7.30am

10am

1.30pm

9pm

10pm

Tall, willowy, with kohl-lined eyes and multiple piercings in her ears, Sunita, an attractive woman in white overalls, can raise hell and she frequently does. In one of her mellow moods, she talks of her daughter’s exam results and of her brothers who are all drivers. But she soon starts to rage — against people who don’t have toilet manners. Sunita is a toilet cleaner in a large, modern office. She is angry not so much with her employers — an agency that supplies housekeeping staff — but with the women who use the toilet.

“They are so dirty. I wonder if they are equally dirty at home. I don’t think so, for then they would have to clean it themselves. Here they dirty the toilets as much as they can because I am here to clean,” she fumes.

Tamanna, a shop attendant at a department store at a mall south of Park Street, bends down to pick up, fold and put in place each garment discarded by customers and scurry to find what they are looking for next. It’s 8pm and she has been on her feet for more than seven hours.

“It is tiring to be on your feet all day. But I have got used to it. It’s only when I am back home that I realise my legs are hurting.”

New professions have given many women — and men — from low-income families a shot at a better life. Several of them would be unemployed or earning less if they had not got these jobs, but they have also earned long hours, poor pay, few holidays and customers’ tempers. Behind every glitzy mall, store and salon, there’s an army of faceless men and women with sore feet and tired eyes. Have you looked at those eyes? They’re mostly from Calcutta’s suburbs.

Round the clock

Their days are long. Basanti, in a starched white coat, looks after the toilet at a mall in the city’s east, hair tied in a no-nonsense bun. “My work gets over at 9pm. I stay in Belghoria. My mother comes to the station to take me home. It is not safe otherwise,” says Basanti, a single woman in her mid-20s.

Babita starts from her house in a village on the fringes of the city, at 7.45am to reach her workplace, a department store in Esplanade, at 10.30am. She works as a shop attendant, returning home at 11.30pm. “My duty gets over at 8.30pm. But it is usually 9pm when I manage to finish work,” she says.

“In the morning, I walk for 20 minutes to catch a bus and spend Rs 12. But while returning, I don’t always get the bus and so end up spending Rs 40 on transport,” she says. She earns Rs 3,500 a month.

When the woman steps out of home, staying out late, it is feared that the family will disintegrate. “My family doesn’t like me to be out so late. When I leave in the morning, my children are getting ready for school and by the time I return they are in bed. I can’t take Sunday off because it is a busy day at the mall,” says Shanti, who commutes from Liluah to a mall in Calcutta’s east every day.

The nature of work has changed but not the routine. The pay has changed, but not by much. Many ayahs, for instance, hired to care for babies or the sick, come from outside Calcutta, from Naihati, Kankinara, Khardah and beyond. Often starting by six in the morning and reaching home a little before midnight after a 12-hour stint, they make Rs 90-100 a day.

Under the state shops and establishment act, women cannot be made to work beyond 7pm. “But the entire service sector is built on the violation of law,” says a senior government welfare official.

Security or shop attendant, salon or hospitality, the monthly earnings hover around Rs 3,500. “There is an annual increment, but it depends on your performance,” explains Tamanna, who has been working at the store for two years and is lucky enough to get provident fund.

At some jobs, even a weekly day off means a dent in pay. “I get Rs 3,300 per month because I work every day of the month. If I took a day off, I would only get Rs 2,800,” says Radha, who works as a security officer at a mall.

Radha used to be a teacher. “But the salary from the school combined with what I earned from private tuition was less than what I earn now,” she says.

For the woman, the career path doesn’t always swing upwards. “The salary scale is the same, but men achieve seniority and higher pay faster. This is because they often stay back after the store closes at 9pm, to learn finance and other jobs. We are in a hurry to get back home,” says Babita.

Maternity blues

Besides, it’s women who still get pregnant, but maternity is not tolerated in many places. Sampurna, who works at a posh salon, is expecting, but her employer will not grant maternity leave. “I’m trying to come for as long as possible. I can claim the job when I come back, but I’ll not get any money for the days I don’t come. In fact my annual bonus is due in a month and my employer wants me to go on leave before that so she won’t have to give me the bonus,” says Sampurna, who is pursuing her graduation. Her husband is studying CA and the couple need the money to save for their child.

Ask women in such services if they have a women’s grievance cell and they gape. “Well, we could tell the supervisor I guess,” is a common answer. Still, it’s more desirable than a career stitching jeans for a few rupees a day, or turning into domestic help.

Some of the girls are content. “Chole to jachhe (we’re getting along),” says Shanti.

Activists and employers agree. “It is not that the situation is perfect. But we still want more girls to join these jobs. At least, it’s an organised sector,” says Dolon Ganguly, who works at the NGO Jeevika, which sent 17 girls to a Mumbai-based organisation for training. They were promised work in big retail houses but only three girls got jobs.

“If they were working at home, embroidering saris for boutiques, the mahajans would cheat them,” says Ganguly.

“If these girls were not working here in security or at the toilets, what else will they do? Work as a domestic servant? The security is even less there. Here we are at least trying to provide a semblance of an organised job and ensure contractors give them their due,” says Brigadier Kar, the chief operating officer of City Centre.

Since the shops are covered under the shops and establishment act, reminds labour commissioner Satyabrata Chakrabarti, employees should enjoy the minimum benefits. “They can’t work over eight hours a day and are supposed to get one-and-a-half days of continuous leave every week.”

The reason these are not respected is that the women working in the security sector are not direct employees of the mall or store and have been hired through contractors. “Even then it is the duty of the principal employer to see the contractors are giving the employees off-days, a minimum wage, PF and ESI benefits,” says Chakraborty.

He admits that organised retail being a relatively new business, specific rules are not in place yet. “We have set guidelines for the IT sector, where employees on night shift must be dropped home. There must be restrooms for women where they can take breaks. But there is no such guideline for retail because till recently shops would shut by 7pm,” he adds.

“Conditions at the malls are very different from those at traditional shops but we don’t have any new laws for them. They have to follow the shops and establishments act,” says R.N. Majumdar, an expert in labour and service law.

Which is not to say that conditions at traditional shops are much better. More likely than not, they’re worse.

Retail and services such as security and housekeeping are not glamorous like information technology, which is why their presence has not yet registered on the radar of trade unions such as Citu. Which may not necessarily be a bad thing. Better no union that a union that shuts down the store and the income.

“We don’t expect employees to join the union as soon as they get a job,” says Kali Ghose, the general secretary (West Bengal council) of Citu.

He is not sure which malls and stores are part of the union. “We are trying to address the problems. Long working hours and low wages are the primary problems faced by these employees. There is also no job security since many work on contracts,” says Ghose.

Retail boom

But long hours or not, maternity leave or not, union or not, retail and the services are booming. According to Images India Retail Report estimates, organised retail in India has the potential to generate over Rs 230,000 crore of business by 2010, creating direct employment for some 2.5 million people and for over 12.5 million in support activities.

For the Sunitas, Babitas and Tamannas, it’s a ticket to a half-decent existence, higher up the social scale than being a domestic help or an ayah or a stitcher of jeans. And it gives a glimpse of life further up the chain, though that may at times throw cold water on aspiration.

As an exasperated Sunita says: “They dress so modern and they work in offices, but they pee on the floors. How many times can I keep cleaning them?”

There’ll be many more to clean in the future.