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By Sujata Madhok Many ‘employment agencies’ that are springing up in cities to place migrant women for domestic work are little more than traffickers. The condition in which these women work violates several laws including the Bonded Labour Act and in many cases the Child Labour and Juvenile Justice Act. Activists are calling for a specific law to regulate the domestic work sector
The phone call was frantic. “I’ve had enough. Get me out of here,” Meena Tirki told her sister, sobbing desperately. The only problem was Meena could not tell her sister where she was. She had been working in a house in Lakshmi Nagar, Delhi, for 11 months but she did not know the address or the name of her employer. The placement agency had told her she could go home when her 11 months were up. But they had not come for her. And her employer refused to let her go. Meena had barely stepped out of her employer’s house since she first arrived in the city. She would be lost if she tried to run away. Meena had run away from home with a woman ‘agent’ from her village in Jharkhand’s Gumla district. Her sister Sangeeta was already in Delhi earning money as a domestic worker. Meena wanted to work like her. The agent handed Meena over to a placement agency in Punjabi Bagh and they sent her off to her employer’s house. Meena’s job was to look after two small children while her employer and his wife went to work. She also had to do the cleaning, washing and other domestic chores. She did not know how much the agency charged for her services. For 11 months, overworked and lonely, she tried to cope with her new circumstances. Her employer did not allow her to make telephone calls; she could not keep in touch with her sister or her family back home. Several months later, her sister learnt that Meena was in Delhi. Somehow she managed to get the telephone number of Meena’s employer from the woman agent and spoke to her sister. But the employer would not reveal his address or let her meet Meena. Sangeeta, 19, is smart and unlike her uneducated sister she studied up to Class 7. This is her fourth year of work in Delhi and she knows her way around the city. She wears skirts and high heels, carries a mobile phone, listens to music on it and chats with her friends while she works in her employer’s kitchen. She was lucky to find work through Nirmala Niketan, a cooperative of tribal domestic workers from Jharkhand, which tries to organise girls and women like her to fight for their rights. Sangeeta spoke to the staff at Nirmala Niketan about her sister, and together they decided that it would be best for Meena to finish her 11-month term. If she left earlier she could lose six months’ wages. But Meena, desperate to leave, simply stopped working. Her employer called the placement agency and packed her off. Sangeeta found out, rushed to the agency with people from Nirmala Niketan and, after a heated argument, managed to take Meena away. She was paid her money a few days later. For her months of hard work, Meena Tirki was finally paid the grand sum of Rs 4,000. The placement agency gave her a full account on a piece of paper. Although her wages were Rs 1,000 a month, there were a number of deductions: Rs 3,000 towards agency fees, Rs 2,500 for medical bills that the employer had incurred for the girl, Rs 1,100 as the cost of going to collect her wages every month! Cheated and disappointed, Meena decided she could not go home with so little money. Nirmala Niketan has offered to find her a better paying job. In theory, Meena does have the option of suing the agency and her former employer but it’s an option she is hardly in a position to exercise. Meena’s sole consolation is the fact that at least she has escaped the clutches of the agent and the agency. Most migrant domestic workers are not so lucky. Barely a week passes without the city newspapers reporting incidents of brutal abuse of domestic workers by employers or placement agencies. The placement agency racket is a lucrative one, with employers willing to hand over anything from Rs 3,000-Rs 10,000 as ‘registration fees’ for a residential domestic worker. Agencies get a regular supply of workers by sending ‘agents’ out to recruit girls from impoverished villages in states like Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and West Bengal. Since they make a commission of a thousand or more rupees per recruit, they are anxious to find girls and lure them with false promises of good jobs, smart clothes and plenty of money. Many of the girls are minors and are easily impressed. Once in the city, the agent hands them over to the placement agency, which is usually just a room in a cheap locality, with an office table and chairs and a board proclaiming it to be a “registered” establishment. The girls cook in a corner and sleep on the floor until they are found jobs. It is not unusual for agency owners or agents to harass the girls sexually, even rape them. Not only do agencies get a fat commission, many also collect the girls’ wages every month directly from the employer. Some take the money and simply vanish! Both agency and employer use non-payment as a method of ensuring that the girls do not run away and are forced to put up with any ill treatment. Often, the agency takes the girl away from the employer on some pretext and places her with another house so that it can pocket the extra registration fee! Or it shifts girls around to better paying households. The girls themselves are never consulted