By workers, for workers: in India, cooperatives are addressing care workers’ own caregiving needs

By workers, for workers: in India, cooperatives are addressing care workers' own caregiving needs

A domestic worker employed by an expat couple in Bangalore, India, makes tea.

(S. Forster/Alamy Stock Photo)
News

In attending to the needs of children, the old, sick, invalid or differently abled, almost every woman is an unpaid care worker, with caregiving largely considered a women’s responsibility the world over. Whereas middle and upper-middle class working women can rely on the services of professional caregivers such as childcare workers, nannies and babysitters, women from poor households typically juggle the dual roles of being a caregiver at home and a care worker outside the home.

In India, thousands of registered and unregistered agencies provide in-home nurses, nannies and domestic helpers to households with care needs. Many of these agencies recruit young women from poor households in remote villages, with the majority of them sent into the field with no training.

Sita Ashokan was just 18 years old when she was recruited by an agency as a care worker. “I had bitter experiences in almost all the houses I worked in,” the now 28-year-old woman from Kerala’s Wayanad district tells Equal Times. “I was accused of stealing, labelled as a loose woman, deprived of food, and subjected to racial and suggestive comments. The agencies seldom hear our cry.”

India’s poorest informal sector workers often have no choice but to bring their children to work with them. Be it at a construction site in a city or a brick kiln in a remote village, these children have to wait outside for their mothers to finish work, in a country where temperatures frequently soar as high as 45 °C. It is equally common for children to be locked in the store rooms of clients’ houses, and for toddlers to be tied to cots or pillars in their homes for hours on end while their mothers are at work.

That is not the case for the hundreds of thousands of workers associated with India’s Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA). Members of this national trade union for women workers in the informal sector – be they vendors, hawkers, waste pickers, construction or domestic workers – can go to work, while SEWA care workers look after their children, as well as sick or old relatives in their care.

A two-fold mission

Founded by Ela R. Bhatt, a lawyer from Ahmedabad, Gujarat (who passed away on 2 November 2022, aged 89), SEWA grew out of the women’s wing of the country’s oldest and largest textile workers’ union in the early 1970s. Initially, government officials refused to register SEWA as a trade union since its intended members did not meet the then legal definition of workers due to their self-employed status. But Bhatt persisted and in 1972, SEWA was officially registered as a trade union.

A few years later, when informal women workers in Anand district, Gujarat, highlighted their need for childcare while at work, Bhatt promptly volunteered to babysit their children. This impromptu childcare offer quickly transformed into a fully-fledged professional child-care service operated and managed by the all-women’s cooperative Shaishav Mandali. Today, Shaishav Mandali operates 35 childcare centres in the Anand district. In Ahmedabad district, also in Gujarat, the Sangini Mandali cooperative runs 13 childcare centres, also promoted by SEWA.

The childcare cooperatives are promoted and supported by SEWA, which today counts 1.5 million members and this April marked the 50th anniversary of its foundation.

Mothers make monthly contributions to the cooperatives based on their income. As these contributions do not cover the full actual cost per child, SEWA makes up the difference from other resources. The centres have flexible opening hours to accommodate members’ irregular work schedules.

“Our childcare centres are unique because they are run by women from the worker communities in urban areas or villages,” says Rashim Bedi, senior coordinator of SEWA’s Urban Union. “SEWA gives a 11-module training programme to these teachers and provides them with training certificates,” Bedi explains, adding that the childcare workers also regularly complete refresher trainings.

Jashodaben Pravinchandra Parmer, a SEWA member of 27 years, is a teacher in one of SEWA’s childcare centres, which accommodate children aged zero to six. “We teach alphabets, yoga, manners and read stories. We take them for picnics and also encourage their creative strengths,” she tells Equal Times.

Children receive fresh, nutritious meals prepared on-site for breakfast and lunch. Staff monitor the children’s health and also make sure that they receive the vaccinations required under Indian law. The teachers also help members enrol their children in primary schools when they turn six, the compulsory school age in India, by assisting with the required paperwork.

