On the ‘fruits’ of Labour in India
‘The missing 235 million’
The longest-serving Congress President in history, Mrs Sonia Gandhi’s birthday this year was marked this year by an utterly disappointing event on Indian Social media. #HappyBarDancerDay was trending all day on Indian Twitter alluding to a notoriously concocted story supplemented with morphed images meant to morally disparage the principal opposition UPA Chairperson’s life as an alleged ‘bar dancer’ in London before meeting the former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. For anyone remotely aware of social media and how vitriolic it is for female public figures and women in general, this may harrowingly be of no surprise and be brushed aside as ‘normal’. Female politicians are no exceptions to this disgusting phenomenon, the ‘Twitter army’(some generals therein followed on Twitter by the Prime Minister himself) notoriously harassed perhaps India’s finest foreign minister, the late Mrs Sushma Swaraj for her grave errors in aiding Pakistani people to get medical aid in India and being the head of a ministry that transferred an official harassing an interfaith couple bysuggesting the husband among other things, to ‘convert to Hinduism’- a gross error by a public servant.
The contrast, however, must be made apparent. Mrs Gandhi was ‘trolled’ viciously for her life before her public role, as an independent citizen making a living, it is thus important to analyse female labour and the societal attitude towards it in India. The statistics reveal a strange anomaly. For a country maintaining a massive 7% and above GDP growth rate between 2011 and 2017–18 and consistently displaying high schooling rates for women, the female participation in labour force dipped to its lowest number since independence in 2017. India in fact, has among the lowest Female Labour Force Participation Rates (FLFPRs) in the world. This data suffers from the lacunae of discounting household work as ‘work’ and ‘labour’ because it is not ‘work’ in that wages are not paid to the worker directly. (an argument may be made that the amount of household work that women in India do and are socially expected to do must be totalled and be paid in cash-i.e.- considering the ‘work’ as labour done by a labourer instead or be paid as compensation for losing out on wages from economically productive work). Less than 19% of jobs created in ten of India’s fastest-growing sectors belong to women, an increase in the absolute number of women employed in the past three decades can be directly attributed to more women in small scale cottage industries or agriculture- marked by low productivity and wages- reputed studies posit that this growth would have been thrice the quantity it had been if the opportunities available to men and women had been at par.
Thus, it is clear that numerous factors prevent the female workforce in this country to reach its potential. Econometric results show that social perceptions of women, women’s level of education, household size and income, and the presence of young children in the household all influence the likelihood of India’s women to participate in the labour market. In short, the structural characteristics in the labour market have played a more important role than changes in the underlying characteristics of the female working-age population in influencing participation rates. Norms that inhibit women’s participation options in the labour market coupled with a decline corresponding to educational opportunities directly account for this regression. While the latter justification is a boon- hopefully translating to more women earning in secondary and tertiary level jobs, the former must be dealt with as fast as possible.
NSSO data (1970–2018) shows that female worker participation rates are lower for higher expenditure categories, particularly in rural areas. Families, strangely enough, take pride when female members withdraw from work, demonstrating that male members can provide a comfortable life for the family, an increased household income thus is a bane for a woman wanting to work as it almost warrants family pressure to quit as her income in ‘unnecessary’ This continued perception of women being secondary earners has also translated into damning numbers such that the female wage has remained about 60–65% of the male wage (on average) over the last three decades (1993–2018). This wage gap then further perpetuates an incentive structure for men to continue working and women to withdraw when household wealth increases. Women in India spend 577% more time than men (352 minutes vs. 52 minutes on household chores), the largest exodus of women under 34, productive, able-bodied citizens with the ability to contribute economically to both, the family and the nation from the labour market can be directly related to maternity, a maternal hostile work environment (lack of maternity leave, informal sectors ability to flout regulations undetected etc.) and the societal expectations to do household work. Safety concerns are rife- from inefficient ICCs in the formal sector that do as poorly to deal with workplace sexual harassment as the Indian Police (an astounding achievement that must be condemned) to people in everyday streets and public transport sneering at women bold enough to step out and earn. The threat of sexual abuse and ill-treatment because of gender(‘sexism’) looms over the largest untapped wealth generators of India. Offering any person, a choice between salaried, productive economic work and a life hypothetically free from sexual abuse and discrimination when both are a person’s inalienable rights guaranteed by The Constitution to justify state and societal inaction to rectify the latter is a mere illusion of a choice, it is a mandate forced upon the person.
The female output is a meagre one-sixth of the total economic output-among the lowest in the world and about half of the global average. A rise in female employment rates to the male level would provide India with an extra 235m workers, more than the EU has of either gender and more than enough to fill all the factories in the rest of Asia. It is ignorant to suggest that women in India do not work because they do not want to work. There is evidence that many women want jobs- the demand is thus high. Census data suggest 31% of stay-at-home women would work if a job were available. Opportunities like MNREGA, the government work scheme that guarantees 100 days of paid labour a year for rural Indians has more female participants than male. The IMF estimates that if the Indian labour force has parity between the genders, it would be 27% richer. There are incalculable human benefits attached to the economic gains. Women who work are likelier to invest more in their children’s upbringing and to have more say over how they lead their lives. Consumption would dramatically increase, even in households that can sustain on the male-only income, expenditure on commodities and services, normal in the rest of the world but considered ‘luxury’ in India would leapfrog, acting as the best incentive for both, domestic and international firms to invest more in manufacturing and supply which would create even more jobs and pull even more people out of poverty or in low productivity, low paying jobs to a better place.
The societally conservative mindset of India requires a rampant change, startling studies reveal that 84% of Indian people believe that men have a right to a job over women when jobs are scarce which translated to a figure of 90% of the 36 million jobs created between 2005 to 2018 taken by men. Sectors where female employment was high- that is agricultural labour are most vulnerable now to automation displacing workers which would affect women by and large. A blanket economically ‘right-wing’ answer to the concerns raised would be a suggestion for women to take lesser pay for the same work as a man meaning imploring an employer, sexist as though he may be to hire more women because the production costs drive down- essentially create a pay gap so that it is beneficial to women in the workforce. Human dignity aside, even economically, this is contentious. Nothing stops male members of the workforce to further reduce the cost of their labour- in effect, this would translate to a price war between the genders in the labour market to the bottom, overall labour costs would drive down and workers would be worse off than they were. Nothing also stops ‘cartel-isation’ between employers again, to the detriment of the labourer.
When national wealth and welfare, national security among several other things that would make India a better place to live in are the stakes, societal ‘conservative’ and allegedly ‘traditional’ mindset must be struck down as detrimental to the national interest. Even if one is a misogynist by way of inculcation, keeping women out of the workforce and not actively creating an environment under which more women can join the workforce is beyond reason and common sense. While Mrs Gandhi referenced in the first paragraph worked as a young adult alternating between waitressing and babysitting, simultaneously studying in a foreign country before she entered public life, she worked to make ends meet and was a self-sustaining economic entity who paid for her own education and expenses- a feat that her Twitter trolls probably do not even contemplate surmounting. All economically productive work must be appreciated and encouraged and must not be disparaged, doing so is an act of axing one’s own feet and those of one’s fellow citizens- a patently ‘anti-national’ act if there ever was one.
