Abstract

AbstractSurvey data on Indian labour points to a rapid expansion of the care-domestic economy, currently the main employment avenue for urban women. Hitherto, studies on domestic service portray the unequal class structures of master–servant relationships and the escalating phenomenon of live-out and part-time hired help. This article shifts the focus to under-researched, yet increasingly visible, placement agencies, which regulate care-domestic markets and provide diverse services, from specialized ‘patient care’ to the training of subaltern communities. The article discusses how these service providers denote prominent shifts in skill sets, intra-household care arrangements, forms of medical assistance, and new (and old) mechanisms of authority. The ethnography expands our knowledge of everyday mediations around hiring and training between agencies, employers, and care-domestic workers in New Delhi. The article puts forward innovative conceptualizations of service provider approaches through juxtaposing the informal practices of local (or Indian) agencies with formalized and ‘civilizing’ agendas developed by Euro-American intermediaries. The formal–informal dichotomized framework of service provider relationships adds to critical scholarship that contrived dualisms which need historical scaffolding and nuanced engagement. I argue that, while informal and formal approaches appear markedly different for the care-domestic economy, they also overlap. Significantly, both approaches are unjustly weighted against the workers who lack the potential to democratize labour relations. Local agencies reinforce exploitative care-domestic relationships, while Euro-American intermediaries, who espouse modern values, formalization, and civilizing experiments, promulgate punitive regimes and stigmatized futures for their Indian subjects.

Highlights

  • In its simplest form, a placement agency is a service provider that employers can approach to hire care-domestic workers and through which workers may seek employment opportunities

  • The ethnography expands our knowledge of everyday mediations around hiring and training between agencies, employers, and care-domestic workers in New Delhi

  • The article puts forward innovative conceptualizations of service provider approaches through juxtaposing the informal practices of local agencies with formalized and ‘civilizing’ agendas developed by Euro-American intermediaries

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Summary

Introduction

In its simplest form, a placement agency is a service provider that employers can approach to hire care-domestic workers and through which workers may seek employment opportunities. Gooptu discusses India’s middle-class consumer revolution that has resulted in a surge in demand for suitably trained labour.[38] This demand reflects changes in middleclass domestic life such as the adoption of cosmopolitan food habits introduced by many NRIs, and overall shifting consumerist desires.[39] The present study allows us to augment cosmopolitan employer cohorts and care-domestic workers catering to global cross-sections within India’s national boundaries. Placement agencies such as the Euro-American (or expatriate) exemplar is capitalizing on emerging markets and the colonial vestiges of trained labour. The conclusion restates how informal and formal approaches both reinforce inequalities for workers

The ethnographic context
The informal approach
Domestic service guidance manuals and regimes of punishment
Conclusion

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