Manu Joseph: Why the super-rich and we pay the same for house help

livemint.com:

₹5,000 a month for getting into acrobatic positions to clean for an hour every day, and a cook only around the same for working 90 minutes daily on meals. The rich keep talking about how they subsidize the poor. They do.

But it is also a fact that the poor subsidize our lifestyles by supplying labour cheaper than in much of the world. Also, every strata of Indian society subsidizes the lifestyle of the strata above by working for exploitatively low wages. And in the end, we have a situation where Indian billionaires probably pay only as much as I do for domestic work.

No household can be impressive when it comes to the matter of paying its domestic staff. Historically, all the famously humane writers who moved our souls through prose had servants who were probably not paid more than market rates. Merchants and conscience-keepers paid their servants just about the same.

Even if some people pay a bit more, it cannot be an impressive sum when spoken out aloud, especially if compared with the incomes of famous humanitarians. What are the consequence of the Hinduja family case? The wages of migrants won’t rise; instead, wealthy Indian families living abroad may stop taking domestic workers from India, fearing trouble, ending a way of enriching poor Indian families. And wealthy Indian families in the West would have to hire local help, which must be a bit uncomfortable because those workers have such swag and that always diminishes the experience of being a master.