Introduction
The labour force in India is as diverse as Indian society itself, divided by gender, religion, caste, region, ethnicity, language and history. In this context, the issue of equality assumes extra importance, yet trade unions have failed to tackle it with the seriousness it deserves. This failure has had an adverse effect on all sections that suffer from discrimination, above all on women, and also on the movement as a whole.
This chapter looks at some examples of the ways in which women workers have organised successfully, and tries to assess how far these attempts go towards addressing the issues of discrimination and equality. It adopts a case study approach, looking at six cases from a diversity of locations: The All-India Chemical and Pharmaceutical Employees’ Federation and its activities in Bombay, Maharashtra, in Western India; the Women’s Wing of the All-India Bank Employees’ Association which has branches throughout the country; The Chhattisgarh Mines Shramik Sangh and Mahila Mukti Morcha from Madhya Pradesh, Central India; the Navayuga Beedi Karmika Sangam in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, Southern India; Sarba Shanti Ayog and Sasha based in Calcutta, West Bengal, in Eastern India; and SEWA, based in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, in Western India. The absence of North India is not accidental; this is the region where women face the most brutal violence and oppressive patriarchal control, and organising autonomously is most difficult. I have also included material from a project sponsored by Women Working Worldwide to find out if Codes of Conduct can help women workers in the garment industry, although this cannot count as a case study since the overwhelming majority of the women remain unorganised.
The chapter aims to show that while some progress has certainly been made, women and other disadvantaged sections remain marginalised in the labour force, and trade unions still fail to recognise the importance of tackling this issue. Finally, it argues that globalisation perhaps opens up possibilities of using new resources which might aid in the struggle for equality.
Research Methods
The case studies draw on individual and group interviews/discussions with women workers, activists and organisers (at least ten, sometimes many more), carried out by myself, sometimes with various colleagues.[1] They also use whatever documentary material is available: collective agreements wherever they exist, court cases published in the Bombay Government Gazette and Maharashtra Government Gazette, and Annual Reports, leaflets, pamphlets and other publications by the groups being studied. My association with the pharmaceutical workers is an ongoing one, dating back to the early 1980s, and recent information is from male union activists; the association with the garment workers is also ongoing, but started much more recently (i.e. in 1998). The other cases were carried out by staying for some time in the places where they are located during the period 1994-96. A case study approach seemed the best way to do justice to the diversity of circumstances and strategies. It also provided a good opportunity to find out how the women themselves felt about their work and organisations.
Problems created by legislation and government policy
The concepts of equality and non-discrimination are not absent in India; the Constitution guarantees both. However, the legislative and policy instruments by which they are sought to be achieved have been sadly ineffective. The most serious attempt to eradicate discrimination has been made in the case of Dalits (formerly ‘Untouchables’) or Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Adivasis or Scheduled Tribes (STs). The practice of untouchability is illegal, and there are job reservations in the public sector as well as reservations of parliamentary and state assembly constituencies for SCs and STs. Yet the most blatant forms of discrimination are suffered by these sections, and even the degrading practice of untouchability still continues. There are two reasons for this. One is that the existing laws are frequently not enforced, and the other is that reservations by themselves are not an adequate means of achieving equality. They have ensured the emergence of a layer of educated, middle class Dalits and Adivasis, but have not prevented the vast majority of individuals from these categories being subjected to various forms of exclusion. Worse still, the reservations themselves are seen by other castes as a privilege unjustly confined to STs and SCs, rather than a measure to bring about social justice! In the case of women, there has been no policy of affirmative action in jobs, and there would undoubtedly be insurmountable obstacles to pushing any such measure through parliament. And even if it were possible to do so, such a measure would do little to counteract the persistent discrimination suffered by girls and women from birth to premature death: widespread female infanticide, deprivation of nutrition and health care, reluctance to invest in education because girls are regarded as ‘paraya dhan’ (another’s property), and so on, all of which ensure that women enter the labour force already at a disadvantage compared to men.
Within the labour force, they face further discrimination. The proportion of women workers in formal sector private industry fluctuates around only 10-12 per cent, and while the proportion is higher in the public sector, there too women are a small minority. For the small proportion of women in the formal sector, wages and benefits are relatively high, the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961, allows them to have three months’ maternity leave with full pay from the employer, and where there are thirty or more women in the workforce, the Factories Act requires the employer to provide a creche for their pre-school children. However, occupational segregation limits the number of jobs available to them, and excludes most of them from the more skilled and better paid jobs (Banerjee 1985; Liddle 1988). Although in general large-scale employers observe the Equal Remuneration Act, 1976, which provides for equal pay for the same or similar work, the issue of work of equal value has not been addressed, and the skills involved in many jobs done by women tend to be unrecognised and unremunerated. Most seriously, the lack of any equal opportunities policy or legislation makes it very easy for employers not to extend formal employment to women at all, and they are increasingly taking this option, since in the formal sector women are more expensive (because of statutory maternity benefits and creche facilities) and less flexible (because of the prohibition on night work) (Hensman 1996c).
