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The massive Asha workers’ struggle is marking its beginning as a political-cultural struggle that, by putting forward a wage increase, exposes the relentless exploitation of grassroots women that has been hidden by the male development strategy of male-dominated, modern Kerala, and in this case, ruled by the CPM
By Mubashir VP
Women who weaved thatch for fences and walls. Those who took the husk of the rice, husk that had been left in the pond and beat them to make a mat. After all the work at night was done, those who sat inside or outside the room, twisted ropes by the light of a kerosene lamp. Those who stood in the fields to plant, reap, carry sheaves, thresh, boil, and pound. Those who went to work in the Mikadu (local masonry); women in the brick fields and cashew nut factories. Those who went to the market every day, bought fish and household items, brought them back in baskets, and served them.
Those who went from house to house carrying a basket of lime on their heads for Onam and Vishu. Those who came to every kitchen door with a basket of fish. Those who did summer farming in the dry fields and came home, and stood at the crossroads with pumpkins, gourds, spinach, and cucumbers.
Those who dived into the backwaters and fished for clams; those who caught fish by tapping the ottal in shallow water; those who rowed boats across the river.
The fortune tellers who came with their grandmothers. The ashattis in the local Aksharakkalari. The black chettichikal with bottle rings and mortars.
Those who pinched tea with a hook. The curry cooks in the toddy shop. Those who baked white pudding in a pot and gave it to their children to sell from house to house. Those who spun and wove yarn at home; weavers of flowers, potters.
Those who work in uniform at petrol pumps. Those who go to cloth shops and gold shops in the morning wearing the same saree and blouse. Those who are busy at the counter and in the wards of hospitals with badges hanging around their necks.
Nannies on school buses. Lunch cooks, Kudumbashree groups who make pickles, chutneys, daily meals wrapped in banana leaves for thousands of hungry people, and soap, and Kondattam, and pack them in stalls. Asha workers — Anganwadi workers, teachers in unaided schools, those who sit in ice water and peel prawns with their pale fingers.
Accountants/collection agents in gold loans/finance, lottery sellers, workers at Akshaya centers, those who wrap their sarees around their heads and hold banners in front of the demonstration showing collective strength on the public square. Those who sit on auditorium chairs at official events.
Without the daily hard work, relentless dedication, and stoic resilience, of the grassroots women who work day and night in their homes, fields, ponds, and backwaters, streets, offices, eating joints, cooperatives, factories, etc, Kerala in the past and the present would not have existed. Without them, the wattles would not have been woven or the leaky roofs would not have been repaired. Even today, without their daughters and granddaughters, clothing stores would not have opened their new showrooms with celebrities.
In Kerala, hospitals and schools of all caste/religion/political/capitalist groups exist and grow by exploiting women’s, their infinite skills, their honest labour, and their time. At the government level, in parallel, Anganwadi workers and ASHA workers work the longest hours for the lowest wages.
When universal literacy and education took place in Kerala, male labour receded in most sectors, and new sectors emerged. In those sectors, female labour was used for low wages. Only in this way did textiles, unaided schools, and private hospitals flourish and rise. In all these, 90 percent of the work is done by educated, grassroots women.
In fact, it can be said that the increasing education of women, stark unemployment in the society, and the high cost of living are being used efficiently by investors in the service sector in Kerala. It is on the basis of this that Anganwadi-Asha worker jobs were created to utilize the educational potential of women in the grassroots communities. In other words, this is a model of not only the private sector, but also the government sector, efficiently using the rising educational level of grassroots women, insecurity in the society, and unemployment in third world societies like Kerala.
These employees are ‘honorarium’ workers whose service-wage conditions have been made irrelevant. Not only in the health and social welfare departments, but also in postmodern World Bank education projects like SSA, there are temporary honorarium workers like this today.
The private sector is also imitating the exploitation of female labour by the government sectors. Receiving honorarium means ‘respecting’ female labour as a ‘service’. As a continuation of the service work that women do at home, their services are utilized in the private and public sectors.
At home and in the country, female labour is considered a reproductive service. Therefore, they are brought into fields such as education, health, clothing, design, and childcare, rather than in the productive sectors.
Even though women, who were previously engaged in fishing, rope-making, and agricultural work, were not given social respect as a profession — and was their labour not secretly stolen?
That is why they have been self-respecting and self-reliant. The increasing number of women entering the workforce is considered by economic and social science experts, in India and internationally, as an important measure of social progress.
The society in which women were confined to the home rather than ‘coming from the kitchen to the stage’ is considered very old-fashioned. However, it can be seen that the presence of women in the workforce has been universal in the grassroots societies of Kerala in the past. They are still present in the stage, behind the scenes, and at the grassroots level. However, the productivity of such traditional, self-reliant, unorganized, and diverse female jobs has not been seen or accepted by modern standards of work.
