Snapshot of the Partnership

Our evaluation partnership, spanning from September to December 2023, employed a comprehensive mixed-methods approach to assess the project’s effectiveness. Through extensive desk research, qualitative interviews, and focus group discussions, we engaged with diverse stakeholders including homeworkers, brands, and multi-stakeholder initiatives. This approach allowed us to examine both the quantitative outcomes and qualitative impacts of the project across its implementation regions.

The evaluation process brought together various perspectives from Transform Trade and partner organisations, homeworkers and their communities, brands and retailers, policy makers, and multi-stakeholder initiatives. Through these interactions, we gained valuable insights into the project’s achievements and challenges, particularly in adapting to unexpected circumstances such as the global pandemic and natural disasters.

Our Impact

The project’s reach extended across three countries, five cities, and involved coordination among ten global teams, creating significant impact at multiple levels. Our evaluation revealed substantial progress in increasing recognition of homeworkers within global supply chains, alongside enhanced awareness among workers about their rights, health, and entitlements. The project successfully established effective communication channels across partner organisations and demonstrated remarkable adaptability in response to changing circumstances.

A particularly noteworthy achievement has been the project’s contribution to building momentum for the homeworkers’ rights movement. Through transnational coalitions and networks, the initiative has created lasting infrastructure for continued advocacy and support. 

Key Learnings and Takeaways

This journey is not short, there is a long way to go ahead.

– Goma Pandey, Advocacy Manager at CLASS Nepal

Our evaluation revealed that the Hidden Homeworkers project has established itself as a foundational initiative in prioritising homeworkers’ rights, with significant momentum that must be sustained through continued networking and coalition building. This understanding of the project’s long-term nature has highlighted the importance of building lasting transnational coalitions while strengthening operational infrastructure.

Looking ahead, the evaluation uncovered crucial insights about stakeholder engagement and operational efficiency that will shape future initiatives. Kratika Choubey from Transform Trade points to the need for earlier business engagement: “One thing I would’ve done differently is that we’ll include businesses within the consultation process as well to ensure that the project is suitable for them to engage in it.” This perspective is complemented by Sarbani Kattel from Home Net South Asia, who notes, “It is important to engage local stakeholders meaningfully as well, beyond just engaging with the central stakeholders. This requires a strategic rethinking of how we use our resources.” 

These learnings provide a framework for future interventions that can more effectively address the complex challenges of supply chain transparency while maintaining focus on homeworkers’ rights.

The post Evaluating Impact, Building Momentum: Insights from Our Assessment of the Hidden Homeworkers Project with Transform Trade appeared first on OFC.

“And I’ve always struggled with this, you know, ki (that) how do we even monetize something as work at home, which actually is what makes the country’s economy run, right? Because if one day my mother, who’s a homemaker, decides that she’s not going to cook, she’s not going to clean, my father won’t be able to go to the office, right? And since we’ve monetized only one kind of work, how do we even grapple with all these complex questions?”

— Sara Sethia reflecting on the gendered politics of unpaid care work, in this episode of the Nurturing Radical Kindness podcast.

Work is an indisputably crucial aspect of our lives. Our working hours determine our mood, our health and even our leisure. To get a good job, that is, to be “well-settled,” seems to be a goal passed down from generation to generation. Doctors, engineers and lawyers have the social sanction, while artists, sociologists and historians not so much. The nature of our work and the way society treats it  can have major ramifications on our lives, but how and in what ways? Why are some forms of work paid, and others not? Is household labour work? Is there ‘good’ work and ‘bad’ work? How do caste, gender and class intersect with advocacy for labour rights? In this episode, co-hosts Vandita Morarka and Sanchi Patel reflect on the political economy of labour, and tackle these questions, and many more, along with Sara Sethia, a growth and development economist.

Content Warning: This conversation includes accounts of caste-based discrimination.

***

Love to read or want to revisit your favourite bits? Dive into the full transcript below!

Vandita

Hi everyone, welcome back to the third episode of Nurturing Radical Kindness, a podcast where we explore radical kindness as a pathway to achieving social justice. My name is Vandita and my pronouns are she and her.

Sanchi
And I’m Sanchi. My pronouns are she/her and thank you for tuning in to another episode with us. 

We’ve been enjoying having these conversations on radical kindness with all of you so much, and yes, looking forward to learning lots more.

Vandita
Definitely, Sanchi. And we’re so excited for today’s conversation. We’ll be talking about the politics of labour and we’ll be exploring a little bit of what even is seen as work, what isn’t seen as work, and how our ideas of morality and right and wrong intersect with how we see work and how we assign value to work and to the people behind that. Before we start off for today, I would like to give a big shout out to the people behind the scenes. We have Kuhoo and Ashita, who’ve been working on the content that we’ve been hearing great feedback for. And we have Suchanda, who’s been producing the podcast. Thank you so much everyone for the work that you did.

Sanchi
Yes, big, big thanks to everyone and I think this is a very important conversation that we’re having today, Vandita. So, allow me to start right off with a question to you. And I want to ask you here, where do you exactly think our current understanding of work really comes from?

Vandita
Thanks for the question, Sanchi. I feel like understanding just what work means is something that I struggled a lot with because it didn’t necessarily make as much obvious sense to me as it seemed to make to everybody. And I think the more I see work around me, I think it’s very much rooted in a capitalist idea of production. So I think work often becomes about, ‘OK, so you did something, but as a result of that, how much did you produce? Is there something tangibly that can either be sold off or that has created additional financial value in some way?’ And I think tying in our understanding of work with the whole financial aspect of production has also limited our imagination of what work is. I think that’s also led to so many other things, right? Work has become so inherently interlinked with what we believe about ourselves. The values of good and bad we assign to ourselves because so much of people’s self-esteem in a capitalist system comes from what we believe work assigns value. That means that we think we’re good or bad based on the values we assign to the work that we do. What about you, Sanchi?

Sanchi

That makes so much sense, Vandita. And to be honest, like you said, we do see this all around us, right? Work is something that can produce additional monetary benefit to us, and since we have grown up seeing certain types of work not being valued as much around us. I think humare khudh ke dimaag mein bhi vahi cheeze internalise ho gayi hain, (this is internalised in our minds also) right? And how domestic work is socially treated, clearly points to this. And I think Vandita, another important thing here is that work output is one thing that is definitely, definitely influenced by capitalism. But another thing that comes into play about the perception we hold towards any work or any occupation is also affected by who is doing it right, vo kaam kaun kar raha hai (who is doing the work) will also decide how we perceive it. And this is where I think what we do intersects with the identities we occupy like yaha pe (here) our caste, our gender identity, our sexual orientation, ethnicity and so many other axes that we hold intersect with what we do. Jaise ki (like), there’s so much caste typing of jobs that happens where in our systems use this to really continuously exploit certain caste groups hain na (right)? And if we talk about gender, I think how this comes into play is very obvious because hum sab ne ye dekha hai ki (we have all seen that) some occupations are considered inherently feminine, while others are taken to be more masculine and phir (then) obviously, by default, jo (those) feminine occupations hai, they come to be valued lesser, right? Matlab humari binary understandings itni engrained hai humare dimaag me ki things like babysitting, nursing or secretarial positions vagera jo ye sab cheeze hai (our binary understandings are so engrained in our minds that things like babysitting, nursing, secretarial positions), very easily we label them less important because we associate them with conventionally feminine traits. And just an instance from pop culture comes into mind here wherein there’s this scene from Friends where Rachel hires a “male” nanny for Emma, and Ross has a very hard time accepting and keeps asking the nanny, ‘So, you’re just like a guy who’s a nanny?’ I mean, how ridiculous is it that we value some work less because a particular kind of person does the work or because some identities come to take up that work more overtime? And so many of us are also guilty of this, right? The way we say female journalist, female comedian, female politician. Why? Why is it unimaginable for us to think that women or other gender minorities can occupy these positions?

Vandita

Bilkul (definitely), Sanchi, thank you for sharing that. I think it’s so important to always go back to remembering ki the bodies we are in will determine how we are treated and also everything that we do is treated. Picking up from the example you shared from Friends, I was recently like watching the rerun of Modern Family and there’s an episode where Phil says, ‘Oh you know, Claire is going back to work after a 20-year vacation’ and she stops him and she says ‘I wasn’t on vacation’ because for 20 years Claire was a mother and a homemaker and she raised three children and managed the house and did a bunch of other things. I love that they actually showed that, where she stops him and specifically raises that that wasn’t a vacation period for me. But thank you so much for the points you bring up. I think it also takes me to the mindset then that comes in when we talk about labour and dignity of labour right? I think often even conversations jo log dignity of labour care ke around karte hain (conversations that people have around dignity of labour care), it becomes about ye jobs aise hai jo koi nahi karna chahta but kisi ko karna pad raha hai isiliye hum inko bacha kaise sakte hain (these jobs are such that no one wants to do, but someone needs to do it so how do we save/protect them). The whole saving mentality comes in like you mentioned, different identities experience jobs differently and depending on who’s doing a job also we assign different values, right? If it’s women doing jobs like nurturing roles, we might assign a certain type of value, but we would not financially compensate for it as much, especially when it comes to caste, these are not even options given. People are forced into jobs that are not even given the sort of protection or given any sort of support, especially in keeping with the hazardous conditions they work in. So I think that whole idea of deserve also needs to be delinked from the idea of labour or just humanity in general. Because when we say that, you know, someone is deserving of a better job, then are we saying ki duniya mein aise log hai (there are people in this world) who are not deserving of such a job, right? Are we saying that there are people who don’t deserve good jobs? But that’s not true. Everyone deserves a job that fulfils them. Everyone deserves a job that has certain safety standards, provides a minimum living wage, and I would say even beyond like a minimum living wage, right? It gives you a wage that allows you to enjoy your life and not just live it so you don’t just survive through it, you’re thriving through life. And I think detaching the idea of deserve from it also really helped me move away from my personal mentality of saving someone or trying to fix something for someone because there is nothing to fix or save but our mindsets and of course work conditions have to be improved. Of course, certain jobs need to go away and they do not need to be assigned or relegated to certain specific identities, but we definitely do not ever have to enter a situation from a saving mindset. We have to enter a situation from the mindset of everyone has a right to an equitable, dignified work environment, and our ideas of morality and our ideas of what we think is good work and bad work cannot determine that.

