CHENNAI: Due to the lockdown in place, most of us have asked our domestic workers to stay home till it is safe to venture out. But, this has hit the workers hard. Since there is no job, they don’t get paid and thousands of workers, especially women, are finding it difficult to feed their families. Express spoke to a few of them to find out how they are coping during this difficult time...
Shankari, a widow and mother of three, left Chennai a couple of days before lockdown 1.0. She went back to her home in Tirupattur to be with her children, who were sent back from government residential schools.“In a matter of days, all families asked me to stop coming to work. I knew that there was a virus on the loose, but I didn’t think it would affect me,” said Shankari. With no job, she went to all her employers house to collect monthly wage and return home to her children.
Usually she worked two hours a day in each house and made Rs 10,000 a month. “One of them gave me the March wage completely. Two of them gave Rs 1,500 and one old woman I work for paid me only Rs 1,000,” Shankari said.
The Rs 6,500 she had, in addition to her savings, kept the family afloat for the first month of the lockdown, but now they have run out of money and supplies. “I have no money and the family depends on me. My children are hungry,” she said.
She is not the only suffering during the lockdown. “A large number of female domestic workers are either single parents or live with alcoholic or abusive husbands. The family loses financial stability if they stop going to work,” said T A Lata, General Secretary of the Domestic Workers Union belonging to the CPM affiliated CITU.
Mallika (name changed) a domestic from Kodungaiyur said her husband, an auto driver, barely gave any money for household expenses. “He only pays the rent. Since both of us are not working during the lockdown, we have no income, but our landlord keeps asking for rent,” she lamented.
When she asked her employers for an advance, they loaned her Rs 10,000 with four per cent interest. I have no idea how I will pay them back, she says. Her friend Sudha (name changed) who works as a cook in three houses said the initial rations and Rs 1,000 given by the government fed her and two sons for a while. “My employers did not give me any advance. One of them still has not even paid my March salary. I got some loan from my landlord. I am scared about the future,” she said.
“I cooked for three families almost every day for the last 6-7 years and yet I can’t feed my own family now,” she rued.“Many live-in domestic workers have also been forced to go back to hostile homes which they left in the first place,” said R Geetha, said a labour rights activist.
Issue at hand
Domestic workers stuggle to make the ends meet during the lockdown. Some employers provide them loans, but workers worry about repaying them as they are the sole breadwinners of their families