From Homes to the Streets: Women Domestic Workers’ Mobilization in Indian and South African Cities

• In Event: 20402 - Worker Resistance in New Fields of Activism

Abstract

How do workers who work in geographically dispersed private households in urban India and South Africa build their organizations as workers? This paper takes a deep dive into domestic workers’ organizing across India and South Africa. Historically, domestic workers have faced challenges in organizing due to the fact that their workplaces are their employers' private homes. However, in recent decades, domestic workers have organized into membership-based workers’ organizations. Drawing on ethnographic research in India and South Africa, the paper demonstrates that while the privacy of employers' homes has posed a hindrance to organizing efforts, domestic workers have developed innovative ways and unique sites for mobilization. Unlike the industrial workers who organized at the gates of the factories, domestic workers cannot meet at the doorstep of their employers’ homes. Domestic workers’ organizations mobilize and recruit domestic workers at two main sites. First are the ‘in-between’ sites that fall between domestic workers’ own and their employers’ homes, which they navigate in their occupational encounters, such as such as beaches, shopping malls, bus stands, and parks, among others. The second are workers’ residential areas, the townships and informal settlements in South Africa, and low-income settlements such as tenement housing, resettlement colonies and informal housing in India. I further demonstrate while the two national cases show similar innovative ways in which domestic workers’ organizations mobilize workers, there are important differences between the two cases. Therefore, instead of seeing innovative organizing practices and the sites they take place at as a product of merely creative strategies in vacuum, I see them as reflections of how domestic workers have navigated the intersecting structures of race, caste, gender, and class in their respective national contexts.

Author

• Sonal Sharma, Tufts University