Our experience of working with the NCC-CL and NCC-USW in developing a comprehensive central legislation for ensuring social security and labour welfare for 37 crore unorganised sector workers has given us the confidence to propose a separate legislation for domestic workers which will simultaneously ensure three needs:
- Implementation of the Ban on child workers in domestic work, rescue of child workers and prevention of re-employment of children.
- Regulation of placement agencies which are using tribal girls as bonded labour, misappropriating more than one hundred crore rupees per year from the earnings of domestic workers and promoting trafficking of tribal girls besides their sexual exploitation during transit.
- Ensuring social security and personal safety of domestic workers through legislation. This can be merged ultimately with the social security legislation for the unorganised sector workers.
In August 2006 Butterflies and HRLN organised a consultation on child labour “From Banning to Moving Ahead”. Officials of the state Labour Department, Social Welfare, Child Welfare Committees, various NGOs, UN/ INGOs participated in this consultation. We have studied the printed Report and the “Plan of Action” for working children prepared as an outcome of this consultation. We are referring to this Report because we, as an organisation of tribal domestic workers themselves, would like to put our experience before this group. Therefore we have invited the participants of this workshop to the October 10 meetings and will also send our presentation to all those are unable to attend.
We look forward to developing a scheme for domestic workers, with the active participation of domestic workers, employers, and government.
The experience of working with construction workers and other unorganised sector workers has made it clear to us that child labour cannot be eradicated in isolation. Regulation of the entire industry or occupation is essential to prevent child labour in any segment of employment. The difficulty lies in accepting ‘Regulation of Employment’ as a viable solution in the present free market era of ‘Freedom to Exploit’.
Once the basic framework of the proposal is accepted, it can be re-written into the form of a draft for state legislation for Delhi. After successful implementation in Delhi, this proposal for domestic workers can be extended to other segments of unorganised sector workers and to other states. Ultimately it can be dovetailed with comprehensive central legislation for unorganised sector workers |
