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INDIA REAL TIME

Delhi Journal: What to Pay the Maid

By Tripti Lahiri
Aug 5, 2012 9 00 am IST

THE MAIDS' COMPANY A screen grab of an online calculator for a maid service, run partly as a
cooperative, that shows the cost of having someone come to clean, cook and wash dishes for a
few hours a day for a family of four living in a house with three bedrooms and two baths.

Given that Delhi rarely appears on those periodic surveys of the best places in the world for
Western expats to live, and often tops rankings of bad things (pollution, car accidents, crimes
against women), it’s understandable that many foreigners feel quite daunted by the challenges
of living here.

But, oddly enough, one of the widely acknowledged perks of living here – the one many Indians
abroad think of most wistfully – seems to cause as much angst to expats as all the city’s flaws
combined: the availability of cheap household help.

Or so it would seem from the periodic discussions that crop up on expat forums. The number
one dilemma? What to pay the maid. And the driver.

“There is no market rate,” said Gauri Singh, who in 2011 started The Maids’ Company, which
trains and supplies domestic workers in the Delhi suburb of Gurgaon.

Concerns include both paying too little and being ripped off.
It’s true that salaries are all over the place. A colleague reports paying 1,100 rupees ($20) a
month for a half hour to one hour of daily cleaning. I pay 3,000 rupees ($54) a month for
between one to two hours of cleaning six days a week, plus occasional cooking or chopping. A
maid who came to me from an expat mailing list requested 6,000 rupees ($108) for the same
work, while an American friend who lived here until a few years ago was paying her English-
speaking housekeeper, who could cook quiche and apple pie, 14,000 rupees ($250) plus perks.

Expat families usually pay well above what a local might. But given the wide range in pay and
work performed in exchange, it's easy for people to careen between feeling like suckers and
exploitative feudal overlords.

"Domestic staff accustomed to working for foreigners can be very savvy and manipulative when
it comes to acquiring perks," warns The American Women's Association of Delhi, whose tips on
hiring Indian help include checking that the prospective worker “displays good hygiene” and
asking, “How would you prepare a fresh red sauce for pasta? How do you make a white sauce?”

In an unfamiliar setting, many expats are willing to pay a premium for proficiency in English,
familiarity with Western food, and the ability to manage other staff. But as the pool
of foreigners in Delhi has expanded beyond the diplomats or company CEOs who used to make
up the expat community, some locals and expats wonder whether salaries are out of whack.

Jeanne Heydecker, an American woman who has been in India for five years, said that her
approach to household staff has changed a lot since she first arrived in Gurgaon in 2008.

At that time, a British woman who was leaving recommended a housekeeper whose asking
salary was 30,000 rupees ($540).

“In my company there were professional marketing people working for 10,000 rupees a
month,” said Ms. Heydecker. “And this person is illiterate and she has 30,000.”

When the salary issue arose yet again on a popular Delhi-based online expat help group in
response to a query, Ms. Heydecker weighed in. Others, too, expressed the concern that
foreigners were excessively inflating salary expectations, pricing out locals or leading those on
the lower rungs of the middle class to consider domestic service over low-level white-collar
work.

Ms. Heydecker’s domestic help situation now is a fusion of Western and Indian norms. She pays
5,000 rupees for a five-day work week, which she says is “a little on the low side,” for her
housekeeper, who had no previous experience. On the flip side, her housekeeper, along with a
husband and a child, share a bedroom of Ms. Heydecker’s home as well as meals. Ms. Heydecker
says she intends to pay for the child, who is not yet of school age, to attend an English-language
school.
Indian colleagues at work told Ms. Heydecker that “we’re getting a good rate with her but they
also said they would never allow her to live in the house.”

Others wonder whether it is fair to compare the earnings of a person in an entry-level white-
collar job, who will likely end up earning a lot more over their career, with the top end of what
people in domestic service can expect to earn. And rather than question whether expats are
paying too much, people who work with maids say the discussion should center around
whether Indians are paying too little.

After surveying maids who lived in Gurgaon shanties and employers in condos, Ms. Singh, of
the maid service, estimated that 5,500 rupees ($100) a month for a 10-12 hour work day, seven
days a week was pretty typical. Another benchmark – the minimum daily wage for an unskilled
laborer in Haryana – would come to about 5,800 rupees a month.

To provide sweeping and mopping, washing dishes, and cooking for 12 hours a day to a family of
four, Ms. Singh charges 7,150 rupees, which is roughly equivalent to the wage for unskilled work
plus 25%; the maid gets that amount minus 10%.

But Ms. Singh says she wouldn’t call that a fair salary. She believes that full-time monthly work
should start at 10,000 rupees a month, and go up from there depending on additional skills. She
knew she couldn't get most of her clients to pay that, though.

“Clients tell me my rates are exorbitant,” she said. “They end up negotiating on 200 or 300
rupees even if they are driving a Merc or living in a penthouse.”

She’s especially irked by what she sees as sexism in pay for domestic workers – drivers . who
tend to be men,  with a few years’ experience typically earn not less than 8,000 rupees a month
for an 8-hour day and get overtime and a regular day off.  It's quite common for a maid who is
offering three services – cooking, cleaning, childcare – to work 10 hours a day for far less, no
overtime and no regular day off.

Ms. Singh’s advice to both Indians and expats is not to worry about what your neighbor or
colleague is paying – in most cases it’s going to be too low rather than too high.

“I don’t think it’s about skewing the market. It’s about whether that person is adding that much
value to your life or not, " she said. “Someone unskilled and illiterate can be adding a lot more
value to your life than someone who is a fresh graduate from an MBA school.”

In her own home, she pays her cook-slash-household manager 19,000 rupees, as well as pays for
English-language tuition for his high-school-age daughter. In return, she said she never has to
give a moment’s thought to the steady stream of guests that stay with her or any other aspect of
running a home while she’s working or traveling.
Vivek Joshi, who also weighed in on the discussion on the expat help group, pointed out that as
India develops economically, one casualty for India’s middle and upper classes is going to be
cheap help. Most maids and drivers, after all, put their savings into their children’s education in
the hopes they’ll be able to find different kinds of jobs.

Household work and childcare is not highly

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paid work even in developed countries
except, perhaps, for an elite category of
super-nannies. Still, cleaners in the U.S.
typically get about three to four times the
federal minimum hourly wage of $7.25. A
recent survey of nearly 700 nannies 
showed that they typically get two-and-a-
half times the hourly wage.

Using a similar multiple with the minimum wage rate around the capital would see maids and
nannies earning from 14,000 rupees to 23,000 rupees a month.

“As with any country that is getting prosperous, domestic help might get priced out of the
range of a lot of people,” wrote Mr. Joshi, who moved back to India last year. “I can't think of a
single developed economy where a middle-class family can easily afford a full-time maid plus
driver. It is not our birthright to have these folks.”

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DELHI JOURNAL DOMESTIC WORKERS DRIVERS EXPATS MAIDS SERVANTS

WAGES

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