Paid Work is not equal to Emancipation - By Pradip Kapse

 

The work culture in contemporary times is changing significantly. Women are also taking part in ‘paid works’. This paid work culture popularly considered as having a emancipatory potential of women’s predicaments. This short note is an attempt to look at it with a question “Is it so or a new form of oppression is emerging with adaptive potential of patriarchy with the time and space?”

While educated women may have expanded their share of managerial jobs, they still face a glass ceiling in the higher strata of management. Poorer women continue to be disproportionately represented in casual and poorly paid activities at the informal end of the labor market.

The view that ‘women’s empowerment, or emancipation as it used to be called, lies in their incorporation into the ‘paid workforce’ needed a critical interrogation. There is a question

troubling me often, ‘Does the access to conditional cash transfers through paid jobs brought about concrete changes in family/social relationships?’

Having a paid job for a woman is considered emancipatory and empowering. It is to highlight the complexity of this popular assumption and critically look at the emancipatory capabilities of a paid job for a woman in a heteronormal conjugal married (Indian) relationship.

The job of a policewoman interests me in this regard for two main reasons one, it is a paid, recognized public work hence, poses an empowering and emancipatory capability by way of economic self-sufficiency, and secondly claiming men dominated “strength” based national service where you protect the society and serves the nation. Hence important to look at a paid and typically stereotyped occupation and personal life insights to make sense of the asked question.

• -  Public vs. Private life

• -  Raising voice on children and get asked not to take her police station at home

• -  Fitting in male-dominated workplace

• -  Uneasiness of male partner for having a police-wife

• -  Dual life of police and wife (exchanging the uniform)

• -  Double burden of job work and housework

• -  Intimacy and no authority to say “no”

• -  Disturbing “everyday”

  Life of her can ever be emancipatory or just in the provided socioeconomic, and cultural system. The issue is complex. One, you need a paid job to recognize your work and for dignity with economic independence second, sexual and social division of labour third, work environment and harassment forth, the double burden on women, so and so forth. The everyday of her is exploitative, torturous, and humiliating.

  Engels in ‘The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State’ has argued that women’s oppression rests on the relationship between the sexual division of labor and the mode of production. Women do face a double burden of oppression, both at the household as well as at the site of production. Households themselves have re-emerged as sites of production for exchange values, where women remain engaged in both paid and unpaid work at the same time.

  This is to say that keeping women confined to clusters of typical occupations discussed earlier, and a simultaneous process of gendering certain occupations, blur the difference between paid and unpaid work.

  Women generally have fewer options than men in labour markets which remain highly segmented along gendered lines. They tend to be concentrated to a greater extent in casual, dispersed, isolated, part-time, irregular, and often home-based activities, a reflection of their disadvantaged access to skills and assets, the constraints imposed by their domestic responsibilities, and gender discrimination in the labour market.

Women's progress in the workforce over the past years has not meant greater access to quality jobs, nor has it brought an end to discrimination. Women's employment is primarily concentrated in a narrow range of sectors. Even within those sectors, women find themselves clustered at the lower echelons. Women make up a greater percentage of workers in "informal" and other precarious forms of employment, which tend to lie outside the purview of labour regulations and inspection, and are therefore more prone to exploitation.

Even when women enter traditionally "male" sectors of the labour market, they earn less than men. Universally, the work of women is not as highly valued as that of men. the idea that women are only good for certain types of occupations is simply false.

The freedom to work by choice, in conditions of dignity, safety and fairness is integral to human welfare. Guaranteeing that women have access to this right is an important end in itself. women want to be in paid employment, but a persistent set of socio-economic barriers keep them out of the workforce and dignity.