This leaves the overwhelming majority of women job-seekers with no option but to go into the ‘informal sector’; for the purposes of this paper, I have used this term to refer to all workers, both urban and rural, who are not covered by basic labour legislation, including unprotected workers (e.g. contract, temporary and casual workers) in large-scale production. The Economic Survey 1997-98 estimated that the labour force was 397.2 million in 1997, with only 27.94 million in the formal sector. In other words, just 7 per cent of workers were in the formal sector, and a staggering 93 per cent in the informal sector! This is partly due to non-implementation of existing legislation, but mostly a result of the inadequacy of labour laws. For example, the Factories Act, 1948, which covers working conditions, health and safety, basic amenities like toilets, working hours, prohibition of child labour and night work for women, workplace creches, and much else, does not apply to workplaces with less than ten workers using electric power and less than twenty workers without electric power; similarly the Employees’ State Insurance Act, 1948, providing for accident compensation and sickness and maternity benefits, does not apply to workplaces with less than twenty workers without power. This provides employers with a variety of ways to evade these laws: splitting up an establishment into smaller units which are supposedly independent of one another, employing large numbers of contract workers (on site) who are deemed to be employees of labour contractors and therefore do not appear on the payroll of the company, or subcontracting production to smaller workplaces. The Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1971, forbids the employment of contract labour for work of a perennial nature, but the way this legislation has been formulated leaves gaping loopholes which have been exploited by unscrupulous employers, one of the worst of whom is the government itself.
The rationale behind the exemption of workplaces employing a small number of workers from most labour legislation is the argument that more employment will be created if labour costs are kept low, and this will relieve the problem of unemployment. Instead, the result has been a shift of employment from formal to informal workers and an overall deterioration in conditions rather than any expansion in employment, since such workplaces neither necessarily represent small capital nor employ labour-intensive technology (Banerjee 1981: 282-6; Holmstrom 1984: 110,114,151). Moreover, it has made trade union organisation to improve conditions in the informal sector extremely difficult. Splitting up a workforce between different production units or different employment statuses already creates problems for unions. But an even bigger obstacle to the organisation of informal workers is the fact that often they do not have a proper employment contract, and are not covered by provisions of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, which prevent arbitrary closure of the enterprise and provide redress for workers subjected to dismissal for trade union activities. Thus although workers in theory have the right to unionise, in practice this means very little, because employers can either dismiss individual workers who join a union, or close down an entire unit and reopen it with new, non-unionised workers, and there is no redress for workers who are victimised in this way. For women in the informal sector, exclusion from jobs perceived as being more skilled is exacerbated by lower pay for doing the same work as men. This has created whole sectors where employment is exclusively or predominantly female, homeworking being one (see Standing 1992).
There is also discrimination against other sections of the labour force. Dalits and Adivasis, most of whom are agricultural labourers, continue to work in atrocious conditions, sometimes as ‘bonded labour’ resembling conditions of slavery. Attempts to organise and fight for their rights are often met by the most brutal repression, including massacres of men, women and children. Muslims, a minority community frequently subjected to pogroms, are systematically discriminated against in the formal sector, including the public sector in which they do not have job reservations. Women from these sections face an extra hazard: the perception of their ‘low status’, usually shared by the police and sometimes even by judges, makes it possible for them to be raped with impunity. The feminist movement in India really took off from the protests against a Supreme Court judgement in 1979, acquitting a policeman who had raped Mathura, a sixteen-year-old tribal girl. Almost two decades later, the movement was galvanised again in the case of Banwari Devi, a low-caste social worker who was gang-raped by the high-caste men of a family in which she had prevented a child marriage. Functionaries of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party felicitated the rapists in public, and the judge acquitted them on the grounds that they could not have raped her – the implication being that a low-caste woman has no right to deny upper-caste men access to her body!
The relegation of the vast majority of women, along with SC, ST and Muslim men, to the informal sector – where union organisation is extremely difficult – means that these sections are seriously under-represented within existing unions, and the result has been that some women in the informal sector have been forced to organise autonomously. On the other hand, while most women workers in the formal sector are union members, their representation in the leadership is extremely low – in many cases nil – and this has led to a few cases where they have chosen to organise autonomously while still retaining membership of the union.
