Cheap Labour

We live a comfortable middle-class life in Ahmedabad, but it is hard to avoid coming face to face with the reality of the desperate existence many others endure. In fact, evidence of injustice and suffering is not hard to come by in India. And sometimes it is right outside your door.

Several weeks ago I left the flat on the way to work and came across a group of road diggers working in the morning sun on Tulsi Row. They were digging narrow trenches to lay a gas connection for the bungalows that surround our block of flats. What struck me, but is really unremarkable in India, was that whole families were at work in the road. There were slim women in the trench, hacking at the mud with pickaxes; boys of fourteen, who should have been in school, were bent-backed to shovel earth out of the trench and onto the verge. Either side of the trench were several children and toddlers with matted hair playing in the dirt and with bits of plastic picked up from the verge. As I walked by with my laptop bag, my shirt sleeves rolled up in preparation for the heat that was already building up at 9:00 o’clock, I noticed a women breastfeeding a baby. She was sat on a pile of earth next to a trench, her sari dirty and her feet on the tarmac of the road. But where else would she go? Manual construction workers like these are often basically homeless and build makeshift camps of wood and plastic sheeting wherever they are paid to work. Across Ahmedabad, where ever road works are taking place you can find a tattered encampment with blue plastic sheeting, where in the evening families cluster around cooking fires fed with scavenged kindling. Paid for a discreet piece of work of only a few days duration, the families on Tulsi Row must have had to travel from their homes to the Satellite area on a daily basis.

This grim scene highlights the reality that labour is cheap in India. And that must be a reason why so many projects in the construction, services and other unskilled labour sectors suffer from so much shabbiness and poor execution. Apart from the injustice of paying people a pittance to work all day at backbreaking tasks, this set up means few tasks get done properly. The trenches in Tulsi Row had been filled after a couple of days, the mud loosely packed back in and rubbish caught up in the refilling sticking out at crazy angles. A pleasant road was suddenly ugly. But then why would anyone expect those worn out mothers, young wives and children to be bothered about the quality of their work? Their working day looks like slavery, with the rest of society the slave driver.

A less extreme example of the effect of paying people very little for their efforts is the work of cleaners in India. I have mentioned before that we do not employ a cook, cleaner or washer women, which is uncommon for a household with our level of income. Apart from the unease we would feel in having someone clean and wash our clothes for us, we know the work would not get done properly. At my office the cleaner sweeps the floor in the morning with a short-handled, feather-like brush, the basic design of which forces her to stoop low to the floor to use it. We have one of these brushes at home but don’t use it because it is less effective at getting dirt up than a normal broom. After this sweeping, which is a brisk affair, the cleaner's adult daughter washes the floor with a cloth. She squats down and swabs at the floor with it, moving the bucket and shuffling backwards every so often. The job gets done but in a more painful and less effective way than is necessary. Even after being cleaned the floor looks grubby at the edges. When I asked a colleague about this, they admitted that they had to almost stand over their cleaner to make sure they did a proper job or even worked at all. A colleague of Dani’s stands and instructs her cleaner to move furniture when dusting item by item, maintaining constant vigilance. Our feeling was that if you have to stand over someone to make sure they do their job properly, you clearly have the time to do it yourself. But then this type of manual work is not something most middle-class Indians would contemplate doing themselves, despite M. K. Gandhi’s best efforts to dignify manual labour. Even in the simplest of tasks then deep rooted social conditioning determines people's action or inaction.

In India, wages for unskilled labour have no doubt always been low. But with a growing urban middle-class in the metros (Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta) and B-class cities (Chennai, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Jaipur etc) with expendable incomes, there is a convergence of a conditioned aversion to manual labour, the existence of a mass of uneducated peons willing to act as ‘staff’ and growing incomes to pay for them. This struck me when I watched a group of Delhiites having their bags carried to their carriage at Old Delhi train station. This family was perfectly capable of carrying their own bags but not even the adolescent children had their hands occupied. Instead sweating porters balanced the family’s hold-alls on their heads, their metal license discs gleaming against the red shirt sleeve of their right arms. Behind the porters the kids ambled, quite possibly having paid a small, fixed amount for their luxury. An even better example of this convergence is given by a colleague. He joked that if you have a bad back and driving your car becomes difficult, don’t pay to see a doctor or physiotherapist, just hire a driver. It’ll be cheaper.