Published Paper Details:

In India, women account for almost one-third of the working population. The majority of these women are employed in unorganized and informal sectors of the economy, such as construction, agriculture, and domestic labor. The bulk of workers in the domestic services sector are, in particular, women and young girls. The current study intends to empirically investigate the nature of labor interactions between paid domestic workers and their employers as perceived by the former. It attempts to take a closer look at the general working conditions of domestic workers as well as the issues and challenges they encounter on a daily basis. Further, the research aims to eventually examine how the life trajectories of female part-time, live-out domestic workers are built by focusing on their nature of employment arrangements and experiences in workplace conditions. The study largely contextualizes domestic work relations in India as a domain of continuing and ongoing power struggle, drawing extensively from feminist theory. Using in-depth, semi-structured interviews with fifteen female domestic workers from Kerala's Thiruvananthapuram district, the researcher sought to realistically illustrate how the world of domestic work still remains an extremely unequal, deeply structured, and intricately stratified terrain characterized by the intersecting hierarchies of caste, class, gender, and religion.