We have written many times that laws passed in bad faith, only to win elections, can only harm the nation and its citizens. We, in the middle class, have been reduced to morons who queue up at election time to get our fingers marked with indelible ink, just to replace one set of feudal thugs with another. The rich buy politicians and civil servants to live outside the system while the poor have the numbers to vote for whichever bunch offers the quickest way to financial suicide, with the greatest handouts. The government is thinking of passing a bill to make it compulsory for all maids to be registered with agencies and employers to pay for pensions, healthcare and vacations. The government maybe reacting to our hysterical media which slavishly repeats what the International Labor Organization has said, without researching the truth. The ILO is also against any modification of our labor laws, which have resulted in fragmentation of industry, to stay outside the laws. Small scale companies are inefficient and highly polluting as they cannot afford the latest technologies because they cannot get loans from banks or raise money from the markets by selling shares. Hence, 94% of labor work in the unorganised sector. Any law to register maids will be a disaster because the cost will rise so high that few will be able to afford maids. At the moment, at least in bigger cities, demand for maids is so huge that they can demand high salaries but if they are priced out of the market most will become unemployed. Instead of being free to negotiate their own wages they will be at the mercy of agencies who will charge them high fees in cash, to find work, just as they do for Indians going to work abroad. The agencies charge them so much that they have to borrow to pay, which means that even when their lives are in danger they refuse to return to India, as 64 nurses have done in Yemen. Without work either the maids will be forced to work part time surreptitiously, which will erode their bargaining power, or be forced into prostitution as happened when the famous ' Chandni bars ' were shut down. Most of these women migrate from villages because they have no income there and being illiterate they work as maids, which does not need any training, to feed their children. When you have 75,000 applicants, some with engineering and post graduate degrees, for 30 posts of peons what hope is their for these illiterate women? Why no jobs? Because the Congress passed the Right to Education Act for its ' vote bank ', thus producing a mass of duffers, who cannot be employed. But there is a glimmer of hope as there is a new party of truth and honesty, called the Indian Business Party which is demanding the right to possess black money. After all, if the rulers have it why shouldn't the subjects?
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