Managing “fear of servants”

building trust and other safety measures

Whether the employers exaggerate the potential safety risks or not, opening one’s home to strangers makes one vulnerable. Thus most

employers in Jaipur perceived honesty and trustworthiness as the most important virtue when looking for a new worker. (See also Dickey 2000b, 474). One way the employers try to manage risks is to build trust with the workers so that they would not resent the employers. Where as managing anxiety is not the only reason why many employers aim at good relations with workers, some employers explicitly mentioned treating workers well in order to avoid “misbe-haviour”. As in any human relation, building trust is a two-way proc-ess and takes time, and many felt that it had become more difficult because of the more contractual, short-term nature of the relations.

As one employer said:

It is natural that you face some difficulties while adjusting with a new serv-ant. There is always a bond of understanding with an old servserv-ant. He un-derstands you very well and you understand him very well, about his likes and dislikes, whether he is honest, he is not a thief. But with a new one you always have to start fresh.

Individual incidents notwithstanding, most employers said they had never experienced theft or any other problem during their years as employers. Some emphasised their “good luck” but others specified that since they had been “good employers”, the workers had not felt a need to commit any crime. One of them, Susheela, perceived em-ployer and worker behaviour as mutually reinforcing: “We try to keep them happy and so they do”. She felt her good employer behaviour would be rewarded and told me about one incident when a wild dog had bitten a maid in front of their house. Immediately, her daughter-in-law took her to their home, washed her wound and took her to a hospital in her car. The daughter-in-law also took the worker home and informed her husband. The next day she got her immunised and Susheela’s family paid the medical bills. This example of maternal-ist benevolence not only indicates Susheela’s kindness (and kind she was) but may also be seen as an example of how employers build trust through kind behaviour (Dickey 2000b, 478). The maternalist

gifts discussed earlier could also be part of the strategy to prevent un-wanted worker behaviour. Thus, one of the embedded meanings of the regular notions of mutual behaviour was that if one treats worker well, they may be less inclined to misbehave.¹⁹⁵

In Jaipur, safety concerns are decisive as to whether one employs a live-in or a part-time worker, and partly determine whether a family hires adult or child workers and male or female workers (see Chapter 7). One way for middle class working women to manage their anxiety is to not to employ live-in workers. Although safety is not the only reason to prefer part-time workers, it is certainly a significant con-cern. In my data, all seven houses to employ live-in workers had one or several adult family members at home throughout the day.

Conversely, none of the dual-earning couples employed a live-in worker. In a way, it would be logical for the busy working women to prefer live-in workers, to whom they could outsource all house-work, but the situation was the opposite. Each of those who worked outside home said that they did not prefer a live-in worker because of safety concerns, as one said: “I prefer a part-time worker because of safety reasons. For full time (worker) there should be someone at home.”

As an occasional employer of cleaners in my native Finland, I have never been at home while they work. In fact, those professionals often explicitly tell the employers not to be at home so that they can work smoothly. In Jaipur, by contrast, most employers explicitly said they would never leave a worker alone in their home, even if this some-times required considerable effort in matching schedules. Only one said that if the worker comes late and they really need to go out, they leave the key at their neighbour’s house for the maid to pick up.

Shanti, a wage-earning woman who did not want workers to be in

195 In Scott’s (1985, 11) study among Hindu peasants in Malaysia, charity as a form of social control was also not explicitly discussed, except when a land-owner directly mentioned that they had to keep giving alms to the poor labourers even if they stole, since not providing charity would only lead to further stealing, creating a vicious circle.

her house without her present, found it very difficult to match their schedules with hers. In fact, she explained that she sometimes ended up doing some of their work. Moreover, she paid more in total for the four workers than she would have had to pay for one live-in worker.

Yet she told me that she would never consider employing a live-in worker to avoid all the schedule-mapping:

S: No, no, no. Because this is a thing, because for 2,000 rupees I can easily have a live-in servant, but I don’t trust. Because live-in servants are the ones who are the, who have committed most of the crimes, because they know every detail, where one sleeps and what is the schedule and what is going on. Actually from a 24-hour servant nothing can be hidden. Ha (yes), so they know all your secrets, they know your places, secret places also, and they also know for how many days master is out and you have that time.

And like my house is lonely from 9 till 3 o-clock till my son comes. From nine to three they have full time for whatever they want to do. And, like my son is also there so I can’t trust to leave the house.

P: You never had a live-in worker?

S: No. I have never and I will never have.

Other control practices include the holding of a probationary period to check a new worker for a couple of weeks or months to test their honesty, for example, by exposing them to temptations by leaving some money in the open.¹⁹⁶ While some employers said they also checked the quality of work, few had turned workers away because they were not being satisfied with the work quality.

Nisha, who employed three part-time workers, explained her preferences and practices in terms of new workers: “They should have a family and their family should be known to us, so any time they cheat we can go and catch them. They should be clean and honest. We check them for one to two months, and then we trust them.”

Another safety measure is to keep all valuables in a locked place.

The employers of both part-time and live-in workers applied such

196 See Dickey (2000b, 476) for a similar practice in Madurai.

safety procedures, but there were additional control measures for live-in workers. One measure that is sometimes applied in Jaipur is the restriction of movement and limiting leisure time because of the potential risks when workers visit their relatives or peers. Two em-ployers explicitly said that if workers meet with other workers, they might start to plan something against the employers. A more extreme way to curb workers’ freedom is locking them inside when employ-ers go out.¹⁹⁷ While none of the employers said they locked work-ers in, several mentioned that this was a prevalent practice in “other families” in Jaipur. Two girls, who previously worked as live-ins, had been locked in the employers’ house for two years while they worked there.

What do these safety measures and the open mistrust imply to workers? In studies of worker behaviour, it has been argued that lack of trust in workers’ behaviour may crowd out trustworthy behaviour, reducing people’s willingness to make an effort to be virtuous (Sayer 2007a, 571). Ehrenreich (2001, 211) has pointed to the humiliating nature of employer practices such as searching employees’ purses to check against thievery or random drug testing in the context of low wage jobs in the US. Such practices signal not only a lack of trust in workers’ competence but also a lack of respect for them as people. In Jaipur, my worker respondents also found control measures humili-ating, even if they were used to them as routine practice.¹⁹⁸

child workers as a safety strategy

In Jaipur, choosing children or young, unmarried workers is one safety strategy especially for those who employ live-in workers. This strategy is important for managing general safety concerns as well as

197 In the Philippines, locking maids inside the bedroom or the house was one of several control mechanisms related to movement and space (Arnado 2003, 164).

198 In Romero’s study (2002, 87) of Mexican workers in the US, the employers instituted a collection of supervisory techniques and tested the reliability of the workers in different ways.

anxieties related to sexuality. Let us in this section peruse more close-ly how Sheha, who employed one live-in worker and one part-time worker, discusses the question of trust in domestic labour relations.

When I interviewed her in 2006, she employed a live-in boy of about ten years, and she said she preferred a child worker, and a boy for that matter. She showed open disgust towards part-time maids as evident from her gendered fears:

That slum area, the bais (the part-time female maids) have a big gang there, they discuss everything there. But he (the live-in boy) doesn’t go that way.

Otherwise he’s free but he doesn’t go. He knows what’s right and wrong. He knows that “my aunty” (the employer) gives him everything so why should he go to the wrong side.

Sheha clearly perceives the isolation of her worker as a strategy to control risks, since the boy stayed practically always in the house. In fact, he hardly had any leisure time during which he might “get ideas”

from other servants.

When I met Sheha again a year later, the unexpected theft in her sister Malti’s house had influenced her thinking. The boy, who stole money from her sister, had known Sheha’s worker and now she em-phasised that “my boy” had gotten into bad company. Since Sheha had assumed that employing a child would protect her (and her sister) from crime, her trust was clearly shaken by a theft committed by a boy of equal age. Whereas she had told me a year earlier that she could fully trust her live-in worker, she confessed to me the following year:

Mine, both are nice, I find no problem with them, you know. Even today, you know, I can rely on them. And they are not doing anything wrong here.

They are such nice people, you know, like I can trust them. But (pauses, lowers her voice), I don’t. I am still little careful with these people, as they did the (robbery).

After the theft, Sheha had substituted the small boy, who had “fallen into bad company” with his older brother, who had earlier worked for

Sheha for several years. Somewhat inconsistently, Sheha explained that the initial plan had always been for the older brother to return to her house after a couple of years. She also told that she had recently learnt about the new legislation which bans the use of child domes-tic workers, indicating that the ban was one reason for sending the younger brother back to his village. The elder brother, now seventeen to eighteen years old, had originally started to work for Sheha when he was around ten. Thus, Sheha had known him for much longer than his smaller brother, which now seemed to make him more reli-able. During our conversation, she kept repeating how there is a risk that “these boys” fall into the wrong company:

If they come directly from their village, you know, they are very fresh and they just do their work, very innocent people there. But once they come and fall in the company like P (the worker in the sister’s house) and all, this... so.

The smaller brother, ‘Chotu’, whom she had sent back to his village, was also waiting to come back to Jaipur for work. But Sheha seemed doubtful about what to do given the boy’s dubious contact with the

“thief” boy. She mentioned that she did not want the boy to come back unless she herself could find a proper family for him because

“otherwise he gets spoiled”.

