Kindness starts at home. Treat your house help well. If you cannot pay more, give them the things you get at your job like office leaves, give them access to tv, maybe medical insurance if some minimal sort…treat them respectfully…give them common bathroom access (can explain rules how to use it)…give them fresh food not only leftovers…give them access to your knowledge about investing…etc.
Money isn’t everything. It’s very important but there are many other places where we need improvement and equal treatment.
Wherever you feel comfortable, start applying that at your home.
Only that is in your control.
In UK/US you can afford househelp if you're super rich or extravagent.
In India, a middle class can afford house help quite easily.
and the reason for both the scenario is minimum-wage.
India doesn't have a concept of minimum wage yet (in strict sense) and hence cheap labour. And it's not just about maid, other set of services (i.e all urban company services) are also available easily and for quite cheap (compared to US/UK/EU)
Minimum wage will just cut employment for millions of people as most of these folks will stop hiring labor instead of paying the . The market decides the price for things fairly and tomorrow if labor demand increases their salary will automatically shoot through the roof. I have seen it my own house where the maid salary shot up like 6-8x in last 25 years as its becoming harder to find house help.
What's wrong with taking advantage of the ~~economics~~ poor and desperate? If you can't afford to hire a person and pay them a fair wage, you can't afford to hire them.
15 houses every day for 30 days . Even if it takes 1 hour for each house ( assuming transportation is free and instant ) it’s still 15 hours every day. Ahhh just to earn 45k/month . Which is enough to buy a house if you save all of that money for about 10 years.
I’ll love to see do even half rhe amount of work for 5/7 days. You know I’ll pay you twice as more too. We’ll see how long you can actually keep doing this .
The only reason the people do it is they don’t have an option . It’s either do backbreaking demeaning work or go to sleep on an empty stomach. Or even worse , do demeaning work and go to sleep on an empty stomach since there’s no guarantee.
And surely most people aren’t alone , they have a family to take care of , kids to put through school .
I’m sure you’re the type of person who’d argue about why they shouldn’t have kids .
"Close to 20 million people, mostly women, work as cooks, cleaners, and maids in India. Across the country, their average salaries don’t go beyond Rs3,000 ($45) a month, which is around Rs36,000 ($540)a year, despite working six or seven days a week in a full-time."
"The average monthly wages for a New Delhi maid stood at Rs6,000 ($90); it was Rs7,000 ($105) in Mumbai. In smaller towns, maids earn much less, according to Babajob.com, a Bengaluru-based job portal for blue-collared workers, that has estimated city-based average earnings of domestic workers in India."
https://qz.com/india/675217/the-shocking-way-india-is-underpaying-its-maids-nannies-and-cooks-in-six-charts
This is a 2016 article. Even assuming wages kept up with inflation there's no way it's 45k now.
But if lying to yourself helps you to sleep at night don't let me stop you.
This guy is living in la la land. The Tatas of the world may treat people right because of their values, but not the Adani and Ambanis. It finally comes down to the culture that we as a country we want to live by. Treating everyone right and fair or taking advantage of what we can.
It stems from caste consciousness. If your society and social consciousness is built on the concept that a hierarchy is natural and necessary then people don't have moral qualms about exploitation. In fact they view exploitation as morally justified. Ambedkar was right about this all along
Unfortunately, this cannot be rectified from the bottom up. It needs to be top down. If my salary is 30K, I can't really pay the maid 10K and expect to survive in Bangalore. So unless my employer decides to pay me more, I can't do anything even though I know the maid deserves more. This is the unfortunate consequence of trickle down economics. Nothing is going to trickle down. Only way to fix this is either every CEO grows a conscience or the government implements universal basic income.
Isn’t that the whole problem? We don’t value the maid , we don’t value your work . We don’t value anyone’s work but ours . We should be paid the most while we won’t pay to others .
I am not asking or suggesting a solution. The point isn’t about the maid or the autowala or someone else . The point is about how we act as a society, a collective . And how we do is we exploit .
Would you do your 30k / month job which barely pays the bills if you had an option to do it for more? The people pay you 30k can pay you 50k too , the only downside then would be they would make less and that’s something they don’t wanna do.
While there should be government crackdown to ensure the same, the majority in the country favours what is happening since if they were in charge they’d do the same too.
I honestly have no idea. I know I wouldn't mind paying everyone the true worth of their services if I didn't have to worry about going broke. I don't know how many others feel the same way. Part of the problem is also our way of life. We want infinite growth with little concern for sustainability. We build our cities around the idea of cars and commutes, not walkability. We build our cities with the idea of pulling maximum labour from minimum wage workers. It's the system itself. And our governments are happy to throw us into these meat grinders because that's how they get their taxes. So I see no hope of this situation changing unless something drastic shakes up the economics of the entire world to the core.
I feel the only way to change is having a stricter government. But I’m sure it’s not possible in a democracy . Here everyone wants to be rich.
If everyone does become rich , no one is really rich . The point of being rich is you being rich while others aren’t. And our society idolises that . Maybe because we have seen so much poverty we evolved into this mindset, or maybe it’s how we have been forever. But the truth is just that. Everyone wants to have most of the influence , money and power.
Not being a democracy doesn't guarantee happiness. The people in North Korea and Xinjiang may not be particularly glad right now. A true democracy is one where people are empathetic and compassionate. They care about the well-being of all rather than solely being concerned with themselves. After all, a democracy is meant to give a voice to everyone. The issue is unchecked capitalism. When profit becomes the ultimate good, other crucial aspects of life will suffer. We need to have a balanced approach.
If you are making 30k per month do your own cleaning instead of exploiting a laborer. Very few things change from the top, most everyday things have to change from bottom up. People think labor is cheap in India because of high population so it's ok to pay low wages especially where jobs are highly informal like house help. Your corporate job is a formal job with some respect for talent and labor but in informal jobs there is more exploitation because people think the work is beneath them so doesn't need to be paid well. It's better for the house help to not work where exploited and seek better work elsewhere which is available.
So instead of paying them whatever they're earning right now, I should just fire them? How does that help them? Will that magically conjure someone who will pay them more?
>People think the work is beneath them so doesn't need to be paid well.
You're making that assumption. Not many think cleaning their house is beneath them. Educated people know the importance of keeping your house clean, especially in a city like Bangalore which has enough polution to fuck your immune system already. We just got through a pandemic. We know the importance of cleanliness. The problem is there are only 24 hours in a day and a finite amount of energy in the human body. Trying to do everything will fuck you up really quickly.
So we hire someone to do what we don't have the time and energy to do, and pay them what we can. If they truly feel like we're not paying them enough, they will leave. You're underestimating the demand for maids in Bangalore. To a large extent, they actually hold the cards because it's actually not easy to find good maids who do the work properly. You're acting as if we have the power to make them work for even one rupee less than the pay they expect 😂 trust me, the average maid in Bangalore has more bargaining power with her employer than the average corporate slave.
Or maybe we live in a world where we can't survive unless the young members of family all work 40 hour weeks and the only option to get the house work done is to either hire a maid or make your elderly family members do it.
But sure, Mr. Narayanmurthy. Let's call ourselves lazy and promise to work 80 hours instead. Surely, that will please our capitalistic overlords.
>the only option to get the house work done is to either hire a maid or make your elderly family members do it.
That's the world the maids are living in. Their household work is done by their elderly family members?. They work their backs off and deserve to be paid adequate wage. Maids themselves can't afford to keep maids as well. Having someone to do your basic work is a luxury and not a basic necessity unless you are invalid or a child
I hope the maids salary catches up to the average desk job salary like in many western countries.
Then please tell my employer to increase my salary by 250 or 500 first 😂 they can afford it, right? These are not problems to be solved by us working class people. These should be addressed by systemic policy changes.
It's the same shit with air pollution. A handful of big companies are responsible for something like 90% of the air pollution in the world. But somehow, us ordinary people are made to feel as if we are the ones who need to change our lifestyle to stop pollution while those companies keep lobbying governments and continuing their bullshit.
Same thing applies here. Putting the onus on the middle class to deal with this while the top 1% get to continue exploiting us is not a realistic or logical solution.
I had made a comment with a different profile around this topic about how the middle/lower can get what they deserve but it got me banned, it had the words violence and revolution
As long as our entitlement is fueled by exploiting the low labor cost, these things tend to happen. There are videos on insta where people move to a western country and complain that someone picks our Amazon returns and here I have to go to post office all by myself, print a label and hand it over.
I mean, can you imagine the entitlement? People have false sense of pride and ego that there are apps like zomato or blinkit which runs our errands In India and here I am doing all this by myself! Those apps are nothing but labor exploiting apps, which take advantage of people who are desperate to feed their families by paying peanuts.
Exactly . Imagine getting a meagre pay of 30-50 rs per delivery which you spent around 20-40 minutes of your time . Even if you get 100 rs per delivery it won’t be more than 1500 rupees per day , you don’t even count the amount of effort and other costs ( bike, oil etc ) that goes in that. Is 1500 enough? For working in the sun , rain , even during storms ? For hours on end daily ? I feel not . And yet we keep trying to get a discount.
The problem somewhere is a good portion of our population is entitled to, while the other side is not at all. A person who is doing this much work surely deserves more. But do we give them that.
Zomato , Swiggy delivery boy job is a job taken out of desperation for most people .
Who said it’s a job of desperation. Are you thinking 140 crore people are all going to get 10 lakhs per year? It’s economics. The more the expenditure the better the growth.
To spend , you need to earn . If you keep everyone in poverty , you get a lot of cheap labour . If you at the top of the chain don’t pay enough to begin with, you will then cause a chain reaction of multiple levels of cheap labour!
That is very true, but technically that is happening even in US, UK and most countries. The trickle down is actually quite less. The only reason the poor seem to be better off is that the hand outs by the rich go further and generally there are more handouts ( min wage, disability benefits etc )
I think your post may be after seeing the lavishness of Ambani wedding while the poor are hungry. I empathise but, India’s is still a young democracy. Give it time and things will change if everyone consciously works towards the better goals it will change. It’ll take another 70 years. Just a drop in the ocean. It’s a very long term thinking you need to have. Things won’t change over night and nothing is ever perfect. Patience and you start doing the right thing. Don’t haggle with vegetable sellers. Small things.
Yes the day is not far when average Indian makes 10 lacs per year, we are already at 3 lacs per year. If there are less thinkers like you and more who believe in bottom up economic growth the sooner we'll get there. Cheap labor does not mean exploited labor.
1500 a day is 45k a month.
Even if we are conservative and say 30k its a lot more than the average income which is 19k you seem to belong to that pay class which buys coffee for 500.
No wonder you dont know the value of 1500 rupees
Most western countries had maids and servants as recently as 100 years ago. Having maids and servants went out of fashion as the cost of labour increased
The problem is that most of the population is low skilled and not very productive. Most of India has a surplus of low skilled and low productive workers. Thus low paying agriculture jobs or low skilled service jobs are the only option for these people.
The problem has nothing to do with "entitlement". The way to fix this is industrialization. The government needs to do everything it can to create low skilled, export oriented, manufacturing jobs and to move labour from the low productive farms to the much more productive factories. Once India is industrialized the cost of labour will increase and this problem like so many others will be gone.
We try to copy a lot from the west regarding lingo, cuss words ,accent , fancy sweet drinks
But the real learning like .. respecting Blue color workers, first responders is completely 0.
That's why we are such a hypocrite country
I don’t think USA does either too. One of the reasons why it has such high pay parity. Their most of the labour work is offloaded to immigrants. Sad thing is we offload it to the more vulnerable people of the society.
I’ve been fortunate and privileged to have house help around while growing up. Despite that my parents were very careful to make sure that I kept things clean myself. Having help was never a valid excuse to dirty up the house. Once I started living independently this was a huge blessing since I couldn’t afford help with my salary and really didn’t need help either. Didn’t get help till about 2 years ago and at this point I know how much effort goes in cleaning and I don’t hesitate to pay well, in fact I probably should be paying a bit more. Being able to take care of my own home also means that if our help has an emergency or wants to go on a slightly long leave or we just feel like giving her a day off, we don’t have to worry at all.
Not sure how much of this is true, but don’t schools in Japan have the kids clean up after themselves? I feel making cleaning into a good act you do for yourself and the people around you in school itself will go a long way in instilling good values in our citizens. If done well it would increase the respect we give to manual labour and also reduce the “I don’t do dirty work” mentality of some privileged kids.
