Answer:

Every year thousands of complaints of exploitation and abuse of domestic workers are received with most of them about unpaid wages, food and sleep deprivation and long work hours with verbal, physical and sexual abuse. The reported cases are miniscule per cent of actual abuse of a workforce consisting of 80% of women.

Several factors have led to such state:

♤ Absence of legal protection through a specific law.

♤ Paid domestic work continues to be excluded from the central list of scheduled employments under the Minimum Wages Act of 1948. It is also not covered under Payment of Wages Act (1936), Workmen’s Compensation Act (1923), Contract Labor Act (1970) or the Maternity Benefit Act (1961).

♤ Only seven states have the provision of minimum wages for them. Hence, wage fixation and payment is arbitrary. Even, where it has been fixed, the wage rate is very low.

♤ Sector is dominated by women. In India, 73% of working women are illiterate or educated upto primary level. Thus, they are unaware of their rights and fail to unite themselves.

♤ Majority of domestic workers are distress migrants, SCs/STs and EWS, seeking employment desperately. They accept work under any conditions and become vulnerable to exploitation as well as caste and class discrimination.

♤ Mobilizing domestic workers to assert their rights is difficult. Also, workplace is an extremely amorphous term in this particular context, as it typically connotes more than one household. The isolated and unprotected nature of the activity makes workers vulnerable.

To improve the situation of domestic workers, NCW drafted ‘Domestic Workers Welfare and Social Security Act, 2010’ Bill. Some important provisions are as follows:

♤ It brings domestic workers under the ambit of organized sector.

♤ Three tier architecture of Central Advisory Committee to implement and review the Act, State Advisory Board for implementation in states and District Boards at the district level.

♤ It creates a Domestic Workers Welfare Fund.

♤ Defines rights of full-time domestic workers and process of their registration and identification.

♤ It also has provisions for registering part-time helps and migrant domestic workers.

♤ It seeks to regulate minimum wages, working conditions and working hours..

♤ The bill mandates domestic worker to be above 18 years.

Since, India is signatory to ILO Convention on Domestic Workers, it is high time that we pass this bill which is hanging since years to protect the rights of the domestic workers.