Maternity leave is not about charity
is visualised as a necessary evil, an efficiency burden that is caused due to women becoming pregnant. Consequently, women who enter the workforce are faced with an impossible choice: they must both conform to the male standard at the workplace (or lose out on career advancement), and also deal with social norms that expect them to continue shouldering family responsibilities. Thus, there have been conflicts over whether and to what extent maternity leave is to be paid for, how long it must be, how it will affect promotional and career avenues, and of course — as the Uttarakhand Rules stipulated — whether it can be capped.
But all of this, as Williams goes to point out, is the result of a “cultural decision to resolve the conflicts between home and work where they have always been resolved: on the backs of women ... the career patterns that accommodate women’s child care responsibilities often are ones that hurt women’s earning potential”. There is, in other words, nothing “natural” about this state of affairs, but a conscious set of decisions that we, as a society, have taken.
It is, therefore, that Justice Sharma’s invocation of Article 42 of the Constitution, in the context of maternity leave, becomes significant: it frames the debate within the contours of (“... just and humane conditions of work.”). It therefore recognises — at least implicitly — that restricting maternity leave is not a question of charity, or pity, or kindness, but a question of justice. And once we accept that the rules governing labour and the workplace are subject to the requirements of justice, we can liberate ourselves from accepting them as they stand, and think from scratch about how to design workplaces that take into account existing imbalances of power in society, and work towards redressing them, rather than perpetuating them.
For this reason, the Uttarakhand High Court’s judgment — despite, at its base, being a straightforward ruling on statutory interpretation — has greater significance for how we think at the intersection of labour and gender equality.
justice Gautam Bhatia is an advocate in the Supreme Court The views expressed are personal