Who Cares and Who Leads: Building Resilient and Sustainable Communities in the South and Democratic Alliance Politics

The working population is decreasing and Care becomes the central issue. While Care workers are considered important subjects of policy making, in concrete micro contexts unions and organizations in the south are rarely aware of the growing importance of Paid Domestic Workers in the labour market. The awakening and consciousness of the need to provide care to a large population in a country like India can act as a catalyst in bringing the mobilizations of Paid Domestic Workers in the policy making contexts.

While changing socio-economic conditions must force the unions of paid Domestic Workers to redefine themselves as Essential Workers and Front line Workers, without whom the cities will come to a halt, policy makers are still targeting them as ‘beneficiaries’ of government welfare schemes.

This paper argues that acknowledging paid Domestic Workers as an important category and demand for identity as workers is not enough today and Anthropocene has made survival and everyday work practices more taxing for the care workers. The extreme weather seriously affects health conditions including life expectancy, privatisation leads to expensive urban mobility and crony capitalism coupled with aggressive privatisation making the future bleak for working class families.

Domestic workers represent the last frontier of the spectrum of informal workers in urban India today. Lack of potable water and sanitation facilities for the working-class neighbourhoods, scarce public health facilities and changing requirements to access citizenship rights are rarely taken as common rallying points for the broader alliances of labourers.

Through case studies of building alliances for dignity, access and control over resources and democratic representation to survive in the era of Anthropocene I argue that building sustainable and resilient communities should be the aim of mobilisations across cities to re-imagine new collectivities and democratic futures