Fragmented unions, fragmented bargaining
Unions are as fragmented as the labour force. The national trade union federations are affiliated to political parties, and statistics are unreliable and hotly disputed. Data published in early 1997 show the position being as follows: The All-India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), affiliated to the Communist Party of India (CPI): 938,486 members; the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC), affiliated to the Congress Party: 2,692,388; the Hind Mazdoor Sabha (HMS) formed by the Socialists: 1,480,963; the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), formed by the right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) with the belief that the doctrine of class conflict is alien to the Indian ethos: 3,116,564; the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) formed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist): 1,775,220. There are smaller party-affiliated unions, such as the United Trade Union Congress (UTUC), the Hind Mazdoor Kisan Panchayat (HMKP), and the All-India Federation of Trade Unions (AIFTU), affiliated to CPI (Marxist-Leninist) splits from the CPI(M).
Apart from these, there are unions affiliated to regional political parties, public sector unions like the All-India Bank Employees’ Association (AIBEA), unions run by professional leaders, a variety of independent unions like SEWA (Self-Employed Women’s Association) and the Chhattisgarh Mines Shramik Sangh (CMSS), and employees’ or workers’ unions, run by the workers themselves and usually confined to a single workplace or company. It has been estimated that the proportion of unionised workers in party-affiliated unions fell considerably from around 60 per cent in the mid-1960s to only around 12 per cent in the 1990s (Bhattacharjee 1999: 22, 42). This implies that the proportion of unionised workers in independent unions, where the opportunities for women to be in leadership positions are marginally higher, rose correspondingly.
The Industrial Relations (IR) system is fragmented in other ways too. Except for some unions in the public sector, unions do not represent workers in an industry or occupation countrywide. In most cases, the bargaining unit is a single workplace, and attempts by unions to form federations across workplaces have usually been resisted fiercely by employers (Banaji and Hensman, 1990). The extreme degree of fragmentation has made it difficult for unions to work for wider social goals, such as social security, welfare, equality, and so on. But it is not just the IR system that is at fault. There has been a singular lack of attention to these issues from the movement as a whole, and a failure to challenge government policies creating a vast pool of unprotected workers. Most unions have confined their attention to the formal sector, and even where individual unions have been concerned about workers’ rights in the informal sector, they have rarely been able to muster enough support from other unions to push through legal reforms which will strengthen them. The formation of the National Centre for Labour (NCL – an umbrella federation of informal sector unions) in 1995 (Mukul 1995; Mani 1995) was a step forward, but was not accompanied by support from mainstream unions. Nor was the demand for equal opportunities ever seriously considered by the trade union movement, much less fought for. The leadership of the movement itself has been dominated by caste Hindu males, although there are exceptions among independent unions. Awareness that equality is a trade union issue has been sadly lacking; where the issue of equality has been raised, it has been by other movements – the women’s and Dalit movements, for example – and even by the state, but not by trade unions. This forms the context in which women workers have experimented with various forms of organisation.
The case studies
The case studies have been chosen to represent regional diversity as well as the diversity of circumstances, ranging from relatively well-paid and secure jobs in the public and private sector, through contract work in the public sector and homeworking in the informal sector, to those who have great difficulty in finding employment at all. Women workers have adopted different strategies in response to differing circumstances, and the issues tackled by these strategies tend to be varied, although common themes also emerge.
The All-India Chemical and Pharmaceutical Employees’ Federation (AICAPEF)
This is a case where women workers who formed a significant proportion of a mixed union federation did not feel the need to organise separately, but led a struggle from within the federation. The issue was the removal of the marriage bar, widely practised at that time, but successfully challenged in this historic struggle.
The pharmaceutical companies which set up operations in and around Bombay from the 1940s onwards recruited young, single women in large numbers. Their workforces, generally literate, educated and ethnically mixed, attempted from the beginning to form unions; most of them did not seek affiliation with the party-linked national federations, but formed their own “employees’ unions”. For example, the Pfizer Employees’ Union was formed in 1950. Within a few years, it had a woman president, Kamala Karkal: “I was really nervous, because I didn’t know anything! I had no experience of trade union work before. But they said, “Don’t worry, we’ll give you all the help you need”.’[2]
The unions supported women’s employment rights as they were then understood: the right to security of employment, equal pay, maternity benefits and childcare; indeed, when a federation of pharmaceutical employees’ unions was formed in 1960, one of the first major actions it launched was an agitation against the marriage bar. Attempts by individual unions to challenge it legally had been defeated, with the courts seeing this practice as being part of management’s prerogative to run an enterprise efficiently rather than an act of discrimination. So member unions of the Federation pooled their resources in order to appeal against unfavourable judgements in lower courts and pursue the case up to the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, women workers conducted factory gate meetings, took out processions to the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly, and even demonstrated outside the homes of directors, shouting slogans like “Hai, hai, kya hua? Shadi karna mana kiya!” (Hai, hai, what has happened? They have forbidden us to get married!), causing acute embarrassment to foreign directors by alleging in front of their neighbours that they were encouraging “immoral traffic of female employees”! On 20th February 1965, they went on a one-day fast at Martyrs’ Memorial, organised a huge procession, ceremonially burned a copy of the marriage clause, and threw the ashes in the Arabian Sea (Hensman 1988). Their activities certainly had an effect on public opinion, and final victory was won later in 1965, when the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the unions: a practice which had been accepted as legitimate was now seen to be discriminatory and unconstitutional.