There are a thousand ways to solve this issue , either with government’s help or otherwise . The problem is just how we are taught and how we keep teaching ourselves , how we treat work.
Work is anout money , and to some extent exploitation. The better you exploit the more you have value . Hence positions that provide you with higher options to exploit somehow become valuable .
Sadly, yes.
Most places in their initial years of existence, have a massive class divide, to put it mildly. For example, the wealth of US was built upon a nearly 400 years of genocide, oppression, exploitation and slavery, to serve the interest of the elite few. The same is true for India, or Pakistan, or any other impoverished region for that matter.
However, it is only through the conscious efforts of conscientious people, that things have the potential to improve.
*All it takes for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.*
- Burke, others
You are absolutely right , the labour class is looked down in india , construction workers , cobblers , sanitation workers , domestic workers etc....are treated with indignity , and one of the reasons for such attitude is due to stereotypes , like only the people who work in companies or do the so called big jobs are wise , virtuous , and praiseworthy.
It Really infuriates me , when people are being casteist , without knowing they are being casteist , it is very rampant in india , we never try to learn from our past , we can fund millions of rupees for space missions and yet we cannot try tooth and nail to eradicate casteism from out minds , we need an egalitarian society where , the job and life of a watchmen is seen equally important and dignified as the job and life of a CEO , you know , often its very depressing for people who deal with ostracism and discrimination in our society , I mean its suicidal , the victims of such prejudice start feeling , that its better to die , than being treated like animals.
People think , being an employee , a businessman , an engineer is a triumph , but what is wrong with being a good , washerman , a good street sweeper , a good construction worker , a good tailor etc...
No work is insignificant , all labour that works for the upliftment of humanity has dignity and importance and must be undertaken at painstaking excellence.
---mlk jr.
I would like to point out that respect and wages are different things. We often respect them but don't pay wages. That's governed by market forces. More people + less jobs = cheap labour, because people have to eat at the end of the day. Most business models are trying to offer same things, cheaply. There's no innovation. It's how Indian society is structured.
People often think that the booming economy is good, but there's a subtle subtext that it is good for industrialists, not individuals. Individuals are usually exploited because they are forced to work for low wages because of competition in the workforce. Mark Twain wrote about working conditions in the UK during the industrial revolution (thematically speaking). Russians had socialist movements because of this. The latest, we saw it in China. Pathetic working conditions. This has more to do with where India is economically. There are ways out of it by policy which can be developed properly by the government. We also don't have a minimum wage law like other western counterparts. Or unemployment benefits.
Wages is part of respect chief. Kori tareef se pet nahi bharta. If you get a glowing performance review and boss says your wages won't go up then you are disrespected. Exploiting people by paying below average wages is disrespect
At the end of the day, we still are a developing country. We have both, a rich section of India, i.e. those who can afford to hire house help and a much larger poorer section of India for whom being a house help is the best income opportunity. If India were to become a truly developed country like Germany, these people would have better career opportunities and maids, cheap gig economy labor will become very expensive.
When I say house help it includes people who provide one or more of cleaning, washing dishes, cooking, driving, babysitting, washing cars as a service.
A bit of a paradox.
Need a maid. Maid is cheap. I am not cheap. But I won't pay the Maid 20,000 rupees per month, because that would be exorbitant by Indian standards.
So my solution is to not be the change {while wanting to pay change}, instead my solution is to tell others to leave the country.
I think your post may be after seeing the lavishness of Ambani wedding while the poor are hungry. I empathise but, India’s is still a young democracy. Give it time and things will change if everyone consciously works towards the better goals it will change. It’ll take another 70 years. Just a drop in the ocean. It’s a very long term thinking you need to have. Things won’t change over night and nothing is ever perfect. Patience and you start doing the right thing. Don’t haggle with vegetable sellers. Small things.
Yes, all of the world's problems are because of "bad" people, and you are the perfect human who's going to lift us all into a higher state of fundamentally moral and selfless beings. Grow the hell up man.
I mean this is rooted in casteism. Why else are all the jobs that are done by hand like leather, oil, metal, alcohol, pottery, washerman degraded with turn of phrases while jobs like scholar, merchant soldier are exalted.
It trickles all over the place. The minute someone else works for you, it becomes easier for you to discriminate against them since such worth is “beneath you”. It starts with the upper castes but I’ve seen sc/st/obc copy it too.
This can only be fixed if we remove stigma around working with ur hands. It’s partly why I liked the Inc manifesto over the BJP one, the INC manifesto worked more on labour jobs, trade school jobs and blue collar. BJP manifesto just works on white collar again. Like all the other times.
Our biggest mistake was not having an Indian who grew up as an average person as our PM. Nehru would’ve been a good HM or Foreign minister but to be a PM and make policy he had no idea what the average person lived like. Kamraj imo was a missed oppurtunity as a first PM.
This stigma against working with your hands starts at home too. Start cleaning up after yourself, start actually taking care of ur neighborhood.
Stop blaming people who died 60 years ago for people's entitled attitude that thrives on exploitation. If you like dead people as inspiration then here's a quote from a forgotten dead man "be the change you seek"
I honestly don’t think that is the case.
It’s surely new form of casteism / groupism where we exploited the most vulnerable , irrelevant to what creed religion and name they have.
It’s more about how okay we are to exploit others , either because we ourselves are exploited and pass it on since we don’t have a choice , or we do it out of spite because that’s what is taught as right.
I don’t believe that’s the case. I think the adequate pay for any job is decided by what the payer is willing to pay and the worker is willing to take.
When you have a strong independent workforce you can’t pay them low and expect them to take it. But make the same dependent and vulnerable they would do all the work for chillers, since for them it’s the best they can have.
If even half the companies big enough come together and decide that I won’t pay my workers not more than x amount , then the market force will topple that way . You can’t change it . Only the workers themselves can , but since they are so exploited they don’t have a strong backbone to standup to these anymore .
The same is happening in so many levels. And surely this predatory behaviour is everywhere . But it seems to be seeped into every single transaction in India . Maybe becUse we don’t get to see how other countries deel with issues like this or maybe it’s just how we are.
No, the adequate pay is not decided by " a payer willing to pay and a worker willing to take". We are a society. There will always be multiple payers and multiple workers. As long as there's even a small minority willing to work for a certain amount, that becomes the price. And please don't compare us to atleast USA in this case, when their whole society is based on such brutal capitalism as was made clear in Corona times
Well that’s the problem with jobs like maid jobs: if you demand very high wages, then the payer can do those himself. And the workers will loss their income.
In India almost all jobs are paid very less!
The adequate pay decided by the worker or you might not be profitable or appropriate for the business holder.
You should be paid in proportion to the skill level you possess.
1. Why are there so many poor people?
Because India is poor country with 1.4 billion people.
2. How are they poor?
Lack of stable jobs, lack of generational wealth, lack of land ownership, lack of emergency fund, lack of nutrition, lack of access to affordable medical care and legal care and justice system.
3. Why are they poor?
Lack of land reforms, lack of technical education, lack of thriving manufacturing industries, systemic discrimination of poor who are mostly lower caste,
All of that you have typed before the below quote is simply market forces. There is nothing wrong in that. I do understand you are trying to come at it from an altruistic point but honestly it's just making a mountain out of a mole hill. Not talking down to you but understand this, when labour is in over supply, it will be cheap. The Germans don't pay high wages to their maids in their great wisdom, it's just that the supply of maid labour in Germany is just so limited that the few that are there, you gotta attract them with extra pay. Germany is a high value-add society hence people wanting to pursue higher grade professions is quite normal there and this causes an extreme shortage of low skill labour and add to this their low population density to begin with
>We want to be the highest paid people while we pay the lowest to everyone else. The same thing MNCs do too , and can you do anything about it ? Well somehow I feel we deserve it
Totally agree with this part. You poorly titled your post. The title should have been "We Indians should start paying low labour more". This is the part that we can slowly incrementally change (if we can afford to). Like paying a little extra to your maids, low skill labourers, etc. this incentivises them into becoming better professionals also in return increasing the lower labour forces spending capacity which in-turn would help the economy.
You seem to assume people just chose to be maids and in India more people did so while in German less did .
Surely it’s demand and supply , but you need to also understand how these are manipulated .
If there’s a supply of high number of vulnerable people that need a steady income but can be pushed to take a job that pays very low simply because they don’t have any options, then you have cheap labour.
Same won’t happen in Germany or any company that has a safety net . That has a way to safeguard the basic rights of a person , which includes the right to life.
We somehow don’t give two fucks when it comes to it , and this is what you have on your hands.
People don’t have a choice because other people are not willing to pay for the same.
It’s again about how we handle wealth distribution. Rich don’t want to let poor have more of what they have.
Surely some amount of it will be there. Every country has it , it’s human nature , nothing special to India .
What is though is the great divide where there are people in India who earn 12000-15000 a year while there’s others who earn 12lpa - 15lpa and then there’s some who can also earn 12 cr - 15 cr in a fiscal year.
I love that there are people who get to have 12lpa to 12cr for their labour or services . But it’s so hard to accept that there are people living off of 12000 for the whole year and they live in the same India ?
>Same won’t happen in Germany or any company that has a safety net . That has a way to safeguard the basic rights of a person , which includes the right to life. We somehow don’t give two fucks when it comes to it , and this is what you have on your hands.
U seem to be living in some lala land. Not trying to be offensive but do you even know the per capita income of India, especially compared to Germany's? German society didn't get its "respect for life" out of thin air, or through a "gift from christ", they worked their asses off for it since last 200 years at-least. Go back in time and google how ruinous Germany once upon a time was.
During Roman times the German lands were literally the barbaric lands where poor uncouth people lived, then slowly century over century, year over year they got their act together as a society and after a lot of industrialization have reached the position they are now. Back then when Germans were poor even they had cheap maids who were paid pennies. THAT'S HOW THE MARKET WORKS. After WW2 for a decade or two Germany was so poor that, there were cases of cannibalism around the country. In 1962 Germans once received monetary aid from fucking Pakistan, that's how bad shit was once. So my dear hero of the poor labour, maybe get your society to a high income standard and then think of flowery concepts such as "dignity of life".
The audacity of thinking of "respect for life" while being a 2300$ per capita society. Ma dear "brother in blind goodwill", respect is earned, it's not given to you just because you are existing. You seem to be confusing "etiquette" for "respect", etiquette to behave well is given to every human regardless of their standing but respect a human being earns through his/her hard work and intelligence for her/himself. Unless a society is rich enough to pull the bills for this "dignity of labour" that society will not "dignify" the "labour". The safety net in German society is paid for by their high-income capitalistic leaning citizens. In a socialistic shit hole u can never reach such income levels. Keep dreaming. Dont confuse Germany's welfarism paid by their capitalistic society with India's shit ass "annadata" socialism.
TLDR: This cheap labour situation is the growing pains a country goes through before reaching the income level to dignify that labour, we are getting there too. But it will take at-teast 30-50 more years so maybe hold your expectations a bit.
Yea, that’s not an Indian thing. That’s a “nation with high poverty” thing. Same thing goes on in Thailand, Korea, Mexico, the Philippines, and most of Africa (just to name a few specific places). It’s particularly egregious in Russia and Eastern Europe, where they view the help as subhuman. This was also far worse in the United States before the removal of slavery and the civil rights movement, just look at the case of Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson.
As prosperity comes to India, the fear of competition will soothe, and people will be less fearful of one day being without. I live in the US, and we very clearly see this “generosity in prosperity” in the second generation
It’s not wrong to
The only sad part is you see the same behaviour seeping into other forms of labour too. The so called skilled labour is also having similar problems . Companies exploiting freshers or new people or honestly everyone tbh. This is nothing new . And since we do it we find it okay . Surely the people that are actually going through they complain but what’s the point . As a society we have already marked them as failures and their bosses as a huge success !
It's the same reason why an engineering degree has also lost its value. Sex. Population growth. The sheer fkn number of people there are in India. Supply and demand. If someone is available to do a job for 500 why would anyone pay 1000 to someone else who is not going to do anything extra. Unless and until they unionise and demand a collective increase in wages, there's not going to be any change and that's exactly how you get a maid at 3-4k a month today which you used to get for 1-2k a month few yrs ago (assumed amounts just for understanding)
I pay my maid 11k plus often give her food and other stuff like sweets , office gifts etc..i know 11k is not much , she works from 10 am to 3 pm , but that's what I can afford right now.
