By Sujit Bhar
The Supreme Court’s recent refusal to entertain a plea seeking statutory recognition of minimum wages for domestic workers has triggered sharp reactions from unions, activists and sections of the legal community. At a press conference in Bengaluru on February 2, domestic workers’ unions described the decision as an abdication of constitutional responsibility and an institutional failure towards one of India’s most vulnerable labour groups.
At the centre of the controversy is a January 29 order by a Supreme Court bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant, which disposed of a writ petition filed by ten registered domestic workers’ unions. The petition sought a declaration that domestic workers are legally entitled to minimum wages and argued that payment below minimum wages amounts to forced labour under Article 23 of the Constitution, relying on the Court’s own interpretation in Peoples Union for Democratic Rights vs Union of India (1982).
Instead of adjudicating these constitutional claims, the bench held that fixing and enforcing minimum wages for domestic workers falls squarely within the policy domain of the executive and legislatures, particularly state governments. The Court declined to issue directions to the centre or states to frame welfare measures or enact a comprehensive law, citing the well-established limits of judicial intervention in legislative matters.
For unions, this was not merely a legal setback. In a detailed public statement, they described approaching the Supreme Court as a last resort after decades of engagement with labour ministries, state departments, women’s commissions, legislators and political parties had failed to yield enforceable rights. The order, they argue, leaves millions of domestic workers—predominantly women and girls—outside the protection of binding labour law and marks a reversal of progressive constitutional interpretation.
THE COURT’S REASONING
The bench’s reasoning has drawn particular criticism. The Court observed that minimum wage enforcement in domestic work involves “complex socio-economic considerations” and cautioned that judicial intervention could trigger job losses, excessive litigation against individual household employers, and over-unionisation.
Union leaders counter that this reasoning privileges employers’ convenience and household privacy over workers’ rights to dignity, equality and freedom from exploitation. Welfare schemes for unorganised workers, they argue, cannot substitute for enforceable wage rights or address the structural invisibility of domestic labour.
Public meetings following the order echoed these objections. Domestic workers spoke of decades of labour without job security, paid leave, bonuses or increments. Many framed the denial of minimum wages as a continuation of caste and class-based servitude, likening it to a modern form of gulamgiri persisting despite constitutional guarantees.
Workers recounted routine abuses: denial of access to toilets, excessively long working hours, wage theft, arbitrary pay cuts, and summary dismissal.
Yet, beyond the moral force of these claims lies a set of hard structural questions that have dogged the domestic work sector for decades. These questions help explain why courts, including the Supreme Court, have consistently shown restraint—and why any durable solution is likely to be far more incremental and decentralised than unions might wish.
WAGE FIXATION AS A STATE MATTER
At the most basic level, fixing wage rates is constitutionally and practically a state matter. Labour appears in the Concurrent List, but minimum wage fixation has historically been carried out by states under the Minimum Wages Act, 1948, reflecting local economic conditions, cost of living, employment patterns and administrative capacity. No central authority—including the Supreme Court—can arbitrarily impose a uniform legislative diktat on state governments without undermining federal principles.
The Supreme Court’s reluctance to step into what it views as a policy and legislative domain is consistent with long-standing jurisprudence on separation of powers.
Courts may interpret laws and enforce rights, but directing legislatures to enact specific laws or fix specific wage rates risks collapsing the distinction between adjudication and governance. In this sense, the bench’s insistence that unions seek remedies from state governments is not an evasion, but an affirmation of constitutional structure, however frustrating that may be for workers who have faced decades of inaction.
THE LIMITS OF STANDARDISATION
India’s economic and social diversity further complicates the issue. Fixing specific rates for domestic workers in a country as poor and as varied as India is not comparable to doing so in developed nations with smaller informal sectors, higher per capita incomes and robust enforcement machinery. Domestic work in India spans elite urban households, middle-class apartments, informal settlements and rural homes, with vast differences in hours, tasks, skill expectations and capacity to pay.
Unlike factory or plantation work, domestic labour is deeply embedded in private households, often informal, part-time and negotiated individually. A single worker may clean utensils in one home for 30 minutes, cook in another for an hour, and provide childcare elsewhere for half a day. Attempting to impose a single or even tiered minimum wage structure across such fragmented arrangements risks either being meaningless on paper or disruptive in practice.
