Domestic workers from margin to center: protest, opportunity and threat in pandemic politics

ABSTRACT (***Special Edition Gendered Pandemic) In India, domestic workers' movements advocated for their own and other workers’ rights both before and during the pandemic. Over the course of the pandemic, however, the political landscape and degree of disunity among workers changed. Despite dwindling resources and a hostile political environment that offered paltry prospects for success, domestic workers persisted in protesting for improved conditions. We argue that while domestic workers’ organising prior to the pandemic may be accounted for by standard theoretical approaches, the onset of the pandemic presents challenges to these same theoretical approaches. The domestic workers’ movement in India has transitioned from its pre-pandemic opportunity-based activism to what might be better characterised as threat-based collective action. Further, an intersectional analysis of these threats suggests that domestic worker protests are driven not only by strategic considerations about how to craft alliances in a shifting political field, but also by a need to assert an identity and to demand inclusion in the category ‘worker,’ from which domestic workers are often excluded by gender and caste bias.