Tiding over socio-ecological vulnerabilities: experiences of two groups of cleaning/domestic women workers from Kerala, India
Overview
This paper is a preliminary attempt to examine the experience of two groups of women cleaning/domestic workers in two cities in Kerala grappling with vulnerabilities induced by natural disasters and the pandemic. The groups are similar to each other in several crucial respects, as assetless or asset-poor workers of oppressed caste social origins who perform stigmatised work and carry burdens of social reproduction. However, they relate to their work in distinctly different ways. The first is of paid cleaning/domestic workers who entered work and negotiated for wages individually in the city of Kochi; the second is of workers who entered paid cleaning/domestic work as part of a local women’s collective aided by the local government in the city of Thiruvananthapuram. We found that though the first group secured better wages than the second, the latter tided over pandemic-induced vulnerabilities far better. Through this comparison, the paper demonstrates the relevance of collective bargaining and state welfare support in helping vulnerable women workers absorb and adapt to various shocks. However, the paper cautions against both romanticising the resilience capacities of informal collectives of women workers which can be rendered fragile by capitalist interventions, as well as treating them as necessarily anti-patriarchal.
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/13552074.2024.2410057ISBN
1364-9221How to cite this resource
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