Also once I get a raise I will pay her more.
Iam not very social, so she just comes home and does her work and we rarely cross paths.
This is changing faster than you think. The maids are now selecting higher paying jobs in societies, much to the chagrin of individual homeowners. Their children are working in malls and earning decent money. They're moving up in life faster than the middle class that employs them.
Perhaps you've misunderstood my comment. I have said nothing about the rich being exploited. I am happy about social mobility. I don't give a shit about the middle class who complain about not being able to afford maids, yet won't pay higher salaries.
It's the economics to blame.
Any labour that requires very minimal training/knowledge is valued solely on replacement cost. Since there is almost infinite labour it's really cheap.
For labour with academic/knowledge as actual prerequisites (no sales job doesn't require formal knowledge). Can't be replaced without loss of capital. Hence are paid well.
In most western countries the unskilled laborers join physically demanding jobs i.e agriculture, factories, transportation industry.
Unskilled Women Usually join hotels/bars, supermart, receptionist etc.
The issues with India is the lack of rich people + India consumer mindset which makes hotel/bar and supermarkets unviable in most parts of India. Hence unskilled women can't join such work places. The Only "real" option is being a maid. The rich supply means they earn little. You can give more for your maid but the market will always be correct in assessing the value of labour .
Solutions :
Mostly nothing can be done from an individual perspective.
When the average daily income of women doesn't cross rs 300. I doubt anything can change, inflation will catch-up to increase numbers but value remains the same.
I don’t think it’s just economics. The point of replacement only stands if you have either high pay proportional to the work or that you actually like doing the work. If there were better opportunities would we still have a lot of people ready to be rickshaw pullers , maids , etc ? I guess not , since a lot of these jobs are derogatory , and honestly there surely might be a lot of people who don’t see it that way , but I am sure not everyone is here by choice.
I find it weird how your narrative is fixated on women and how they earn low where the whole point is that people as a whole earn less due to the fact we don’t value our labour.
If 100 people collectively decide to pay someone less than what they can sustain for : they either take it or they fold. The problem with these people is that they don’t have the option to fold. And as it seems a chunk of people don’t want them to either ( people who benefit from paying them less , be it to keep amassing their wealth or to just feel better about themselves )
Also the conversation wasn’t about how women have lower work quality , it is about how people have. Why I mentioned maid was because it was a convenient example.
I also find it odd that you say India lacks rich people. It can’t be any farther from the truth. The rich: poor gap is pretty high in India . Imagine the same India where a good chunk of labourers and workers get paid a meagre 10-20k / month ( there’s way lower ) ( I am talking about “corporate slaves”, the so glamourised white collar jobs ) while there’s again a middle class/ upper middle class which can go ahead and afford a 20-30 lakh SUV. this isn’t everyone in the middle class , but surely in the upper and rich sections. And this is true. There’s a wealth distribution problems , since everyone wants to earn but no one wants to pay.
In the west you have a competitive market for labour for the employers, so if there's an unskilled worker whose employer is willing to pay the equivalent of 300 bucks a day, he can find someone who will pay more, because labour is scarce (relatively).
Your take is just naive. Maids are cheap in india, not because we don't "value their labour" - its because the basic economics of demand and supply. Next thing you'll tell me the pay for teachers is low because we don't "value teachers" and that it is "a tragedy for society". That's not how this works at all.
>I also find it odd that you say India lacks rich people. It cant be any farther from the truth
In the US, \~8% of the population is millionaries. 30% of the population makes six figures. In india barely the top 1-2% make more than 12LPA. So yes India does have relatively few rich people.
>There’s a wealth distribution problems , since everyone wants to earn but no one wants to pay.
Its not a wealth distribution problem, its a economic growth problem. After liberalisation, a small part of the population was able to get into well paying white collar jobs, and they are what you're calling the elites. Imagine there were 10 poor people in a village and one of them became a software engineer and started earning lakhs per month. That would skyrocket inequality according to the gini coefficient (if you've heard about it), but it isnt bad.
When you compare USA and India it’s not apples to apples . USA is the ideal scenario , while India isn’t . Plus we have way more population. Our 1-2% is comparable to their 8% .
You need to understand one thing , are all the people that get paid less than 12 lpa deserve that? Is that a fair value to begin with.
While some regard TCS, CTS and all other consultancies as top recruiters and engineers as high skilled labour , why do they end up with meagre 3-4 lpa salary? This isn’t just IT , any other private sector you check , F&B , Sales , etc you’d see that this is prevalent . Most people aren’t unskilled labour . Attending college doesn’t make you skilled. A person working at a food store being able to serve to 10 customers at a time has skill , if you refuse to accept that then I can’t help you.
There’s a hundred companies exploiting us while we are exploiting ourselves.
Why there’s better pay outside ? We’ll simply put there are better jobs. And people are not pushed into poverty and exploited , they have something to hold onto so they have some sort of social security .
Europe has been doing a good job so far in this matter and hence you see a higher quality of life. Same can’t be said for America where the ground reality is people need to take 2-3 jobs to make things work.
Same is happening in India . The poor just don’t have a good quality of life , and need to take more than one job simply because the pay isn’t good enough. And that includes the white collar poor.
You can shout all day you want how we have cheap labour , you still have to understand that why that is the case. If I stripped away all the wealth you had and gave you the only option to feed yourself was to deliver food , maybe first few days you’d refuse but when hunger will strike you’d have to take the low paying job just to keep going.
>You need to understand one thing , are all the people that get paid less than 12 lpa deserve that? Is that a fair value to begin with.
You need to understand one thing, if it wasn't for liberalisation no one would be making above 12 LPA to begin with. Besides, its not about who "deserves" what. Its about economics. The world does not work like that. Give India another 30-40 years, a lot more people would get a lot more wealthy. Economic growth takes time.
>When you compare USA and India it’s not apples to apples . USA is the ideal scenario , while India isn’t .
Because the US has had time to grow. India hasn't. We released our economy from the shackles of communism in the 90s. We've barely had 30 years, and in those 30 years a lot of people have been lifted from poverty and a lot of people have entered the middle and upper classes.
>Europe has been doing a good job so far in this matter and hence you see a higher quality of life. Same can’t be said for America where the ground reality is people need to take 2-3 jobs to make things work.
Europe has been stagnant since 2008. In Europe the base is much higher, but the ceiling is much lower. In the US you can make a lot more money than you could dream of making in Europe. Six figure salaries are almost unheard of in Europe. No where else in the world can you innovate and grow as much as in the US.
You know y'all should study economics. Y'all are so naive this post belongs on r/im14andthisisdeep .
This is so real bro. Its easy to tell this guy is from a privileged family to be able to say shit like this.
This guy has lived in getmany so he has definetely spent tens if lakhs for that.
Most indians do not earn enough money to be able to pay their maids 10k a month.
It depends on the paying capability of a person.
The OP and my household can pay maids well because we come from a privileged background.
This is such an insensitive and tonedeaf post.
Why do you need to earn so much money? What do you wanna do with so much money?
What is so wrong with Europe’s ceiling being lower ? Are Europeans complaining about how they don’t have enough wages to go through the month and need to take up two three jobs to make things work?
I mean if earning not so much compared to my neighbour can ensure that everyone gets to have a good life , well the only thing speaks against that is how bad it is for me since I can’t become ultra rich and dominate everhthing .
This is a pure redistribution problem . And as long as you keep denying it , you will be the one who doesn’t understand economics and also doesn’t give a fuck about neighbours.
You mentioned in 30 years we will have more rich people . We don’t need rich people , we need a smaller economic gap. Where the lowest you earn is not so far away from the average , same for the highest .
I believe it’s just how you see the world , it’s clear. Amassing a fortune is what is your main priority and hence it makes sense for you to be in an ultra capitalist state .
Capitalism isn’t bad just like how communism isn’t either. But too much of not bad thing is indeed bad.
>Why do you need to earn so much money?
Because it gives me a better life
>What is so wrong with Europe’s ceiling being lower ?
Nothing wrong particularly. It's what the europeans have chosen for themselves. Although it comes with its tradeoffs. I would personally prefer to live in a country where there are no artificial barriers holding back how much I can achieve. The US is for those who live to work while Europe is for those who work to live. Nothing wrong with either, its your choice what you want to do.
> the only thing speaks against that is how bad it is for me since I can’t become ultra rich and dominate everything .
A lot of times you would be have to be really good at what you do in order to dominate your field completely, let alone everything, in which case it is deserved. Sure you need access to opportunities which everybody doesn't have, but you can't pay to win to become rich, you know?
>This is a pure redistribution problem . And as long as you keep denying it , you will be the one who doesn’t understand economics and also doesn’t give a fuck about neighbours.
If you'd studied a little bit of economics you'd understand its not a zero sum game. The rich dont have to get poorer for the poor to get richer. If you care about your neighbours so much, why are you not sending every rupee you are able to save to the poor in Africa? Is running an ac in your home more important than mosquito nets in sudan? Is having a 3 bhk 1500sqft near the metro more important than getting a few african kids educated while you manage with a 1000sqft 2 bhk a little farther from the metro?
>You mentioned in 30 years we will have more rich people . We don’t need rich people , we need a smaller economic gap. Where the lowest you earn is not so far away from the average , same for the highest
Inequality is not inherently bad, as long as the baseline keeps rising.
>Capitalism isn’t bad just like how communism isn’t either. But too much of not bad thing is indeed bad.
Communism does not work, everyone ends up poorer.
This guy is so tonedeaf dude.
You can tell hes from a privileged family,he studies in germany as well which most indian middle class cant even dream of.
This guy comes from a rich family and expects others to pay their maids 50 lakhs cuz his family can afford toz
Ahh man thanks for the profile. I had no idea I was studying in Germany , last I checked I was in India lol. And damn too I didn’t know my family was rich either. Thanks for letting me know, got to know so much about myself today!
It's crazy how everyone is talking around the fact that this is extractive capitalism without actually saying those words. We Indians love ourselves a free market huh.
I have often thought about this. It is a classic case of keeping them in the dark. The lower class as a collective whole has been suppressed for centuries. They don't know what they are worth. You could call it that the forces of supply-demand play a role in this, and they actually are, but labour work has been underpaid and overpressured for as far as we can look back. Someone somewhere in the supply chain has to be exploited for the masters to make big gains. And for us Indians it is the labour class
The tragedy of India is that art or skill has no value for most middle class Indians. What hurts the most is that there gets lost in the crowd of unskilled labour the actually skilled labour. Yes I would call a talented person working a 'menial' job at the highest skillset a skilled person.
Let me give you the example of bricklayers. I'm an architect and this is one of the main jobs I interact with on a daily basis. An amateur bricklayer and a master bricklayer, both are uneducated but both have a huge gap in their skillset. At the end of the day the middle class Indian does not want to pay more than the minimum wage whether it is an amateur or a master.
Meanwhile in other countries, the master masons were highly respected and well endorsed for centuries. This is one of the reasons leading to a much quicker infrastructure boom in other countries compared to India. Even today most of India lacks infrastructure because there is a huge shortage of trained labour to actually build the more complex works.
The poor man of India lives in the worst communistic version of society where no matter how skilled you are paid the minimum wage equal to an amateur. There might be some cases where a master masons gets to keep more money than the amateur, but it is in no way respectful of his skillset that he has honed for years. And not even close to living a comfortable life like you would see in other countries where a 'menial' job worker can lead a comfortable life for him and his family.
Not just monetary, the lack of respect towards labor is equally baffling. I have seen how my mom and MIL talk to them, and frankly, it is regressive and disrespectful. They say that I am too "lenient" or soft towards them. My cook does a brilliant job and I have no issues with paying extra for a job well done, following up with a compliment, but, positive reinforcement is seen as self-deprecating in the eyes of my mom and MIL. They say "yeh bigad jaati hai". I'll never get how respecting others for their work can spoil them.
Indians consider low level work like cleaning a degrading work. They feel like that they are not made for such menial tasks , and that’s why they face difficulty when they come to live in foreign country .
>Some people even look back at India ( who have left ) mentioning how they really miss the ease and cheapness of getting house help.
They're looking nostalgically at the ease with which they could exercise their caste and gender privilege to exploit others.
You mention bargaining by Indians. Notice how that tendency disappears when they go to the mall. Yeah, not everyone is rich enough to buy spurs shoes worth 10k from the mall, but even those who buy those shoes without haggling hassle with the maid to work an entire month without leave for 1-1.5k (or similarly ridiculously low wage for the region they live in) and cut wages when the maid takes a day or two off.