The vibrancy of the women workers’ activism can be attributed partly to the relatively democratic functioning of employees’ unions, which allowed for greater participation and leadership from women, and partly to the fact that the women were young and single at the time. But employers in many factories responded by ceasing to recruit women, and by the mid-1990s, women were a demoralised and shrinking minority. Philo Martin of Glaxo Wellcome, one of the very few women active in the agitation against the marriage bar who was still an active unionist in the mid-1990s, despite having a gross salary of 8084 rupees per month compared with only 84 rupees per month in 1960, could still look back and say, “Those were the lovely days!”[3] By 2000, most of the women who were still employed were seeking voluntary retirement. With marriage, children and domestic responsibilities, women had dropped out of activism and leadership; only a handful who remained single or had supportive partners continued to be active, thus demonstrating the limitations of the earlier struggle, which neither took up the issue of equal opportunities in employment, nor issues of gender relations outside the workplace (cf. Rees 1992).
The All-India Bank Employees’ Association (AIBEA)
This is a unique case where women formed their own wing in an all-India public sector union. The case is also notable for the breadth and radicalism of their demands.
The AIBEA is an all-India union formed in 1946. Of the approximately 8,500 members of AIBEA in the Bombay region, about 45 per cent were women in 1996, although in the whole of India women were only 15 per cent of the workforce in banks. Employment conditions are among the best available to women, with relatively high pay and allowances, reasonable working hours and a generous amount of paid leave. Women get equal pay for equal work and three months’ maternity leave on full pay. The union was also demanding 21 days’ paternity leave for male employees – a demand still pending in 2000.
One measure taken to involve women more actively was the reservation of some office-bearers’ seats in the union, since “normally, men didn’t look at women as leaders”. This gave women a chance to get experience and standing as union leaders before contesting elections for the general posts. It was also evident that women participated more in their own programmes, as on International Women’s Day, so it was decided to set up a women’s wing. On 25-26 February 1996, the first All-India Women Bank Employees’ Convention was held in Bombay, attended by almost 300 delegates from all over India. A procession they organised was joined by more women to make up the numbers to nearly 3000.
In the convention, the point was made that it was extremely difficult for women to find time for union activities; “as it is, they are doing two jobs – at work and at home – and to work for the union is like taking on a third job!” Speakers emphasised the need for sharing of household tasks between women and men. They acknowledged that men did play a role in nuclear families, but it was still far from being equal to what women had to do. A declaration issued by the convention drew a link between the different ways in which women are disadvantaged in society and resolved to combat all of them:
In a male-dominated society, the women suffer from varieties of gender bias and repressive laws in all fields of life. Right from the moment of birth upto that of death, they suffer from severe handicaps in the fields of education, health care, child-bearing and rearing, laws relating to marriage, inheritance and also personal laws… The convention calls upon all women employees as well as all male employees to stand up unitedly and fight against the exploitation of women in all forms at home or in office or in society...
A five-member committee of the women’s wing of the AIBEA was elected at the conference, with the responsibility to struggle for women’s interests as well as increase the involvement of women in union activities. Consequently, many more women did in fact get drawn into active participation; the convenor Asha Mokashi estimated that “at least a hundred women can be mobilised overnight for any programme held by the Women’s Wing”. Many women said they felt more comfortable in an all-women organisation, less inhibited in speaking out and taking inititative. Hence the women’s wing provided an opportunity for the involvement of women who otherwise would not have participated actively in the mixed union. In September 2000, branches of the women’s wing were flourishing in most parts of the country, especially the South, but not in the North, where they existed only on paper, and not as centres of autonomous women’s activity.