Sanchi
Thanks for that, Vandita. And I think what you said about we don’t have to enter anything with a fixing mindset, but because all that we have to fix is our own mindset is so powerful and thanks for that. And another thing that then comes to mind here is how we also attach value to the kind of work a person is doing hain na? And I think that really feeds into our fixing mindset ki (that) ‘oh, this person is doing a job that we don’t really value’ because we have a moral Judgement about the work and the kind of work, more importantly, that they’re doing and I think that is really something that we need to change because, for example, people performing tasks considered intellectual are definitely more respected than persons performing more physical tasks hain na (right)? And I think a very, very clear example of this is a school setting wherein a teacher is more respected in any school setting than a janitor, even though dono jo kaam kar rahe hain (both are working), it’s equally required and critical in fact to how the school runs. And even though both the roles are critical, which means that the labour that they put in, the teacher and the janitor, both are necessary for a school to be functioning smoothly, there is a clear difference in how both are treated, right? Chaahe (whether) it’s the treatment by students, by parents, by other teachers or by the management. Hume pata hai (we know) whose labour is respected more. And I think even in our general perceptions of such labour, everything is so value judged, right? And this clearly reflects in our movies also, where a girl’s father, I think, might reject a boy she loves because he does a job that is not respected. Ek toh (firstly) already so many layers of problems with this, but talking about labour in specific, we have seen this whether in Raja Hindustani where Aamir Khan was a taxi driver or even in Ishq where he was a mechanic if I remember correctly. And in both the movies, the stories and the plotline really revolves around the fathers of the love interest rejecting the guy for the work he did for it was considered lowly somehow.

Vandita
Bilkul (definitely), Sanchi, I think what you’re sharing about the value we assigned to the type of work is extremely important because I think this is where that distinction comes in, right? That even if someone is financially making as much money, like economically bringing in the same amount of income, we have certain preconceived ideas of what work is good and what work is bad. And I give this example so much, but a priest that maybe comes home and does pooja in your house, or like in a temple, sometimes is earning less than what a driver would be earning. But the way a family would treat a priest is so much different than how they would treat a driver. So, it’s not always just class that comes in. We also assign a lot of value to certain roles just because one, of intellect versus physical needs to do the job, but also often because of caste connotations, because of historical reasons, and because we’re continuing the oppression of certain identities by doing this.

Sanchi
Yeah, that’s so true. And I think we’ve seen this all around us, that class-based social mobility, like even if you’re earning more, it doesn’t automatically mean that your job is as respected like you said, right? And a real-life example that comes to mind here is, I know someone who moved to the US and they started working as a taxi driver and they were earning good for themselves and they were happy in what they were doing. But people back home were just saying, ‘Oh ye gaya (he went to) US and what is he doing? He’s just driving cars around. Vo driver hai. (he’s a driver)’ And the moral Judgement that comes from it is so harsh, right? And that just goes on to tell us ki even if we move upwards in the class hierarchy, our systems just teach us to value some work less than the other.

Vandita
That’s an extremely relevant example, Sanchi. I think I’ve seen this happen so much even in my communities where people will often not take up jobs, they will ostracise persons and it is so interlinked to caste. It is so interlinked to our ideas of what is a good job, what is a bad job, because for so long we’ve been taught that this is not your place in life, right? You deserve better and that whole idea of deserve your place in life, those come from inherently caste-based assumptions. They come from inherently, like hegemonic identity assumptions because they’re assuming that each person, one, wants to have the same pathway in life. Second, they’re also assuming that if you take up some sort of job versus the other, you are less than the other. And often in certain situations, I find a certain moralising that happens about the job as well, right? Where it’s not just about, is this a good job or a bad job. It becomes a reflection of your virtue and your character.

Sanchi
That’s so true, Vandita. And like from what you pointed at, I cannot help but think of sex work here and the idea of morality that we attach to it. I mean, there is historical evidence of sex work existing as a profession, and today it has come to a point where people indulging in it are ostracized by the mainstream society. Now, there are cases where we need to intervene if there is bonded labour and if somebody is being forced into it, but what I’d like to talk about here is people exercising their choice and their agency to do sex work and how they are looked at, both by the society and by the law and we know it’s in a very, very demeaning way, which is so problematic.

Vandita
Definitely, Sanchi. I would also say that when we are talking about the concerns of sex workers, it becomes so important, like with any other profession, to centre their voices and their agency. Which means that, while a lot of sex workers have been forced into this profession, at least from what I have read of their thoughts through my work, this is the work that they do now and they don’t want you to come in and save them without providing them alternatives that they can truly take up. And they definitely do not want to be saved, right? They do not see themselves as helpless. They do not see themselves as at the mercy of NGO, government body. They need rights. They need to have protection from police officers, sometimes from other civil society members. They need protection from other, like stakeholders. What they don’t need is for us to moralise their job and what they don’t need is for us to create a whole saviour attitude around their profession anyway.

Sanchi
Yeah, that’s so true, Vandita. And I think you put that so beautifully. And there’s a poem that then comes to my mind, which I’d like to share because it’s very, very relevant to what we’re talking about right now. It’s a sex worker’s plea, and I think it’ll help us understand this better. So here goes, 

Free from being treated like a burden,Free from a life where food is uncertain, Free from poverty, which bleeds me dry, Free from a situation which forced me to break down and cry. Free from a husband who beat me sore,Free from a house to run, oh, what a chore,Free from a belly bursting with his seed,Free from producing more mouths to feed. They look at me funny, as though I’ve gone astray,How do I explain to them that I’m happier this way? I make the calls and get to decide,Who lays on top and who gets to ride? My rates are set and so are my hours,How different am I from perks your corporates shower? It’s a hard job and I labour for money,Stop the ridicule and making this funny. Did you know I pay taxes? No labour is tax-free. There’s hard work that goes into what makes me ‘me’. So the next time you see a sex worker on the street,Just remember the simple sex worker’s plea. We do what we do because it pays. Why not make it legitimate, all of these lays?Why should I switch jobs and become what you want me to be?

Vandita

That is so powerful. Thank you so much, Sanchi, for sharing that. I think the last line just really stays with me. I think the whole idea of just agency and choice and people being able to decide what they want to do and to be able to do it in a way that is fulfilling and dignified is so important. And in a scenario where abuse and violence and harm exist, it is so important to create a supportive environment for survivors. If we are talking about labour violations, if we are talking about unsafe labour conditions, what we need to do is not just go in there and save a certain, say, 10 people or 15 people. What we need over time is systemic change where the ecosystem for all people everywhere changes, where work conditions change, social security kicks in, where you have benefits even when you’re working independently. And I think Sanchi, just picking up from that, I think it’s also about what roles in society have traditionally been seen as essential and what have been seen as not so essential, right? And often they say, ‘oh the market will fix the rates and the market forces will fix things.’ But the pandemic for me also was really eye-opening in the sense to say that no, you know, the market does not know because the market set rates and set salary benchmarks for jobs, for professions that were completely irrelevant in a pandemic. It did not recognize the need for so many people who we do not think of as essential workers.

I’ll give you an example, for me, the Amazon delivery person was serving as an essential worker because, in the initial months of the pandemic itself, they were there delivering stuff everywhere. And I’m not saying they’re just delivering frivolous items, right? These were the people bringing us our N95 masks. These were the people bringing us our sanitisers. So the idea of who an essential worker is really shifted, I think at a community level as well, because now when I think of an essential worker, the first images that come to mind are so much more different. And I know that a lot of conversation during the pandemic happened about content creators and how we would not have been able to survive without all of this rich content, right? Especially for persons with the privilege to access internet, have devices with them. And I think some content creators that get completely missed out even over here, are porn actors, porn actors create content. There were reported spikes of consumption during the pandemic. While a lot of porn is unethical, a lot of porn is abusive and the industry in itself is problematic. There is a lot of ethical feminist porn that is coming up as well, and we don’t necessarily value them or give them the same sort of dignity and respect. I mean, think of what our country has done with Sunny Leone, the way we’ve treated her. I’ve seen her be extremely dignified in interviews, at speaking engagements, and somehow every person that engages with her thinks that because of her profession, it is okay to then be invasive and disrespectful towards her about her everyday life in so many different ways. And I think that really is a reflection on how we attach value to work because of the models we associate with these jobs.

Sanchi

Yeah, and like, it just ties up so well into a conversation that we’ve been having about what is really valued as work and if an artist painting a painting is seen as an artist, then why isn’t a porn actor seen as an artist?

Vandita
Definitely, Sanchi. I think in addition to some of the recent conflicts. And I know I’m jumping from one thing to the other, but when I talk about the politics of labour, as for you, I think it’s so enmeshed with each other that you can’t really have a conversation about one without the other. Like, when I think of this, I think about the value we assign to, say, housework and care work, and recently legal conversations that have come up about, say, paying a salary for these roles, right? I find that sometimes we settle for very simple solutions for what are actually very nuanced demands, for what are very complex problems. Like, I don’t think that my mother is a homemaker and I don’t think giving her a salary on a monthly basis is necessarily going to fix anything. I think there is so much more that needs to go into this in terms of policy change, in terms of maybe directing the income of the partner to their other partner who’s the homemaker or the home manager. Maybe the government, doing direct cash transfers in cases of the family anyway would not be able to afford to pay the mother, you know, in the house. What about land rights, property rights? And I think that of so many other cases as well. 70% above farmers in the country are women, and they don’t have land rights. They don’t have property rights. They till land that is still in the name of their husbands, their fathers, their brothers. I see that in other professions as well and I think that conversations around labour often get restricted to maybe a salary increase or a wage increase, but I don’t think that adequately addresses issues of dignity. It does not adequately address issues of rights, because rights are not just about money. Rights are about so many other benefits. And we never really, you know, we never really want to go beyond slightly more superfluous and the more easy thing of ‘Oh, let’s increase the income or let’s give them a salary’ to like an actual solution. 

