Addressing Violent Workspaces And Their Relation To Women’s Work

A woman attired in police clothes stands managing the crowds at a busy railway station, a sight which might have escaped our notice had it not been the one-year-old she was cradling in her hands while doing this. This photo of Reena, an RPF constable has become viral over the last month. She is quintessentially the hand that rocks the cradle and rules the word—in the language of the Railway Police Special Force – ‘she serves, she nurtures, she does it all.‘

In the recent months the questions around women’s work and her workspace grabbed some attention in the wake of the heinous rape and murder of a trainee doctor in a reputed hospital in Kolkata. A prime demand of the movement has been the safety of women in workspace, to create a workspace more conducive to the needs of women and gender queer people. 

Laws governing women’s work

Since the time of independence there has been a plethora of laws trying to safeguard women in their workspaces. The Factories Act of 1948 mandates that women employees need to be provided with separate toilets, changing rooms and lockers, with a creche and compulsory nursing breaks.

The Maternity Benefits Act of 1961 provides women employees up to twenty-six weeks of paid maternity leave with the guarantee of prevention of termination of their jobs during this period or of negative changes to their terms of employment. The Equal Remuneration Act of 1976 provides for equal pay for men and women for equal work and prohibits discrimination of women workers in recruitment, promotion and general employment conditions.

Finally, the 2013 The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act promises to protect women against sexual harassment of any kind for which the employer is mandatorily required to set up an Internal Complaints Committee to ensure speedy and confidential addressing of such complaints. 

In spite of such robust legislations then why is work such a site of hazard for women and gender queer people? An obvious explanation lies in putting this on implementational lapses. In 2023 the Supreme Court of India expressed concerns over the serious lapses in the implementation of the POSH act including non-compliance. But to really understand the obstacles that women face at work maybe we need to take a step back and ask what really constitutes women and workplace in the context of India. 

Home as a workspace

According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (2021-22) female labour force participation in India was 32.8%. In spite of registering an increase from the previous round of 2017-18 of 23.3%, the picture is sobering especially when compared to 77.2% participation of men in the labour force.

According to the same report 44.5% cite childcare and home making as the primary reason for dropping out of paid labour. It is clear therefore that what is counted as ‘not work’ in the national level surveys constitutes in fact a bulk of women’s work. Based on the Time Use Survey of NSSO 2019 it can be seen that 85% girls and women between the age of 15-29 and 92 % women between 29-59 spend over five hours on unpaid housework in contrast to 24.5% of men and boys aged over 6+ spending over an hour on domestic duties.

Given this huge care burden that women bear as work, their home often serves as their primary worksite. This home, as we know, is hardly a safe workspace. Along with unequal terms of labour evident in the vast disparity in distribution of unpaid domestic and care work, women are also susceptible to violence within their home. A very quick glance at self-reported cases of domestic violence shows that 29.3% of ever married women between ages 18-49 report facing domestic and/or sexual violence. Experts working on issues of violence agree that even this figure is severely underreported.

The home as a space of unpaid care work is not recognised as a workspace. But even as a site of home-based work, the home escapes the contours of laws legislating women’s employment in India. Jayati Ghosh notes that fall in women’s employment in export-oriented manufacturing in the 1990s corresponded to a rise in female self-employment. This increase in regular work through what is recognised for measurement as ‘subsidiary activity’ is evident in increase of home-based work as part of subcontracting system for export and domestic markets.

According to PLSF report (2023-24) 36.7% women engage in unpaid work within household enterprise. For many working on bidi, zari and other such home-based work, the hazard of occupation are specific. Low pay and difficult conditions of work intersect with exploitation by subcontractors. As feminised work carried out by individual women or women in a household in their houses, these works hardly enter our attention and indeed often escape the state’s net of protection.

Informal work and lack of protection

Next, we come to the section of workers who constitute the 32.8% reporting to be in paid work. 81.8% of women in paid work, labour in the informal sector which includes domestic work, street vending, home based work and the like (ILO, 2018). Employing one of the largest segments of women, especially poor migrant women, paid domestic work remains one of the least regulated sectors in post-colonial India.

As a feminised sector employing usually individual workers it also falls outside the ambit of most of the labour laws governing women’s protection in India. Women domestics complain of exploitative conditions of work, incommensurate pay and various humiliating behaviour that they face in their employers’ homes including denial of access to toilets. They report facing regular verbal abuse and often extreme physical and sexual abuse.

While the POSH Act of 2013 makes provisions enabling workers in private homes to file complaints against their abusers, it must be remembered that domestic service is contoured on acute caste and class disparities. Poor women, usually migrants, often low caste lack both the knowledge and the support structure required to pursue such redressal mechanism.

In fact, government reports suggest that between 2015-2021 there has been an increase of 45% in rape of Dalit women and girls, illustrating how conditions of employment marked by unequal caste-community relations lead to both distinct forms of violence and obstruction to its redressal. This is further entrenched by inadequate unionisation or collectivisation in this sector. 

Women who work on the streets remain differently disadvantaged. The street is rarely recognised as a space of work. Street vendors regularly experience various forms of abuses that they are subjected to ranging from violent evictions to assaults by police, local strongmen and a general public apathy towards their plight. While the government has passed a Street Vending (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act in 2014, there has hardly been any real difference in the life and livelihood of workers from this.

In spite of recognising sex work as profession, this ruling is marked by many caveats including continued criminalisation of it as organised trade. More crucially the judicial pronouncement has not brought about changes in conditions of work in the streets.

In sectors like manufacturing or plantations where workspaces came under the ambit of labour laws, there remains persistent wage discrimination and bias against women workers. Circumventing equal pay for equal work, women are pushed into low end jobs termed naturally suitable for them entailing low wages and precarity. 

No work without safety

A report by Indiaspend suggests that lack of safety at workplace determines many women’s decision to not undertake paid work. So while we celebrate the dual role that Reena is seen dispensing in shouldering her dual burden, all the time sweeping under the carpet the infrastructural lapses which create such conditions of critical labour, women are routinely exploited, assaulted and killed in their workspace.

From Bhanwari Devi’s gangrape in 1992 to the RG Kar rape and murder in 2024 the contours through which violence shapes women’s work, while marked distinctly by its caste, class and community location, has been horrific in its consistency. And it is time we pay attention to that.