Liminality as wage penalty for India's women community health workers

Abstract

In this paper, I analyze the experiences of the world's largest all-women community health workforce through the lens of liminality. Originally used to describe transition from one state to the other, the concept of liminality in the study of work and organizations can frame workers' experiences of being in-between established structures and roles in varying degrees, times, and/or places. India's ASHAs, or Accredited Social Health Activists, are community women at the frontlines of the state's health care provisioning. But the state does not categorize them as workers or employees. ASHAs are considered volunteers. Instead of salaries, they are paid task-based incentives. Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork, including 80 interviews, I find that ASHAs' liminal occupational status as 'paid volunteers' produces conditions of chronic underpayment and control for them, further lowering their already low wages. This has implications for how we understand the gender wage gap. I argue that we need to consider not just how much women are paid, but how the payment is structured, and how that places marginalized women workers in relation to others in the workplace.Moving beyond whether liminality is a negative or positive experience, future research should delineate the conditions under which liminality is negative or positive.