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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

How to Curtail Double Burden that Keeps Women out of Paid Work -Shirin Akhter & C Saratchand

-Newsclick.in

The authors propose a project to increase the long-term employment of women that decisively breaks from neoliberalism.

Like other countries where the neo-liberal project is ascending, India is witnessing a rise in unemployment and a falling labour force participation of women. Proponents of the neo-liberal project claim that women’s labour force participation falls in periods of rising family incomes. The question, however, remains that even if family incomes were rising (though the evidence is contrary in India), why should it be female labour force participation that gets adversely affected and not the male labour force participation?

Women tend to be disproportionately represented in jobs where work arrangements are precarious (no written labour contracts, for instance). Further, sectors in which women are concentrated are also those (we may bring them together under the rubric of petty production) which tend to be relatively more impacted by “shocks”. Besides, women tend to be disproportionately disengaged from sectors where there is rapid labour displacing technical change (especially during the ascendancy of the neo-liberal project). As a result, capital engenders a set-up where women workers tend to be a relative surplus component of the labour force that ebbs and flows mainly depending on the demand for and supply of male workers.

A critical underlying determinant of the female labour participation rate is the disproportionate burden of domestic work that “devolves” on women. Often women find it objectively unviable to tackle both paid and domestic work. First, women cannot expend the time required for paid and domestic work sustainably. Second, some types of domestic work, such as child care and elder care, may be needed at times that conflict with the requirements employers enforce in the labour process. Third, it is logically impossible for all women capable of expending work for pay to employ someone else to perform domestic work their families need. Fourth, the wages of most women who undertake paid work are too low for them to hire someone else to undertake domestic work. The previously mentioned four factors are both causes and consequences of women’s limited decision-making roles within families.

A key factor linking domestic work and labour force participation, which we will be unable to deal with in much detail in this article, is that not all families are organised in ways that conform to heteronormativity. All members of such families, especially those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual/aromantic/agender, are oppressed in communities and workplaces in complex ways. But this is a subject of later study.

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