Domestic workers, unite!

Campaign to register domestic workers reveals the State’s elitist foundations

“The state is nothing but a committee for managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie”

Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Five thousand households in Islamabad registered the criminals they employ at their home in the first week of the Household Servant Registration drive. The Islamabad-specific campaign was ordered by the new Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan on June 20, who appears to have reached the sagely conclusion that “registering domestic servants” would conclusively resolve the “prevailing law and order situation.”

The door-to-door campaign involves NADRA officials visiting the homes of Islamabad’s crème de la crème, accompanied by a flier asking them to “Help NADRA secure your home, city and country.” The campaign betrays its classist origins in its labeling of each domestic worker as a “potential criminal” and each household employer as the “benevolent benefactor”.

The form and the flyer are both disgusting examples of elite attitudes towards domestic helpers. The form only asks single dimension questions: who are you, who is your domestic worker and where is their original home. The purpose is clear: to allow the police to “round them and their families up” (legally or illegally) whenever a household theft or robbery is reported.

“All domestic workers are potential criminals” is the simple message of the form. It does not even pretend to ask questions about their wages, work hours, leaves and benefits, all of which are supposedly guaranteed to every worker under Pakistan’s labour law.

Domestic labour conditions in Pakistan make a travesty of labour laws, a fact which neither the form nor the flyer alludes to. As Aravind Adiga writes in his novel “The White Tiger”, in South Asia, we do not have cooks, drivers or sweepers. We have “servants.” The “servant” (which is also shamefully the term of choice for the NADRA campaign) can be tasked with anything under the sun (and moon) given the ambiguous “job description” of catering to every whim of the “begum sahab.”

There are no age restrictions or fixed work hours nor are the responsibilities defined. It is all too common to be greeted by a child under the age of 10 at an elite home. Middle class parents will make no qualms about hiring a child to “play with” and care for their children. But that is not all: as you sit in their drawing rooms, the same child will walk in bearing a tray laden with the finest delicacies, only for the guests of course.

Incidents of physical and sexual abuse encountered by child and adult domestic workers alike are rampant. Only last month reports surfaced that the former prime minister Yousaf Raza Gilani’s niece Hina Gilani allegedly hit a 13-year-old boy servant with a glass jug he had accidentally broken. After the child bled to death, his body was dumped ruthlessly and reportedly buried in a junkyard when it began to rot. Once the case made it to the media, the PML-N chief minister Shahbaz Sharif ordered that a case be registered against the home owners.

But this was just a PR measure. The same political party of whom he is chairman has launched a campaign that reverses the equation: it aims to protect the Hina Gilanis against the alleged criminality of the “servant class”, rather than even pretending to secure the security and welfare of domestic workers.

The PML-N government’s decision to start such a campaign is emblematic of a larger societal tendency to slander and criminalise the working class. Many a “begum sahab” complains of the lazy, immoral and heathen servant who “eats too much,” “talks too much on his mobile phone” and “steals from the fridge.” One family member once suggested that “these servants would murder you if you are not strict with them.”

The wealth gap between the rich and the poor is increasing. Interestingly, this has not triggered an analysis which focuses on the rich’s role in impoverishing the poor. In fact, as their cars get bigger, their cell phones smarter, their generators louder than ever, the elite’s paranoia regarding their domestic servants peaks. The disparity between their lifestyles and those of their domestic servants, who are usually confined to a dingy quarter in a corner of the house, seems only to lead in one direction: all servants are potential criminals.

The State’s intervention at this point aligns it clearly with one class: it wishes to protect home owners from domestic workers. The non-implementation of any minimum wage regulations, child labour laws and work hours requirements is not a concern worth taking up. In fact, the State has reinforced the paranoia of the elite regarding the “criminal tendencies” of their domestic workers.

The fact that the form does not include any questions about the welfare of domestic servants appears to suggest that the State believes that all is hunky dory in terms of their treatment. What is more alarming, however, is that the flyer itself flaunts the picture of a child servant – a thin, dark female washing dishes – in a blatant admission that the State is blind to its own laws banning child labour.

The so-called campaign makes no pretense that when it claims to want a safer Islamabad, it is only going to be a safer Islamabad for the house-owning elites. Domestic servants and other members of the working class are the ones that the elites are being protected from.

The government press release before the campaign reads: “A large number of people are working as domestic servants in the capital. These servants come from different parts of the country and pose a potential risk to theft and robbery due to lack of identification. The decision of registering these servants and maids is taken in the wake of prevailing law and order situation in the country.”

The fact that the interior ministry has held domestic servants responsible for the poor “law and order” situation, and not the Taliban, sectarian extremists or the military-run security agencies (i.e. itself) is indicative of a larger crisis of the legitimacy faced by the State. Having been robbed of its “monopoly over violence” by the Taliban, it is now grabbing at straws to win itself some legitimacy by promising to “protect houseowners from their domestic help.”

The campaign’s delusional self-importance is represented by its slogan, “Help NADRA protect your home, your city and your country,” in which somehow the mere process of registering domestic servants can help “secure” all of Pakistan.

In fact, if anything, if there was some form of domestic worker unity, there should have been protests on the streets of Islamabad and inside each home. Imagine the irony of a servant opening the door to a NADRA officer and carrying the registration form inside to the “begum sahab” asking for his/her details. Complete with a complementary SMS service and 24/7 helpline to verify the “credential of their domestic workers,” the campaign is the sort of change on offer when the middle-classes become the vanguards of all three: political transformation, morality and society.

With no laws having been passed to either protect or even register domestic servants, the entire legal basis for the campaign is up in the air. How can the interior minister, on a whim, initiate a discriminatory registration drive? Is such a task not the domain of the local labour department? And should a form and helpline not be available to domestic workers, who are underpaid, overworked and kept in inhuman living environments?

Drives such as this one bring into sharp relief the sham that is Pakistan’s democracy, where the elected representatives spearhead campaigns which shamelessly discriminate against and arrogantly ignore the socio-economic injustice suffered by the majority.

If every domestic servant is a potential criminal, then is it not high time that these ‘criminals’ came together to struggle for their rights and made their voice heard in the political realm?

With the State “criminalizing” them and unwilling to to offer them any protections, the time has come for domestic workers to unite!

Sara Kazmi is a theatre-activist and an independent researcher.

Hashim bin Rashid is a journalist and independent researcher. He is also the general secretary (Lahore) for the Awami Workers Party.