Unlike the women in the pharmaceutical unions, these women did feel the need to organise separately, despite having a union which had won good employment conditions for them. This was basically due to the lack of women activists and leaders in the union. The success of the women’s wing in mobilising women members as well as statements by the women themselves suggest the importance of separate organising for building up confidence and leadership skills. The demand for paternity leave, with its implicit recognition of a father’s responsibilities in the home, as well as the call for the union to take up more general gender issues, indicate recognition of equality as a trade union issue, and an attempt to mainstream gender issues. The convention also took up the problem of discrimination and prejudice against minority communities, showing an awareness of the importance of combating other inequalities. While such efforts may be common in other countries (cf. Linda Briskin’s chapter in this book), they constitute a pathbreaking development in India.
The Chhattisgarh Mines Shramik Sangh (CMSS) and Mahila Mukti Morcha (MMM)
The MMM, like the women’s wing of AIBEA, was formed mainly due to dissatisfaction with the relative marginalisation of women in the CMSS, but in other ways the two cases are very different. Firstly, these are mainly tribal, relatively uneducated women, who started out as contract workers with miserable wages and conditions. And secondly, the MMM was unusual in including women members of workers’ families as well as women workers in its membership.
The CMSS was formed in 1977 in the public sector Dalli Rajhara open cast iron ore manual mines, with a membership of around 10,000 workers, and the charismatic leader Shankar Guha Niyogi. There was a high proportion of women miners – initially around 50 per cent – in the manual mines, where workers were hired through labour contractors and consisted of the local, rural and mainly tribal population. As mechanisation progressed, women were targeted by a variety of incentives to go in for early retirement, and some accepted these, so that the proportion of women declined. At the time the union was formed, however, around 4,200 of its members were women.
The CMSS raised wages substantially, and to some extent succeeded in bridging the divide between the formal and informal sectors, with the contract workers starting as informal workers (though in the public sector!), but achieving a more formal status as they became organised. But the union did not confine itself to workplace issues. It also took up issues like housing and housing allowance for contract workers, sexual harassment of women workers, and struggles against alcoholism. Women played a leading role in this last campaign, seeing alcoholism as contributing to domestic violence, and also as “putting an extra burden on women, who are left with the financial responsibility for supporting the family” (Sen 1995).
Women played an active and creative role in the new union, but once the initial stage of militant struggle was over, began to slide back. If there was a rally or meeting in the afternoon, women had to leave it and go home by 6.00 p.m. This applied even to leading activists, because their menfolk did not help with domestic labour at all. Moreover, it became obvious that despite their active participation in union programmes, women did not get elected to leadership positions in proportion to their numbers in the union. Nor could the union handle problems like domestic violence. A discussion started among ten to twelve women and men about the reasons for these problems, and a separate women’s organisation was suggested. This was the genesis of the Mahila Mukti Morcha (MMM), which was officially set up in 1981. The integration of workplace and community issues which characterised the CMSS was also an important feature of the MMM.
It was assumed that all women members of the CMSS would be members of the MMM, and all voted at the first meeting, at which a 16-member committee, including office-bearers, was elected; in addition, more than 500 other women from miners’ families became members. The MMM took over the anti-liquor campaign, and also organised new campaigns for demands such as separate toilets for women at the bus stand, and punishment for hooligans harassing women at the cinema. A group of about a hundred women had a series of discussions analysing the reasons why women so rarely became union leaders. The equal sharing of housework was discussed and strongly supported. As other unions in the area were formed and came under the influence of the CMSS, the MMM too spread among the women workers and family members of workers in these unions.
Members of the MMM felt they had gained in confidence and dignity – in their own eyes as well as the eyes of male workmates, husbands and family members – by being part of an autonomous women’s organisation and engaging in these collective struggles: “We got strength – not only we, but our children also got strength when they saw their mothers could confront and deal with police and officials!” This made the experience a worthwhile one for them even if they suffered severe personal hardship as a consequence; as a victimised woman worker in Raipur put it, “Since getting organised, we can speak back, we have dignity, we can even talk alone to the police. And our brothers and sisters work in better conditions. Never mind that we lost our jobs – we got courage as a result of organising”.
However, gender issues were not brought back into the mixed union, by challenging it to take up problems like domestic violence and the unequal division of domestic labour as union issues. And although mechanisation, which was decimating women’s jobs, was confronted by the union, they demanded a moratorium on the introduction of new technology rather than shorter working hours and an equal opportunities policy, and the practical outcome was limited. Consequently, by the mid-1990s the initial problem – lack of women in the union leadership – was made worse by the falling proportion of women in the workforce (Sen 1995).
The Navayuga Beedi Karmika Sangam
This is a case which is unambiguously in the informal sector: women homeworkers rolling beedis (Indian cigarettes). It is a good example of successful unionisation of women homeworkers, and illustrates the importance of legal rights even in the informal sector. An unusual feature is that the union organising the women is associated with a women’s organisation which has taken up domestic issues that have an impact on the union.
