Over the last two months, my closest friends — women, in their first jobs — and I have discussed appraisal season to a great degree. We had all reached the one-year mark, thought we were doing good work. Soon, a consensus was reached: We had to believe in ourselves, not look for external validation, and ask for what we deserved. That, we concluded, was the “feminist” choice to make.
Around the same time, our cook, Bimla didi, who had been working with us for a year at the house I shared with a flatmate, asked for a hike. I immediately came up with reasons for why she didn’t deserve one: “we do not eat breakfast”; “we order out so much”. My flatmate later knocked sense into me, saying the amount didi had asked for was not a lot at all. More fundamentally, she was entitled to a raise.
In retrospect, the irony of the situation was hard to miss. At the simplest level, we were all doing work. Work needed to be compensated for adequately. But as didi asked for her hike, I had automatically made a distinction between the work I was doing and the work she was doing. I had come to believe mine was more structured, corporate and somehow more important; hers was physical, strenuous, informal and not as methodical.
Recently, a tweet on a Bangalore housing society asking for cuts in domestic worker salaries after the Congress government there introduced free bus passes had gone viral. Underpinning this move is our society’s pervasive disregard for informal work.
As a journalist, I was aware of the precariousness and challenges of informal work. But in my personal capacity as an employer, my response was neither guided by the awareness that my job brought or the theoretical understanding I had from the courses I took in college.
The incident also led me to think about the limits of how I was defining feminist conversations for myself.
My friends and I — upper caste, city-bred, English-speaking with arts degrees — openly proclaim our feminist credentials. We look at it as an important and grounding factor in our friendship. We are there for one other. My own role models were high-achieving women, in creative fields, all “breaking the glass ceiling” and reinventing things. I wanted to be one of them.
The informal worker, the woman who was not accorded the same privilege as them, or the home-based worker whose labour was rendered invisible, was not part of any conversation I was having outside the boundaries of a news item.
Data from the Periodic Labour Survey (2017-18) shows that more than 90 per cent of working people in our country are part of the informal economy. The most vulnerable among this lot are those who are marginalised on multiple axes — of gender, class, and caste.
I thought I understood the structural issues that define our society and the importance of intersectionality, until I was confronted with my own biases and internalised behaviour. Then came the more important realisation: There is a huge gap between theory and practice. And that we need to do more than just pat our backs for saying the right things at the right time. We need to put money where our mouth is, introspect, make uncomfortable choices and take a step back when it is not our turn to speak.
National Editor Shalini Langer curates the ‘She Said’ column
