You are here: Home / Updates / India: "Unity is power" - Residents of Mumbai gated complex sack domestic workers who protested "rate card"
India: "Unity is power" - Residents of Mumbai gated complex sack domestic workers who protested "rate card"

India: "Unity is power" - Residents of Mumbai gated complex sack domestic workers who protested "rate card"

Comments
by IDWFED published May 27, 2017 12:00 AM
Contributors: Mridula Chari | Scroll.in
Around 200 workers staged a three-day strike after residents of a development in Chandivali unilaterally fixed wages at a level they believed was unfair.

Details

INDIA

Read the original article in full: ‘Unity is power’: Residents of Mumbai gated complex sack domestic workers who protested ‘rate card’ | Scroll.in

Excerpt:

Days after around 200 domestic workers in a gated community in north Mumbai went on strike to protest their employers’ attempt to standardise their wages below average rates, residents of the complex have begun to lay them off without notice.

The strike began on May 21, after some residents at the Raheja Vistas housing complex in Chandivali put up a circular on their noticeboard declaring the rates they would pay to domestic workers.

“I lost my job in four houses since yesterday,” said Nekma Sheikh, 43, a domestic worker who participated in the three-day strike. “The madams in Vistas said they don’t want people who attended the protest to work in their houses and they told me not to come for work from June 1.”

Sheikh collectively earned Rs 15,000 each month in these houses, and is now left with work only worth Rs 5,000 per month in other buildings. She claimed that most people who worked in the building and attended the protest had lost many of their jobs there.

“I worked with one of these families for 10 to 12 years, moving with them from another building to this one,” Sheikh said. “I saw their children grow up. And now, they are removing me as if I am just an insect.”

The contentious notice

Raheja Vistas is an 11-tower building complex, parts of which are still under construction in the larger gated community of Raheja Vihar. It is the only building complex to still be under the management of the builders, the KV Raheja group, and so does not yet have a housing society.

The post-dated circular on the notice board of all 11 buildings in the society says that more than 100 members decided to standardise the rates amongst themselves “due to rate-disparity within Vistas, for same job under similar situation.”

The circular added that members are free not to follow the suggested rates and that those who are paying more than this can consider adjusting downwards by denying workers their annual increment. It ends with the exhortation, “Unity is Power”.

First time in Mumbai

In Mumbai, this might be the first such instance of residents trying to do this.

“In my knowledge, this is the first time we have heard of employers making a rate card for domestic workers,” said Chitra Gosavi, member of the National Domestic Workers Movement, a non-governmental organisation for domestic workers’ rights headquartered in Mumbai. “But since it is the workers who are at a disadvantage, they should be the ones demanding rates, not the employers.”

The movement made a standardised rate card based on living costs in March 2015 to circulate among its members in different cities. It was, they claim, the first such rate card to be circulated in Mumbai. These prices were due to be revised in April 2017, but meetings are still on to decide new wages.

Source: ‘Unity is power’: Residents of Mumbai gated complex sack domestic workers who protested ‘rate card’

Story Type: News

blog comments powered by Disqus