Domestic-helpers’ co-ops: A Speculative Probe into Gated Societies

Team Phoenix [ Sweta Bisht, Jahnvi Vegad]

“What are the outcomes when a co-op of domestic-helpers emerges in a gated-society?”

We have tried to answer this by producing a piece of “speculative evidence” from the anecdotes of domestic helpers and what they imagined as alternatives to the existing. We believe this is one possible way we could extrapolate from such future-facing evidence back into the present, to help transform decision making today that Anab Jain talks about.

Brief

Research Area

Starting with secondary research into gated-societies, we came across quite a few interesting statements that made us curious about domestic-helpers’ situation. To state one of the many trigger points, one paper said

“…homes are often not considered as workplaces, hence domestic-helpers are not considered as professionals. Most of the work domestic-helpers practice is often taken as humanitarian work. ”

To know more about it, we dug deeper into the current gated-community management systems that involves discussions/features which are related to domestic-help. For our detailed proposal, checkout our proposal article here.

We concluded from the data and the readings that domestic-helpers somehow don’t have an upper-hand in their own jobs. They were merely seen as spectators in these systems. Looking at this scenario on paper, we felt that there is a need for a more transparent, fair work-place for domestic helpers. This led us to thinking into “what if”s of current scenario. For starters, we straight away started looking into

“what if domestic helpers had a say in their system in gated-societies in India?”

This might result in an emergent situation forming a co-operative of domestic workers like that of this New York based co-op Up&Go. So rather than finding a solution, we decided to stay with this problem and look at this emergent situation instead in a gated society’s framework.

For detailed progress work, checkout our previous article here.

Iteration Process

From a “co-op” to a speculative “group”

After defining our research area, we started looking at various co-ops and their working. We looked at NYC based Up&Go, which inspired us to look at co-ops in the first place. We also looked at some co-ops based in India like SWaCH and SEWA, to understand the local context. We also studied proper structures of a co-op, its principles and working on different levels.

“As it turned out, all these local Indian co-ops have risen from a peculiar primary issue that all the people involved in co-ops faced unanimously.“

Thus, as a team we realised that if we want to speculate over a co-op of domestic-helpers in this context, we ought to find out their peculiar issue over which it might look probable to speculate a working co-op. The structure, principles and their primary goal — should all come from the domestic-helper community. As the only goal of our speculation is to highlight the change this kind of co-ops can bring to the gated-society systems, it is not necessary for us to build a structured co-op of domestic helpers on paper.

Participatory Research

Research Methodology

As we started blowing off dust from our blurred research area, we now dove into various participatory methods to draw information from domestic-helpers regarding the change that a speculative co-op could bring to the system. Our goal was to get their anecdotes and put it on paper as it is, but at the same time infer speculative changes that these sayings might bring.

We started with building a rapport with a few domestic helpers. We talked informally to the helpers on daily basis(with their consent) about their schedule, their work and the basic concerns they and their communities have in present scenario. One interesting insight came up from these conversations was,

“Every domestic-helper out of all the other concerns, is majorly concerned about his/her pay and is always trying to optimise his/her time to get as much pay as s/he can earn.”

This gave us a rough direction to focus our future activities on. We also came across a series of day-to-day life incidents they face as domestic helpers with their employers and with each-other. From these anecdotes, we sketched out various scenarios and tried to analyse them. Using these scenarios, we planned to conduct a participatory activity with them.

Participatory Activity

Sketched Scenarios

The objective of this session was to use evocative images to open up a space of discussions and possibilities.The sense of united entity might capacitate them to bring about a change in presented scenarios and speculate an alternative journey. The activity was conducted with two domestic-helpers. [We could not get desired number of participants for our activities because many of them withdrew at last minute!]

We staged our participatory session in 4 sections:

Casual Talking: A series of icebreaking talks were used to remove any feelings of shyness or discomfort. We tried to understand their perspectives of their workplace.

Scenarios: We showed them placards with scenarios and asked them to interpret the scenarios. We asked them questions like,

• What do they feel about the scene?
• Does it happen around them?
• If yes what do they do in such situations?
• Anything else associated with the scenario that they’d like to share?

