India’s retail economy is one of the largest in the world – with a workforce of over 40 million people, accounting for more than 10% of GDP and around 8% of total employment. Additionally, it is a highly feminized industry, with approximately 60% of the workforce being women.
Female workers are primarily found in textile showrooms, jewelry stores, and hospitality establishments across the country, the very sectors where permanent employment is most strictly enforced. Most of these women spend most of their day standing while serving clients and working beyond the legal 48-hour week.
The associated health costs are extreme and are almost completely ignored in political discussions. Standing for long periods of time (more than four hours at a time) is associated with chronic back pain, varicose veins, and long-term joint damage. For women, who bear the brunt, the consequences go even further. Research on dysmenorrhea in working women links long working hours and workplace stress with severely painful menstruation and recommends sitting during shifts as a first step in intervention. However, even today, workers are still forced to trade their health for work. In most establishments, from high-end cafes to small clothing stores, seating is scarce and employees must complete their 12-hour shifts exclusively standing.
Why is reputation so strictly enforced anyway? A seated worker can fold clothes, attend to customers, or process transactions just as effectively. A permanent employee is sought after not only for business efficiency, but also because it signals respect and availability. Women are expected to be attentive, available, submissive, and constantly on duty. It is mandatory for a retail employee to be available to the customer at all times. The dominance of women in such customer-facing roles is no coincidence; They are chosen solely for their perceived capacity for deference and submissiveness. Their vulnerability in the informal world of work is further exploited as the threat of replacement implicitly enforces compliance. The professional requirement of being on your feet for 12 hours is not a given for women. It is naturally feminine.
What does the law say?
In India, there is no national legislation to enforce workers’ rights. Right to rest. As per the Constitution, labor falls under the Concurrent List, which means both the Center and the states can make laws. As far as the seat issue is concerned, the Center has decided against it. The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020, India’s latest central legislation on workplace conditions, has no seating provision and applies only to establishments employing ten or more workers, directly excluding the vast majority of small shops and commercial establishments that employ most retail workers. In 2022, Parliament was asked directly whether the government intended to include the right to sit in this code. The reply confirmed that as far as the Center was concerned, the matter was a matter for the states.
In most states the matter has not been addressed.
Only two states have specific seating provisions: Kerala, which changed its Shops and Establishments Act in 2018 after years of sustained protest, and Tamil Nadu, which followed suit in 2021 Deccan Chronicle reported as recently as May 2025: Telangana – which extended the operating hours of commercial establishments in 2024 for the benefit of companies – did not make adequate provisions for the workers who would sustain these additional hours. In Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Delhi, there are no special seating requirements for retail and commercial workers. A worker’s right to rest her body during a twelve-hour shift is determined not by a national standard of dignity, but by the state in which she was born.
And even where there are laws, compliance is a completely different matter. In Kerala, The Wire reported that vendors in textile and gold showrooms are largely disorganized and that store owners routinely crack down on employees who contact unions. In Telangana, union organizers describe CCTV cameras being installed specifically to catch workers attempting to sit down, and workers being forced into silence for fear of pay cuts or dismissals. In Tamil Nadu, workers at major retail chains like PVR and Pothys are still resting on stairs between shifts, five years after the change.
Meena has been working at Trends clothing stores in different parts of the city for over four years, doing six-day, nine-hour shifts. Permission is required to sit between these hours. On days when her period pain makes standing unbearable, she takes painkillers and asks the store manager if she can use the lunch area. The alternative is to take a vacation, she says.
Yasmin’s nine years at Smart Bazaar have given her a sharper calculation of rest: a thirty-minute lunch break and a ten-minute tea break. This is the sum of their sitting hours in a nine-hour shift.
The situation is even worse for workers who have no place to sit. John, 28, came to Chennai from Manipur four years ago and has been working in an upscale coffee house ever since. During this time he has never had a chair at his station. When a labor inspector in Mylapore learned of John’s situation, he was unmoved. “How are coffee houses and so on supposed to do their work while sitting down?” she said. “That’s not practical.”
The costs of asserting a right
The reason most workers don’t complain isn’t because they don’t know their rights. It’s because they can’t afford to exercise them.
Organized retail in India is almost completely unorganized from a labor perspective. Most major showrooms and chains do not have unions. Workers are hired on informal terms, often without written contracts, meaning there is no grievance mechanism, no documented employment relationship and no clear legal recourse. Shop owners routinely take action against workers who contact unions – even in Kerala, the state with the most progressive track record on the issue.
It is also important to understand the household context of retail workers in India. The majority are women aged 18 to 30 who earn between 6,000 and 15,000 rupees a month, often from lower-income households where this salary is essential for subsistence in an urban environment. In addition, after a twelve-hour shift on the floor, a second shift awaits at home in the form of household chores. The double burden in this story is no coincidence. This is why rest, in any short form, is so important. Denial of such an essential right in the workplace adds to the burden of exhaustion that millions of women in India endure every day.
Even though women are disproportionately burdened, the right to rest is not just a gender issue. Male employees in retail and hospitality endure the 12-hour shift without chairs, the same fear of retaliation for rest breaks, and the same constant surveillance. In states where there is not even the slightest amount of seating, which is the case in most states in India, the right to sit and rest at work is a denial of equal opportunity. It is not discrimination based on gender, but based on class.
Those who are compelled to run do so because of their place in a social hierarchy that has historically deemed certain bodies suitable for service. In India, this hierarchy cannot be separated from caste. An overwhelming one large percentage of workers earning low wages in the retail and hospitality sectors are members of Dalit and OBC castes, whose history of exclusion from other forms of work means that service work is more than a choice but a necessity in the urban labor market that operates outside the scope of reservation policies.
In the absence of affirmative action, caste continues to play an important role in determining working and wage conditions for the weakest sections of society. Several studies (Deshpande and Newman (2007), Madheswaran and Attewell (2007), Thorat and Attewell (2007)) describe discrimination in the urban private sector and show that social identity influences labor market outcomes even when there is no difference in educational attainment or skills.
Retail is not an exception, but rather the most visible expression of this structure – a space in which the least protected and most physically demanding roles are filled by people from lower castes.
The right to rest
Ultimately, the denial of calm reveals something deeper than just a legislative failure. Feminist theorists of social reproduction (Silvia Federici, Tithi Bhattacharya, etc.) have long argued that capitalism relies on unpaid labor outside the workplace: cooking, cleaning, caring. Retail extends this logic to the wage relationship itself: the body, having spent all day serving others, returns home to serve again, with no discernible boundary between the two. In this sense, capitalism not only removes labor hours; it extracts the person.
This extraction is disproportionately female. And it is invisible precisely because it is treated as something natural, something that women simply do, rather than something that requires time, energy and rest to maintain. The denial of something as fundamental as the right to rest is the logic of this system made visible; a system that has always assumed that the female body is endlessly available, endlessly absorbent, and endlessly capable of going on. In this sense, demanding the right to sit means demanding more than just a chair. It’s about insisting that the body has limits, that those limits matter, and that the woman within it is not just a resource to be used to maximize profit margins.
Rest cannot be viewed as a favor granted by the employer on a good day. For working-class women and men in India’s retail economy, it remains what it always was: something stolen from time to time, on stairs not intended for them. As long as the state does not see this as a problem worthy of solution – not for two states, not for companies above a threshold, but for every citizen who stands in every factory in the country, the right to peace and quiet will continue to exist as before. On paper and nowhere else.
The names of all retail employees mentioned in the copy have been changed for privacy and job security reasons.
