Urban Company’s pilot Insta Maids (now rebranded as Insta Help) service promises the delivery of a domestic worker in 15 minutes, advertising “cleaning help, faster than your pizza delivery”. The ad for Insta Help shows a harried-looking woman employee in a sari checking her phone message from Sunita who says she cannot come today because she has to travel to her village. The ad declares: “Your maid left you hanging? We will leave your home spotless!” for only Rs 49 an hour. Another ad features a young, light-skinned woman with her hair in a neat ponytail wearing a black, high-collar t-shirt holding presumably dirty utensils and promising to arrive in 15 minutes. Insta Help does not only promise instant delivery of a domestic worker but also that of a modern, “clean” maid who will not need to go on last-minute village trips like Sunita.
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Technology, in this case, promises seamless delivery, productivity, and modernity. However, such advertising hides economic and social realities on the ground that are greatly exploitative for domestic workers and turns the “maid” into more of a commodity, a piece of automation much like a robot. The statistics on domestic workers in India are murky and involve a wide range of estimates, from 4.75 to 80 million, with women making up at least 70-plus per cent of the workforce. What is clear is that domestic work is largely unregulated and workers are not covered under significant labour laws in India. Most workers have little awareness of their limited rights. They often work gruelling hours at multiple households with long commutes. They risk sexual violence, usually have no weekends or set holidays and often have no access to bathrooms, food, etc.
App-based gig work has consistently held the promise of economic benefits and individual agency for workers. However, as evidence from India and other nations increasingly demonstrates, gig work — whether it is Uber driving or Swiggy delivery — has overwhelmingly trended in the direction of broken promises for workers and relatively low-paid, exploitative conditions of work, especially for individuals with marginalised identities. Gig workers unions such as the Indian Federation of App-Based Transport Workers (IFAT) and the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union (TGPWU) have criticised this initiative for good reason and asked for rigorous regulatory oversight by the Indian government to stop “modern slavery”. Critics have claimed that the pay and compensation promised by Urban Company remain insufficient. While Urban Company says that they will provide health insurance and other benefits, assurances made by other gig economy platforms like Uber demonstrate, at the global level, that such promises have usually not been fulfilled if left to corporations.
Ventures like Insta Help place the onus of responsibility solely on the domestic worker for their success. In this vein, employers in online spaces such as Quora fiercely emphasise that their maids need to be “entrepreneurial” to succeed in life, highlighting desired attributes of “enterprise,” “creativity” and “discipline” and touting a few “success stories.” These comments assume relatively equal playing fields and ignore deep inequalities of economic and social capital in the forms of preferred education, networks, appearance, etc., that usually help set up individuals for upward mobility.
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Within some households, the home does become a model of a corporation where employers can deliver certain benefits to their workers such as help with expenses for medical needs, weddings or kids’ education in return for their loyalty and hard work. In the absence of proper regulations governing domestic work, these exchanges are often based on long relationships between the employer and the worker that will be impossible with a rotating array of Insta helpers, and workers will be deprived of even this precarious but possible safety buffer. Nevertheless, it is vital to recognise that the collective workers’ rights for which domestic workers are increasingly organising remain the most assured form of protection.
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Evolving forms of technology have promised inclusion for domestic workers but have reinforced societal inequalities. Police verification processes, based on finger-printing, have caricatured the worker as an archetypal “buffoon” in the past, asking for physical “deformity/peculiarity” and “pet words of speech.” As researchers such as Nitin Sinha have found, these initiatives further criminalise the domestic worker.
Urban Company has rebranded Insta Maids to Insta Help following a social media backlash, claiming that they believe in the “dignity of labour.” Their advertising, however, follows older apps such as the DekhoSeekho app that attempted to transform the worker into a modern housekeeper by including cooking videos catering to global tastes and voice assistive features in learning to pronounce the dishes. In both these initiatives, what is prioritised is the comfort of the employer and a cosmetic makeover of the “maid” into a twenty-first-century worker without ensuring fair, humane conditions of work and legally enforced, collective protections.
The writer is associate professor of communication at Santa Clara University
