As the ILO convention turns 30, domestic workers in India demand equal rights Labor Rights Issues

New Delhi, India – On a hot afternoon in a working-class neighborhood in India, Shehnaz Bano sits on the floor of her one-room apartment, expertly sewing pieces of a new leather jacket.

Making each piece – a box, front or back or a shoulder yoke – the 38-year-old mother of two young sons spends hours, but is paid 100 rupees (about $1) per piece.

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“Imagine if I were a full-time employee working the same job for the same hours, but in a factory,” Bano asked.

“Because I work from home, I don’t get equal pay or rights.”

This is because Bano, like about 260 million others around the world, is a domestic worker (HBW) – people who are employed to produce goods or services in or near their homes. HBWs are part of the so-called global economy. Such work is characterized by low wages, denial of workers’ rights, lack of social security or regular working hours, or paid holidays.

HBWs are also female workers, and about 57 percent are women, according to a 2024 estimate by Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), a United Kingdom-based international research organization that focuses on improving the conditions of the working poor, especially women, in the informal economy.

On this day 30 years ago, however, efforts were made to change the culture of HBWs – with little success so far.

The International Labor Organization (ILO), a United Nations organization, at a meeting at its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, approved the well-known “Convention 177”, or the Domestic Work Convention on June 20, 1996, recognizing HBW at the same level as wage earners.

It was the first call sufficient to establish an international standard for HBWs. The meeting called on ILO members to adopt and implement policies that promote cooperation between HBW and other wage earners.

Convention 177 entered into force on April 22, 2000.

However, only 13 countries have accepted it so far and none from South Asia. This is despite the fact that Asia and the Asia-Pacific region have the highest number of HBWs, as well as being the center of global fashion production and production.

Renana Jhabvala was in a room in Geneva – along with hundreds of government and non-government representatives – when the Home Workers Conference was launched.

As a member of the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), India’s leading trade union for working women, the 73-year-old worker was at the ILO’s International Labor Conference (ILC), and still remembers the excitement and hope in the room.

“Discussions continued for about 21 days, but none of us knew whether the Convention would be accepted or not. We were all in the biggest hall at the ILC… There was a majority in the final vote and the Convention passed,” he told Al Jazeera.

But workers’ rights activists, experts and economists say that the lack of recognition of HBWs even after thirty years following the ILO convention has increased the structural inequality among workers, especially in a developed country like India.

According to them, HBWs, especially women, remain “invisible” to policy makers, as they are forced to work for insufficient wages under insecure and vulnerable jobs.

“Convention 177 has gone a long way in recognizing domestic work as ‘real work’ and domestic workers as workers with the right to work,” Deepa Bharathi, senior expert on gender and non-discrimination at the ILO’s Bangkok-based Decent Work Team, emailed Al Jazeera.

“In South Asia, domestic work is often embedded in complex labor practices, making labor relations difficult to identify and manage.” Difficulties in monitoring work, data gaps and the invisibility of domestic workers in policy frameworks have also limited progress,” Bharathi said in response to the question of the Convention’s limited acceptance, especially in South Asia.

Since the majority of domestic workers in the region are women, their work is often seen as an extension of domestic responsibilities, Bharathi said. “This limitation, combined with gender inequality, has been a major obstacle to acceptance and implementation,” he added.

When asked about what the ILO wants to promote the implementation of the Convention, Bharathi said: “For women domestic workers in particular, the focus should be on visibility, fair wages, social security, safe workplaces, opportunities for training and child care and a strong voice for the whole group.”

‘I can’t go to work’

Bano lives in New Delhi’s Kapashera neighborhood, which is home to migrant workers from the southwest suburbs of the city whose name translates to “cotton settlement” in English. The area is known for its cotton clothing and leather industries.

Along its busy streets are buildings that rent out rooms to working people. In one such room live Bano with her sons and her husband who works as a porter in an upscale area of ​​Gurugram, a business district that is home to several Fortune 500 companies outside New Delhi.