The overwhelming majority of beedi workers are women homeworkers. Decentralisation of production enables employers to evade labour legislation, and the lack of any formal employer-employee relationship makes it easy for employers to get rid of workers who are seen as trouble-makers simply by denying them work. The women obtain their raw materials from an employer or contractor, roll the beedis at home, and return the finished product. Unlike most homeworkers, they do get minimal protection from the Beedi and Cigar Workers (Conditions of Employment) Act, 1966, which extends the definition of the employer-employee relationship to include contract workers and homeworkers. Along with the Minimum Wages Act, 1948, this is one of the few labour laws applicable to homeworkers.
The first struggle of the women homeworkers in Hyderabad was to be recognised as workers at all. When the Progressive Organisation of Women (POW) and the AIFTU (both affiliated to the CPI (Marxist-Leninist) Jan Shakti faction, and active in Andhra Pradesh) began their attempt to organise these women in the mid-1980s, government statistics showed only a few hundred workers in the city; but when the Labour Department was pressurised to investigate in 1986, they found there were approximately 10,000! The union contacted the women by going from house to house, and held meetings at the only time the women came together: when they were delivering the completed beedis and collecting fresh raw materials. Initially women were scared to join the union, because they could easily be victimised and quite often were. Nonetheless, the union was registered in 1987, and by 1994 the membership had grown to around 5000.
When the union was started, the rate of pay was far below the minimum wage, and one aim of the union was to obtain minimum wages for its members. There were strikes, but even more effective, perhaps, were demonstrations and other agitations which obtained city-wide publicity for the plight of the workers. They were successful in getting the rate increased, but it still constantly lagged behind the minimum wage, which kept increasing as inflation eroded its value. The struggle to regularise the employment of the workers was less successful; although employers were required to issue identity cards and appointment letters to the workers as proof of employment, hardly any of them did so. However the workers did succeed in getting welfare cards from the government, giving them access to maternity benefit of Rs 250 for each of two births, and scholarships for their children. Paid holidays, leave and weekly off-days were not given anywhere. In most places, benefits were non-existent. Homework enabled employers to evade the obligation to provide exhaust fans, comfortable seating, and other facilities which would have reduced health and safety risks, and also meant that children, especially girls, got involved in it at an early age, so that the occupation tended to become almost hereditary.
There were also domestic problems. Many women were beaten by their husbands, and encountered as much opposition to involvement in union activities from home as from employers – indeed, employers initially instigated husbands against the union, saying, “How can you let your wives walk the streets like this?” Some women were intimidated into dropping out, but others said, “We want our families, but we also want to be part of this movement”. Fellow-workers and the POW intervened to put pressure on their husbands to allow them to participate actively in the union.
All the women who succeeded in getting involved in the union found it an extremely positive experience. The main advantages, in their eyes, were that they achieved (1) increased knowledge, of the world and of the ‘system’; (2) increased power, not only vis-Ã -vis employers but also vis-Ã -vis husbands; and (3) enjoyment of the companionship of other women. In Hyderabad, a city which has seen horrific communal riots, this was a case of Hindus and Muslims organising jointly. Muslim women, who formed a sizeable minority of the membership, said they had not encountered communal prejudice in the union. However they did complain that all the leaflets and speeches were in Telegu, whereas they were Urdu-speaking, and it appeared that there were no Urdu-speaking activists in the union or POW. Moreover, union leaders sometimes berated Muslim women for not attending meetings, whereas, as one women pointed out, many of the Muslim women like herself did not wear a burqa (veil), and therefore were not recognised as being Muslim! This was probably not a case of conscious discrimination, but of insensitivity to a religious and linguistic minority.
One factor which seems to have been crucial to the success of this union is the existence of legislation which applies to beedi workers; this provided both a legal resource which could be used against recalcitrant employers, and a psychological source of strength to the women. As a result, they were able to improve their employment conditions and develop a sense of collective strength – but only up to a point. Their pay and conditions still remained very poor, and they could not go beyond that point because most of the labour laws effective in the formal sector did not apply to them. The cooperation of the POW was helpful in tackling domestic opposition to participation in union activities, although, unfortunately, since the POW too lacked Urdu-speaking activists, they were unable to help Muslim women, who therefore continued to be a disadvantaged minority even among women as a whole.
