A prayer for the workers of the world

Part of how caste and class privilege are maintained is by undervaluing the work we pay for. Another way is by not really ‘seeing’ the labour, therefore not acknowledging it. Pic/iStock

I would be hard pressed to find a more profound reflection on Labour Day than the one posted by the Instagram handle @bakeryprasad. It's a moving deliberation on how the Indian caste-influenced mentality doesn't merely disrespect most forms of labour but actively invisibilises them. It reminded me of my time in Delhi as a single woman who needed domestic help. I appreciated that the woman who worked at my apartment demanded an annual salary increment. One year, I decided to ask people I knew who had full-time and part-time domestic help how much they were paying. It turned out I was allegedly ‘overpaying' my maid for the basic services - brooming, mopping and doing the dishes. I had even offered my help the possibility of taking Sundays off, but she had refused. Her logic was that no one else gives her the weekend off, so it didn't make sense for her to not come to just one house. I could see why it would be easy for me to manage without any help over the weekend but would be difficult for someone with a larger family. Still, I wondered how her own family managed in her absence? This is the irony of how labour works in India - so many mothers tend to have to take care of other children so they can afford to feed their own.

It is completely normal in India to bargain with people, especially careworkers, about their salaries. While most middle-class people feel entitled to negotiate their contracts with their higher-ups, expecting a certain minimum in terms of sick and casual leave, medical insurance and a net income, we do not extend these privileges to unskilled or deskilled workers in our employ. When these workers don't show up or take off without warning, we act surprised by their betrayal, as if their loyalty was a given. Whether we admit it or not, most middle-class employers do expect slave-like allegiance from the people they hire and are committed to maintaining caste and class hierarchies. I don't know how many times I witnessed families practising segregation at restaurants. The usually affluent family is generally seated at one table while the nannies sit at another. There's a deep commitment, in fact, to maintaining the status quo. We don't really strive for anything radically different. Part of how caste and class privilege are maintained is by undervaluing the work we pay for. Another way is by not really ‘seeing' the labour, therefore not acknowledging it.

When I found out I was going to be the mother of a boy, I decided I would raise him using certain strategies that I felt were used on me to my benefit. If you were conditioned as a girl in India, you may have also been asked by your mother to ‘help' all the time, something boys are seldom asked to do. During visits to relatives' houses for either lunch or dinner, for instance, once my sister and I were old enough, my mother would explicitly ask us to ‘go help' in the kitchen, for example, either with cooking or with laying the table and cleaning up after. We were trained to ‘see' what labour looks like and recognise where our interventions might be necessary. This is an approach I have actively adopted as a feminist parent. Our oldest knows the names of the personnel at the supermarket we frequent regularly. Since he was two, we trained him to help us with the shopping, which means we go over a ‘list' of things we need, then, once inside, he seeks them out and puts them into the shopping cart, and finally places each item on the counter so it can be scanned and totalled. We encourage him to pay… after we show him the receipt, so he learns from an early age that there is a cost of living. When we see someone who needs help, we point it out to him, so he understands the spectrum of situations where forms of service might be called for.

As I began practising this strategy, I realised that the average Indian male is oblivious to the concept of emotional labour because they haven't been trained to perceive what it entails. This is one of the many pitfalls of gendered conditioning, another malaise that intersects with casteism to make most Indian work environments toxic. I remember being educated about the notion of ‘dignity of labour' from a very early age, yet I rarely ever saw it being enforced through my entire life in India. Even as a culture worker in the arts industry, all I knew were hierarchies and systematised inequalities.

Siddesh Gautam, who manages the Instagram handle @bakeryprasad, reminds us that May Day is a call to ‘remember the forgotten, to honour those who clean our wounds and our waste, to demand a future where no one is born into servitude.' I share this prayer.

Deliberating on the life and times of every woman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She posts @rosad1985 on Instagram
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