Sanchi

Yeah. Thanks for bringing that up, Vandita. I think that again goes on to show us how various identity markers, like our gender here, intersect with what we do on a daily basis. And I’ve always struggled with this, you know, ki (that) how do we even monetize something as work at home, which actually is what makes the country’s economy run, right? Because if one day my mother, who’s a homemaker, decides that she’s not going to cook, she’s not going to clean, my father won’t be able to go to the office, right? And since we’ve monetized only one kind of work, how do we even grapple with all these complex questions? And I think what you shared really helped me build and really start thinking about it in a more holistic manner. So really, thanks a lot for that.

Vandita
Definitely, thanks, Sanchi. And I think something that has helped me put this into perspective is thinking about how our lives are so often subsidised by people living in the cities, but people living in conditions that we would not want to live in ourselves. So the fact that I, as a modern-day Indian woman, am able to go to a job and do something outside of her house is because my life is subsidised by a domestic worker who I pay very minimum wages. Even the minimum wage laws in our country are laughable, right? Like, the income levels are extremely low. But my life is subsidised by that domestic worker and I’m able to do other things and create more money, or like more financial value for money outside because there is someone who then takes care of my home, for some people, takes care of their children, like in so many different ways, right, as a nanny, as a domestic worker. And I think these are conversations we’re not having. And these are also things we’re not thinking about when we think about what is fair remuneration, what are fair wages for people because of whom we’re even able to pursue what we want to do. And I think in line with this, I’d love to now introduce our guests. Today, we have with us Sarah who is the Senior Program Officer for Knowledge and Advocacy at One Future Collective. Sarah is also one of the Co-leads on a research study that looks at gendered care work and housework during the pandemic. And we thought she’d be a great fit for everyone to listen in and really understand the value of labour and the politics that goes behind labour. Sarah, so happy to have you today with us.

Sarah
Hi, so happy to be here. I’ve already learnt so much from your conversation. 

Sanchi

Hi Sarah, you’re always so kind and it’s so nice to have you here on the podcast today. Like, you know, we’re talking about the politics of labour and we’d love to know your take on what you think is really seen as valuable labour in our society. And how does identity then intersect with this value? 

Sarah

So I would like to start by quoting Zadie Smith, she says, ‘I think the traditional feminine arts of homemaking or dressmaking or whatever are shamefully undervalued. They’re doing what I’m doing, making a space for another person to be in, creating an architecture for life. There’s no greater task, but also no more mundane one.’ And I think this essentially summarises what we see is valuable work. As Vandita rightly mentioned previously in the conversation, we have such a capitalistic idea of work that we don’t consider care work or domestic work or anything that involves nurturing and anything that cannot have measured output as valuable. And consequently, care work in domestic work is highly undervalued in spite of the fact that it’s essential. It’s something that keeps the world going. It’s something that we all need all throughout our lives and at different points and lives also have to contribute to. To answer the second part of your question, which is what is the role that identity plays here? The first aspect of identity that I would like to explore is gender. Like Zadie Smith also mentioned, homemaking and care work is tagged as feminine. It’s a consensus that women are supposed to do it. It’s a feminine thing to dond the problem with this is twofold. First, because it’s considered feminine, because we’ve labelled it feminine, people also assume it to be easy and, you know, weak or like not important or secondary, which reflects in the way we treat domestic workers, like people who come home and work for us, and also in the way we treat our mums when it comes to homemaking. Like usually when they whine about domestic work or they whine about certain problems at home or coordination or the fact that they’re not getting time to themselves. We usually look at it as whining. We usually don’t want to listen to it, or we usually think of it as trivial, whereas that may not be the case if someone is complaining about having a bad day at office, for instance. And the second problem with this is that because we label it as feminine, girls, from the very beginning of their lives, see women around them carrying the burden of household work, they’re taught that this is their essence, this is their main purpose in life, that this is what they’re meant for. And that is really unfair. I can’t really understand how you tie in gender with the type of, you know, with this idea that housework can only be performed by women or only should be performed by women. It’s very possible that in a family maybe the dad is more suited to stay at home and do the nurturing work, whereas the mum is more suited to go outside and work. But that sort of a setting will be very unacceptable in the society and that may cause a lot of stress for everyone in the family, and that is really unfair. Another aspect of identity that I would like to explore is caste. So, Rajasthan is my native place and over there, there’s a certain caste called Bhangans. They are supposed to clean toilets. No one else cleans toilets. Only Bhangans clean toilets and there is this lady, old lady, who’s been cleaning toilets at my Nani’s place since the time I was a kid. I don’t know her name. Nobody in my family knows her name, but she’s just the Bhangan and she’s supposed to clean toilets, her children are supposed to clean toilets. It’s as though even before they’re born, their caste is determining that they’re supposed to do that job, and they’re not very well respected because of the job they do. The similar thing goes for Gujjars, who are people who were supposed to tend to cows or rear cows and it’s assumed that their children will do the same. So, this sort of structure is again, very oppressive because it limits the possibility that they see for themselves. It limits the possibility for their children because they cannot climb up the social ladder. They’re not respected. They’re not treated as equals.

Vandita
Thank you so much for that, Sarah. This actually reminds me of something that Kiruba says, which is that ‘caste in itself is violence.’ It’s not just caste-based violence, right? Because the existence of an external social categorization that not only pre-determines your position in life, but it predetermines the path your life is supposed to take and it also assigns and takes away the dignity that you are allowed to have in life, at least from a societal perspective that is inherently violent. And we see that so much when we talk about labour. Just going to pick up on something else that you shared that, you know, when women talk, like when women who manage the house talk about their problems, it’s seen as whining but we’re somehow very comfortable with people who go to formal jobs talking for hours about why they hate their jobs. But we don’t even allow our homemakers, our caregivers, the same benefit, the same easy, simple luxury of being able to say ‘I had a really bad day at work. Everyone around me was horrible. I wish I wasn’t doing this job.’ Even that is seen as whining and we don’t assign the same importance we do to maybe a friend ranting about their bad day at office. From that, I’d just like to share this quote from the book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State published in 1884, which goes on to also state that the emergence of private property is what led to women’s household work sort of sinking into insignificance in comparison to man’s what is seen as productive labour. It does look at the whole binary of work from a very binary gendered lens, but it brings up a very important point that even a century later is quite valid, right? It’s quite ingrained in our society. So, Sarah, I’d love to understand from you. I want to start by asking that what do we mean when we say unpaid household and care work? And is there a gendered aspect to this work?

Sarah
So, unpaid household and care work refers to domestic work like cleaning, sweeping, laundry, cooking, gardening and anything else that is needed to run the house and ensure the well-being of the people who live in it. An unpaid household and care work is definitely gendered in nature in India and this is suggested by a number of trends. So for instance, you know, let’s discuss women’s participation in the labour force in India. So it’s a paradox, ok? Like, in spite of a decrease in the gender gap in education and a decline in fertility, female labour force participation rate in India is amongst the lowest in the world. And it’s even more weird when we see that there’s a U-shaped relationship between education and a woman’s decision to enter the labour force in India, which essentially means that post middle-school education, the chances of a woman entering the labour force increases as she acquires more education. That said, I think it’s important to highlight two facts. The first being that data suggests that there is a strong negative relationship between the education attainment of a husband and his wife’s decision to enter the labour force. And the odds of a woman entering the labour force decreases by more than 50% if her husband is a college graduate. Another fact that I would like to highlight is that there is also a negative relationship between a woman’s decision to enter the labour force, the number of children she has and if she’s married, with the odds of a woman’s decision to enter the labour force declining by more than 60% if she’s married. These statistics are a representation of the gendered nature of household and unpaid care work. Like the societal norms and culture has made it so normal for care work to be a woman’s first priority, and it’s become such an acceptable part of our lives that we no longer even acknowledge it or consider that care work is real work. And this division of work based on gender, instead of abilities, puts women at a disadvantage. It makes it more difficult for them to achieve professional goals. So, for instance, women who go to work today outside of their homes are expected to balance both the home and their professional office or workspace. And you know, the image of an ideal woman is one who can balance all of this. Why expect so much out of a woman? I mean, we’re human beings, right? And like the same expectations are not set on men. And somehow women are, you know, made to feel guilty or made to feel like failures if they fail to deliver on, you know, household work. And the clearest example of this is, so when I was in school, one of my classmates, her mum, was a politician. And so essentially when my friend didn’t do very well in exams, like the supervisor, she came and she told her ki (that) you know, ‘Tell your mum to pay more attention on your studies. Politics can keep happening.’ And in spite of being a woman, she said this to her as though like my friend’s education or a child’s education is only the woman’s responsibility and this happens all the time. For any wrongdoing of the child, people raise their fingers towards their mother as though the father or other family members have no responsibility towards nurturing or taking care of the child or raising the child and this puts women at a disadvantage right from the outset because they have to juggle these responsibilities, it means that they have to take into account greater constraints if they’re thinking of pursuing further education or if they’re thinking of taking on a more demanding job. So, it’s not a level playing field for women out there. 

