Written by Glenn Fawcett – Executive Director, Field Operations
There is hardly a middle class family in India that doesn’t have someone to look after the children and the domestic chores. In Australia, where I grew up, only the very rich can afford a variety of full and part time nannies, house keepers, maids and cooks as they are paid relatively well and are not considered another class. At least, not by us ordinary folk.

In India, however, there is an unbridgeable divide between ‘servants’ and those hiring them. While I’ve somewhat adjusted to it in more than a decade of living in India, I’ve never really let go of my discomfort with the inequality of compensation for work that exists here.

It was interesting for me to find out that the first minimum wage laws were enacted in Australia and New Zealand in the 1890’s (followed by the USA in 1912) and aimed at setting a minimum hourly rate for labor. There were a lot of legal battles fought over almost one hundred years, and the advent of the Trade Unions to represent workers ensured the working class had a voice and received a salary a family could live on.

That’s precisely what has not happened in India. There is a minimum wage, but it is half what a family needs to live on. Most of the poor are living in the twilight of the ‘unregulated sector’ anyway, where workers most often get what they can, commonly about half the minimum wage — which is already half what a family needs to live on!

Which brings me to economics, fear and paradigms. At this point those reading may begin to get drowsy, but the reason that all this is so damn interesting is because this is an issue of social equality, justice and the right to a decent life for hundreds of millions of Indians working fourteen hour days and still relegated to a life of poverty.

Our ‘cook cum cleaning lady’  (I call all our staff ‘domestic assistants’ — my wife is of course Director of House Management and Minister for Domestic Affairs) wakes at five in the morning, prepares breakfast for her family, travels on a bus to her work area, cleans, cooks and scrubs for around six families, then heads home to the evening chores. For all of this, she manages to scrape out the actual minimum wage. Of course, families like hers cannot afford private schooling and tuition. They have no choice but to send their kids to dysfunctional Hindi medium government schools in a country where universities teach in English, thus perpetuating the class divide.

My idea –- which seems to me like good economics — is to double the minimum wage. This would effect a huge influx of capital from a group with an expendable income now able to buy a new fridge and washing machine. The impact on economic growth would be phenomenal and perhaps even some of the families could afford to give their children a chance at a university education! And it really is doable. Even middle class families could easily afford to pay twice what they now pay their ‘servants.’

Of course (surprise, surprise), most Indian families are not thinking along these lines and will work hard to ensure their ‘domestics’ don’t even imagine such lofty ideas. I sense that lurking behind all this is fear of the privileged that the ‘uneducated classes’ will overrun them, and most have not even glimpsed the possibility of benefits for all that could accrue from such a trade-off. Unfortunately, due to such fear and prejudice, to achieve what I am suggesting will take much more that forking out a decent salary to those that clean and scrub for us. What is needed is a paradigm shift, and this will not be found in the hallowed halls and libraries of economic rationalism and reductionism. Perhaps (ironically), compassion will provide the window through which we will see a brave new world where we pay our household assistants a dignified wage and the whole society benefits.

Filed under: Uncategorized, lotus outreach on January 19th, 2009