Night Duty For Women - Protection Or Discrimination?

Alapan Bandyopadhyay, chief advisor of West Bengal’s Chief Minister, told media persons at the state secretariat that the flagship programme for women safety of the state government has been named ‘Rattirer Shaathi – Helpers of the night’.

The guidelines laid out by the International Labour Organisation for safety of women workers during night shifts are adequate to ensure their safety, not only in their respective workplaces but also during their late night commute.

So, rumours and theories circulating on social media claim that perhaps it would be desirable to restrict women’s night duty in some workplaces and industries. If this were true, then the concept of “Claiming the Night” would collapse.

It will fall to pieces, resulting in the law and order machinery, specially the police, admitting that it is unable to give proper protection to women doing night duty in Kolkata.

One of the guidelines issued by the West Bengal government calls for minimising night duty for women. How will this dictum — “wherever possible, night duty may be avoided for women to the extent possible” — secure safety at the workplace? This regressive move will only end up removing women from the workforce, instead of ensuring a stop to violence.

The working woman is no freak entity. She is as strong, as capable and as efficient as the working man. Yet, most nations across the world have placed restrictions on women workers’ hours of work and on overtime.

Though the original intention might have been to protect the woman worker, in the long run, the real effect has been the limiting of her work which automatically reduces her possibilities of promotion, increments and so on and raises the possibilities of a geographical transfer.

Few countries over the past decades have made concrete attempts to bring greater equality between male and female workers by actually doing away with different hours of work for men and women even from the statute books.

The World Health Organization (WHO), estimates state that globally, till 2024, women comprise around 70 percent of the workforce. Over the years, there has been a significant increase in the enrollment of women in medical schools all over the world. In 2022, 31,190 women applied to medical schools in the United States, that accounted for 56.5% of all applicants.

An ILO study in 1973 stated that there was absolutely no consensus among governments and among employers’ and workers’ circles about leaving women free to choose for themselves, as responsible and capable adults, whether they should undertake night work or not.

There were three general opinions: (a) restrictions on women’s employment for night work should be removed or ordered to bring about equality of employment opportunities among men and women; (b) a more limited relaxation of the then-existing restrictions and greater flexibility in national laws and practice; (c) night work for men and women should be generally regulated in order to safeguard the health of all workers and in order to promote the welfare of the entire family comprised of husband, wife and children.

Article 21 of the Constitution of India reinforces 'right to life.' Life in its expanded horizon includes all that gives meaning to a person's life including culture, heritage and tradition with dignity of person.

The fulfilment of that heritage in full measure would encompass the right to life, equality, dignity of person and right to development, elimination of obstacles and discrimination based on gender for human development.

Sociologist Esther Boserup had suggested that male-dominated governments and labour markets in Africa had conspired to pass special protective legislation for women, knowing that it “will assure that women cannot compete for the jobs men want.”

Though protective legislation for women workers may have been enacted in order to protect women from being brutalised, or sexually exploited at the workplace in the days of early industrialisation, today, the belief has changed and so has the attitude of women and society.

What does the phrase “danger at work” mean? The sexist assumption of the term “danger at work” almost accuses the woman worker of being weaker and more vulnerable to danger at the workplace than the men.

It also implies that women cannot protect themselves after certain hours or during certain periods of a 24-hour day. Therefore, they need social legislation in their favour.

If “danger” is indeed a sexist term with reference to working hours, then why are these dangers not identified by the law-makers? What are the specific “dangers” they need protection from?

Which or what are the sources of these dangers? Why is the danger assumed in a time-wise perspective rather than on a job-wise or a health-hazard-wise perspective? The emphasis clearly is on work during night hours.

Is the danger assumed to be from members of the opposite sex, that is men? If this be true, then the danger should cover not only the place and the time of work, but also during the commute to and from the place of work. This means the danger from men to women at certain hours is almost taken for granted and is legitimised through these enactments.

There is a contradiction here. Women in the field of entertainment, performing in dance halls, at concerts, on stage or in night clubs and bars, in hotels and at cabaret shows, are hypothetically, more susceptible to danger from men, than women who work in factories and in professions such as medicine, health workers and teachers.

But the cabaret dancer is permitted to work at night. Her work is directed and aimed at the entertainment of male patrons, without whom her profession cannot exist. She also faces no competition from men on the job because at dance parlours, these jobs are almost exclusively for women.

In India, labour legislation mainly covers the night shift for women workers in terms of working hours through three acts – The Indian Factories Act, 1948, The Plantation Labour Act, 1952 and the Mines Act, 1952.

On the other hand, in many factories women are not permitted to work beyond 8.30 PM as per the law and have to face tough competition from men workers for the same jobs. This competition is unequal because the male candidate has better chances of bagging the job as the employer will prefer to hire a male who is permitted to work round the clock for any of the three shifts.

For the same reason, the female industrial worker also loses vertical mobility on the job, while her male colleague does not. Is this protection or is this discrimination?

There is nothing dangerous or odd about working hours if the sex-tinted undertones, and overtones, of the man-woman relationship in the marketplace can be brought down to a minimum. In other words, the danger from men to women can be wiped out only if men cease to be dangerous.

The change is desired in the behaviour of men towards women and not in women being restricted from taking on night work. Hundreds of women working in the unorganised sector do not fall within any legislative statute. How will they run their families if their work is restricted in terms of the hours they need to report for duty?

Women at any workplace therefore, do not need protection. It is the men, and the unions, and the organised sector dominated by men who easily outnumber the women, who need to change their ways of looking at women and at women’s lifestyles. We need an evolving social climate. Backdated laws and points of view cannot bring this about.

More than 20 years ago, three women from different walks of life authored a book titled ‘Why Loiter’. Shilpa Phadki, Sameera Khan and Shi Ranade presented an original take on women's safety in the cities of twenty-first century India.

The question begins with “do women loiter?” Loitering is a male-exclusive luxury not necessarily denied to women but actually, women keep away from it as they have never pondered over the idea of loitering on the streets without meaning or purpose.

Women never get the time to even think of loitering as this is an act that has no aim, no purpose and no target. Loitering, every man and woman will agree, is a male-exclusive act especially after sundown.

That is why any girl or woman wandering aimlessly and dressed anyhow is soon apprehended by the local police and taken to the nearest police station. Why? “Mentally disturbed… a runaway from home who cannot find her way back” are the usual excuses.

It is assumed that she is mentally handicapped, or is a runaway or is a destitute. And immediately, a process of taking her back to her “home” is begun with NGOs coming in.

‘Why Loiter’ maps the exclusions and negotiations that women from different classes and communities encounter in the nation’s urban public spaces. At one point, they write: “the insistence on respectability actively contributes to not just reducing women’s access to public space, but also compromises their interests when they do access…

“The inextricable connection of safety to respectability, then, does not keep women safe in the public; it effectively bars them from it.” Though the book focuses on the limitations of women in Mumbai, it applies to all metro cities of the nation and even beyond.

Swami Vivekanand had once said: “Just as a bird could not fly with one wing only, a nation would not march forward if the women were left behind”.