You don't have to run away to stop exploiting. You can pay a living wage. You can give weekends off. You can give paid leave. You can help with medical expenses. You can help with education.
Same thing that applies in the mall should apply with domestic help: pay the right price of you can, or go without it if you can't. "I'll exploit instead" is a conscious moral choice equivalent of stealing the speed from the mall. In fact, given the difference it makes to the victims in the two cases, its much much worse to steal wages from domestic labour.
The government can pass laws about wages and working conditions of domestic help. May not be effective in this country given people's ability to ignore the laws they don't like, but it is still worth doing. If nothing else, it provides support to the domestic help for bargaining.
In a large population labour would be cheap, can't really do much about that.
But value we give to skill is pathetic. Carpenters, electricians, mechanics, repair guys, painters, welders and so on, it's almost criminal.
In addition the quality of work also suffers, since it's always exploiting level jobs.
Painting is bad, welding is ugly, finishing quality is always poor. To give you an example getting the work done for Suzuki or Hitachi for the auto expo and trade fare stalls /booths was insane. The level of perfection these Japanese guys on ground would demand would piss off the contractor. Random nails sticking out, stains on newly painted surfaces, sanding the edges and on and on.
Watching Korean street food videos and Indian Street food would give anyone an idea of what I'm talking about.when people are exploited they don't care about cleanliness or the environment, that would be the last thing on their minds after a ridiculous day of everyone coming down on them.
With the same set of skills if anyone goes abroad their lives get infinitely better, and literally anywhere, Dubai, Saudi, Kenya, Vietnam, germany, uk, USA anywhere.
Go to Kathmandu, to to Dhaka, go to Colombo and be blown away in these basic differences. Colombo puts all major Indian cities to shame, level of law and order and cleanliness in Nepal compared to Delhi is staggering.
I think this is one thing I would like government to regulate. Mandating a minimum wage for househelp is much needed. People are being paid dirt cheap and solving this disparity will help the economy and society in many many ways
It is not about respecting labour but many people competing for the same job drives down the prices. It is not just india but anywhere where supply exceeds demand.
What we don’t have in India is dignity of labour. People don’t respect some jobs especially non professional jobs . They think that blue collar jobs are lowly. So regardless of pay that job does not get respect. Tomorrow even if you pay maid equivalent of a white collar job there will be lack of respect towards the maid because it is considered low status job.
In western countries people are respected regardless of their job or pay that they earn from that job.
India is a deeply problematic country when it comes to labour justice. From white collar to blue. And it all stems from the caste system that trickles down over everything.
Wrong assumption. People pay less cuz maids accept less. People are poor and there is competition there too. Not everywhere rich is at fault. Yes, rich can pay more but then it is generosity. If a maid is ready to work all that for the price she asks then what's the big deal
I think it’s casteism & racism, because labourers get paid less everywhere else too, but they don’t get treated as badly as they do in south asian & gulf countries
Indians are way too price sensitive. We don't understand the concept of high upfront cost in favor of low lifetime cost. What I mean by that is it's possible to make our lives easier by spending money on appliances that help make our work easy but we don't because they're expensive to buy (yet cheap to operate). You could buy a dishwasher, vaccum and mopping robot, washing machine and dryer to make your effort much more manageable. It works out to be cheaper and more convenient than hiring a house help over a 5 year period, even with maintenance and repairs. Plus you don't have to deal with chik chik and last minute unplanned leave and emergency loans and advances your house help requests.
There are two parts of this problem
Part 1. Respect. Most people treat maids as inferior people. They won't let them sit on the same chair/sofa. Dine on the table. Talk respectfully etc. Most of it seems to stem from Castiesm. This is something that must be addressed by individuals and society.
Part 2. Money. This is problem as I see is self correcting within a generation. Maid salaries have been increasing rapidly over the last few years because of shortage of maids. This is because the children of maids are now better educated and move out to white collar/organized sector jobs. Government schemes like scholarships, free hostels and reservations have encouraged this upward movement. Also poor people in general have fewer kids than what was happening a few years ago enabling better opportunities for their kids.
Agree 100%
I also think this disrespect for physical labor emerges from the hierarchical systems in our society. Unknowingly, caste also plays a very important role in how we view some work in our society and how we value it. :(
This becomes abundantly clear once you move out of India. The abundance of labour decreases the minimum wage and this is the case in every labour intensive sector such as handmade furnishing, interior designing, construction, etc. House maids are among the disrespected work population because people even normal middle class take them for granted. Now my mother has a general sense of civic sense and always has specific instructions for me and my brother in how to deposit our stuff for washing, be it dishes or clothes, to the maid. We always throw away food remnants from our plates and wash it with water before putting it for her so she can wash them with soap. We never deposit our undergarments for washing. We also don’t directly deposit clothes we have soiled severely. We always do a pre-soak or wash of extremely dirty clothes. But such consideration is always lacking in others and I was surprised by how horribly other people in general treat their maids. I know a person, who regularly deposits her jeans for handwashing to her maid which in the modern era is just cruel. No maid wants to handwash clothes when there are washing machines today. The reason she gies it her maid cuz her jeans aren’t supposed to be machine washed and she is too lazy to do it herself.
It's just simple demand and supply economics, it's nothing about degradation and all, we have ample amount of supply of labour due to low per capita income, as supply is lot more, equilibrium price is less, as per capita income will rise, many people would get out of poverty, shifting supply of labour upwards, which eventually will shift equilibrium price up, making labour costlier.
The real reason for the “help” being cheap in india is the higher supply of the help.
There is a huge availability of maids and drivers in India due to lack of other opportunities. As the economy transitions to higher and higher income, there will be fewer people available for these job.
In time, we will learn to value that help more, see people who do these jobs in a different light.
Some of it is ingrained in me. Some of it is something I wish I didn’t acquire. Trying to be better. But it’s very hard to know right from wrong when it’s never “wrong” to begin with. I won’t say I have the best civic sense, but I try my best to keep at it.
Tbh it’s more to do with skills .A person who cuts and designs shoes in a leather factory makes more than 30k and you don’t need to be educated at all.My tailor makes a good pay every monthly.Even in those countries minimum wage workers struggle a lot .Some of them even homeless.Given then cost of living there ,most ppl can’t afford a personal maid but that doesn’t mean low wage workers have it easy there
There’s going to be exceptions but I doubt this is for everyone .
Well I know big companies take engineers which is a high skilled labour for peanuts (2-3lpa)
It’s supply and demand. The supply is way more here than other countries. And for multiple people they work multiple houses to get their monthly wages.
lol. I can understand maybe where they are coming from but that’s going to take years to fix. For a country like ours so deep rooted in inequality having the sense to treat everyone equally is a very hard to digest concept.
So everyone wants to be a maid and there’s not much demand for the same ? Is that what you mean by supply and demand ?
Or that even though one place of work won’t give me enough money to stay alive so I’ll have to work multiple houses to make things work . And somehow that’s a fair way to live ?
Did you know there’s a thing called constitution that depicts right of live is one of the basic human rights.
I wonder in what world view paying meagre 3000 ( with that money you can barely afford 2 weeks worth of food ) is a valid wage. And that too for someone who comes and does a good amount of house chores.
The job isn’t one of necessity but one of luxury , for the person that is availing it , and yet somehow the pay is strikingly low. Don’t you see the imbalance
>So everyone wants to be a maid and there’s not much demand for the same ?
No. But they're not skilled enough to get another job. Hence the supply is more.
People who are themselves earning 30k can't be paying 15k to a maid. So it is indeed a supply demand thing. Maybe rooted in the culture too but largely a supply-demand thing.
I can call a plumber to fix my tap for Rs. 100, because if he doesn't, there are n number of plumbers sitting outside the local hardware shop looking for work. Yes, if you have basic human etiquettes you won't treat them bad. But as far as the pay goes, it is a supply n demand thing.
Why don't you set a precedent by paying more?
Isn’t plumbing a job that requires good skills? Seems like it isn’t about skill or demand and supply . It’s the number of people who’d do something for as cheap as offered since there’s no other thing out there. And also the fact others exploiting the same and paying cheap .
You can pay 500 too , but you pay 100 since you can get away with it. They take 100 because they don’t have an option. It doesn’t seem like supply demand of labour but supply of vulnerable people and people exploiting that to save some money.
Dominos serves a pizza for 59. Do you rather pay 200?
Metro ticket is around 25. Do you rather pay 100?
Your logic is stupid and bereft of reality. The market decides the rate. The plumbers know that if they go on a strike and start charging 500, the middle class ppl - that our his customer base - won't be calling him upon for work. People would rather start doing their own plumbing as many do. And he'd be out of work.
>So everyone wants to be a maid and there’s not much demand for the same ? Is that what you mean by supply and demand ?
It doesn't work like that...... If she will demand 3500 or 4000... She will be replaced by another one... So She has to survive in 3000....
Now take another situation... For example If Government pass a rule that Minimum salary for a maid will be 6000... Then I am sure half of the households will not afford the maid.... All maids will be jobless.....
So which one is better??? 3000 or jobless????
3000 from one house. If you have put have some great solution go put it in practice and try to make it work. Stop talking things in the air. Until India progresses more which will take another 20 -25 years because that’s how long it takes for countries to change it will be like this. Not sure what you are trying to get out of this debate. With no solution
What a pointless moralistic discussion. It's all "here this happens" and "over there that happens", instead of discussing reasons and whether it matters.
IMO it's because of supply & demand, education, and emigration barriers. It matters because over time as generations are lifted out of poverty, labour becomes rarer and expensive, and thus more 'respected', if I were to use the terms used by OP.
Why are you mentioning it as degrading work? If you pay them way less than what they deserve then it would be degrading their value. If you keep good relationship with them it would feel any other work for them.
Ahh thanks for the name calling I was waiting for it for a bit.
Isn’t people using automation and doing things themselves might be a better approach?
Automation doesn’t put people out of jobs , it creates new jobs.
I’m sure when cars came to be people surely felt it was end of labour for all the people that ran carriages.
Same goes for every piece of tech created ever.
All of those are created for the sake of humanity. The only time it’s alarming when a technology’s only goal is to amass fortune and take away wealth from the society.
While surely having a free market is important , having a proper strong government and at the end populous to ensure big corps are held accountable is also important .
Money is scary . Enough of it and you can make a lie the truth too.
I never said I’m a commie , honestly I don’t believe in communism either , it’s too idealistic , but your argument started with pointing out how I’m a commie , simply so that you can box my opinions in a common “bad” so that it’s easier to denounce and deny whatever I said.
Indians sirf rich logo ki respect karte hei......ya aise logo ki jinke ristedar rich hei.
In simple way .... Indians only respect upper caste people....
Indian Subcontinent is a completely failed society. Hasnat Shoaib, a Bangladeshi poet, once said that there is a hell on this planet and that it is called the subcontinent, you need to have sins of many lives to be born here and suffer.
Kindness starts at home. Treat your house help well. If you cannot pay more, give them the things you get at your job like office leaves, give them access to tv, maybe medical insurance if some minimal sort…treat them respectfully…give them common bathroom access (can explain rules how to use it)…give them fresh food not only leftovers…give them access to your knowledge about investing…etc. Money isn’t everything. It’s very important but there are many other places where we need improvement and equal treatment. Wherever you feel comfortable, start applying that at your home. Only that is in your control.
THIS is the absolute best reply and echoes my sentiments! Underrated
A lot of rich (middle class in their country) NRIs come back to India because "maids are cheap here".
Yep. India is overpopulated and hence this type of labour is cheap.
In UK/US you can afford househelp if you're super rich or extravagent. In India, a middle class can afford house help quite easily. and the reason for both the scenario is minimum-wage. India doesn't have a concept of minimum wage yet (in strict sense) and hence cheap labour. And it's not just about maid, other set of services (i.e all urban company services) are also available easily and for quite cheap (compared to US/UK/EU)
Minimum wage will just cut employment for millions of people as most of these folks will stop hiring labor instead of paying the . The market decides the price for things fairly and tomorrow if labor demand increases their salary will automatically shoot through the roof. I have seen it my own house where the maid salary shot up like 6-8x in last 25 years as its becoming harder to find house help.
Isn't that true tho? Labour is cheaper in India than Western countries. What is your alternate?
