House husband & dignity of labour

(The writer can be reached at nijwmzen29@hotmail.com)

People at social gatherings like weddings often greet me with the question, 'so, what do you do for a living?' This is one of the most common ways of greeting people in India. Perhaps, this is an unconscious way of sizing up other people or a way to know their social status, which is often inextricably tied up with a person's job and earnings. When I reply that I am a house husband, I can sense that the enquirer is a little taken aback and almost apologetic for having come up with that question. Initially, I was nervous and hesitant to give a straight answer because I was afraid of being judged for I don't have a job as defined conventionally or traditionally. I do not work for the government or for a private company. What is an educated man in his late 30s like me doing without a job, the enquirer might wonder.

Well, I had a well-paying job as a college teacher in New Delhi. About 5 years back, I quit my job for personal reasons to be with my wife and two little kids in Guwahati. Since then, I have been a house husband looking after my kids while my wife goes out for work. Being on the other side of the traditional, gendered division of labour has made me appreciate how challenging, yet important and rewarding the role of a wife and mother is.

As schools were shut and going out for recreational activities became risky during the Coronavirus pandemic, I often found it quite challenging to deal with my kids by myself, who're often throwing tantrums and bickering with each other as kids tend to do. I grew up in a small village in an extended family of grandparents. But, as jobs become more mobile, people are increasingly moving out of their place of origin to far-off places seeking better employment opportunities, thereby living in small nuclear families without the help of secondary care-givers like grandparents and other relatives. Living spaces are rapidly shrinking in urban areas, forcing people to live in cramped flats or even in slums. With little open spaces to run around, kids are leading sedentary lifestyles while being glued to the screens of TVs and smart phones.

What I want to explore here is the idea of dignity of labour. Feminists and supporters of women's rights have long argued that the work done by women in the domestic sphere is undervalued and looked down upon. Homemakers not just cook and clean, they also do caring and nurturing labour, borne out of sheer affection and responsibility towards their family. Of course, their work is tangible because it allows breadwinners to go out for work and makes society functional. In recent times, there have been debates on whether homemakers should be paid wages for their domestic work.

I do not wish to wade into this debate at the moment, but I want to highlight the callousness with which, we as a society treat workers who're not well-paid. The dignity of labour requires that we value all forms of work, whether manual or intellectual. As a child growing during the 1990s in a post-liberalization India, I was socialized by parents and society to desire only certain jobs. Engineering, Medical Sciences, and Civil Services were top of the priority list while the Arts and Humanities were thought to be leftovers for the academic laggards who could not clear entrance examinations.

I do not want to be overly critical of parents, but it is still sad when they pressurize children to pursue a subject regardless of their interest or aptitude. We are also part of the whole educational, labour and cultural ecosystem that incentivizes a few professions to the detriment of others. A highly consumerist culture places more value in what we can afford to consume, rather than on what we productively do as members of society. People are no longer seen as expressive beings capable of realizing their creative potential but as automatons trained to produce more and more consumer goods.

Teaching, for example, is a profession few middle-class parents want their children to pursue because it is not lucrative or prestigious enough in the eyes of many people. It is fair to expect teachers to be selfless and public-spirited, but their social contribution is often taken for granted and, when they unionize and protest, they are given all sorts of labels and criticized as entitled, spoiled and overpaid. I have experienced firsthand how challenging teaching can be. Teaching is more than just delivering lectures. It is a deeply intellectual and academic exercise that requires time-consuming research, training, and meticulous and rigorous preparation to be able to impart quality education to students.

Society has often stigmatized people engaged in manual labour such as construction workers, sanitation workers, factory workers, delivery boys, drivers and maids. Many of them are underpaid, exploited, discriminated against and sometimes subjected to violence. We often read news stories of manual labourers choking to death while clearing excreta from septic tanks in posh colonies, or of housemaids who're tortured and violated by their employers. The work they do to make our lives comfortable is made invisible by the boundaries of privilege and social class. Yet, without their essential services, cities would come to a grinding halt, and whenever they go on strike to demand better wages and working conditions, they're ignored or criticized as disruptive.

The plight of these workers was starkly brought to light in the initial stages of lockdown during the pandemic. Trapped in their places of work without adequate essential provisions, they survived due to the generosity of good Samaritans who did their best to provide them food and shelter. Thousands of them travelled hundreds of kilometres on foot in extreme heat, attempting to reach their villages with the hope that they would find some semblance of comfort and security in the familiarity of home. Many of them sadly perished along the way, unable to overcome the exhaustion and deprivation that they had to face in their perilous homeward journey.

Let me end this article by recommending a highly readable and enjoyable book called, "Bullshit Jobs- A theory", written by David Graeber, an American anthropologist and activist who sadly passed away suddenly last year. The book is an insightful and sometimes humorous exposition on issues of labour, work culture, lack of leisure time, consumerism, and the dignity of labour. The central premise of the book is that there are many people around the world who work what he calls 'bullshit jobs'. He defines such a job as "a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence". He explores why and how such jobs came to exist and what their effects on society are.