Unregulated Labour in Private Spaces: A Socio-Legal Analysis of Domestic Work in Urban India

Abstract

Domestic work in urban India remains persistently informal and weakly regulated despite employing millions of predominantly female and migrant workers within the informal economy. This study examines the socio-economic conditions, legal awareness, and employment realities of domestic workers across Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Chennai using a qualitative socio-legal approach. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 36 domestic workers and Braun and Clarke’s thematic analysis, the findings reveal recurring patterns of employment fragmentation, institutional exclusion, migration-driven vulnerability, and workplace exploitation. The study develops an integrated analytical framework combining Quality of Life (QOL), Quality of Working Life (QWL), Quality of Employment (QOE), and Quality of Work (QOW). It conceptualizes QOW as an independent dimension of labour precarity, capturing task degradation, occupational stigma, and embodied labour conditions within domestic work. The findings demonstrate that migrant domestic workers experience intensified vulnerability due to dependence on informal intermediaries, limited urban social capital, and weak bargaining power. The study further shows that domestic workers are concentrated in low-status and physically demanding tasks such as sanitation work, waste handling, and repetitive cleaning, reinforcing occupational hierarchies and caste-linked labour stratification. Weak legal enforcement, absence of contracts, and limited social security contribute to structural informality and legal exclusion. By bridging legal frameworks and lived experiences, the study contributes to socio-legal scholarship and labour process theory by demonstrating how task-level degradation intersects with employment insecurity to shape labour dignity and vulnerability within informal domestic work. The findings have implications for labour regulation, social protection, and the formal recognition of domestic work in India.