SEWA childcare staff see their mission as two-fold – to nurture the children in their care and to help the mothers of these children be more productive at work by resolving their childcare needs.

“SEWA is an extended family, bringing women in the informal sector together to learn, grow, access facilities, share experiences, understand their rights and raise their voice,” says SEWA Federation deputy managing director Jayaben Purushottambhai Vaghala. SEWA Federation supports SEWA’s cooperatives with capacity-building, marketing, and policy and advocacy interventions.

“When the onus of caregiving is shifted to a profession, women have the freedom to choose their profession and commit wholeheartedly to their work, leading to full employment and self-reliance. Productivity increases, resulting in enhanced income and consequently access to better living standards,” Manali Shah, SEWA’s national secretary adds. “[As] SEWA members, these teachers also benefit from a range of social services like health insurance, access to banking and credit,” she explains.

“Not scared of my clients”

In addition to their childcare responsibilities, many SEWA members – and women workers in India more generally – also shoulder the burden of caring for elderly and sick relatives. Awareness of these pressures as well as a flood of requests from the public for SEWA to provide trained home care workers led the union to establish the Shri SEWA Home Care Women’s Cooperative, a home-based elderly care service, in 2010.

“In these 11 years, I have worked in maybe 12 houses taking care of the old, sick and needy. Our clients vary from the super-rich elites to middle-class families,” says Krishnaben Dineshbhai Khadayta, one of SEWA’s 70 home care workers. As a widow, she is her family’s sole breadwinner. “My life, living conditions and status have improved. I have educated both my sons. Because I am associated with SEWA, I don’t fear [becoming] unemployed; nor am I scared of my clients,” says Dineshbhai Khadayta.

Prospective clients are required to register with the cooperative and sign an agreement detailing the tasks the carer is expected to undertake. The client pays the salary to the cooperative, and the cooperative transfers the money to the carer’s account after deducting a 10 per cent service charge.

“If the entire amount of 17,000 rupees (approximately US$213) is given in hand, it gets spent soon,” says Prutha Vyas, education and training coordinator at Shri SEWA Home Care Women’s Cooperative. “If deposited in the bank, they withdraw only the necessary amount,” she says, adding that this approach allows the workers to build up savings.

SEWA has also established teams of community healthcare workers, currently active across 18 states. These community health workers sensitise both SEWA members and women in the local communities on health and hygiene issues and help them access government social security, health and nutrition programmes. Women are also encouraged to discuss their health concerns during educational sessions conducted by the community healthcare workers.

Recognition and professionalisation needed

As a trade union, SEWA has long lobbied and advocated for care worker issues to be recognised and addressed at the local and federal level, as well as in international forums. It closely worked with the International Labour Organization on its Convention 177 on the rights of home-based workers and Convention 189 on the rights of domestic workers. The union was also involved in the drafting of a 2004 bill that gave street vendors legal status and entitled them to social security, as well as the country’s first-ever umbrella legislation for informal sector workers in 2008. SEWA has also launched a national campaign calling for the recognition of care work as decent work, proper remuneration and social security benefits for care workers, as well as capacity-building and training of care workers. It also recently launched a national campaign calling for universal health care.

India does not have a legal or policy definition of care workers, but SEWA has lobbied the Indian government for years to embrace its own definition of the care economy. “The care economy in India needs to be broad-based and include waste recyclers, who contribute significantly to a clean environment,” Shah, the SEWA national secretary, says. She is calling for many more categories of workers, such as watershed workers, small-holder farmers and forest workers – to be recognised.

“Care workers are involved in the most informal forms of work and often considered an extension of household responsibilities such as childcare, old age care, nursing care and housekeeping,” adds Sonia George, a SEWA Council member. “SEWA believes it is time to recognise the skills needed to perform such tasks and to professionalise these to ensure decent work.”

This story was supported by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES).