Dr. Panchali Ray points out that labour historians have often argued that informality rather than precarity has been a more useful category for understanding labour conditions of the Indian workforce. With the exception of a small group of workers in formal manufacturing units, most workers, historically, have grappled with insecure work contracts, long hours, below minimum wages, and exploitative working conditions. Women, however, have been facing segregated labour markets, low wages, and insecure work, even in the heyday of formalisation, given that masculinisation almost always accompanies modernisation. In her talk, Dr. Ray argues for the efficacy of precarity as a conceptual tool to understand a segment of women’s care work, by drawing out the stigma associated with corporeal-affective labour (care work), and how it further leads to precarity of life. She contends that there are historical continuities of gender and caste norms that continue to reproduce certain forms of care work as precarious and compromise the life opportunities and economic and social well-being of the caregiver.
Though paid care work, historically, has almost always been precarious, stigmatised, invisibilised, and often the lot of working-class, lower-caste women, what remains striking is that despite care work being increasingly brought into the market, it has not been touched by the transactional nature of capitalism and instead continues its associations with precarity, femininity, and stigma. This is more so when one notes how social reproduction has almost always been women’s labour, more so, and particularly if commodified, the labour of Dalit women. Dr. Ray argues that a caste-based division of labour plagues the Indian nursing profession and enables multiple hierarchies that at once draw from the devaluation of care labour as manual, servile, and feminine as well as reinforces the invisibility of care as labour, thus intensifying the precarity of the worker.
5 окт 2024