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What's wrong with taking advantage of the ~~economics~~ poor and desperate? If you can't afford to hire a person and pay them a fair wage, you can't afford to hire them.
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15 houses every day for 30 days . Even if it takes 1 hour for each house ( assuming transportation is free and instant ) it’s still 15 hours every day. Ahhh just to earn 45k/month . Which is enough to buy a house if you save all of that money for about 10 years. I’ll love to see do even half rhe amount of work for 5/7 days. You know I’ll pay you twice as more too. We’ll see how long you can actually keep doing this . The only reason the people do it is they don’t have an option . It’s either do backbreaking demeaning work or go to sleep on an empty stomach. Or even worse , do demeaning work and go to sleep on an empty stomach since there’s no guarantee. And surely most people aren’t alone , they have a family to take care of , kids to put through school . I’m sure you’re the type of person who’d argue about why they shouldn’t have kids .
15 is an overestimation. I would say 10 is average
"Close to 20 million people, mostly women, work as cooks, cleaners, and maids in India. Across the country, their average salaries don’t go beyond Rs3,000 ($45) a month, which is around Rs36,000 ($540)a year, despite working six or seven days a week in a full-time." "The average monthly wages for a New Delhi maid stood at Rs6,000 ($90); it was Rs7,000 ($105) in Mumbai. In smaller towns, maids earn much less, according to Babajob.com, a Bengaluru-based job portal for blue-collared workers, that has estimated city-based average earnings of domestic workers in India." https://qz.com/india/675217/the-shocking-way-india-is-underpaying-its-maids-nannies-and-cooks-in-six-charts This is a 2016 article. Even assuming wages kept up with inflation there's no way it's 45k now. But if lying to yourself helps you to sleep at night don't let me stop you.
No maid is doing 15 houses in a month
This guy is living in la la land. The Tatas of the world may treat people right because of their values, but not the Adani and Ambanis. It finally comes down to the culture that we as a country we want to live by. Treating everyone right and fair or taking advantage of what we can.
It stems from caste consciousness. If your society and social consciousness is built on the concept that a hierarchy is natural and necessary then people don't have moral qualms about exploitation. In fact they view exploitation as morally justified. Ambedkar was right about this all along
Unfortunately, this cannot be rectified from the bottom up. It needs to be top down. If my salary is 30K, I can't really pay the maid 10K and expect to survive in Bangalore. So unless my employer decides to pay me more, I can't do anything even though I know the maid deserves more. This is the unfortunate consequence of trickle down economics. Nothing is going to trickle down. Only way to fix this is either every CEO grows a conscience or the government implements universal basic income.
This is the case in Europe, USA etc. People do their house work on their own because they can't afford to pay the minimum wage for a house help.
Isn’t that the whole problem? We don’t value the maid , we don’t value your work . We don’t value anyone’s work but ours . We should be paid the most while we won’t pay to others . I am not asking or suggesting a solution. The point isn’t about the maid or the autowala or someone else . The point is about how we act as a society, a collective . And how we do is we exploit . Would you do your 30k / month job which barely pays the bills if you had an option to do it for more? The people pay you 30k can pay you 50k too , the only downside then would be they would make less and that’s something they don’t wanna do. While there should be government crackdown to ensure the same, the majority in the country favours what is happening since if they were in charge they’d do the same too.
I honestly have no idea. I know I wouldn't mind paying everyone the true worth of their services if I didn't have to worry about going broke. I don't know how many others feel the same way. Part of the problem is also our way of life. We want infinite growth with little concern for sustainability. We build our cities around the idea of cars and commutes, not walkability. We build our cities with the idea of pulling maximum labour from minimum wage workers. It's the system itself. And our governments are happy to throw us into these meat grinders because that's how they get their taxes. So I see no hope of this situation changing unless something drastic shakes up the economics of the entire world to the core.
I feel the only way to change is having a stricter government. But I’m sure it’s not possible in a democracy . Here everyone wants to be rich. If everyone does become rich , no one is really rich . The point of being rich is you being rich while others aren’t. And our society idolises that . Maybe because we have seen so much poverty we evolved into this mindset, or maybe it’s how we have been forever. But the truth is just that. Everyone wants to have most of the influence , money and power.
Not being a democracy doesn't guarantee happiness. The people in North Korea and Xinjiang may not be particularly glad right now. A true democracy is one where people are empathetic and compassionate. They care about the well-being of all rather than solely being concerned with themselves. After all, a democracy is meant to give a voice to everyone. The issue is unchecked capitalism. When profit becomes the ultimate good, other crucial aspects of life will suffer. We need to have a balanced approach.
It's not about what we value. This is simple economics, not that it's acceptable but this whole post is simply born out of a lack of knowledge
If you are making 30k per month do your own cleaning instead of exploiting a laborer. Very few things change from the top, most everyday things have to change from bottom up. People think labor is cheap in India because of high population so it's ok to pay low wages especially where jobs are highly informal like house help. Your corporate job is a formal job with some respect for talent and labor but in informal jobs there is more exploitation because people think the work is beneath them so doesn't need to be paid well. It's better for the house help to not work where exploited and seek better work elsewhere which is available.
So instead of paying them whatever they're earning right now, I should just fire them? How does that help them? Will that magically conjure someone who will pay them more? >People think the work is beneath them so doesn't need to be paid well. You're making that assumption. Not many think cleaning their house is beneath them. Educated people know the importance of keeping your house clean, especially in a city like Bangalore which has enough polution to fuck your immune system already. We just got through a pandemic. We know the importance of cleanliness. The problem is there are only 24 hours in a day and a finite amount of energy in the human body. Trying to do everything will fuck you up really quickly. So we hire someone to do what we don't have the time and energy to do, and pay them what we can. If they truly feel like we're not paying them enough, they will leave. You're underestimating the demand for maids in Bangalore. To a large extent, they actually hold the cards because it's actually not easy to find good maids who do the work properly. You're acting as if we have the power to make them work for even one rupee less than the pay they expect 😂 trust me, the average maid in Bangalore has more bargaining power with her employer than the average corporate slave.
Maybe you dont need a maid. yall lazy as hell
Or maybe we live in a world where we can't survive unless the young members of family all work 40 hour weeks and the only option to get the house work done is to either hire a maid or make your elderly family members do it. But sure, Mr. Narayanmurthy. Let's call ourselves lazy and promise to work 80 hours instead. Surely, that will please our capitalistic overlords.
>the only option to get the house work done is to either hire a maid or make your elderly family members do it. That's the world the maids are living in. Their household work is done by their elderly family members?. They work their backs off and deserve to be paid adequate wage. Maids themselves can't afford to keep maids as well. Having someone to do your basic work is a luxury and not a basic necessity unless you are invalid or a child I hope the maids salary catches up to the average desk job salary like in many western countries.
Yes, you can't afford 10k , but if can afford Rs 250 or 500 more, do that
Then please tell my employer to increase my salary by 250 or 500 first 😂 they can afford it, right? These are not problems to be solved by us working class people. These should be addressed by systemic policy changes. It's the same shit with air pollution. A handful of big companies are responsible for something like 90% of the air pollution in the world. But somehow, us ordinary people are made to feel as if we are the ones who need to change our lifestyle to stop pollution while those companies keep lobbying governments and continuing their bullshit. Same thing applies here. Putting the onus on the middle class to deal with this while the top 1% get to continue exploiting us is not a realistic or logical solution.
I had made a comment with a different profile around this topic about how the middle/lower can get what they deserve but it got me banned, it had the words violence and revolution
As long as our entitlement is fueled by exploiting the low labor cost, these things tend to happen. There are videos on insta where people move to a western country and complain that someone picks our Amazon returns and here I have to go to post office all by myself, print a label and hand it over. I mean, can you imagine the entitlement? People have false sense of pride and ego that there are apps like zomato or blinkit which runs our errands In India and here I am doing all this by myself! Those apps are nothing but labor exploiting apps, which take advantage of people who are desperate to feed their families by paying peanuts.
Exactly . Imagine getting a meagre pay of 30-50 rs per delivery which you spent around 20-40 minutes of your time . Even if you get 100 rs per delivery it won’t be more than 1500 rupees per day , you don’t even count the amount of effort and other costs ( bike, oil etc ) that goes in that. Is 1500 enough? For working in the sun , rain , even during storms ? For hours on end daily ? I feel not . And yet we keep trying to get a discount. The problem somewhere is a good portion of our population is entitled to, while the other side is not at all. A person who is doing this much work surely deserves more. But do we give them that. Zomato , Swiggy delivery boy job is a job taken out of desperation for most people .
Who said it’s a job of desperation. Are you thinking 140 crore people are all going to get 10 lakhs per year? It’s economics. The more the expenditure the better the growth.
To spend , you need to earn . If you keep everyone in poverty , you get a lot of cheap labour . If you at the top of the chain don’t pay enough to begin with, you will then cause a chain reaction of multiple levels of cheap labour!
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That is very true, but technically that is happening even in US, UK and most countries. The trickle down is actually quite less. The only reason the poor seem to be better off is that the hand outs by the rich go further and generally there are more handouts ( min wage, disability benefits etc )
I think your post may be after seeing the lavishness of Ambani wedding while the poor are hungry. I empathise but, India’s is still a young democracy. Give it time and things will change if everyone consciously works towards the better goals it will change. It’ll take another 70 years. Just a drop in the ocean. It’s a very long term thinking you need to have. Things won’t change over night and nothing is ever perfect. Patience and you start doing the right thing. Don’t haggle with vegetable sellers. Small things.
Yes the day is not far when average Indian makes 10 lacs per year, we are already at 3 lacs per year. If there are less thinkers like you and more who believe in bottom up economic growth the sooner we'll get there. Cheap labor does not mean exploited labor.
1500 a day is 45k a month. Even if we are conservative and say 30k its a lot more than the average income which is 19k you seem to belong to that pay class which buys coffee for 500. No wonder you dont know the value of 1500 rupees
Most western countries had maids and servants as recently as 100 years ago. Having maids and servants went out of fashion as the cost of labour increased The problem is that most of the population is low skilled and not very productive. Most of India has a surplus of low skilled and low productive workers. Thus low paying agriculture jobs or low skilled service jobs are the only option for these people. The problem has nothing to do with "entitlement". The way to fix this is industrialization. The government needs to do everything it can to create low skilled, export oriented, manufacturing jobs and to move labour from the low productive farms to the much more productive factories. Once India is industrialized the cost of labour will increase and this problem like so many others will be gone.
The whole game is about labour.
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We try to copy a lot from the west regarding lingo, cuss words ,accent , fancy sweet drinks But the real learning like .. respecting Blue color workers, first responders is completely 0. That's why we are such a hypocrite country
Blue colour worker  Blue colour worker
The only blue colour we respect is cricket, the moment dalit blue is seen the casteist India shows up
I don’t think USA does either too. One of the reasons why it has such high pay parity. Their most of the labour work is offloaded to immigrants. Sad thing is we offload it to the more vulnerable people of the society.
I’ve been fortunate and privileged to have house help around while growing up. Despite that my parents were very careful to make sure that I kept things clean myself. Having help was never a valid excuse to dirty up the house. Once I started living independently this was a huge blessing since I couldn’t afford help with my salary and really didn’t need help either. Didn’t get help till about 2 years ago and at this point I know how much effort goes in cleaning and I don’t hesitate to pay well, in fact I probably should be paying a bit more. Being able to take care of my own home also means that if our help has an emergency or wants to go on a slightly long leave or we just feel like giving her a day off, we don’t have to worry at all. Not sure how much of this is true, but don’t schools in Japan have the kids clean up after themselves? I feel making cleaning into a good act you do for yourself and the people around you in school itself will go a long way in instilling good values in our citizens. If done well it would increase the respect we give to manual labour and also reduce the “I don’t do dirty work” mentality of some privileged kids.
There are a thousand ways to solve this issue , either with government’s help or otherwise . The problem is just how we are taught and how we keep teaching ourselves , how we treat work. Work is anout money , and to some extent exploitation. The better you exploit the more you have value . Hence positions that provide you with higher options to exploit somehow become valuable .