Sanchi

Thank you so much for that, Sarah. I think I really resonated with what you shared, especially about how the school setting or the education responsibility of the children falls upon the mother. And I remember from my school days, whenever I did not do well in a test, the teacher would come back to me saying ‘tumhari mummy dhyaan nahi deti kya tumhari padhai pe?’ (does your mother not pay attention to your studies?) and it was never ‘tumhare papa dhyaan nahi dete’ (your father doesn’t pay attention) or like anybody else in the family. And I think what you shared really helped me understand closer home, how this really manifests in our everyday life. So, really thanks a ton for that. And from what you shared, it really got me thinking about how our situations have drastically changed this year because of the onset of the pandemic and then the subsequent lockdown. And this is what brings me to my next question to you which is, how do you think that this problem that is of unpaid household care work and the gendered nature of it, how is it that this problem is manifesting during the pandemic? And why should we even think about unpaid household and care work in the first place? Why do you think it is important to talk about it, especially right now? 

Sarah 

Okay, so I’m going to begin by answering your first question. And in the pandemic, there are like two aspects to this problem. The first being that more people are staying at home, were staying at home, because of the lockdown and so there was more work to do at home. And the second, there was very limited or absolutely no access to outside domestic help, so that also increased the burden of domestic work. And you know, it is very difficult to argue against the fact that unpaid domestic and care work facilitates paid work, education and almost every other activity in our lives. And like I mentioned previously, the problem is that this work has been labelled as feminine and it’s become an acceptable norm for women to shoulder the burden of unpaid domestic and care work disproportionately. And again, this trend has costs, especially for the people who are shouldering these responsibilities because women are engaged in domestic work and care work, they cannot develop the skills or engage in education to get a paying job. It takes away from their financial independence and it often makes them vulnerable to, you know, abuse because they would have no independent finances or places to go to or people to consult if they’ve been doing only household, domestic and care work all their lives. And you know, household and care work is also not accounted for in the GDP- this is again a reflection of the fact that household and care work is not given importance, its contribution is unacknowledged and this is also reflected in the way domestic help is treated in India. It’s an issue of social justice and gender equity and you know, the fact that household and care work has a gendered nature implies that women are conditioned to feel guilty for failing to complete these duties and their worth is judged by their ability to perform them. And, like, you know, this is very evident from the latest round of the NSS survey, which suggests that the biggest reason why girls under the age of 18 drop out of school is that they need to engage in domestic work. And this is just to say that in every debate about gender equality, it is important to acknowledge household and care work that is performed and to change the attitude and norms around it.

Vandita
Those are some incredibly important points, Sarah. Thank you so much for bringing them up. I think I saw this so much during the pandemic where there were instances of male academics being able to publish more whereas the publishing rates of female academics went down simply because the increased burden of care work was so disproportionate. There was a lack of access to domestic help bringing me back to an earlier point where without having other women, especially women sometimes from oppressed groups, allows for our lives to be subsidised and without that, it will often be detrimental to women and other marginalised identities, and not necessarily for men. Even that during the pandemic, like, there was a higher rate of dropout amongst girls and a higher, like, loss of jobs amongst women as compared to men. Of course, most of the data that we do have is very binary in terms of gender, but thank you so much for all of these extremely pertinent points, and I think it gives me a lot to think about some of those relations between data points for things that I had never thought about. I was also recently reading a book called Data Feminism by Catherine and Lauren, and they mentioned that the International Feminist Collective in the 1970s launched what was the Wages for Housework campaign, where they used the term reproductive labour in contrast to productive labour, which is your traditionally paid labour instead of calling it unproductive to denote unpaid. And this terminology comes from the understanding that reproductive labour made it possible for those involved in productive tasks, right? What we see as like office work, work in factories, etc, to continue to perform these tasks. And I think it’s so important to reimagine our work like that. To think of our work with dignity and respect in every aspect.

Sanchi

That’s so beautiful, Vandita and I’m sure going to be using that terminology going forward. So thanks for sharing that. And thank you so much for joining us today, Sarah. It was a treat talking to you and getting to hear your thoughts. And thank you so much for all that you’ve got us to think about. 

Sarah

Thank you so much for having me. I love being here and talking about this essential, like, having this essential conversation.

Vandita
Thank you, Sarah. You were wonderful. And to everyone who tuned in, thank you so much too.

Vandita
Until next time everyone, stay with us on our journey towards a radically kinder world.

***

For more delightful discussions on practicing feminism and fostering communities of care, check out the other episodes of the Nurturing Radical Kindness podcast! Until then, here’s a reflection activity for you to mull over.

About the Nurturing Radical Kindness Podcast

Radical Kindness is the ethos and practice that forms and informs One Future Collective. It guides our constitution as an organisation and is the core value that guides our work. It is a politics of love, fighting against apathy and hopelessness. Often being ‘hard’, ‘stoic’ or ‘rigid’, is considered crucial for social change, and it is this very notion that radical kindness challenges. It espouses that being kind, compassionate and loving in our activism can still pave the way for dissent, defiance, growth and rebuilding. It is a tool we seek to use to rebuild our systems with care, nurturance and justice at their core. It allows us to hold various stakeholders, including ourselves, accountable in how we interact with ourselves and our communities and to build towards a lived reality of social justice collaboratively. 

Hosted by Sanchi Mehra and Vandita Morarka of One Future Collective, this podcast attempts to unpack what it means to be radically kind and how we can practice it through conversations with members of the One Future Collective community. 

The post The Politics of Labour: Nurturing Radical Kindness Podcast, Episode 3 appeared first on OFC.

This Mental Health Month, as the world focused on workplace mental health, One Future Collective undertook the Civil Society Wellness Campaign—a critical initiative dedicated to the wellness of civil society workers. While civil society organisations are on the frontlines advocating for social change and providing essential services, the wellness of the people working within these organisations is often de-prioritised and under-resourced. 

“During the pandemic, […] there was immense compassion fatigue and lack of institutional infrastructural support that we weren’t really able to address because this was a category of workers that was completely invisibilised when it came to wellness, and rights, and just any sort of social protection at the workplace.”

— Vandita Morarka, Founder and CEO, OFC

When we think of wellness in civil society, the initial hurdles that come to mind are often managing heavy workloads, burnout, and vicarious trauma. However, these challenges do not operate in a vacuum—they are shaped by the sector’s unique demands. The root causes of these wellness issues are systemic, embedded in structural inadequacies, cultural narratives, and regulatory pressures. Some sector-specific challenges include the absolute absence or inadequate implementation of health and accessibility policies, especially through an inclusive, intersectional lens; power hierarchies within organisations; public narratives about civil society workers; and limited, often precarious funding that is further complicated by regulatory frameworks and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex.

With this in mind, our idea of wellness extends beyond the mental and physical health of individuals to their experiences of safety, dignity, and belonging, as well as to workers’ access to rights within the civil society ecosystem. Workplace wellness, as defined by the International Labour Organisation, encompasses “all aspects of working life, from the quality and safety of the physical environment, to how workers feel about their work, their working environment, the climate at work and work organisation.” This highlights the need to simultaneously focus on individual as well as structural and cultural issues when addressing the wellness of civil society workers. 

They take care of others, who will take care of them?

— Drishti, Student, Jai Hind

As a part of the Campaign, we’re launching the Civil Society Wellness Protocol. This Protocol has been informed by our research on the experiences of frontline workers during the pandemic, our panel discussion on wellness in civil society organisations, our conversations with the public to understand cultural narratives about the civil society sector, as well as our lived experiences as civil society workers.

Over the next year, we will be developing principles, measurable indicators, and tools that reflect the true wellness needs of CSO workers. The principles we are developing are iterative, designed to evolve alongside sector needs. We’re building this with you, seeking your input, feedback, and collaboration to ensure these efforts reflect the realities and needs of our sector.

Civil Society Wellness Principles

1. Intersectional Solidarity:  We embrace the complexity of identities and experiences, fostering an environment where diverse perspectives not only coexist but strengthen our collective work and vision.
2. Liberative Accessibility: We recognise the need to dismantle accessibility barriers and create liberative spaces that meet physical, social and cultural inclusive standards. 
3. Power-Shifting Praxis: We actively work to identify, challenge, and transform existing power dynamics, striving for more equitable distribution of influence and resources within our circles and beyond.
4. Intergenerational Engagement: We cultivate opportunities for continuous shared learning across age divides through flexible leadership models, embracing the transformative potential of intergenerational dialogue and collaboration.
5. Reciprocal Accountability: We cultivate shared responsibility for our actions and impacts, emphasising mutual respect and collective growth among all parties involved.
6. Brave Spaces: We acknowledge the need for systemic protective measures that balance psychological and physical safety, ensuring an environment where individuals feel empowered to speak up and express themselves openly.
7. Responsive Healing: We adopt informed responses to harm, grounding each grievance in its specific context while prioritising trust, respect, and empathy for the overall wellness of the individual.
8. Ethical Ecosystems:  We expand our ecological consciousness to encompass the interconnectedness of the social, economic, and environmental impacts of our actions and meet ESG standards. 

As we embark on the journey of developing and implementing the Civil Society Wellness Protocol, we recognise that this initiative is not just a set of principles but a collective effort. Together, we can cultivate a safer, more supportive, and socially just civil society. If you have any ideas, suggestions, or feedback, please write to us at vandita@onefuturecollective.org by the end of 2024, so we can consider your inputs when we revisit this draft of principles.

The post The Civil Society Wellness Protocol: Principles for Promoting Worker Well-being appeared first on OFC.

Welcome to ‘Decolonizing our Practices: Conversing about Care’, a three-part blog post series. This series is a culminating conversation between Tangent MHI and One Future Collective as a part of our collaborative initiative, which was undertaken in October of 2021, to work towards decolonizing the perceptions and practices of mental health in India.

This is the third and final post of this series – ‘Shifting Away from a Single Narrative of Care’. Join us on this journey, and explore ideas around care as a process versus a product, care in communities and how one can try to shift away from normative performances of care. [Please note that for the purpose of readability, the speakers’ responses have been divided into paragraphs.

Each new response begins with their name (Ankita and Anvita), followed by their initials (A.B and A.W, respectively).]

