The paradigm increase in India’s female labour force participation (FLFP), from 23.3% in the financial year (FY) 2017-18 to 41.7% in FY 2023-24, has been an indicator that triggered an array of conversations around improving outcomes for working women and their participation in the economy. At the same time, the discourse around the deterministic nature of the gendered division of labour escapes the analysis of policymakers who drive such growth indicators, leaving the stakeholders to grapple with a flood of debilitating questions regarding India’s working women.
Looking into statistics for FLFP in the last few years shall drive home certain broad points about what drives FLFP—better formal and skill education, increasing job opportunities, shift from agriculture to a service-based economy, and even the compelling circumstances of stagflation and decreasing consumer expenditure. Unfortunately, rural and urban women wage workers remain alienated from their bare minimum entitlements—their identity and recognition as workers.
Leaving affirmative action to the concern and scrutiny of policymakers, it’s important to address the most elemental questions about what seems to be the problem of gendered exclusion of women and gender-minority workers from equal rights to wages, identity, and recognition as members of the workforce.
Reproductive labour: Cross to bear
Demand for the reduction and redistribution of socially reproductive labour has been a longstanding demand of feminist economists.
This would not only mean the redistribution of the the entire onus of socially reproductive labour that women carry within the household, but also structural changes to paid work across formal and informal sectors.
‘Formal Sectors’ can be defined as salaried occupations that pay Employee State Insurance (ESI) and other benefits. On the other hand, ‘Informal Sectors’ can be broadly defined as sectors where the workers do not receive any ESI or other social security benefits.
It is estimated that only 18% of all formal employment is held by women in India as opposed to 61% in the informal sector. So India’s working women dominate the informal sector jobs, which mostly include work as domestic workers, caregivers, construction workers, and street vendors among other low-pay, hazardous jobs.
The informal sector, often dominated by intermediaries such as labour contractors, is notorious for its colossal wage gap wherein India’s working women earn about 40-50% less than their male counterparts, doing the same work for the same period.
Long hours of laborious work, lower-than-average wages and exposure to the risks of hazardous work environments are the bane of India’s working women in informal jobs. Besides, varying statistics of FLFP in the formal and informal sectors, variations can also be observed in FLFP in the nature of work relegated to rural women compared to the urban.
Data released by the Ministry of Labour and Employment for FY 2023-24 revealed that 25.5% of urban women were part of the labour force while 47.6% of rural women were part of India’s rural labour force. Despite the FLFP in rural areas being higher than in urban, it is evident that India’s working women do the most arduous and the least financially rewarding/ compensating work.
Around 76% of the FLFP in the rural areas were engaged in agriculture in FY 2023-24, but their labour is usually unpaid. Women are forced to reckon with laborious tasks, which normalise the non-compensating and unrewarding nature of their labour.
Agriculture accounts for only 11% of FLFP in the urban areas.
However, there is a noticeable gap between the participation of women wage workers in formal sectors when compared to the informal sectors, which is indicative of the lopsided burden of socially reproductive labour on working women.
At the antipathy of law
Noteworthy is the fact that despite the problem of increasing informal work being relegated to women wage workers, no significant measures have been taken either by the state machinery, the judiciary or non-state actors to phase out the gender gap pertaining to wage and area of work.
In essence, the stepping stone for demands regarding better wages and safer working conditions comes with the identity and recognition of India’s working women, wage earners, as a part of the workforce that is entitled to equal rights and benefits provided to them by various labour legislations such as the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, Workman Compensation Act, 1923 and so on.
For India’s working women in the informal sector, their right to identity and recognition fails them.
ICDS (Anganwadi) workers, Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) workers, and domestic workers, inter alia, are not protected by such labour legislations should there arise a dispute between them and their employer.
Not falling under the statutory definition of ‘Workmen’, they are often left at the antipathy of law in their rightful protests against illegal termination, wage disputes, compensation for disability on the job, and even minimum wages.
In the eyes of the law, such ‘informal’ women wage workers fall into the category of ‘self-employed’ working women and are excluded from the benefits of labour laws and even their right to approach the court in the matter of an industrial dispute.
Courts of the country have periodically faced the question—can these women wage workers own their identity as ‘workmen’? Are these women wage workers entitled to minimum wages and other social security benefits like ESI, PF and gratuity?
In several judgments, rooting back to the array of labour rights activism back in the 1980s, the Supreme Court, as well as different high courts have evidently withheld themselves from granting these women wage workers the ownership of their identity as ‘workmen’.
In 2006, the Supreme Court bench of Justices SB Sinha and Markandey Katju held that Anganwadi workers are not entitled to minimum wages as they are not the subjects of the Minimum Wages Act 1948 since Anganwadi workers are deemed to be ‘honorary’ workers and their honorarium is to be decided by the respective government on periodic intervals.
Besides their tussle with the Courts on minimum wages and social security, these workers were withheld from holding civic posts and even taking up additional/ supplementary employment for extra income.
ASHA and Anganwadi workers were even barred from holding civil posts and being elected into Panchayats and other local bodies. It took two decades of activism, judicial and otherwise, by these women wage workers, trade unionists and labour rights activists for the judiciary to rule in favour of the right of ASHA and Anganwadi workers to gratuity and maternity leaves.
Unfortunately, women wage workers in the informal sector, such as construction, are still on the dark side of things as they were in 1982 when the People’s Union of Democratic Rights (PUDR) approached the Supreme Court highlighting labour law violations during the Asian Games of 1982 hosted in Delhi. Long, strenuous hours of being forced to work without minimum wages and unequal payments between men and women workers were their locus standi.
As a part of the petition, PUDR also made certain observations which, four decades later, continue to persist at the detriment of wage-earning women in the informal sector.
They noted that while men received Rs 8.25 per day as wages, women workers only received Rs 7 per day, out of which the rest were pocketed by the contractors.
It is noteworthy that workers, irrespective of their gender, are subject to extra-economic exploitation by contractors.
India’s working women, women wage workers, however, are the most vulnerable to such exploitation as it renders their labour almost wholly exploitable without compensation.
At such a point, women wage workers become appendages of their male counterparts.
The lopsided burden of socially reproductive labour coupled with capitalist super-exploitation and invisibilisation has left women wage workers the most vulnerable in recent history.
Looking ahead
As India looks forward to imagining a more equitable future for those who most deserve it, questions that arise on this International Women’s Day are
- Can redistribution of socially reproductive labour, inside and outside of the household, equalise the wage gap?
- Now that women increasingly participating in jobs the same as their male counterparts, why are their identities as workers further marginalised?
- How their struggles for recognition and identity can help them bridge the burning gap?
Debjani is a social activist and student of law. She talks all about politics, philosophy, law and current affairs.