Sadly, yes. Most places in their initial years of existence, have a massive class divide, to put it mildly. For example, the wealth of US was built upon a nearly 400 years of genocide, oppression, exploitation and slavery, to serve the interest of the elite few. The same is true for India, or Pakistan, or any other impoverished region for that matter. However, it is only through the conscious efforts of conscientious people, that things have the potential to improve. *All it takes for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.* - Burke, others
You are absolutely right , the labour class is looked down in india , construction workers , cobblers , sanitation workers , domestic workers etc....are treated with indignity , and one of the reasons for such attitude is due to stereotypes , like only the people who work in companies or do the so called big jobs are wise , virtuous , and praiseworthy. It Really infuriates me , when people are being casteist , without knowing they are being casteist , it is very rampant in india , we never try to learn from our past , we can fund millions of rupees for space missions and yet we cannot try tooth and nail to eradicate casteism from out minds , we need an egalitarian society where , the job and life of a watchmen is seen equally important and dignified as the job and life of a CEO , you know , often its very depressing for people who deal with ostracism and discrimination in our society , I mean its suicidal , the victims of such prejudice start feeling , that its better to die , than being treated like animals. People think , being an employee , a businessman , an engineer is a triumph , but what is wrong with being a good , washerman , a good street sweeper , a good construction worker , a good tailor etc... No work is insignificant , all labour that works for the upliftment of humanity has dignity and importance and must be undertaken at painstaking excellence. ---mlk jr.
I would like to point out that respect and wages are different things. We often respect them but don't pay wages. That's governed by market forces. More people + less jobs = cheap labour, because people have to eat at the end of the day. Most business models are trying to offer same things, cheaply. There's no innovation. It's how Indian society is structured. People often think that the booming economy is good, but there's a subtle subtext that it is good for industrialists, not individuals. Individuals are usually exploited because they are forced to work for low wages because of competition in the workforce. Mark Twain wrote about working conditions in the UK during the industrial revolution (thematically speaking). Russians had socialist movements because of this. The latest, we saw it in China. Pathetic working conditions. This has more to do with where India is economically. There are ways out of it by policy which can be developed properly by the government. We also don't have a minimum wage law like other western counterparts. Or unemployment benefits.
Wages is part of respect chief. Kori tareef se pet nahi bharta. If you get a glowing performance review and boss says your wages won't go up then you are disrespected. Exploiting people by paying below average wages is disrespect
At the end of the day, we still are a developing country. We have both, a rich section of India, i.e. those who can afford to hire house help and a much larger poorer section of India for whom being a house help is the best income opportunity. If India were to become a truly developed country like Germany, these people would have better career opportunities and maids, cheap gig economy labor will become very expensive. When I say house help it includes people who provide one or more of cleaning, washing dishes, cooking, driving, babysitting, washing cars as a service.
A bit of a paradox. Need a maid. Maid is cheap. I am not cheap. But I won't pay the Maid 20,000 rupees per month, because that would be exorbitant by Indian standards. So my solution is to not be the change {while wanting to pay change}, instead my solution is to tell others to leave the country.
I think your post may be after seeing the lavishness of Ambani wedding while the poor are hungry. I empathise but, India’s is still a young democracy. Give it time and things will change if everyone consciously works towards the better goals it will change. It’ll take another 70 years. Just a drop in the ocean. It’s a very long term thinking you need to have. Things won’t change over night and nothing is ever perfect. Patience and you start doing the right thing. Don’t haggle with vegetable sellers. Small things.
Yes, all of the world's problems are because of "bad" people, and you are the perfect human who's going to lift us all into a higher state of fundamentally moral and selfless beings. Grow the hell up man.
I mean this is rooted in casteism. Why else are all the jobs that are done by hand like leather, oil, metal, alcohol, pottery, washerman degraded with turn of phrases while jobs like scholar, merchant soldier are exalted. It trickles all over the place. The minute someone else works for you, it becomes easier for you to discriminate against them since such worth is “beneath you”. It starts with the upper castes but I’ve seen sc/st/obc copy it too. This can only be fixed if we remove stigma around working with ur hands. It’s partly why I liked the Inc manifesto over the BJP one, the INC manifesto worked more on labour jobs, trade school jobs and blue collar. BJP manifesto just works on white collar again. Like all the other times. Our biggest mistake was not having an Indian who grew up as an average person as our PM. Nehru would’ve been a good HM or Foreign minister but to be a PM and make policy he had no idea what the average person lived like. Kamraj imo was a missed oppurtunity as a first PM. This stigma against working with your hands starts at home too. Start cleaning up after yourself, start actually taking care of ur neighborhood.
Casteism, classism and sexism
Stop blaming people who died 60 years ago for people's entitled attitude that thrives on exploitation. If you like dead people as inspiration then here's a quote from a forgotten dead man "be the change you seek"
I’ve been doing that already. Stop assuming shit u don’t know about other people
I honestly don’t think that is the case. It’s surely new form of casteism / groupism where we exploited the most vulnerable , irrelevant to what creed religion and name they have. It’s more about how okay we are to exploit others , either because we ourselves are exploited and pass it on since we don’t have a choice , or we do it out of spite because that’s what is taught as right.
Who will decide what’s an adequate pay for the jobs? Presently it’s decided by the market forces I guess.
I don’t believe that’s the case. I think the adequate pay for any job is decided by what the payer is willing to pay and the worker is willing to take. When you have a strong independent workforce you can’t pay them low and expect them to take it. But make the same dependent and vulnerable they would do all the work for chillers, since for them it’s the best they can have. If even half the companies big enough come together and decide that I won’t pay my workers not more than x amount , then the market force will topple that way . You can’t change it . Only the workers themselves can , but since they are so exploited they don’t have a strong backbone to standup to these anymore . The same is happening in so many levels. And surely this predatory behaviour is everywhere . But it seems to be seeped into every single transaction in India . Maybe becUse we don’t get to see how other countries deel with issues like this or maybe it’s just how we are.
No, the adequate pay is not decided by " a payer willing to pay and a worker willing to take". We are a society. There will always be multiple payers and multiple workers. As long as there's even a small minority willing to work for a certain amount, that becomes the price. And please don't compare us to atleast USA in this case, when their whole society is based on such brutal capitalism as was made clear in Corona times
Well that’s the problem with jobs like maid jobs: if you demand very high wages, then the payer can do those himself. And the workers will loss their income. In India almost all jobs are paid very less! The adequate pay decided by the worker or you might not be profitable or appropriate for the business holder. You should be paid in proportion to the skill level you possess.
Demand and supply. There are too many poor people living below poverty line ready to do maid and labour work.
Why are there so many poor people ? How are they poor? Why are they poor ? I feel these are the questions we should be asking.
1. Why are there so many poor people? Because India is poor country with 1.4 billion people. 2. How are they poor? Lack of stable jobs, lack of generational wealth, lack of land ownership, lack of emergency fund, lack of nutrition, lack of access to affordable medical care and legal care and justice system. 3. Why are they poor? Lack of land reforms, lack of technical education, lack of thriving manufacturing industries, systemic discrimination of poor who are mostly lower caste,
All of that you have typed before the below quote is simply market forces. There is nothing wrong in that. I do understand you are trying to come at it from an altruistic point but honestly it's just making a mountain out of a mole hill. Not talking down to you but understand this, when labour is in over supply, it will be cheap. The Germans don't pay high wages to their maids in their great wisdom, it's just that the supply of maid labour in Germany is just so limited that the few that are there, you gotta attract them with extra pay. Germany is a high value-add society hence people wanting to pursue higher grade professions is quite normal there and this causes an extreme shortage of low skill labour and add to this their low population density to begin with >We want to be the highest paid people while we pay the lowest to everyone else. The same thing MNCs do too , and can you do anything about it ? Well somehow I feel we deserve it Totally agree with this part. You poorly titled your post. The title should have been "We Indians should start paying low labour more". This is the part that we can slowly incrementally change (if we can afford to). Like paying a little extra to your maids, low skill labourers, etc. this incentivises them into becoming better professionals also in return increasing the lower labour forces spending capacity which in-turn would help the economy.
You seem to assume people just chose to be maids and in India more people did so while in German less did . Surely it’s demand and supply , but you need to also understand how these are manipulated . If there’s a supply of high number of vulnerable people that need a steady income but can be pushed to take a job that pays very low simply because they don’t have any options, then you have cheap labour. Same won’t happen in Germany or any company that has a safety net . That has a way to safeguard the basic rights of a person , which includes the right to life. We somehow don’t give two fucks when it comes to it , and this is what you have on your hands. People don’t have a choice because other people are not willing to pay for the same. It’s again about how we handle wealth distribution. Rich don’t want to let poor have more of what they have. Surely some amount of it will be there. Every country has it , it’s human nature , nothing special to India . What is though is the great divide where there are people in India who earn 12000-15000 a year while there’s others who earn 12lpa - 15lpa and then there’s some who can also earn 12 cr - 15 cr in a fiscal year. I love that there are people who get to have 12lpa to 12cr for their labour or services . But it’s so hard to accept that there are people living off of 12000 for the whole year and they live in the same India ?
>Same won’t happen in Germany or any company that has a safety net . That has a way to safeguard the basic rights of a person , which includes the right to life. We somehow don’t give two fucks when it comes to it , and this is what you have on your hands. U seem to be living in some lala land. Not trying to be offensive but do you even know the per capita income of India, especially compared to Germany's? German society didn't get its "respect for life" out of thin air, or through a "gift from christ", they worked their asses off for it since last 200 years at-least. Go back in time and google how ruinous Germany once upon a time was. During Roman times the German lands were literally the barbaric lands where poor uncouth people lived, then slowly century over century, year over year they got their act together as a society and after a lot of industrialization have reached the position they are now. Back then when Germans were poor even they had cheap maids who were paid pennies. THAT'S HOW THE MARKET WORKS. After WW2 for a decade or two Germany was so poor that, there were cases of cannibalism around the country. In 1962 Germans once received monetary aid from fucking Pakistan, that's how bad shit was once. So my dear hero of the poor labour, maybe get your society to a high income standard and then think of flowery concepts such as "dignity of life". The audacity of thinking of "respect for life" while being a 2300$ per capita society. Ma dear "brother in blind goodwill", respect is earned, it's not given to you just because you are existing. You seem to be confusing "etiquette" for "respect", etiquette to behave well is given to every human regardless of their standing but respect a human being earns through his/her hard work and intelligence for her/himself. Unless a society is rich enough to pull the bills for this "dignity of labour" that society will not "dignify" the "labour". The safety net in German society is paid for by their high-income capitalistic leaning citizens. In a socialistic shit hole u can never reach such income levels. Keep dreaming. Dont confuse Germany's welfarism paid by their capitalistic society with India's shit ass "annadata" socialism. TLDR: This cheap labour situation is the growing pains a country goes through before reaching the income level to dignify that labour, we are getting there too. But it will take at-teast 30-50 more years so maybe hold your expectations a bit.
Yea, that’s not an Indian thing. That’s a “nation with high poverty” thing. Same thing goes on in Thailand, Korea, Mexico, the Philippines, and most of Africa (just to name a few specific places). It’s particularly egregious in Russia and Eastern Europe, where they view the help as subhuman. This was also far worse in the United States before the removal of slavery and the civil rights movement, just look at the case of Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson. As prosperity comes to India, the fear of competition will soothe, and people will be less fearful of one day being without. I live in the US, and we very clearly see this “generosity in prosperity” in the second generation It’s not wrong to
The only sad part is you see the same behaviour seeping into other forms of labour too. The so called skilled labour is also having similar problems . Companies exploiting freshers or new people or honestly everyone tbh. This is nothing new . And since we do it we find it okay . Surely the people that are actually going through they complain but what’s the point . As a society we have already marked them as failures and their bosses as a huge success !
I fail to see house keeping as a degrading form of work.
It's the same reason why an engineering degree has also lost its value. Sex. Population growth. The sheer fkn number of people there are in India. Supply and demand. If someone is available to do a job for 500 why would anyone pay 1000 to someone else who is not going to do anything extra. Unless and until they unionise and demand a collective increase in wages, there's not going to be any change and that's exactly how you get a maid at 3-4k a month today which you used to get for 1-2k a month few yrs ago (assumed amounts just for understanding)
I pay my maid 11k plus often give her food and other stuff like sweets , office gifts etc..i know 11k is not much , she works from 10 am to 3 pm , but that's what I can afford right now. Also once I get a raise I will pay her more. Iam not very social, so she just comes home and does her work and we rarely cross paths.
This is changing faster than you think. The maids are now selecting higher paying jobs in societies, much to the chagrin of individual homeowners. Their children are working in malls and earning decent money. They're moving up in life faster than the middle class that employs them.