Sarba Shanti Ayog (SSA) and the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA)
A major problem for women, given a context of high unemployment with discrimination on top of it, is finding employment at all. SSA attempts to solve this problem by creating employment in cooperatives. It is unusual in experimenting with modern technology as well as making positive efforts to integrate women from minority communities. SEWA, already functioning as a union in the informal sector, started many of its cooperatives because its women members either needed employment, or had lost their jobs when they tried to organise and fight for improvements. It is a unique case of a union and cooperatives combined in the same organisation.
SSA was started in 1978 as a development organisation to promote artisan/craft producer groups. Subsequently the Sasha Association of Craft Producers separated out as a specifically marketing organisation. The Sasha shop was set up in 1981 in Calcutta, and sales in other parts of the country were handled through regular exhibitions and a wholesale unit supplying craft shops in different cities. An export market was also built up through Alternative Trade Organisations like Oxfam and Traidcraft. Marketing is carried out on a professional basis, and this has been crucial to the survival of the project in an extremely competitive market.
By 1995, SSA consisted of a network comprising approximately 50 craft groups and 15 communities. The majority of craft groups consisted of women, but some were formed by men, and a few were mixed. They ranged from four or five to a hundred people, and were involved in a wide variety of activities. Groups come to SSA wanting help in setting up production units. Once an activity has been identified, SSA carries out a skills training programme, usually provided by people from other groups. Guidance on financial and production management and group functioning is also provided by SSA; in some cases this involves training not only in accountancy but even in basic literacy. The network provides the new group with an advance of upto 75 per cent – in exceptional cases 100 per cent – to stock raw materials if they are cheaper in bulk.
Once the groups are set up, SSA continues to provide assistance with product design and development, and, most crucially, with marketing. Other community activities sometimes branch out from the producer groups: health, education, childcare and environment programmes, for example. Groups of women touring other cities to exhibit and promote their products provides an occasion to break down communal barriers and combat prejudices against women from minority communities.
This example of employment creation for a large number of women owes much to the existence of a support network, including a sophisticated and complex marketing strategy. The women clearly have much greater control over their own working conditions and remuneration than most women in the informal sector, such as the beedi workers. The women said they enjoyed working in the friendly atmosphere: “I like it here because we’re all women”; “It’s like a family – sometimes we fight, sometimes we laugh together!” “I like working here, and will stay on if I stay alive! I’m not yet on the Executive Board, but would like to be”. The main problem, they felt, was that earnings were too low. One reason for this is the low productivity of the work done in the groups, which could only be remedied by using more sophisticated technology and mass production methods. An experiment of this sort was in progress, namely the manufacture of herbal cosmetics using modern machinery. If this is successful in generating higher incomes, it could set the pattern for other producer groups.
SEWA was formed in 1971-2 when its founder, Ela Bhatt, left the Textile Labour Association to form a women’s union. SEWA cooperatives are registered under the Cooperatives Act, while SEWA itself is registered as a trade union under the Trade Union Act, 1926. All members of cooperatives are also members of SEWA. SEWA provides the cooperatives with training in skills and business management, initial working capital and help with tackling policy issues; it also helps them with design and marketing. Apart from handicraft cooperatives, SEWA also has service cooperatives performing services like cleaning, cooking and childcare.
The existence of SEWA as an umbrella organisation provides cooperatives with a medium through which they can interact with one another. Thus artisan cooperatives can share skills and designs with each other, while service cooperatives can provide one another with services. More interestingly, the link has proved very useful to the trade union constituents of SEWA. Since the women in these belong to the informal sector, attempts to organise themselves and demand even minimum wages are often met by victimisation and loss of employment. After a number of such experiences, ‘The workers realised that unless alternative sources of work were provided their bargaining power would always remain low’ (SEWA in 1988, p.49). Thus cooperatives were seen as complementing the union function and strengthening the bargaining power of the workers; when an agricultural cooperative was set up, the wages of local agricultural workers also went up.
Women in the cooperatives felt they had gained knowledge and self-confidence by joining SEWA: “I’ve gained in education, experience, and economically. I’ve even been to Africa as a SEWA representative – something I would never have been able to do otherwise!” They also appreciated the chance to be with and talk to other women: “I enjoy working with other women”; “My mind gets spoiled when I’m alone!” Many suffered from problems at home, including domestic violence, and while SEWA did not help them with these, they did get emotional support and solidarity from the other women.
The combination of union and cooperatives thus seems to be a potent one for workers in the informal sector, strengthening the bargaining power of the union by providing a fall-back source of income for victimised workers. The formation of service cooperatives is also a novel and potentially powerful idea; performing the functions usually done by housewives and mothers, it offers them a low-cost service which helps to reduce their double burden. However, the very low level of earnings – one-tenth to one-fifth of what a woman worker in the formal sector with comparable seniority would be earning – continues to be a problem, and has sometimes resulted in SEWA members joining other unions in order to bargain with their own organisation for better pay![4] The fundamental inequality of legal rights of all workers in the informal sector is a problem for these women too.
