The death of 12-year-old Shazia has been widely condemned in the media as an example of the harsh treatment to which domestic servants are so often subjected in Pakistan. As part of the low-income class, household servants cannot do anything about their maltreatment by their employers. As economic historian Robert Heilbroner noted, power follows money in modern society, and thus servants, with their meagre incomes, find themselves at the receiving end in the form of violence by their employers. The fact that this ill-treatment is an abomination is hardly debatable, but there is a phenomenon at play which is hardly recognised: servants subsidise the very lives of their employers.

The first thing to realise is that household servants assist practically all day-to-day activities of the people who are able to afford their services, especially the rich. The maid, the cook, the guard and the driver together often perform the very basic tasks of a household: the home’s cleaning, washing and ironing of clothes, cooking, serving of food, protection of the house and enabling the transport of members of the household from place to place.

I, for example, almost never have to worry about washing and ironing my clothes, for the housemaids do it. I also don’t have to spend time on other personal chores, such as the cleaning of my room. When I leave home, I hardly ever have to deal with the traffic of Lahore. I commute to and from my university every day, making what I think is good use of my daily time, thanks, of course, to the services of the household driver. Time that would have otherwise gone to these tasks goes to activities which contribute, in my opinion, to the furthering of my education. Relieved of the responsibility of performing these tasks, I can be better focused on what may be called my “professional” identity, that of a student.

Servants thus may contribute to the better performance of a CEO, a judge or a doctor, making these people’s work easier by freeing up their time which would be taken up by household activities. In some cases, the servants may be attached to households for such long periods of time that they may even be trusted with the keys of the house in the absence of the homeowner. In such pessimistic and troubling times, such servants are a blessing.

Having seen how servants contribute to a household, let us see what they get in return.

First, they get a miserable income which hardly helps them make ends meet, let alone educate their children — if they aren’t children themselves. Second, abuse is widespread, the verbal kind being more frequent than the physical. Of course, one cannot deny the existence of households which treat their servants well — providing them with the same food which is cooked for everyone else in the house, helping out when a member of the servant’s family is sick or the village home needs repairing, when money is needed for a family wedding — and where verbal and physical abuse is absent.

But these are exceptions. It is in this suffering where lies the subsidisation of the lives of the better-off and rich by the conditions of the poor. People do not pay the full cost of the services their servants provide: what the servants get in return for their services is, more often than not, humiliating treatment and the hardships accompanying the pathetic wages they are given.

When a government provides a subsidy, it must make up for the expenditure; that is, in a sense it must be repaid by the consumer in the form of a tax or the revoking of a subsidy. How is the subsidy provided by the servants to be repaid? We can talk about raising incomes as a starting point, but we must not stop there. To do that would mean that we have put a monetary price on the misery of the poor and that we are content with its continued existence in exchange for a monetary reward.

What should be done is to begin with the provision of the following: greater monetary compensation, along with the assurance of their physical safety, dignity and respect and — last but certainly not least — the recognition that they truly serve the household. Secondly, what is it to which those with money have access and the poor don’t? That is education. Thus, it is their responsibility to make sure that the subsidy their lives have been receiving from the poor for years and years is repaid qualitatively through the ushering in of a social-economic environment in which the servants of households are given dignity and respect as well as a chance of educating themselves. It is only they who can do this, for it is they who have access to education as well as socio-political power which follows their money. No repayment could be greater than this.

The term “servant” is considered by many to be disparaging. I don’t agree. They do truly serve as they subsidise the very lives of the better off and the rich, despite their low-incomes, misery, toleration of suffering and patience. For such service they must be repaid, and it is about time they started getting their due.

The writer is a LUMS student. Email: daniyalk@gmail.com