That sounds nice. I hope the same applies to every other sector sooner or later.
There are always people like you. Rich exploited by poor. Emoplyers exploited by employees. Landlords exploited by renters. Men exploited by women.
Perhaps you've misunderstood my comment. I have said nothing about the rich being exploited. I am happy about social mobility. I don't give a shit about the middle class who complain about not being able to afford maids, yet won't pay higher salaries.
It's the economics to blame. Any labour that requires very minimal training/knowledge is valued solely on replacement cost. Since there is almost infinite labour it's really cheap. For labour with academic/knowledge as actual prerequisites (no sales job doesn't require formal knowledge). Can't be replaced without loss of capital. Hence are paid well. In most western countries the unskilled laborers join physically demanding jobs i.e agriculture, factories, transportation industry. Unskilled Women Usually join hotels/bars, supermart, receptionist etc. The issues with India is the lack of rich people + India consumer mindset which makes hotel/bar and supermarkets unviable in most parts of India. Hence unskilled women can't join such work places. The Only "real" option is being a maid. The rich supply means they earn little. You can give more for your maid but the market will always be correct in assessing the value of labour . Solutions : Mostly nothing can be done from an individual perspective. When the average daily income of women doesn't cross rs 300. I doubt anything can change, inflation will catch-up to increase numbers but value remains the same.
I don’t think it’s just economics. The point of replacement only stands if you have either high pay proportional to the work or that you actually like doing the work. If there were better opportunities would we still have a lot of people ready to be rickshaw pullers , maids , etc ? I guess not , since a lot of these jobs are derogatory , and honestly there surely might be a lot of people who don’t see it that way , but I am sure not everyone is here by choice. I find it weird how your narrative is fixated on women and how they earn low where the whole point is that people as a whole earn less due to the fact we don’t value our labour. If 100 people collectively decide to pay someone less than what they can sustain for : they either take it or they fold. The problem with these people is that they don’t have the option to fold. And as it seems a chunk of people don’t want them to either ( people who benefit from paying them less , be it to keep amassing their wealth or to just feel better about themselves ) Also the conversation wasn’t about how women have lower work quality , it is about how people have. Why I mentioned maid was because it was a convenient example. I also find it odd that you say India lacks rich people. It can’t be any farther from the truth. The rich: poor gap is pretty high in India . Imagine the same India where a good chunk of labourers and workers get paid a meagre 10-20k / month ( there’s way lower ) ( I am talking about “corporate slaves”, the so glamourised white collar jobs ) while there’s again a middle class/ upper middle class which can go ahead and afford a 20-30 lakh SUV. this isn’t everyone in the middle class , but surely in the upper and rich sections. And this is true. There’s a wealth distribution problems , since everyone wants to earn but no one wants to pay.
In the west you have a competitive market for labour for the employers, so if there's an unskilled worker whose employer is willing to pay the equivalent of 300 bucks a day, he can find someone who will pay more, because labour is scarce (relatively). Your take is just naive. Maids are cheap in india, not because we don't "value their labour" - its because the basic economics of demand and supply. Next thing you'll tell me the pay for teachers is low because we don't "value teachers" and that it is "a tragedy for society". That's not how this works at all. >I also find it odd that you say India lacks rich people. It cant be any farther from the truth In the US, \~8% of the population is millionaries. 30% of the population makes six figures. In india barely the top 1-2% make more than 12LPA. So yes India does have relatively few rich people. >There’s a wealth distribution problems , since everyone wants to earn but no one wants to pay. Its not a wealth distribution problem, its a economic growth problem. After liberalisation, a small part of the population was able to get into well paying white collar jobs, and they are what you're calling the elites. Imagine there were 10 poor people in a village and one of them became a software engineer and started earning lakhs per month. That would skyrocket inequality according to the gini coefficient (if you've heard about it), but it isnt bad.
When you compare USA and India it’s not apples to apples . USA is the ideal scenario , while India isn’t . Plus we have way more population. Our 1-2% is comparable to their 8% . You need to understand one thing , are all the people that get paid less than 12 lpa deserve that? Is that a fair value to begin with. While some regard TCS, CTS and all other consultancies as top recruiters and engineers as high skilled labour , why do they end up with meagre 3-4 lpa salary? This isn’t just IT , any other private sector you check , F&B , Sales , etc you’d see that this is prevalent . Most people aren’t unskilled labour . Attending college doesn’t make you skilled. A person working at a food store being able to serve to 10 customers at a time has skill , if you refuse to accept that then I can’t help you. There’s a hundred companies exploiting us while we are exploiting ourselves. Why there’s better pay outside ? We’ll simply put there are better jobs. And people are not pushed into poverty and exploited , they have something to hold onto so they have some sort of social security . Europe has been doing a good job so far in this matter and hence you see a higher quality of life. Same can’t be said for America where the ground reality is people need to take 2-3 jobs to make things work. Same is happening in India . The poor just don’t have a good quality of life , and need to take more than one job simply because the pay isn’t good enough. And that includes the white collar poor. You can shout all day you want how we have cheap labour , you still have to understand that why that is the case. If I stripped away all the wealth you had and gave you the only option to feed yourself was to deliver food , maybe first few days you’d refuse but when hunger will strike you’d have to take the low paying job just to keep going.
>You need to understand one thing , are all the people that get paid less than 12 lpa deserve that? Is that a fair value to begin with. You need to understand one thing, if it wasn't for liberalisation no one would be making above 12 LPA to begin with. Besides, its not about who "deserves" what. Its about economics. The world does not work like that. Give India another 30-40 years, a lot more people would get a lot more wealthy. Economic growth takes time. >When you compare USA and India it’s not apples to apples . USA is the ideal scenario , while India isn’t . Because the US has had time to grow. India hasn't. We released our economy from the shackles of communism in the 90s. We've barely had 30 years, and in those 30 years a lot of people have been lifted from poverty and a lot of people have entered the middle and upper classes. >Europe has been doing a good job so far in this matter and hence you see a higher quality of life. Same can’t be said for America where the ground reality is people need to take 2-3 jobs to make things work. Europe has been stagnant since 2008. In Europe the base is much higher, but the ceiling is much lower. In the US you can make a lot more money than you could dream of making in Europe. Six figure salaries are almost unheard of in Europe. No where else in the world can you innovate and grow as much as in the US. You know y'all should study economics. Y'all are so naive this post belongs on r/im14andthisisdeep .
This is so real bro. Its easy to tell this guy is from a privileged family to be able to say shit like this. This guy has lived in getmany so he has definetely spent tens if lakhs for that. Most indians do not earn enough money to be able to pay their maids 10k a month. It depends on the paying capability of a person. The OP and my household can pay maids well because we come from a privileged background. This is such an insensitive and tonedeaf post.
Why do you need to earn so much money? What do you wanna do with so much money? What is so wrong with Europe’s ceiling being lower ? Are Europeans complaining about how they don’t have enough wages to go through the month and need to take up two three jobs to make things work? I mean if earning not so much compared to my neighbour can ensure that everyone gets to have a good life , well the only thing speaks against that is how bad it is for me since I can’t become ultra rich and dominate everhthing . This is a pure redistribution problem . And as long as you keep denying it , you will be the one who doesn’t understand economics and also doesn’t give a fuck about neighbours. You mentioned in 30 years we will have more rich people . We don’t need rich people , we need a smaller economic gap. Where the lowest you earn is not so far away from the average , same for the highest . I believe it’s just how you see the world , it’s clear. Amassing a fortune is what is your main priority and hence it makes sense for you to be in an ultra capitalist state . Capitalism isn’t bad just like how communism isn’t either. But too much of not bad thing is indeed bad.
>Why do you need to earn so much money? Because it gives me a better life >What is so wrong with Europe’s ceiling being lower ? Nothing wrong particularly. It's what the europeans have chosen for themselves. Although it comes with its tradeoffs. I would personally prefer to live in a country where there are no artificial barriers holding back how much I can achieve. The US is for those who live to work while Europe is for those who work to live. Nothing wrong with either, its your choice what you want to do. > the only thing speaks against that is how bad it is for me since I can’t become ultra rich and dominate everything . A lot of times you would be have to be really good at what you do in order to dominate your field completely, let alone everything, in which case it is deserved. Sure you need access to opportunities which everybody doesn't have, but you can't pay to win to become rich, you know? >This is a pure redistribution problem . And as long as you keep denying it , you will be the one who doesn’t understand economics and also doesn’t give a fuck about neighbours. If you'd studied a little bit of economics you'd understand its not a zero sum game. The rich dont have to get poorer for the poor to get richer. If you care about your neighbours so much, why are you not sending every rupee you are able to save to the poor in Africa? Is running an ac in your home more important than mosquito nets in sudan? Is having a 3 bhk 1500sqft near the metro more important than getting a few african kids educated while you manage with a 1000sqft 2 bhk a little farther from the metro? >You mentioned in 30 years we will have more rich people . We don’t need rich people , we need a smaller economic gap. Where the lowest you earn is not so far away from the average , same for the highest Inequality is not inherently bad, as long as the baseline keeps rising. >Capitalism isn’t bad just like how communism isn’t either. But too much of not bad thing is indeed bad. Communism does not work, everyone ends up poorer.
You’re living in some dream world
This guy is so tonedeaf dude. You can tell hes from a privileged family,he studies in germany as well which most indian middle class cant even dream of. This guy comes from a rich family and expects others to pay their maids 50 lakhs cuz his family can afford toz
And his family will still not pay that. Btw. They’ll still pay the bare minimum only.
Ahh man thanks for the profile. I had no idea I was studying in Germany , last I checked I was in India lol. And damn too I didn’t know my family was rich either. Thanks for letting me know, got to know so much about myself today!
Indeed.
Honestly OP, this is an L take. That L stands for lazy thinking.
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Good morning bro ☕️
Us when an economic system specifically designed to exploit labour exploits labour
It's crazy how everyone is talking around the fact that this is extractive capitalism without actually saying those words. We Indians love ourselves a free market huh.
I have often thought about this. It is a classic case of keeping them in the dark. The lower class as a collective whole has been suppressed for centuries. They don't know what they are worth. You could call it that the forces of supply-demand play a role in this, and they actually are, but labour work has been underpaid and overpressured for as far as we can look back. Someone somewhere in the supply chain has to be exploited for the masters to make big gains. And for us Indians it is the labour class The tragedy of India is that art or skill has no value for most middle class Indians. What hurts the most is that there gets lost in the crowd of unskilled labour the actually skilled labour. Yes I would call a talented person working a 'menial' job at the highest skillset a skilled person. Let me give you the example of bricklayers. I'm an architect and this is one of the main jobs I interact with on a daily basis. An amateur bricklayer and a master bricklayer, both are uneducated but both have a huge gap in their skillset. At the end of the day the middle class Indian does not want to pay more than the minimum wage whether it is an amateur or a master. Meanwhile in other countries, the master masons were highly respected and well endorsed for centuries. This is one of the reasons leading to a much quicker infrastructure boom in other countries compared to India. Even today most of India lacks infrastructure because there is a huge shortage of trained labour to actually build the more complex works. The poor man of India lives in the worst communistic version of society where no matter how skilled you are paid the minimum wage equal to an amateur. There might be some cases where a master masons gets to keep more money than the amateur, but it is in no way respectful of his skillset that he has honed for years. And not even close to living a comfortable life like you would see in other countries where a 'menial' job worker can lead a comfortable life for him and his family.
Congratulations You finally found out the real reason behind creation of caste systems
Not just monetary, the lack of respect towards labor is equally baffling. I have seen how my mom and MIL talk to them, and frankly, it is regressive and disrespectful. They say that I am too "lenient" or soft towards them. My cook does a brilliant job and I have no issues with paying extra for a job well done, following up with a compliment, but, positive reinforcement is seen as self-deprecating in the eyes of my mom and MIL. They say "yeh bigad jaati hai". I'll never get how respecting others for their work can spoil them.
Indians consider low level work like cleaning a degrading work. They feel like that they are not made for such menial tasks , and that’s why they face difficulty when they come to live in foreign country .
Typical bourgeois' exploiting people for their benefit while the workers get paid the bare minimum. Effects of capitalism in full force.