Disclaimer: Before you go ahead, we would like you to remember that this conversation is informed by the personal and professional stances of the speakers, by their respective socio-political location, and by the resources, they have been able to access. We recognize that this is not the only way one can think about the ideas mentioned here. We would encourage you to bring your perspectives, share your thoughts, and any other resources in the comments below!

Ankita [A.B.]: (continuing from the earlier conversation)…This also brings into perspective how deeply ingrained into our system, the idea of care is and how the personal is always going to be political in one way or another, right? I wonder which systems benefit from the singular and magnified focus on individualised care? There are a couple of answers that come to mind. One would definitely be capitalism because we’re riding on the productivity high that we need every individual to be a productive part of society. And this is how capitalism ensures productivity – it markets these ideas, provides a space for care, of course with terms and conditions! I give you care and you get my work done.

A.B.: Another industry that, uh, benefits from this is the mental health industry to be very honest. As much as we’ve been realizing the importance of mental health and therapy, over the last two years, I also realize that therapy tends to be seen as one of the most, uh, legitimate forms of taking care of oneself. It also creates this clear power dynamic within the industry, and between the industry and the people who are seeking care. This was spoken about a number of times, both in our conversations with mental health practitioners and in our conversations with individuals who access mental health services. Thus, even when we talk about individualized care, or “self-care” as we call it more popularly, it also keeps the power with mental health professionals. And it might be very easy for even a mental health practitioner to miss out on the fact that, um, an individual evidently does not exist alone and in a vacuum, but this person exists as a part of a system and has multiple factors influencing them. 

A.B.: This brings me to the next question that I wanted for us to talk about. Over the last couple of months, we’ve been trying to learn as well as unlearn. What I want to ask you is that, if we were to unlearn and try to make a shift away from this individualized form of care, what can be some of the next steps? Or where do you think we can redirect our attention?

Anvita [A.W]: I absolutely agree with what you shared! An individualized approach to therapy ends up placing the onus of healing on the individual without taking their social reality into consideration. People can work on themselves as much as possible, but it’ll never truly make a difference if they continue living in a system that is against them. The notion of productivity that we spoke of earlier is also born from this individualized responsibility of taking care of ourselves. And what you said about the mental health industry, too, absolutely. When healthcare becomes more and more privatized, we accept it as a marketed transaction for a privileged few, instead of holding the state accountable for an inadequate public health infrastructure or working towards trying to improve it; to make it more accessible; to question these power dynamics.

A.W.: A conversation we’ve had a lot at OFC–especially while discussing the ongoing COVID Mental Health Project–is that oftentimes, um, service provision can be a reactive way to provide care. And, of course, during times of crisis and even otherwise, seeking such services can be so helpful. Seeking therapy has really helped me heal and grow. But we cannot stop our efforts there. What would it mean to have more universal and preventative forms of care where we create–co-create–cultures that are compassionate and just and equitable? So, instead of always responding to a mental health issue after it arises, we’re reducing its overall chances of occurring in the first place? And so much of this would involve unlearning ideas that we’ve believed all our lives. 

A.W.: I think it’s also important to acknowledge how deeply institutionalized these beliefs about care are, as you’d mentioned earlier. It’s like when we’re born, there are already certain norms about how our parents should take care of us and, ever since then, we grow up internalizing what we see–in our homes, our schools, our TVs, our media, public places, everywhere. So, we would need to restructure our institutions in a way that there’s more awareness about how the current ways of, you know, providing and seeking care are not always helpful for everyone–especially for people in the margins. We would need to go beyond just the field of mental health service provision and collaborate with other sectors. We would need to think about how we are forming educational curricula; how organizations are developing policies; how our laws are being made. And we can’t just gloss over structural inequalities when we consider all of these. We would need to consider how even our most personal ideas are actually shaped by these structures. And we would need to reflect on not just the structure of these institutions, but also the kind of culture we cultivate in them. 

A.W.: Also, our communities play such a key role here. I think, even during the pandemic, it was so lovely to see people making mutual aid efforts, amplifying SOS calls, and organizing sharing spaces to support each other; to stand in solidarity with their communities. During a time when people were experiencing collective grief and trauma, so much of the healing was happening in collectivities, too. I would love to hear your thoughts as well.

Ankita [A.B.]: I don’t think there are, like, a lot of different things for me to add. I agree that it’s of essence to start noticing, learning and practising cultural forms of care, which we haven’t previously seen as important because it hasn’t been portrayed to us as such. To also start respecting that “care” can shift its meaning for different individuals. For someone it can be sharing memes, for another, it can be reading a book and for the next person, it can be cooking for people they love. It doesn’t have to be glamorous. It doesn’t have to be visible. It doesn’t have to be–definitely does not have to be–expensive! 

Anvita [A.W]: Yeah!–A few days back, a team member of Tangent was telling me about this book on transformative justice that they’d recently read. And we went on to talk about holding space for feelings of guilt and shame. Even that can be such an important part of care. And the other day, in one of OFC’s meetings, someone said, “failure is a form of resistance to the capitalist system,” which was so moving. Accepting our failure can be a form of care and healing and liberation for a lot of us! Okay, you can go ahead. Sorry for interrupting you!

Ankita [A.B.]: No, absolutely! I think it’s a very, very important point. Failure is a manner of resistance. I think it’s important to remember that, because it’s easy for us to forget, so thank you for bringing that up. So we’ve just moved into the fag end of the conversation. How do we continue to keep this conversation going? What are some of your thoughts on that?

Anvita [A.W]: Would you like to take that up before I talk about it?

Ankita [A.B.]: Yeah, definitely! I also think about how much privilege we have to be able to even have this conversation. You know, there’s a privilege in that fact that we are here and having this conversation and we have access to things that are making it possible for people sitting in different parts of the country to be interacting with each other. If we want to keep continuing the conversation, it’s important for us to remember that we are going to fail and it’s fine. We’re going to stumble – that’s fine. We need to remember that different people might be at different levels of having this conversation. Our end goal might just be that we are trying to do away with a system that tells us that worth is based on productivity or on money or status indicators. I’m genuinely happy about how people are creating more resources based on lived experiences. And I think both Tangent MHI and OFC, have been trying to do our bit in sharing and curating resources. That is one thing I’m really glad about. Something that I would really love to see is for this conversation to keep on happening across intersections, across, language intersections, most importantly, and across intersections of like, all kinds of socio-political identities. So, I think that is what I had in mind. Yeah, I would love to hear what you think. 

Anvita [A.W]: Thank you, Ankita! I think you’ve covered everything that I had in mind. Also, I love what you ended with–about language intersections. And it may help to take this to different spheres of our lives, too. As in, not just having this conversation with those in the field of mental health, but also talking about it with our parents or our grandparents, you know, and understanding their experiences to explore these ideas across generations as well. I think we could continue having this conversation by holding it–formally or informally–within our micro-communities and in our social circles. It’s just a small start that would grow over time–is, is, is what I would hope.

Conclusion: 

Thank you for accompanying us on our dialogue around care! This is the concluding conversation of our blog post series. 

To access resources that have shaped our ideas of care, please find our resource list here. You can also find the summaries of our Sharing Circles 1, 2 and 3 with Mental Health Professionals here, here, and here, respectively; and that of the Participatory Workshop for Mental Health Users/Survivors here.

This blog also marks the concluding resource of our collaborative initiative, ‘Decolonizing our Practices’. We hope you found resonance in these spaces and that all of us continue to keep this conversation alive within and around us. Thank you!

About the Speakers

Anvita Walia is a student, researcher, and eternal learner. She is a Senior Program Officer at One Future Collective, a feminist social purpose organisation with a vision of a world built on social justice, led by communities of care. To know more about OFC’s work, please click here.  

Ankita is a listener, a mental health professional and one of the co-founders of Tangent Mental Health Initiative. Tangent MHI began in 2020 and works in the field of mental health service and advocacy. Their work is informed by the values of intersectional feminism, inclusion and accessibility. To know more about Tangent MHI’s work, you can click here.

The post Shifting Away from a Single Narrative of Care appeared first on OFC.

Even as the Social Security Code, 2020 extends social security schemes to unorganized workers, including gig workers, it is crucial to understand the vulnerabilities inherent in gig work which were exacerbated by the pandemic, and what it might take to embed accessible social security in gig work. 

Meanings and Definitions of gig workers and social security

India’s Social Security Code, 2020 defines a gig worker as “a person who performs work or participates in a work arrangement and earns from such activities outside of a traditional employer-employee relationship”. Essentially, a gig worker performs on-demand, task-based labour upon being connected to a consumer through an online platform business. This can look like a food delivery aggregator connecting orders to delivery ‘partners’, or a ride-hailing app connecting drivers to passengers. Also referred to as ‘platform work’, the Code recognises such platform-enabled gig work as “work arrangement outside of a traditional employer-employee relationship in which organisations or individuals use an online platform to access other organisations or individuals to solve specific problems or to provide specific services or any such other activities […], in exchange for payment”. These definitions are central to the discussion of gig work in the Indian context because they are the first of their kind indirectly addressing and including gig workers within the ambit of labour codes and the associated benefits in terms of seeking safe and fair work environments.

As we begin the conversation on why social security is crucial for gig workers, particularly in the context of the pandemic in India, it is key to remember that social security in the gig workspace essentially translates to “the measures of protection afforded to employees, unorganised workers, gig workers and platform workers to ensure access to health care and to provide income security, particularly in cases of old age, unemployment, sickness, invalidity, work injury, maternity or loss of a breadwinner”, per the Code of Social Security, 2020. In our discussion of gig work and the many vulnerabilities to which it exposes workers, it is useful to define how social security can provide comprehensive safeguards against insecurity in the workplace, leading to more equal and inclusive workspaces, where economic survival does not come at the cost of the health, well-being and dignity of workers.

