A Woman's Place: The Struggle for Employment in the Bombay Pharmaceutical Industry

If labour history earlier tended to ignore women workers on the one hand[2] and Third World workers on the other,[3] the point where these two streams of ignorance converged was the history of trade union organisation among Third World women workers. More recently, there has been a growing body of literature on ways in which women workers in the Third World have organised themselves in order to struggle for basic rights;[4] however, compared with the total volume of literature on trade unionism, this still remains a very small proportion.

This paper is a contribution to redressing the balance by providing an account of the struggle of women workers in the pharmaceutical industry in Bombay against the marriage bar – a struggle which made history by challenging norms which had hitherto been taken for granted. Demands for equal pay, maternity leave and workplace creches were also fought and won. However the outcome, paradoxically, was declining employment for women in the organised sector[5] of this industry: the consequence of a complex interaction between employers and unions where each learned from the other and from their own successes and failures.

A Short History of the Employees' Unions in Bombay 1947-1991

Employees’ unions emerged in the late forties and fifties as a new and increasingly dominant form of union organisation among large companies in Bombay. By ‘employees’ unions’ we mean unions which have the words ‘Employees’ Union’ or ‘Workers’ Union’ or ‘Staff and Workers’ Union’ in their name, regardless of whether they retain an outsider as their President. The counterpoint to such unions are the much larger general labour or mass unions which attract workers from a host of companies within or across industries. Till the mid- fifties, by far the best established union of this type (henceforth ‘external union’) was the AITUC. The fragmentation of the labour movement which began in the fifties with employers encouraging the expansion of INTUC as a counterpoise to the AITUC continued unabated over the following decades. The growth of outside unions exacerbated union rivalries and partly eroded the base of the employees’ unions.

We shall argue in this paper that the history of employees’ unionism in the Bombay region has to a large extent been dominated by an endemic hostility to independent unionism among managements in the area. By ‘independent unionism’ is meant the sector represented by the stronger employees’ unions and their federations, where these exist. But ‘endemic hostility’ has reflected itself in three very different styles: (1) Companies that accept employees’ unions but litigate fiercely over demands; (2) companies that pursue strategies designed to break the power of a strong internal union or union federation; and (3) companies or business groups which have never been willing to deal with unions they cannot control. These styles represent different degrees of hostility, of course. In particular, attempts to undermine the power of internal unions became a constant feature of the eighties.