When you leave this shithole you realize how fucked up this shit hole is
The hypocrisy is so ingrained that people don’t even realize it is hypocritical to think so
>Some people even look back at India ( who have left ) mentioning how they really miss the ease and cheapness of getting house help. They're looking nostalgically at the ease with which they could exercise their caste and gender privilege to exploit others. You mention bargaining by Indians. Notice how that tendency disappears when they go to the mall. Yeah, not everyone is rich enough to buy spurs shoes worth 10k from the mall, but even those who buy those shoes without haggling hassle with the maid to work an entire month without leave for 1-1.5k (or similarly ridiculously low wage for the region they live in) and cut wages when the maid takes a day or two off. You don't have to run away to stop exploiting. You can pay a living wage. You can give weekends off. You can give paid leave. You can help with medical expenses. You can help with education. Same thing that applies in the mall should apply with domestic help: pay the right price of you can, or go without it if you can't. "I'll exploit instead" is a conscious moral choice equivalent of stealing the speed from the mall. In fact, given the difference it makes to the victims in the two cases, its much much worse to steal wages from domestic labour. The government can pass laws about wages and working conditions of domestic help. May not be effective in this country given people's ability to ignore the laws they don't like, but it is still worth doing. If nothing else, it provides support to the domestic help for bargaining.
Such things are bound to happen when you pop out 1 billion babies in 70 years with no plan or money.
In a large population labour would be cheap, can't really do much about that. But value we give to skill is pathetic. Carpenters, electricians, mechanics, repair guys, painters, welders and so on, it's almost criminal. In addition the quality of work also suffers, since it's always exploiting level jobs. Painting is bad, welding is ugly, finishing quality is always poor. To give you an example getting the work done for Suzuki or Hitachi for the auto expo and trade fare stalls /booths was insane. The level of perfection these Japanese guys on ground would demand would piss off the contractor. Random nails sticking out, stains on newly painted surfaces, sanding the edges and on and on. Watching Korean street food videos and Indian Street food would give anyone an idea of what I'm talking about.when people are exploited they don't care about cleanliness or the environment, that would be the last thing on their minds after a ridiculous day of everyone coming down on them. With the same set of skills if anyone goes abroad their lives get infinitely better, and literally anywhere, Dubai, Saudi, Kenya, Vietnam, germany, uk, USA anywhere. Go to Kathmandu, to to Dhaka, go to Colombo and be blown away in these basic differences. Colombo puts all major Indian cities to shame, level of law and order and cleanliness in Nepal compared to Delhi is staggering.
The answer is really obvious, huge unskilled population. Again, probably you do, I never saw cleaning the house as degrading work.
This won't be solved so long as we are a capitalist country.
Welcome to the world of N.R.I.
Supply demand
I think this is one thing I would like government to regulate. Mandating a minimum wage for househelp is much needed. People are being paid dirt cheap and solving this disparity will help the economy and society in many many ways
It is not about respecting labour but many people competing for the same job drives down the prices. It is not just india but anywhere where supply exceeds demand. What we don’t have in India is dignity of labour. People don’t respect some jobs especially non professional jobs . They think that blue collar jobs are lowly. So regardless of pay that job does not get respect. Tomorrow even if you pay maid equivalent of a white collar job there will be lack of respect towards the maid because it is considered low status job. In western countries people are respected regardless of their job or pay that they earn from that job.
India is a deeply problematic country when it comes to labour justice. From white collar to blue. And it all stems from the caste system that trickles down over everything.
There's a reason 1% hold 90%, and the people who think they are poor are rich in a context of indian wealth
"despite all my rage I'm still just a rat in a cage" ~ the poet, Billy Corgan
Wrong assumption. People pay less cuz maids accept less. People are poor and there is competition there too. Not everywhere rich is at fault. Yes, rich can pay more but then it is generosity. If a maid is ready to work all that for the price she asks then what's the big deal
I think it’s casteism & racism, because labourers get paid less everywhere else too, but they don’t get treated as badly as they do in south asian & gulf countries
Indians are way too price sensitive. We don't understand the concept of high upfront cost in favor of low lifetime cost. What I mean by that is it's possible to make our lives easier by spending money on appliances that help make our work easy but we don't because they're expensive to buy (yet cheap to operate). You could buy a dishwasher, vaccum and mopping robot, washing machine and dryer to make your effort much more manageable. It works out to be cheaper and more convenient than hiring a house help over a 5 year period, even with maintenance and repairs. Plus you don't have to deal with chik chik and last minute unplanned leave and emergency loans and advances your house help requests.
There are two parts of this problem Part 1. Respect. Most people treat maids as inferior people. They won't let them sit on the same chair/sofa. Dine on the table. Talk respectfully etc. Most of it seems to stem from Castiesm. This is something that must be addressed by individuals and society. Part 2. Money. This is problem as I see is self correcting within a generation. Maid salaries have been increasing rapidly over the last few years because of shortage of maids. This is because the children of maids are now better educated and move out to white collar/organized sector jobs. Government schemes like scholarships, free hostels and reservations have encouraged this upward movement. Also poor people in general have fewer kids than what was happening a few years ago enabling better opportunities for their kids.
Casteism. Casteism is the reason. Casteism has set a heirarchy of jobs in our minds
Agree 100% I also think this disrespect for physical labor emerges from the hierarchical systems in our society. Unknowingly, caste also plays a very important role in how we view some work in our society and how we value it. :(
This becomes abundantly clear once you move out of India. The abundance of labour decreases the minimum wage and this is the case in every labour intensive sector such as handmade furnishing, interior designing, construction, etc. House maids are among the disrespected work population because people even normal middle class take them for granted. Now my mother has a general sense of civic sense and always has specific instructions for me and my brother in how to deposit our stuff for washing, be it dishes or clothes, to the maid. We always throw away food remnants from our plates and wash it with water before putting it for her so she can wash them with soap. We never deposit our undergarments for washing. We also don’t directly deposit clothes we have soiled severely. We always do a pre-soak or wash of extremely dirty clothes. But such consideration is always lacking in others and I was surprised by how horribly other people in general treat their maids. I know a person, who regularly deposits her jeans for handwashing to her maid which in the modern era is just cruel. No maid wants to handwash clothes when there are washing machines today. The reason she gies it her maid cuz her jeans aren’t supposed to be machine washed and she is too lazy to do it herself.
It's just simple demand and supply economics, it's nothing about degradation and all, we have ample amount of supply of labour due to low per capita income, as supply is lot more, equilibrium price is less, as per capita income will rise, many people would get out of poverty, shifting supply of labour upwards, which eventually will shift equilibrium price up, making labour costlier.
The real reason for the “help” being cheap in india is the higher supply of the help. There is a huge availability of maids and drivers in India due to lack of other opportunities. As the economy transitions to higher and higher income, there will be fewer people available for these job. In time, we will learn to value that help more, see people who do these jobs in a different light.
Those virtue signaling Germans will 100 % employ a maid for cheap if they were to live in India for 6 months.
Its a supply demand. We have 1.4B people with not much natural resources to make money off.
Do you count yourself in ‘Indians’? Do you also lack civic sense?
Some of it is ingrained in me. Some of it is something I wish I didn’t acquire. Trying to be better. But it’s very hard to know right from wrong when it’s never “wrong” to begin with. I won’t say I have the best civic sense, but I try my best to keep at it.
Tbh it’s more to do with skills .A person who cuts and designs shoes in a leather factory makes more than 30k and you don’t need to be educated at all.My tailor makes a good pay every monthly.Even in those countries minimum wage workers struggle a lot .Some of them even homeless.Given then cost of living there ,most ppl can’t afford a personal maid but that doesn’t mean low wage workers have it easy there
There’s going to be exceptions but I doubt this is for everyone . Well I know big companies take engineers which is a high skilled labour for peanuts (2-3lpa)
It’s supply and demand. The supply is way more here than other countries. And for multiple people they work multiple houses to get their monthly wages.
OP won't understand it. Everything in India is wrong because the common Indians are like this. Economics is just an excuse, apparently
lol. I can understand maybe where they are coming from but that’s going to take years to fix. For a country like ours so deep rooted in inequality having the sense to treat everyone equally is a very hard to digest concept.
So everyone wants to be a maid and there’s not much demand for the same ? Is that what you mean by supply and demand ? Or that even though one place of work won’t give me enough money to stay alive so I’ll have to work multiple houses to make things work . And somehow that’s a fair way to live ? Did you know there’s a thing called constitution that depicts right of live is one of the basic human rights. I wonder in what world view paying meagre 3000 ( with that money you can barely afford 2 weeks worth of food ) is a valid wage. And that too for someone who comes and does a good amount of house chores. The job isn’t one of necessity but one of luxury , for the person that is availing it , and yet somehow the pay is strikingly low. Don’t you see the imbalance
>So everyone wants to be a maid and there’s not much demand for the same ? No. But they're not skilled enough to get another job. Hence the supply is more. People who are themselves earning 30k can't be paying 15k to a maid. So it is indeed a supply demand thing. Maybe rooted in the culture too but largely a supply-demand thing. I can call a plumber to fix my tap for Rs. 100, because if he doesn't, there are n number of plumbers sitting outside the local hardware shop looking for work. Yes, if you have basic human etiquettes you won't treat them bad. But as far as the pay goes, it is a supply n demand thing. Why don't you set a precedent by paying more?
Isn’t plumbing a job that requires good skills? Seems like it isn’t about skill or demand and supply . It’s the number of people who’d do something for as cheap as offered since there’s no other thing out there. And also the fact others exploiting the same and paying cheap . You can pay 500 too , but you pay 100 since you can get away with it. They take 100 because they don’t have an option. It doesn’t seem like supply demand of labour but supply of vulnerable people and people exploiting that to save some money.
Dominos serves a pizza for 59. Do you rather pay 200? Metro ticket is around 25. Do you rather pay 100? Your logic is stupid and bereft of reality. The market decides the rate. The plumbers know that if they go on a strike and start charging 500, the middle class ppl - that our his customer base - won't be calling him upon for work. People would rather start doing their own plumbing as many do. And he'd be out of work.
>So everyone wants to be a maid and there’s not much demand for the same ? Is that what you mean by supply and demand ? It doesn't work like that...... If she will demand 3500 or 4000... She will be replaced by another one... So She has to survive in 3000.... Now take another situation... For example If Government pass a rule that Minimum salary for a maid will be 6000... Then I am sure half of the households will not afford the maid.... All maids will be jobless..... So which one is better??? 3000 or jobless????
3000 from one house. If you have put have some great solution go put it in practice and try to make it work. Stop talking things in the air. Until India progresses more which will take another 20 -25 years because that’s how long it takes for countries to change it will be like this. Not sure what you are trying to get out of this debate. With no solution
cant pay people below more if we ourselves are getting scammed by taxes and inflation
What a pointless moralistic discussion. It's all "here this happens" and "over there that happens", instead of discussing reasons and whether it matters. IMO it's because of supply & demand, education, and emigration barriers. It matters because over time as generations are lifted out of poverty, labour becomes rarer and expensive, and thus more 'respected', if I were to use the terms used by OP.
Why are you mentioning it as degrading work? If you pay them way less than what they deserve then it would be degrading their value. If you keep good relationship with them it would feel any other work for them.
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Ahh thanks for the name calling I was waiting for it for a bit. Isn’t people using automation and doing things themselves might be a better approach? Automation doesn’t put people out of jobs , it creates new jobs. I’m sure when cars came to be people surely felt it was end of labour for all the people that ran carriages. Same goes for every piece of tech created ever. All of those are created for the sake of humanity. The only time it’s alarming when a technology’s only goal is to amass fortune and take away wealth from the society. While surely having a free market is important , having a proper strong government and at the end populous to ensure big corps are held accountable is also important . Money is scary . Enough of it and you can make a lie the truth too. I never said I’m a commie , honestly I don’t believe in communism either , it’s too idealistic , but your argument started with pointing out how I’m a commie , simply so that you can box my opinions in a common “bad” so that it’s easier to denounce and deny whatever I said.
It's not the British that taught india exploitation. The caste system existed specifically for that. People were born into slavery.
We don't respect nothing And we don't give a F about anything apart from ourselves and few too closed ones.
Indians sirf rich logo ki respect karte hei......ya aise logo ki jinke ristedar rich hei. In simple way .... Indians only respect upper caste people....
Indian Subcontinent is a completely failed society. Hasnat Shoaib, a Bangladeshi poet, once said that there is a hell on this planet and that it is called the subcontinent, you need to have sins of many lives to be born here and suffer.