Bano presents a typical HBW scenario in India. He started working as a bedi (a small hand-rolled cigarette) in his village in the neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh in Azamgarh district. After marriage, she joined her husband in New Delhi and started sewing pieces of leather jacket at home.

Moving from his village job as a beedi roller to a casual laborer in the city has not changed his plight: long hours, irregular work, low pay and jobs that leave his eyes tired and his fingers aching.

He is paid about one dollar for his work on a leather jacket that sells for $200 or more in the foreign market – more than double Bano’s monthly income. Also, in order to reduce costs and maximize profits, contractors often subcontract more workers.

Only those who are in trouble do this kind of work. We have rent, bills, groceries and school fees. Bano told Al Jazeera.

HBWs are divided into two groups: account staff who have access to markets and staff who are often employed through intermediaries. Bano belongs to the latter, who are considered the most vulnerable due to low and inflexible wages.

In another corner of Kapashera, Sangeeta Devi, 30, is putting the finishing touches – buttons, mending, finishing – on the clothes she makes before they go back to the factories.

He is doing all this inside an 8 × 8 (2.4m) room, where his family of six children, including four school children sleep, eat, work and study. They cook, clean and bathe in one room.

“I can’t go to work because then who will take care of my children?”

“Every day, there are 100 clothes in this small room. I always have to keep them aside and do housework,” a migrant worker in Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, told Al Jazeera.

Sangeeta Devi earns a dollar for every 100 shirts she completes.

“I really want to do a job where I can easily work from home, take care of my children and get paid well. I don’t know if it’s possible,” he told Al Jazeera.

Her neighbor, Putul Devi, also works in a similar job and earns about $20 a month.

“I’ve been cooking with wood because of the high price of fuel. And when it rains, I don’t know what to save so it doesn’t go to waste – the wood or the cloth I bring home,” he told Al Jazeera.

Shalini Sinha, domestic work expert at WIEGO, said that female HBWs in India face “invisibility” even after three decades of recognition of their work.

“Home continues to be seen as a place of residence and not as a place of work,” Sinha told Al Jazeera.

“There is also a larger issue of women’s economic activities not being sufficiently recognized in the context of domestic work. It is often seen as an extension of her caregiving role,” she added.

From India’s point of view, said Mr. Sinha, “there is an urgent need for better statistics and a voluntary policy or law for domestic workers, which does not exist”.

Elizabeth Khumalrambam, who works at the Community for Social Change and Development (CSCD), an NGO that works with women HBWs in Kapashera, said that the social security policy launched in India in 2020 mentions HBWs, but “no one knows” how it will be implemented on the ground.

Introduced as part of India’s labor reform legislation, the Act brought together nine social security laws into a single framework to ensure the safety of all workers, including those in the unorganized sector.

“Honestly, for us the problem starts with getting the workers to understand the value of their work.” “Many don’t see this as a job and don’t think it needs freedom and protection,” Khumarlambam told Al Jazeera.

Alakh N Sharma, an economist and director of the New Delhi-based non-profit Institute, Institute for Human Development, said there is a “systemic bias”, which is why women’s jobs are left out of statistics and government calculations.

According to him, counting with the help of technology, asking questions and interest among researchers, can help to overcome the problem of statistics.

“Security concerns, barriers to mobility and social conditions – all of these prevent women from entering the workforce. But the main reason is often the responsibility of taking care of the children, especially taking care of children,” Sharma told Al Jazeera.

In 2022, Mr. Sandosh Kumar P, the president of the Communist Party of India (CPI) passed a bill to promote BHWs, but the parliament did not discuss it.

In December 2024, India’s Ministry of Labor and Employment was again asked in parliament whether it has a valid assessment of HBWs, and whether it intends to legislate on them. He replied that the Code on Social Security 2020 provides protection for irregular people, including HBWs. It also said that the government has established a national database of such workers.

Looking back 30 years since HBWs became popular, Jhabvala said he does not see Conventions or legislation like this as a success or failure.

He said: “It is like a revolutionary tool.