The papers have recently been full of reports about a prominent Indian-origin family settled abroad, whose treatment of their household staff has led them to being handed prison sentences. Their crimes include grossly underpaying their staff, making them work all hours, confiscating their passports, and so on.

Reading these reports, I must confess that while I was shocked, I was not surprised. This particular family may have caught the attention of the law, but what they did is all too common among Indian households, both within this country and abroad. As a people, we tend to treat our household staff like our personal slaves, with no personal lives of their own. We make them work night and day, they are forever on call depending on our whims and fancies, and we grudge them even an annual pay rise no matter how hard they work. If they happen to live with us, they spend their nights on the floor in dingy, airless rooms, with scarcely any ventilation. And if they live on their own, the salaries we pay them don’t enable them to rent even a two-room set on their own.

I know what you’re muttering to yourself as you read this: this is a gross generalisation; not every Indian family behaves like this; my servants are paid handsomely and treated like family; and so on. And perhaps you are right. But my essential point remains: even if there are some exceptions among us, the general standard of behaviour towards household staff remains abysmal in India. And if the law were to be applied equally, there would be many other Indian families who would also be headed to jail.

But, as we all know, that will never happen in India. It is this sense of security that enables so many of us to treat our staff with casual cruelty or simply throwaway thoughtlessness. And since we get away with it, we see no incentive in changing our behaviour and granting them a living wage, basic dignity and self-respect.

One easy way of gauging if we are treating our household staff with compassion and empathy is to ask ourselves how we would react if our bosses at work treated us in the same way. Would we be happy working a 16 to 18-hour day and then getting up the next day to do it all over again, seven days of the week, without any respite in sight? How would we react if we took a day off and had our pay cut as a consequence? What would our reaction be if we weren’t paid for our annual leave? How incentivised would we be to work if we didn’t get a raise for years on end?

My guess is that if we had to work like this, it wouldn’t be long before we began looking for another job that put a fair price on our work and treated us as valued employees. And yet, too many of us expect our household staff to just suck it up and be grateful to have a roof over their head, a mattress to sleep on, three square meals a day, and a tiny pay cheque at the end of the month.

And that, surely, is a crime that deserves punishment.

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