Stop Being Selfish and Let Your Domestic Help Stay Home

I genuinely do not find any joy in cooking and cleaning. Part of it might have to do with my subconscious rebellion against well-meaning aunties mocking my abilities to make perfect rotis because "how will you keep your husband happy?" And part of it might just have to do with sheer laziness. But realising how life has changed over the past week, and what additional precautions we must all take, I asked Manisha—who’s been coming over to clean my house for the past three years, and has the cutest cackle out there—to stay at home until we figure what kind of a situation we’re up against.

“But I might as well come in,” she told me in return. “It’s not like the other places I work at have told me they’re okay with me not coming in. If I am coming all the way, I might as well come to yours too. And unlike you, what if they don't pay me for the days I don't come in?” Manisha commutes 10 kms on the Mumbai train each morning, and then takes the bus to work at my place, followed by four others.

Many white-collar jobs in India—including mine—have turned to a Work From Home (WFH) model over the past week in an effort to fight the spread of COVID-19. Some horrible bosses of friends are still rolling out a WFH plan and ignoring the many warnings we’ve been given. But, it turns out, the worst bosses are the very people around me—my friends, my family, my neighbours, even me.

Even as we’ve moved to Instagramming our home desks, our board games, the indoor hobbies we’ve picked up and the 4 p.m. snacks we’ve made ourselves, many of us have not extended the option of staying at home to our domestic help, who are probably in a way more vulnerable position than we are. As we talk about ‘self-isolation’ and ‘social distancing’, our house help—who often stay in packed houses and live paycheck to paycheck—continue life like we’re not staring into the deathly face of a contagion that, some experts say, might even be our ‘new normal’ for at least a year. And that’s our collective failure as a society.

In a way, it’s also not surprising how we’re reacting to this emergency. Domestic workers have been undervalued, underpaid, unprotected and abused for a long time. Though the work they do contributes significantly to the economy and society—allowing many of us to go to jobs and make a living, or just live life without having to do the back-breaking and banal job of housekeeping—this group of workers has always been discriminated against. With few rules and regulations, or a union of any kind safeguarding their interests, domestic workers have often dealt with excessive working hours, miserable pay, lack of access to care, and termination of jobs without the luxury of a notice period or severance pay. There is no sick leave safeguarding them for a time like this either.

They’re hardly counted as a statistic when it comes to India’s working class, which means their numbers fall anywhere between 2.5 and 90 million. Tripti Lahiri, in her book Maid in India, writes that there was nearly a 120 percent rise in the demand for domestic workers in the years following liberalisation in India. Over two-thirds of this workforce are women. That aside, traditionally, too, the work inside a home has always been invisible. And so, even in the invisible class of informal workers, the domestic help find themselves to be even more invisible. Sure, we might feel their absence when they call in sick now and then, but that’s only because our lazy asses have gotten so used to somebody else picking up after us. When they call in sick, how many of us are genuinely concerned about their well-being, and how many of us first think of how the hell you’re going to get all those dishes cleaned today?

I called up some friends and aunts (because patriarchy means it’s the women who dictate the regime of the house help—or at least that’s how it is in most families I know) about whether they’re insisting their help take additional care as well. Most of them are not. One said, “Things are not so panicky anyway, we hardly have any new cases,” while another said, “I can’t imagine managing a WFH while also taking care of the house.” Yet another told me, “This is just a hype; look outside, everything is normal,” while another sheepishly said, “I know I should and I know I am being selfish, but housework is so tough.”

Some colleagues, though, and a couple of friends had already made their house help aware of why they shouldn’t be stepping out much, and that they wouldn’t be docking their pay for not showing up these days. My cook, though, herself refuses to stay at home where she believes she will end up meeting more people than at any of her workplaces. She insists on coming in to work, where she believes she is, in fact, safer. Another friend spoke about how her help, who is in an abusive marriage, is wary about staying confined at home with her husband, and insists on continuing her job, though with additional precautions. One more spoke about how it’s impossible for the six people she lives with to stay indoors in their tiny house, and that going out to work is actually a breath of fresh air for her. The narratives are so many, and so many of them are twisted.

But I urge you to have a conversation with your domestic help, and help her understand the benefits of staying home right now, if they are in a position to. Times like these bring out the worst in people, so it’s up to you and me to make sure the bad people don’t win. So please continue paying the salaries of those who have made your life so comfortable. And if nothing works and you still feel selfish, remind your asshole self that if the virus comes for them, it’ll come for you too.

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