None of this negates the legitimacy of domestic workers’ demands. Exploitation is real, systemic and gendered. However, certain issues demand separate and context-specific treatment rather than being folded into a single wage-fixation framework.
Take, for instance, access to toilets—a recurring grievance raised by women domestic workers. This is not merely a matter of wages, but of dignity and basic human rights. Notably, West Bengal has addressed this issue with relative clarity. Denial of access to toilets for women domestic workers can be lawfully charged in the state, reflecting a recognition that certain abuses require targeted legal intervention rather than broad labour-law solutions. This demonstrates how state-level sensitivity and political will can translate into enforceable protections without waiting for national mandates.
SOCIO-CULTURAL BARRIERS
Another often-ignored obstacle is the deeply entrenched socio-cultural biases across states. Even in the 21st century, caste, religion, race and creed remain powerful determinants of social relations. Domestic work, historically associated with lower castes and marginalised communities, is particularly vulnerable to these prejudices.
Enforcing any specialised regulatory system in such a landscape is incredibly difficult without local knowledge and political legitimacy. State governments, which better understand regional social dynamics, are more suited to navigating these fault lines than a distant central authority or court.
A uniform national framework risks either being ignored or generating backlash in societies where domestic hierarchies remain fiercely guarded.
In urban high-rise societies, most domestic workers are part-time. Over time, fixing part-time rates has effectively been left to Residents’ Welfare Associations (RWAs), which negotiate informal standards for cleaning, cooking or security work. Even here, enforcement is uneven and often biased in favour of employers. Outside such organised residential complexes, however, no standards exist at all.
When work itself is non-standard—varying daily, weekly and seasonally—standardising remuneration becomes conceptually and administratively fraught. Any rigid wage framework risks collapsing under the sheer variety of arrangements or pushing employment further into informality, harming the very workers it seeks to protect.
SAFETY CONCERNS
Another uncomfortable but real dimension is household safety. Cases of theft and even murder by domestic workers—sometimes long-serving ones—have periodically come to light, particularly in households of senior citizens unable to defend themselves. In response, local police across cities have long advised residents to verify and deposit domestic workers’ identification details at local police stations.
This is not an argument against workers’ rights, but it illustrates the deeply personal and trust-based nature of domestic employment. Regulation in this sphere inevitably intersects with policing, privacy and fear—factors that courts are wary of reshaping through blunt legal instruments.
LIMITS TO LESSONS FROM ABROAD
Developed countries do offer examples of standardised pay structures and strict enforcement. The 2013 case of Devyani Khobragade, then India’s Deputy Consul General in New York, is instructive. Charged by US authorities (among other charges) for allegedly failing to pay her domestic worker the minimum wage, the incident triggered a diplomatic storm and pushed India-US relations to a low point.
Such enforcement is possible in societies with clear laws, strong inspection regimes and manageable caseloads. In India, by contrast, the socio-economic structure is vastly different. There are no comprehensive laws governing domestic work, the judicial system is already overburdened, and enforcement machinery is weak. Importing developed-world standards without building corresponding institutions risks legal chaos rather than justice.
The Supreme Court has acknowledged the exploitation faced by domestic workers while maintaining that it cannot direct legislatures to enact or amend laws. It has encouraged continued engagement with policymakers and pointed to existing social security schemes for unorganised workers as partial relief. Critics may find this inadequate, but it reflects an institutional assessment of capacity and limits.
A NEGOTIATED MIDDLE PATH
The way forward likely lies in a negotiated middle path—one that balances workers’ dignity with economic reality. With middle-class incomes under sustained pressure, rigid fixed rates may, in the long run, reduce demand for domestic work, pushing workers out rather than empowering them. Gradual state-level regulation, targeted protections against specific abuses, expansion of social security, and localised wage guidelines may offer more breathing space to all parties.
The unions are right to insist that invisibility is injustice. But courts are also right to recognise that not all injustices can be remedied by judicial decree. Between constitutional ideals and social realities lies a difficult terrain—one that only patient, decentralised and politically grounded reform can hope to navigate.
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