The change that has come now is that women are working in service jobs that can be said to be domestically related and are apparently ‘coloured’ for the lowest wages. Although when it comes to the lowest-paid private/public workplaces, it is considered as female work that has come from the kitchen to the public arena, this economics of development is mostly silent about the low wages that women get.
That is, the presence of women in the workplace is important in the development criterion; not whether they have the service and wage conditions they deserve. Because, as in the home, the base female labour outside is also included in the same list of unpaid reproductive power by ‘modern and male Kerala’.
The service sector development that has advanced in Kerala since the late 1980s shows the new utilization of the reproductive labor capacity of the base female class.
Whether it is an Asha worker, an Anganwadi worker or a sales girl at Kalyan Silks, women have emerged from the inner circle of the home as a female presence in the workplace. But the question is whether new private/public employment sectors are being given to the lower caste women who have to work ten or twelve hours a day, beyond the subsistence income that women previously earned by weaving thatch, beating cotton and threshing rice?
By giving them the new status of ‘worker’, who has come out of the bondage of the house, most of the newly emerged jobs in the outside world are cleverly exploiting the lower caste women of Kerala. Back then, those who threshed rice, went to the fields and caught fish in the mud, had dirty clothes. Today, many have uniforms, combed hair, polished faces and crocheted clothes. Their income is divided between clothes, make-up, household expenses and loans.
But how much more did the income of a low-income woman in Kerala compare to the wages received by those who raised chickens and sold eggs as self-employed workers, or who made rope by spinning hemp?
Most of the jobs available to women at the grassroots level today lack job security, rights, or benefits. After the household chores that are divided between morning and night, Kerala showcases the brilliance of each of its shining sectors outside the women’s time, which is spent at least from nine in the morning to six or seven in the workplace.
If you look closely, by bringing women out of the kitchen and into the arena as ‘maids’, the extension of traditional domestic and reproductive work has been expanded to outside workplaces. Thus, the world itself has become a family for the grassroots Malayali woman. The same service attitude that is required of working at home is demanded by the male figures of the garment shop, the rich owners, and the government, the Asha worker capitalist, from the toiling grassroots women.
The Kerala government, which has brought grassroots women into modern service jobs, convinces us that it is an extended, ironic and hypocritical form of traditional domestic system where nuclear power is entrenched. It can be said that the intervention in grassroots women ‘from the kitchen to the stage’ is a modern strategy to extract women’s reproductive unpaid work outside the family into the exploitative private/public sectors.
The struggle of the Asha workers is exposing the reality that the governments in India/Kerala, which proclaim women’s freedom and gender equality, are based on male domination. The government is not ready to make any compromise with this female working community because they are the epitome of grassroots female power and stand in direct opposition to the government-establishment, and its dominant male ideology.
To view the Asha workers’ struggle sympathetically means to at least somewhat accept the grassroots female reproductive values, which have become universal since at least the 1990s, which are the axis of pride and economic growth in the government/private service sectors. The hypocrisy that gender equality and women’s freedom are taught to grassroots women only to get their housework done in a hurry, and get them to work for the government/private service sector, has been exposed here.
The government’s behavior towards the massive Asha workers’ strike is proof that, beyond the tricks of pretending that we are at the pinnacle of women’s protection, by showing that women’s education has skyrocketed in our society, and that their presence in the workplace is astonishing, our governments do not have any empathy or compassion for the hardworking and honest grassroots women, for the equal economic and social justice they deserve in society, and for their immense contribution in the making of the modern society.
This means that the CPM-led Kerala government is not ready to soften the growth of the public/private service sectors in Kerala, which is built on the reproductive labour of grassroots women, by showing even a little compassion for women. Thus, the state government has become an excellent and entrenched male-dominated model of how to use women’s labour for Kerala’s growth without turning a blind eye. And that too, a government that is led by the Left, and is apparently very keen on organizing seminars and symposiums on gender justice at every panchayat level.
The (Left) male government in Kerala is not united in accepting this struggle because it recognizes that the Asha workers’ struggle is being carried out by the masses who refuse to be reduced to a mere satyagraha for a wage increase. If this male government is ready to accept the reality that the advanced status of postmodern Kerala society is outside the extreme labour of the grassroots women, it will also be a way of respecting the gender equality and rights struggles that will be led by the grassroots women in Kerala in the future.
If the Asha workers’ struggle is not considered sympathetically, this neglect will inevitably become a strong impetus for future female-led non-violent struggles.
In any case, the Asha workers’ struggle is apparently marking its beginning as a political-cultural struggle that, by putting forward a wage increase, exposes the exploitation of grassroots women that has been hidden by the exploitative male development strategy of male-dominated modern Kerala, and in this case, ruled by the CPM.
The writer is a scholar and researcher based in Delhi. His home state is Kerala. This report is based on his recent visit to Kerala.