What gig work looks like

Many sources, like Boston Consulting Group’s 2021 report titled ‘Unlocking the Potential of the Gig Economy in India’, highlight the gig economy’s contribution to the creation of jobs for the unemployed in India, estimating that there will be nearly 90 million gig working jobs created in the next 8 to 10 years. Gig-work, this report asserts, is not a new concept in the country. Instead, the large informal sector in India, comprising nearly 90% of the workforce, has always comprised of gig workers in the form of agricultural labour, construction workers and household help.

Participation in gig work, proponents claim, allows for convenient, flexible work. Further, it builds an entrepreneurial spirit in workers, who are directly responsible for their earnings, which depend on their ability to maintain positive ratings for the platform’s algorithm. It also allows for organisations to work in efficient and cost-effective ways. Gig work saves platforms time since it includes little formal contracting and training. Further, since the pool from which gig workers can be drawn is immense, they are easy to replace if performance is not found to be up to par. It also requires very little economic investment from employers, since infrastructural costs are largely borne by workers towards investing in a more economically stable future, as part of what Kuehn and Corrigan refer to as ‘hope labour’.  

In reality, however, a key defining characteristic of gig work is a lack of access to social security and control over conditions of work afforded to workers who are treated as independent contractors or ‘partners’ of an  ‘asset-light’ platform. 

Although their work has some features of formal employment (access to a grievance redressal for individual concerns, for instance), gig workers straddle the line between formal and informal work. For example, workers are forced to leverage informal unions like the All India Gig Workers Union (AIGWU) and the Indian Federation of App-based Transport workers (IFAT) to effectively rally against collective concerns with their respective platforms in the absence of ‘formal’ channels of redressal for collective grievances, since gig work can often be isolating and does not present opportunities to form collectives within organizations. Another example of the blurring of the boundaries of formal and informal work is that of pay. Although gig workers may be paid in predictable cycles, the amounts they are paid are unpredictable due to a variety of reasons – varying demand, frequently changing payments per task and lack of clarity on how payments are decided. Thus, a degree of informality gets built into the nature of gig work done for otherwise organized workplaces. This gap can be observed in the ways in which social security and benefits like minimum wage protection, maternity and paternity benefits, leave plans, gratuity plans, social security schemes, etc. are unevenly applied to gig and permanent workers. 

A different aspect of gig work that leads to loss of control for the worker is the opacity present in the working of the algorithms of various platforms, as well as algorithmic control. First, with very little understanding of and control over how task rates are determined, workers are often forced to undertake tasks at rates which they had no hand in determining, and which may not necessarily reflect the cost they incur in order to complete the task. Second, most platforms depend on a reputation or ranking-based system of assigning work. While at first glance, this may seem to promote a merit-based system of success, in practice, that may not be the case. What it may mean is that a worker’s ability to find work depends on their ability to secure arbitrarily assigned positive ratings, often in the face of difficult customers or uncomfortable conditions. Third, the constant surveillance of workers’ activities through management systems and GPS tracking has negative psychosocial effects. 

As a result, while gig work does generate employment and income opportunities for many, the quality of work in these opportunities per the ILO’s standards of decent work is questionable, considering the lack of social security, such as income security and healthcare cover, offered by systems that operate the gig economy.  The employment generated by gig work should also be assessed for its ability to provide safe, inclusive and dignified workplace conditions, even under the most difficult socio-economic circumstances. 

Doing gig work in the pandemic without social security

During the COVID 19 pandemic, workers and working conditions globally were impacted in significant ways. As multiple lockdowns were imposed and more and more people began to socially distance and isolate at home, the demand for ‘gig worker jobs’, such as home delivery, rose exponentially. In some economies, people who had lost their jobs in the organized sector also began to turn to gig work as a secondary or primary source of income. However, this rise in demand for gig workers came with its own challenges. 

Many platform-based businesses chose to capitalize on the demand for delivery services during the pandemic by promoting delivery workers as ‘COVID warriors’ or ‘heroes’. These ‘heroes’ were forced to work even during the height of the first and second waves of the pandemic. 

Their work often involved making deliveries to containment zones and coming in direct contact with a number of people, risking their physical safety. In most cases, the onus of vaccination, temperature checks, masking, social distancing and ensuring no contact was on the gig worker and not on the customer, which was indicative of the control the customer had not only on the gig worker’s income but also on their safety. 

This, when there was very little clarity on the issue of the essential worker status of delivery personnel, leading to many having to face police violence in the absence of relevant passes or government mandates. There were also a host of other concerns – many regions saw a decline in delivery requests, meaning workers received little to no payouts during this period. In some cases, they were also having to independently buy protective equipment and fund petrol costs. Many gig workers who had migrated back home early in the pandemic also lost jobs and any financial security. Ultimately, these social, physical and financial risks that gig workers were forced to take in order to ensure economic survival led to negative effects on their quality of life and their ability to perform labour. 

Bajwa, et al. (2018) classify these negative conditions into three categories of vulnerabilities associated with gig work – occupational vulnerability, precarity and platform-specific vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities offer a particularly useful framework to navigate the conditions of gig work during the pandemic. The first, occupational vulnerability, is associated with risks to the health and wellbeing of workers in their line of work, such as the risks posed when coming in contact with potentially infected individuals during a task. The second, precarity, refers to the dangers posed to gig workers by unstable working conditions – incurring their own infrastructural costs, no job or income security, pay discrimination and low wages for women or other marginalized groups, misclassification as contractors rather than employees and associated loss of benefits etc. Lastly, platform-specific vulnerabilities refer to opacity in the platform’s algorithmic logic, worker surveillance, etc. 

Even as we discuss the negative impacts of gig work during the pandemic on the health, well-being and security of workers, it is important to recognize the role of intersectional identities in the shaping of the experiences of different people. Women, in particular, were hit by the pandemic in very complex ways – many left the workforce to perform care work full-time, while others who were primary earners found it difficult to manage working long hours (to earn uneven wages compared to men) in their seemingly ‘flexible’ gig jobs alongside care work responsibilities. Another significant issue for women gig workers were the algorithms of their platforms, which had been designed with varying degrees of bias against women and their work. Algorithms and systems had, over time, learnt various means to restrict women’s ability to earn as gig workers – assigning domestic work tasks specifically to women, gamifying work in a way that women’s shorter or scattered hours (in line with their care-work schedules) earned them less money, etc. Therefore, women gig workers’ ability to work was impacted not only by the pandemic but also by the patriarchy and associated power relations. 

Overall, the pandemic served to exacerbate and throw into sharp relief the various precarities that shape gig work in the current socio-economic context of the world. Now, more than ever, the pressing need for rights and justice in the form of social security for gig workers is apparent. Evidence such as Fair Work India’s dismal ratings of work conditions for gig workers in several big platform-business players in the country identifies the various issues with fairness in pay, representation, conditions, contracts and management which must be addressed in order to solve for the multi-faceted exploitation of and lack of social security for gig workers. 

As we begin the conversation on what social security can look like for gig workers and why it is important, it is key to remember that social security in the gig workspace essentially translates, among other safeguards, to “the measures of protection afforded to employees, unorganised workers, gig workers and platform workers to ensure access to health care and to provide income security”, per the Code of Social Security, 2020. 

How does social security solve the issue of precarity? 

The Social Security Code, 2020, referenced earlier in this text, is a crucial piece of legislation to discuss when assessing viable solutions for embedding social security in gig work, particularly in the Indian context. Also known as the Code of Social Security (CSS), it is “an act to amend and consolidate the laws relating to social security with the goal to extend social security to all employees and workers either in the organised or unorganised or any other sectors and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto.”

To summarize, the Code extends social security benefits, including “access to health care and to provide income security, particularly in cases of old age, unemployment, sickness, invalidity, work injury, maternity or loss of a breadwinner”, to all employees, gig/platform workers and unorganized workers, per relevant welfare schemes. These schemes would be funded by the central and state governments (as relevant), beneficiary contributions, and contributions by aggregators at a rate of 1 to 2 per cent of turnover, and not exceeding 5 per cent of the total amount paid to gig workers. It also states that the central government would institute a Social Security Fund for gig workers. The Code also provides for the making of a National Social Security Board with a tenure of three years, which would oversee the recommendation, monitoring and administration of welfare schemes. This board would include, among others, five representatives of gig workers and five of aggregators. 

The Code of Social Security (2020), although it is an important piece of legislation in terms of ensuring social security to gig workers, is not a comprehensive solution for the issue of social security.  The Code is part of four key labour codes in India – the Industrial Relations Code (2020), the Occupational Health, Safety and Working Conditions Code (2020), and the Code on Wages (2019). The Code of Social Security is crucial to the discussion on precarity and gig work since it is the only labour code in the country which recognizes gig work, platform work and workers. This means that as yet, gig workers are not explicitly mentioned as being part of the national legislation on unionization, collective bargaining, occupational safety and minimum wage protection. This is troubling, since industrial relations, occupational health and safety and minimum wage are all central issues for gig workers in the post-pandemic world. Because these issues form the larger context of precarity in the gig working sector, no conversation or legislative action on one can be considered complete without the others. 

As we critically analyze the labour codes as policy tools to aid social security and justice in the workplace, it is important to note that they currently stand deferred, at least since April 2021. This deferment has been attributed to a variety of factors, such as states not having finalized the rules applicable under the codes, as well as delays due to COVID. Until the Code of Social Security remains deferred, no legislative action can be taken towards the goal of providing social security and control to gig workers and their precarious workplaces. 

Most importantly, it is crucial to remember that the mere enactment of legislation will likely not ensure safe and just working conditions for gig workers. Apart from the implementation of the Code of Social Security in comprehensive ways and the dispensing of welfare schemes in a timely and effective manner, sustained advocacy and organizing against exploitative working conditions and continued conversations on the issue of workers’ rights, algorithmic justice and holding platforms accountable for working conditions are important steps towards reimagining the future of work as being more just, inclusive and safe.

