At your service

A true measure of a person is how they treat their domestic staff 

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 generalization; 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 incentivized 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.

 

Are you being served?

The snooty sales assistant is alive and well, and ignoring you at that unfriendly neighbourhood designer store

We’ve all been there at one time or another. You walk into a designer store where every item on sale has a stratospheric price tag attached. As you browse through the shop you realize that a sales assistant is beadily tracking your every move. You ask if you could get a closer look at a certain item on display. Instead of handing it over, he snootily informs you that it costs, say, Rs 3 lakh.

Technically, of course, he has done nothing wrong. You asked to see an item in his store and he told you its price. But you know exactly what is going on. The sales assistant has weighed you up, calculated the cost of your handbag, your watch, your shoes, and whatever jewellery you are wearing, and decided that this item is definitely not within your budget. Having decided that, he sees no point in wasting time showing it to you. He’s a busy man you know; he can’t be bothered with window shoppers like you.

Now, there are three ways you can deal with this. You can act as if you didn’t get the subtext of his reply and ask to see the bag anyway. Or you can call him on his rudeness and ask why he felt obliged to tell you the price when you hadn’t asked the question. Or you could just walk out and take your custom to another store where the sales assistants are a tad less snobby and a little more helpful. (Always choose option three.)

But if you are Oprah Winfrey, one of the richest women in the world and a global media superstar, you could also mention this experience in an interview. You can recount the time you walked into a store in Switzerland – which you are careful not to name – and asked to see a handbag. You reveal your amazement when the sales assistant refused to show it to you, despite your repeated requests, and steered you towards some cheaper bags instead. “This one,” she said, “is too expensive.”

Of course, being Oprah, you lay this down to the insidious racism that prevails in much of the world; a world which sees a Black person as being too poor to afford pricey goodies like these. And because you are Oprah, all hell breaks loose after your interview.

The Swiss Tourism Board offers you an apology on behalf of the whole country and says it’s a shame you were treated that way. The media track down the store in question and the owner is forced to clarify that it was all a huge misunderstanding because the sales assistant’s English is ‘not so good’. The sales assistant herself tearily explains that she is not a racist and that she was just trying to explain to Oprah that there were cheaper versions of ‘that’ handbag on sale as well. She adds, for good measure, that she cannot understand why Oprah is making such accusations. “She is so powerful and I am just a shop girl. I don’t understand why someone as great as her would cannibalize me on TV.”

At which point, Oprah backs down, and says that she wishes she had never raised the issue, and she regrets how it has all got so out of hand.

All this kerkuffle about being snubbed (or not) in a designer store…I know, it beggars belief, doesn’t it?

But while all this sounds very silly indeed, I have to admit that there is something about these fancy-schmancy stores that brings all our insecurities to the fore. I know women – otherwise completely rational human beings – who never venture into these shops unless they have at least one designer item on their person. And when I scoff at them, they regale me with stories of their ritual humiliation in such stores when they don’t quite look the part.

This can take several forms. The sales assistants may studiously ignore you, offering no help at all even if you indicate that you are looking for it. Or they will shadow you assiduously as if they are afraid you will slip an expensive item in your capacious handbag the moment their back is turned. Or they will be unbearably patronizing when you ask questions about the merchandise. Or they will resort to that tried-and-tested insult of telling you much a thing costs even before you ask the question.

Speaking for myself, I have noticed that service in such stores dramatically improves if I am carrying an easily identifiable label handbag, or wearing what looks like a designer garment, or even better, an expensive piece of jewellery. I can feel the sales assistants clocking up the value of every item in their internal computer and placing me on that sliding scale of costumer preference. And their disappointment is almost palpable when I leave without buying anything, as if I had somehow tricked them into serving me under false pretenses.

But while this is fun on a slow afternoon, I must confess that I would never ever set foot again in a store where the shop assistants had been snooty and rude. If I’m not good enough for you, then my money most certainly isn’t either.