Article
Domestic Workplace: Critical
Crossroads of Unorganized Labour
and Management
Debasis Poddar
1
Abstract
In the world of work at large, domestic workplace constitutes an altogether different space for
hitherto labour jurisprudence and more so in the given age of liberalization-privatization-globalization
worldwide. The way workforce used to get together at workplace and thereby unionized to form
trade union in factory, mine, plantation and other establishments cannot take place anyway in case of
domestic workplace. No wonder that the same attracts attention of relevant stakeholders on several
counts, for example, labour on the one side and management on the other side.
The author explores peculiarity of such workplace, issues involved therein along with means and
methods to address major hurdles for management and labour studies to grapple with one among the
least explored workplaces of the world. The forthcoming paragraphs are meant to grapple with relative
(read comparative) vulnerability for members of the workforce inside a space otherwise meant for
private individual use, albeit with the potential for abuse to gross detriment of the workforce and, at
times, of the management as well. With recent focus of the International Labour Organization (ILO),
the labour wing of the UN administration and one among the oldest institutions meant for global
governance since the League of Nations regime, a unique trajectory of labour jurisprudence is on its
wise to save stakeholders of the workplace from drudgery, if not vagary, of injustice with impunity.
The hitherto private space is thereby increasingly converted to public space during its working hours in
technical sense of the term and thereby subjected to the rule of law genre available elsewhere outside.
Keywords
Labour, unorganized, alienated, dehumanized, vulnerability
Introduction
Domestic service is indeed one among the oldest service sectors since the time immemorial with
little recognition for the vulnerability out of victimization involved therein. Thus, those engaged in this
Management and Labour Studies
43(1&2) 46–57
© 2018 XLRI Jamshedpur, School of
Business Management
& Human Resources
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0258042X18754429
http://journals.sagepub.com/home/mls
1
Assistant Professor of Law, National University of Study and Research in Law, Ranchi, Jharkhand, India.
Corresponding author:
Debasis Poddar, Assistant Professor of Law, National University of Study and Research in Law, Kanke-Pithoria Road, Ranchi,
Jharkhand 834006, India.
E-mail: debasis.bengal@gmail.com