By Karishma Shafi, Senior Program Officer, Knowledge at One Future Collective

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Welcome to ‘Decolonizing our Practices: Conversing about Care’, a three-part blog post series. This series is a culminating conversation between Tangent MHI and One Future Collective as a part of our collaborative initiative, which was undertaken in October of 2021, to work towards decolonizing the perceptions and practices of mental health in India.

This is the first post of this series – ‘Being ‘selfish’ vs. Being ‘productive’: The Politics of Care’. Read on to see why we think care is a political conversation and what informs our understanding of care. [Please note that for the purpose of readability, the speakers’ responses have been divided into paragraphs.

Each new response begins with their name (Ankita and Anvita), followed by their initials (A.B and A.W, respectively).]

Disclaimer: Before you go ahead, we would like you to remember that this conversation is informed by the personal and professional stances of the speakers, by their respective socio-political locations, and by the resources, they have been able to access. We recognize that this is not the only way one can think about the ideas mentioned here. We would encourage you to bring your perspectives, share your thoughts, and any other resources in the comments below!

Ankita [A.B.]: As we were thinking about the idea of care and when we came upon this topic, which is politics of care, something that, uh, I was discussing with my team and with Anvita is, what are some of the things–or what are some of the stories that come to mind whenever I think about the term, “politics of care”. I realized that it’s very hard for me to settle down on any one story or one thing that I can point out as, ‘Okay, this is what informs my thought when I think about politics of care’, because even the terminology in itself, has many layers and meanings that you can reach into. Whichever perspective you take, there’s plenty to uncover and speak about. So I’ll just try to summarize my thoughts. 

A.B.: The ideologies around the politics of care and particularly self-care, come from different personal/professional lenses. Something that I’ve noticed in my work with clients, especially over the last year and a half, is that when speaking about ideas of care, there is a sense of guilt that takes up space. This guilt may sound like, “Am I being selfish if I’m choosing to care for myself?” or “Am I being selfish if I’m choosing to set boundaries?” Even when there is a realization that these are necessary for an individual, it’s always underlined with guilt. However, if we switch the conversation with the same individuals and ask them to look at people in their life who might be debating about the importance of care – they do not hesitate to point out its importance. 

A.B.: Care can take different forms and at the end of the day, it is essential for the person to just be able to exist in society. This is what speaks to the idea of the politics of self-care – what are we learning to prioritize and why am I being taught and told by the system that if I end up prioritizing myself, I’m being selfish or jeopardizing something/ someone by putting myself at the top of this list.

A.B.: If I were to step out of the role of a mental health professional, I also can say that I am one of the people who struggle to care for themselves. We need to recognise that care can appear different for each individual and even for the same individual under varied circumstances. How I like to take time off when I’m by myself is different from how I would like to do it when I’m with somebody. That being said, I would like to hear your thoughts on this. 

Anvita [A.W]: Wow, thank you, Ankita. I agree that, oftentimes, anything around self-care can be perceived as selfish. And I think even for me, one of the first things that came to mind when I thought about the politics of care was that we can see it through so many different lenses; and how in different spheres of life, care is perceived in different ways. 

A.W: Even caregiving as a mental health professional–this is a formalized, professional way of providing care. But what about the kind of care work that home-makers do without being paid for it? You know, it’s not like they aren’t working, it’s just that unpaid care provision is not being formally recognized and valued as work. And not only do standard economic measures overlook this form of care, but often, we take it for granted in our own homes. In my household, we still automatically place certain care-related expectations on my mom that we just don’t put on my father or my brother; and I’m also guilty of doing this.

A.W: In this context, caring for others is equated with being selfless. It ends up becoming a form of sacrifice. It’s almost as if the sacrifice is what makes it meaningful and worthy of appreciation. But, of course, for centuries we’ve been placing these expectations on certain people or certain communities. And if they don’t conform to the norm of putting everyone above themselves, they’re perceived as selfish–which they’re taught is the worst thing they could possibly be. This affects their health, their social life, their autonomy—their very sense of self. What does ‘self-care’ mean for them, then? 

A.W: When I think about more formalized approaches to providing care…I completely agree with you about the notion of productivity. It also makes me think about our Sharing Circles, in which one of Tangent’s team members had mentioned that even therapy–even though it’s a form of care–ends up becoming this pursuit of productivity because, in our heads, we’re trying to meet certain goals to be ‘better.’ And that can give rise to all this pressure and, of course, so much guilt. 

A.W: I think, we’re currently in an age and in a culture where, you know, not sleeping or forgetting to eat or relying on caffeine to make it through the day is almost glorified. Uh, not always in an overt manner, but often in subtle ways; and even if it’s not glorified, it’s normalized to a certain extent. And when these behaviours become the norm is when they become a cause for concern because then we don’t question them; we just go along with them despite how they affect us. Even though we realize that they’re unhealthy. ‘Cause if you’re not conforming to the norm, then you’re not good enough to be in the system. Again, I am not immune to this. There are days when even if I have worked for a long time–for like, you know, hours and hours, and then I take a break for 10 minutes, all I think about for those 10 minutes is how I’m not being productive anymore and I’m wasting time, or like, I’m not doing my best, or something like that. And I think a lot of my self-worth is also related to being productive. This really affects how I seek and receive care. 

A.W: Yeah, these are some things that immediately come to mind. Would you like to share any reflections that may have come up, and perhaps we could also explore the next question? 

Ankita [A.B.]: Thanks Anvita! There were quite a few things that I resonated with, but there is one in particular that I would like to talk about. You mentioned how in the present system(s) we’re a part of, our worth is equated to productivity. The more productive a person is, the more they can contribute to the system. In association with this idea, I would like to mention a post I came across on Instagram. The post was made by the CEO of an organization, where they were talking about two of their employees who are very good at their job. Even so, this person is unhappy as these employees stick to time and do not stay beyond work hours. The CEO was quite aggrieved about how to address this ‘issue’ with them. From how I see it, this instance highlights your point around worth and productivity.

A.B.: If I could speak from personal experience, I am a stickler for keeping to time. My teammates will account for this! However, I also know that my association with punctuality is heavily influenced by the idea of perceived productivity. My desire to be punctual isn’t just motivated by respect for other people’s time but also by personal (sometimes overwhelming) anxiety. This anxiety further drives the idea of being an ‘ideal’, um, colleague/employee/student–whatever an ideal individual looks like. I think it’s only now that I can question the anxiety and understand if it comes from within or if it’s one I’ve learnt from the system. That is what came to mind when you were sharing. And I think I just wanted to kind of put it out there. Um, is there something that you’d like to add? Would you like us to move to the next question? 

Anvita [A.W]: I’d just like to share this one thought: what if someone actually needs that extra time? And I absolutely relate with you; I also have this thing where I try to be there before time or go out of my way to make sure that I’m not causing an inconvenience to someone because of my own learnt anxiety. 

A.W.: But also…what if the reason for someone being late is not because they don’t respect our time? What if someone genuinely needs that time because they have a mental health issue or a physical impairment or a disability? What about working people that also have to carry out unpaid caregiving duties at home? What about people who have to balance multiple jobs to make ends meet? Even the idea of a 9 to 5 workday is patriarchal. I’d come across this tweet that explained how these work hours and productivity norms were designed by men and for men during a time when their wives did all the behind-the-scenes work for them—from cooking to copy-editing. Workplaces still don’t account for the gendered division of domestic work. What if someone needs accommodation for reasonable purposes? Would they hold space for that? And I’m actually saying this from a place of privilege, too, because I don’t do most of the domestic work at my house. And considering these norms, I know I wouldn’t be able to manage to study and work if I did; and I shouldn’t have to. Nobody should.

A.W.: Also, if you don’t meet this standard of work, you’re automatically thought of as lazy or as slacking off. But these standards are defined by people who are able-bodied or who don’t have to do as much domestic labour or who aren’t working round the clock to survive. If our idea of ‘normal’ and ‘standard’ is being defined by people who have all these privileges, how does this affect those who don’t? They are constantly having to keep up, and understandably, falling short because the world wasn’t designed keeping their needs in mind. And so, what would ‘care’ look like for all of them in this unequal world, you know? That’s why the idea of care is not simply a personal matter; it’s a political issue. It’s a rights-based issue. 

A.W.: Yeah, this was a small thing that I wanted to add!

Thank you for accompanying us on Part 1 of our dialogue around care! This conversation continues in the next blog post. 

To access resources that have shaped our ideas of care, please find our resource list here. You can also find the summaries of our Sharing Circles 1, 2, and 3 with Mental Health Professionals here, here, and here, respectively; and that of the Participatory Workshop for Mental Health Users/Survivors here.

About the Speakers

Anvita Walia is a student, researcher, and eternal learner. She is a Senior Program Officer at One Future Collective, a feminist social purpose organisation with a vision of a world built on social justice, led by communities of care. To know more about OFC’s work, please click here. 

Ankita is a listener, a mental health professional and one of the co-founders of Tangent Mental Health Initiative. Tangent MHI began in 2020 and works in the field of mental health service and advocacy. Their work is informed by the values of intersectional feminism, inclusion and accessibility. To know more about Tangent MHI’s work, you can click here.

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What is mutual aid?

Mutual aid is an integral part of all sustained social movements. Lawyer and trans activist Dean Spade, who works towards racial and economic justice, explains mutual aid as a “collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them,” in his book Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (And the Next). A New York magazine defines the term loosely as, “a form of solidarity-based support in which communities unite against a common struggle, rather than leaving individuals to fend for themselves.” Mutual-aid groups are non-hierarchical, with equal control over resources. They are egalitarian in nature and designed to support participatory democracy, equality and consensus-based decision-making. 

This is survival work done along with demands for systemic change and justice, Spade explains. Therefore, mutual aid’s approach is two-fold: to coordinate and provide immediate relief, and to raise consciousness and fight the systems that create these crises in the first place. These approaches necessarily go together as every struggle against such colluding forces of power is long-drawn. The oppressor, whether a company, the state, university board, or all these together makes every effort to tire, demoralise, and humiliate the resistance with delays, violence, silence, threats and more. Mutual aid and care of all kinds are therefore essential to sustaining movements, and these manifest in various ways. 