and their views are ignored. Often, girls are sent off to distant cities and small towns if the commission offered is good enough. The agencies take no responsibility for the girls. They do not check on the girls’ wellbeing or their working conditions; they do not even look after them if they fall ill. At best, they may arrange to send a girl home if she outright refuses to work any longer. Curiously enough, there are no laws that seem to apply to placement agencies. They are not registered with civic bodies, labour departments or the police. They have no licence. They exist outside the ambit of the law, and they act like it. Yet the money involved is massive and the agency racket is growing, with kickbacks to the police to ensure a trouble-free existence. An agency that places 10 girls a month could make an easy Rs 50,000 in registration fees alone, and Rs 20,000 every month thereafter (Rs 5,000 per head for registration; Rs 2,000 per head per month as wages). Recently, the Kolkata-based Shramjeevi Mahila Samiti tried to track down a number of missing girls and boys who had been trafficked to Delhi. They discovered that nearly a hundred of them had been placed by a single agency based in Lado Sarai. The rich agency owner, only five years ago, had been a vegetable vendor. The fortunes of this tamatarwala changed when his brother married a woman from West Bengal and they began trafficking women, girls and boys from her village to the city. The problems of girls caught in the net of such placement agencies are made worse by the attitude of many employers who treat them more like domestic slaves. Many girls report their employers as saying: “We have bought you for a few thousand rupees. Now you have to do whatever we want.” Employers often treat the registration fee as license to work the girls round the clock, give them little to eat, make them sleep in the kitchen, and deny them any form of rest and relaxation. Alone in an unfamiliar environment, unaccustomed to urban lifestyles, sometimes unable to speak the local language, migrant domestic workers find it hard to demand even their basic rights. The women often suffer verbal and physical abuse, including beatings and sexual abuse, at the hands of their employers and families. Although the house is a domestic worker’s workplace, there are no laws to regulate the working conditions in it. The domestic worker is officially not a worker and cannot have recourse to the labour laws or labour courts, should a dispute arise with the employer or the agency. There is no prescribed minimum wage for domestic workers in most parts of India. The conditions in which many residential domestic workers are forced to work are akin to trafficking and violate several laws including the Bonded Labour Act. In many cases the practice also violates the Child Labour Act and the Juvenile Justice Act. Since the existing laws do not curb the exploitation of those in domestic work, activists are calling for a specific law to regulate the sector. In March 2008, the National Commission for Women (NCW) held a national-level consultation to discuss the draft of a law for domestic workers. The draft law was seriously debated by activists, NGOs, small trades unions trying to organise domestic workers, child rights activists and lawyers, administrators, labour officials and police officials working to stop trafficking. The draft law envisages mandatory registration of workers, employers and ‘service-providers’ or placement agencies -- a step that’s essential to track down missing girls and missing agencies. The registration authority will be state and district-level boards that will enjoy some of the powers of civil courts and be able to look into complaints, enter households to rescue workers, order the attendance and cross-examination of any person, call for the production of documents, etc. The draft law also envisages the setting up of a welfare fund to provide social security to domestic workers. It recommends that no one below the age of 18 be employed in domestic work. Meanwhile, the National Campaign Committee for Unorganised Sector Workers has prepared a detailed alternative law that proposes tripartite boards with representatives of the government, workers and employers. It recommends that workers’ representatives be elected and suggests the constitution of dispute-resolution bodies for speedy justice. The minimum age of employment suggested is 15 years. A valuable recommendation is the section on minimum labour standards and workers’ rights and entitlements, which asks the government to provide model standing orders. Exhaustive as this section is, it could specifically include the right to freedom of movement and the right to maintain contact with family and friends. It should be illegal to confine domestic workers to the house and to refuse them the right to receive or make telephone calls to their families or to receive and write letters. The issue of legislation calls for further debate. The NGO draft is exhaustive and its spirit and valuable suggestions must be incorporated in any official draft law. At the consultation, NCW member Malini Bhattacharya welcomed the suggestions made and promised that the draft would be revised before being recommended to the government. As it stands, the NCW draft is far from perfect. But it is a significant first step towards regulation of employment in the hugely exploitative sector of domestic work. InfoChange News & Features, April 2008
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