Alternative Scenarios: After discussing every scenario, we asked them to think as a group(co-op) and answer unanimously for a change or an alternative scenario to the presented scene.

Co-op: We also tried to push them to define some of the aspects that the co-op (group) might work on. It had sections as Needs, When(would the co-op be in used), Resources (to form a co-op) and Outcomes(this co-op might bring to the system).

Participatory Activity

Insights

Alternative Views | Observations

Following are the inferred insights from the activity and conversations with domestic-helpers:

• There are ample of opportunities for domestic-helpers in gated-societies.
• There exists regional differences in the pay asked by domestic-helpers from different communities.
• The terms of job of domestic-helpers are fixed verbally on humanitarian trust.
• Schedule of a domestic helper is usually too tight.
• Domestic helpers cannot directly talk to residents for job opportunities. Security guard is the only medium.
• Domestic-helpers feel that security in gated-societies is important. Only people with “wrong” intentions would question the security-rules.
• The security is usually very strict about domestic helpers as compared to other visitors, in terms of entry/exit into gated-communities.
• Domestic-helpers happily do the extra-work, if they find employers’ behaviour nice to them.
• If there are conflicts between a domestic-helper and his/her employer, regardless of the reason the last resort for him/her is to leave the job.
• Domestic helpers maintain their own groups(through phones), where they discuss about work and employers, suggestions & reviews.
• If a domestic-helper needs to go to hometown, his friends support in terms of money or work.

Following are the alternative views of domestic-helpers on changing current scenarios:

• Visiting cards, instead of giving contact to guards
• Fixed pay for fixed amount of work
• Written terms and conditions of contract
• Shared tasks that helps them grow together
• Internal ratings and reviews of employers

Some of the observations during the activity we noticed are:

• They were initially not very clear with the idea of group. A sense of denial was seen towards group-thinking.
• Their answers showed a lot of collective benefits which they could speculate.
• Depending on person to person, domestic-helpers treat their work terms very differently. Some of them might be lenient, some of them might be adamant etc.
• They were aware that their profession do not have a proper employee — employer relations but they seem to also enjoy this (illusion of) independence.
• They were not very aware of labor rights or their data privacy. If they were, they did not give it enough importance to bring them up during conversations.

Blueprint of Domestic-helpers in Gated-societies

Initial Blueprint of current system

From the understandings of their anecdotes and viewpoints, we built individual journey map of all the scenarios that they stated in the session. We plotted the Physical Evidence, User Actions, Front-stage and Back-stage scenes and Supporters together on a chart. Having done that, we felt the chart being too “product-oriented” did not justify for the real-world complex scenarios. We then removed some of these sections and introduced some new ones. For example, System is a section for showing the underlying belief systems that make the scenario occur. In fact, System can be seen as a Backstage. Similarly, Benefactors and Stories were added to make the blueprint more relevant to this context.

Speculative Blueprint

Altered Blueprint from speculative situation

Using domestic-helpers’ alternative views for change, we altered the initial blueprint that speculated an emergent co-op situation. As you will find, most of the benefactors section now has both residents and domestic helper in it showing a shift in benefits to all.

Initial blueprint and change combined in one blueprint

Conclusion

Shortcomings | Outcomes

Although we got very interesting insights from this project, there were a few shortcomings:

• While conducting the participatory activities, we did not have any kind of structure of co-op in mind for speculation.
• We could not get desired number of participants for our activities because many of them withdrew at last minute. Hence, the results doesn’t reflect totality.
• Both the participants were males. Hence, the findings might be subjected to gender-bias.
• Both the participants were from same regional-community, hence the findings are subjected to regional-bias.
• More time could’ve been given to the participatory activities to gain detailed insights.

The findings of this project are speculative — yet concrete forms of evidence like anecdotes might become powerful catalysts for directly informing policies, product innovation, and new business models.

A future plan for this project would be to go into the participatory methodologies along with awareness agenda. If we can make the domestic-helpers aware about their rights, and then ask them to speculate a future, it might give us some very promising insights. We’re also trying to make this project a little more critical. This work done was more of a probing than critique. We feel that a concrete change is better coming from a critique than a speculative probe.