The term ‘mutual aid’ originates from Peter Kropotkin’s work in 1902,  Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, arguing that human cooperation and not competition facilitated our survival. He also posited that the best system of economic and social organisation would be based on mutual exchanges rather than coercion and the profit-motive, as explained in this ROAR Magazine article. This reflects what BIPOC, queer-trans, disabled and other minority communities have known, which is made clearer as we face the continuous effects of colonialism, capitalism and neoliberalism – all of which not only impede but directly oppose our collective survival. 

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha adds key characteristics to these definitions in her powerful book,  Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. She sums up previous writers’ descriptions of the term as “a voluntary reciprocal exchange of resources and services for mutual benefit. Mutual aid, as opposed to charity, does not connote moral superiority of the giver over the receiver,” adding that, “White people didn’t invent the concept of mutual aid—many pre-colonial (and after) Black, Indigenous, and brown communities have complex webs of exchanges of care.” We see mutual aid in all movements, regardless of scale or issue – in persecuted Maruti Suzuki workers in Haryana organising funds for the families of their jailed comrades, the setting up community kitchens during the migrant worker crisis brought on by the government, and more.  

The historic farmer’s protest against the proposed farm laws, labour codes, and the corporatisation of agriculture, as well as the anti-CAA sit-ins led by Muslim women in various cities in India, are recent examples of movements in which the process of resisting violent power structures also led to the creation of alternative modes of living together based on solidarity. Communities came together to sustain themselves, and alliances were built across struggles – not only through the powerful acts showing up together in resistance but also by meeting each other’s basic needs of food, water, safety, shelter and warmth, amongst other things. These were complemented by consistent education and information sharing across struggles through libraries, speeches, cultural events, art, and discussions. 

Divorcing direct action from collective care and education in the mainstream is another way to maintain the status quo. Painting a negative picture of protesting communities through misleading headlines and misinformation campaigns is often an attempt to obstruct public solidarity. At the same time, philanthropy and charities, whose wealth is usually based on violating vulnerable communities, obstruct self-organising by donating small fractions of their wealth or offering services. Such charity is based on the idea that rich people are morally superior to poor people, and therefore deserve their privilege, while poor people brought poverty upon themselves. This tends to create dependencies to further legitimise these bodies and their wealth, and strengthen inequalities and power hierarchies in the long run. A crucial aspect of mutual aid is, therefore, self-organising and collectivising in solidarity, which is a major threat to a fascist state or company. 

Why is mutual aid necessary?

There are several reasons for this. Much like with social movements in general, in the world we’re striving towards, mutual aid should ultimately not be necessary, as our rights and wellbeing would be provided for. 

In India and every state that is based on oppressive hierarchies and capitalism, mutual aid highlights that the reason people are in dire circumstances is that the government deliberately abandons its duty and is unwilling to ensure the safety and health of all its citizens. Corporations and the state make profits by creating scarcity, withholding resources from the majority, while a minority are excessively wealthy, and taking away most people’s power to access these. Capital, therefore, accumulates with a few when in reality there is enough for everyone — which mutual aid shows in practice. To maintain this system as well as systems of Brahmanism, racism, ableism, and patriarchy that mutually benefit each other, the state is brutally violent towards most of its citizens, and actively works to make living as difficult as possible for them.  Marginalised communities are facing violence in all forms, either directed by or encouraged by the state. Mutual aid is required to help meet the safety, health, and economic needs of people under these conditions, while simultaneously organising to overthrow such regimes.

Dean Spade explains why mutual aid is important in our current economic system, by caring and supporting each other rather than competing and occasionally providing charity or philanthropy:

We are put in competition with each other for survival, and we are forced to rely on hostile systems — like health care systems designed around profit, not keeping people healthy, or food and transportation systems that pollute the Earth and poison people — for the things we need. In this context of social isolation and forced dependency on hostile systems, mutual aid — where we choose to help each other out, share things, and put time and resources into caring for the most vulnerable — is a radical act.” (Spade, 2020).

The crisis of the current pandemic emphasised the problems that already existed due to our economic and social systems. A myriad of issues brought about by wilfully careless state responses has led to countless deaths, severe mental distress, and economic ruin across the globe. In India,  most migrant workers with informal contracts were fired since everything was closed, many were evicted and unable to pay rent, as well as stuck without transport in foreign states in this condition. The government facilities provided in various states were of deplorable condition and several workers died in the process of making it home on foot (Chattopadhyay & Pandit, 2021). 

Non-migrant street-based and informal sector workers were also put out of work, with little government support in India. Meanwhile, labour regulations were modified against the interests of employees and several businesses cut pay, exposed workers to unsafe working conditions as well as fired people at will. Across the world, people with disabilities, chronic illnesses, and other immunocompromised conditions are at higher risk and therefore further isolated at home, forced to work or otherwise be at risk. The exclusion of these groups is exacerbated by those flouting COVID rules without good reason, and influential politicians and bodies holding rallies and gatherings involving large numbers of people. COVID protocol itself was misused in India as it granted the police another way to target Dalits, Bahujans, Muslims and poor people. 

Mutual aid became essential in the face of these circumstances and has been practised in various countries since. Christian Ikeokwu explores how mutual aid groups often serve as informal self-organised financial collectives, especially in areas and communities that cannot adequately access banking facilities and don’t have financial safety nets. With the soaring unemployment of the pandemic, the people who needed such safety nets the most were often those who didn’t have them. Rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs), informal credit like in lending clubs, informal insurance like in risk-sharing networks, amongst other collectives, become a way to address these issues through self-organising and care. These ideas are not new but play an important role in addressing survival needs during the pandemic. Meeting these needs through one’s own community is a step towards agency-taking and self-determination, that can facilitate organising for wider systemic change.

The health risks of the pandemic bring unique problems to mutual aid workers, however, collective decision-making and participation enable work to be structured according to people’s abilities without excluding anyone or placing any one aspect of the work above another. In general, it values care and support work without making it profitable and exploitative or seeing it as lesser  “women’s work” as is often the case. Examples of mutual aid during the pandemic abound beyond previously cited examples, such as the Trans Community Kitchen in Chennai, the Workers’ Dhaba in Delhi, work done by Migrant Workers Solidarity Network, Women and Transgender Joint Action Committee in Hyderabad, and more. Significantly, Hong Kong’s protest movement handled the onset of the pandemic solely through mutual aid organising, in the face of the government’s apathy and harmful policies.  

Commonly faced issues in mutual aid work

Mutual aid requires group work and the elimination of internal hierarchies. However, power structures are so internalised in us that we often see them reproduced in movement spaces, such as patriarchy within communist movements, casteism in feminist movements, and similar biases that skew the movement’s priorities and decision-making, while also causing harm to its participants. Mutual aid work needs to be extremely cognizant and must work to eradicate these ingrained biases, especially in South Asian contexts where caste and gender often determine the kind of work you do and the value assigned to it. In line with these biases, it is imperative to question and eliminate the saviour mindset and ensure the work is led by the people it is meant to benefit. 

Dean Spade elaborates on similar issues in detail and provides options for how to tackle them in Mutual Aid. Some of these include handling money and being wary of institutionalising the work and applying to funding organisations, overworking and burnout in an ableist culture of productivity and competition, conflict, perfectionism, and pressure. 

Mutual aid is a powerful practice based on “solidarity, not charity”. It harnesses the power of people choosing to care for and help each other materially and emotionally. Doing this across movements builds crucial solidarities through understanding and forming bonds with people who do not have the same issues, and, as history has shown, creates a powerful threat to an oppressive state. 

Sources:

Emancipatory mutual aid: from education to liberation | ROAR Magazine 

Mutual Aid and Self-Organization in Anti-CAA and Farmers’ Protests 

So You Want to Get Involved in Mutual Aid 

Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi, (2018). Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Arsenal Pulp Press.

Marcel Fafchamps and Susan Lund. 2003. Risk-sharing networks in rural Philippines. Journal of development Economics 71, 2 (2003), 261–287. 

Catherine Cross, (1987). Informal lending: do-it-yourself credit for black rural areas. Indicator South Africa 4, 3, pp. 87–92.

https://www.thinknpc.org/blog/what-do-we-mean-by-mutual-aid/ 

https://www.gaylaxymag.com/exclusive/salt-sugar-spices-a-handful-of-love-how-trans-community-kitchen-is-winning-the-hearts-of-its-local-community/#gs.c83gmb 

https://thewire.in/rights/delhi-workers-dhaba-migrant-workers-covid-19-lockdown 

https://www.mwsn.in/ 

http://www.deanspade.net/about/ 

Spade, Dean (2020). Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (And the Next), Verso. 

https://mutualaidindia.com/food%20supplies-chennai-underprivileged 

Saayan Chattopadhyay & Sushmita Pandit (2021). Freedom, distribution and work from home: Rereading Engels in the time of the COVID-19-pandemic, tripleC,  19 (1), https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v19i1.1225

Written by Tara Rai, Programme Officer, Knowledge at One Future Collective

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There are specific measures organisations can take to support their people and communities.

(1) Clear, empathetic communication from the leadership team.

(2) Extended paid sick leave.

(3) Mandatory work from home.

(4) Additional pay for work from home and reduced hours at the same pay, as required.

(5) Try and find interim solutions to support your employees in case your revenue is taking a hit.

(6) Check-ins on mental health and wellbeing of employees.

(7) Extension of these measures to contractual workers and support staff that may not have similar legal rights.

(8) Extension of resources at scale, infrastructural and otherwise, to communities in need.

(9) Donations towards funds for unorganised sector workers, healthcare professionals and others.

Some examples of statements to communicate the above to your people can be found here: One Future Collective, Wikimedia Foundation.

Image source: Martela

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