I have so far presented several employers’ safety measures. One additional measure was to register the names and photographs of do-mestic workers at the police station. According to a local police order all households were supposed to do this. The idea of this is precisely to help the police trace a worker in case of a crime. Yet only one out of seventeen employers in my data had registered her workers. The general understanding among the employers was that “nobody does it” or “most people never do it”, although some mentioned that in Delhi everyone registers their workers. Some suspected that only very rich employers with live-in workers register their workers in Jaipur, as one said:

Rich and high-class people do it because they always need a 24-hour work-er. Then they have large sums of money and jewellery in their home so they need police verification. But in middle class families servants also know that they (the employers) don’t have much. A servant knows everything.

The contradiction between the discussion on servant crime and the fact that the employers had not registered their workers is intrigu-ing. It begs the question of why the employers, who carry out several other measures to ease their anxiety, do not do what would seem the most obvious thing to do.

This may reflect a general mistrust against the police. The employ-ers may also feel that it would be insulting for the workemploy-ers if they demanded that they do this. Would it be more difficult to uphold maternalist relations based on subordinance and benevolence if they were officialised in this sense? Not registering workers may also re-flect the discrepancy between the rhetoric of fear and everyday rela-tions in which few employers had been duped by their workers.

5.4 conclusions

As we have seen, there is a tendency not to frame the relationship as one between an employer and employee. By portraying workers as greedy and by idealising the workers of the past, employers in Jaipur downplay the workers’ legitimate demands for better working condi-tions. The tendency to draw a line between the work of today and that of the past is broader one: sociological labour studies generally tend to draw a line between old and the new work, thereby under-mining the diversity of both current and past work ( Julkunen 2008, 13). Yet, my data show that the idealisation of the past and criticism towards today’s workers is strikingly similar with both contemporary employers in South India (Dickey 2000a, 37) and late 19^th century employers (Banerjee 1996).This forces us to ask how much of what

we see in Jaipur is about transition and how much is about slight variations in old existing patterns.¹⁹⁹ What seems evident, in any case, is that today there is much more diversity in labour relations, explicit in diverse work arrangements and changing discursive practices. So-cial mobility in India has also increased, even if domestic workers are realistically not among those to rise in class status. The need to guard one’s class position is reflected in the middle class and upper middle class employers’ sense of the fragility of and worry over their position.

What is common to most employers is the tendency to try to maintain at least some elements of the maternalist relation towards workers. Acts of maternalist benevolence such as small gifts or finan-cial support to workers’ children continue to shape the relationships.

The most common gift is the provision of two saris per year but the employers and workers frame the act differently. Employers continue to portray the clothes as a gift which qualifies them as human em-ployers, whereas the maids try to frame saris as a standard practice, as an add-on to their low salaries, not as an act which they should be grateful for.

The ubiquitous rhetoric of ‘like a family member’, familiar from other countries, existed in Jaipur too, but discursive changes were taking place along with the increase in part-time work. Today, kin-ship terms were used by part-time employers and workers mainly as a polite form of speech, not so much to reinforce the workers’ subor-dinate position. However, those who employed live-in workers talked about the workers in demeaning terms. In any case, the rhetoric of

‘treating servants like family members’ was increasingly replaced by a rhetoric of ‘treating servants like human beings’.

199 There has been a certain tension between traditional history, which empha-sises the continous development of social phenomena over time, and argument by analogy, which cuts across the idea of continuous development. Argument by analogy leapfrogs through time in order to confirm or challenge the conventions of the present. (Tosh 2006, 2).

Upward class mobility through paid domestic work was not likely for the domesic workers I met. Thus my findings in Jaipur support the notion that upward mobility of the working class poor generally requires great effort (Dickey 2002), and that upward mobility in the labour markets is particularly difficult for the lower classes (Banerjee

& Raju 2009, 120, 122). The situation may be different in larger cit-ies.

The claims of the employers I met in Jaipur about the untrust-worthiness of today’s domestic workers seems to form part of a pan-Indian discussion, as my employer respondents’ accounts were remarkably similar to those documented by Dickey (2000a) in Ma-durai and Ray and Qayum (2009) in Kolkata. These discussions and the mistrust itself can be perceived as manifestations of broader class anxieties and the middle class tendency to distance itself from the lower classes. The employers’ fears are accentuated not only by the perception of increased crime, fueled effectively by the media, but also by the transition towards short-term and more anonymous la-bour relations.

In addition, having several part-time workers visit one’s house eve-ry day increases employers’ sense of vulnerability. Yet safety concerns are among the main reasons why those who do wage work do not hire live-in workers, which would free them from the constantly changing stream of workers. Singlemindedly, the employers who worked out-side the home did not want any worker to stay in their house while

In addition, having several part-time workers visit one’s house eve-ry day increases employers’ sense of vulnerability. Yet safety concerns are among the main reasons why those who do wage work do not hire live-in workers, which would free them from the constantly changing stream of workers. Singlemindedly, the employers who worked out-side the home did not want any worker to stay in their house while