The point raised by Murthy merits attention, but the first question we should actually ask is what do Indian workers, especially women, need beyond a ‘safe space’ and a revised salary to achieve peak performance levels? How helpful, how unbiased will the socio-legal perceptions be towards helping our invisibilised working women if the labour laws are revised ? A major English daily recently quoted a judgment from the Madras high court delivered on June 23, that sums up the current perceptions on gender: “In generality of marriages, the wife bears and rears children and minds the home. She thereby frees her husband for his economic activities.”
https://thewire.in/labour/men-women-and-the-gendered-life-of-labour
This is the ground reality women see, aankhon ki dekhi, as Kabir says.
‘Does your man or family approve?’
‘How do your children cope after school hours?’
These are questions never posed to male employees. Unsurprisingly, according to the NSSO, on an average, male salaried employees earn 1.2-1.3 times more than their female colleagues. And while men spend 150 minutes more per day as paid employees, working women spend twice the time than males in carrying out domestic duties within homes and have 24% less leisure time than the males. Time poverty eats up a woman’s energies and work potential all through her working life.
Being pro-women is now the politically correct stance even for the most extreme right-wing parties. But governments that launch a thousand schemes to save, educate the girl child and make women’s domestic lives better barely think of raising salaries and social safety levels for improving lives of rural women workers like those under the ASHA or landless farm labourers. Neither they nor the corporate honchos who mobilise Corporate Social Responsibility budgets for empowering women actually see the irony of the obvious clash between better lives for workers with poor health and educational backgrounds being burdened with longer hours so India can compete better with China!
One fears the impact of longer work hours will be to create job pressures that will automatically squeeze women out of the formal work force.
by Mrinal pande
26/11/2023