Conclusions
It is clear that autonomous organising of women workers in India has taken place not because of encouragement from the trade union movement, but due to the exclusion of women, either from the leadership (in the formal sector), or from the movement itself (in the informal sector). A common theme running through these very diverse situations is the satisfaction and self-confidence gained by women from participation in autonomous organisations.
The reasons for the abject failure of the trade union movement to take up the issue of equality – exemplified once again in a statement of the Joint Action Committee, comprising all the major unions, in Bombay on September 23, 2000 – are complex. The exclusion of underprivileged sections from the trade union leadership, both because discrimination excludes them from the unionised formal sector, and also, in the case of women, because it is virtually impossible to combine long hours of union work with domestic commitments, means that they are simply not in a position to pursue equality issues. In their absence, the predominantly male, caste Hindu leadership tends to reflect the deeply stratified nature of Indian society, many aspects of which have uncritically been absorbed into the trade union movement.
Starvation wages, appalling conditions, child labour and easy victimisation are the hallmarks of the informal sector, where the overwhelming majority of women workers are found. Blatant legal discrimination against this entire sector means that the proportion of women workers in it who have succeeded in organising is extremely small. Far more typical than the women workers in these case studies are millions of garment workers, largely confined to the informal sector, who are too terrified to attempt to organise because they know only too well – sometimes from bitter experience – that it is likely to result in the loss of their jobs. For them, having the same legal rights as workers in large-scale industry is a key demand.[5]
Organisations like SEWA and SSA have boosted the bargaining power of informal workers by setting up cooperatives, together with the necessary infrastructure, to provide a livelihood for victimised workers and mop up the pool of unemployed women. Yet income from these cooperatives remains at the extremely low level characteristic of the informal sector, even if working conditions are better. Such a strategy can supplement but not substitute for fighting for equal rights for the casual, temporary, small-scale and contract workers who comprise the informal sector. An organisation like the NCL could play a key role if they took up this demand and pressed other unions to join them in campaigning for it.
Overlapping with this source of inequality are others based on gender, caste and religious community. Once again, while proposals for equal opportunities policy and legislation have been put forward (Bajpai 1996), no major trade union has launched a struggle for this demand. This failure has not only deepened the divide between formal and informal sectors, but also resulted in job segregation and disunity within each.
Finally, lack of a systematic challenge to the gender division of labour in the home has had adverse effects on women workers. In the formal sector, where unions have fought for and obtained maternity benefits and creche facilities, it has resulted in exclusion of women. In the informal sector, women have to choose between an inordinately long working day without any help with childcare, and no paid employment at all. The domestic division of labour is also an obstacle to women’s full participation in unions, especially in the case of those who are married and have young children. Traditional power relations in the home – the Indian version of patriarchy, where a woman generally goes to live with her husband’s family and is controlled by them to a large extent – exacerbate this problem. Husbands and in-laws may object to a woman going out to work, or, even if she works outside, forbid her to participate in union activities. Such prohibitions, sometimes backed up by violence, prevent many women from playing an active role.
These sources of inequality affect all workers, not just women. Millions of male workers in the informal sector are equally deprived of legal rights, while the existence of this sector undermines job security in the formal sector. Discrimination hurts male Dalits, Muslims and other underprivileged workers as well as women. Lack of recognition for the importance of caring work and the domestic responsibilities of male workers can cause problems for them as individuals; moreover, a statutory working week of 48 hours combined with rapid technological modernisation is leading to structural unemployment even within the informal sector. The assertion that all workers, men and women, have responsibilities outside their waged work could be an important component in struggles for a shorter working week, more parental leave, and part-time work with pro rata benefits, all of which would help to create employment (Hensman 1996b). And the exclusion of women and other sections from trade unionism weakens the movement as a whole.
In the short run, however, male workers from the dominant community benefit from the monopoly of the small number of formal sector jobs, and male unionists have a stake in a gender division of labour which allows them to evade all domestic commitments. This suggests that nothing will happen so long as the initiative is left to them. Women activists have shown much greater awareness of the importance of these issues. SEWA played a key role in pushing through the ILO Home Work Convention, 1996, which confers stronger legal rights on homeworkers, although it did not succeed in getting the Indian government to ratify or implement it. They also proposed a levy on all employers, which could be used to fund maternity leave and childcare, making these benefits more accessible to women in the informal sector and removing the incentive for employers to stop recruiting women in the formal sector. SSA and the Women’s Wing of AIBEA consciously took up the issue of communal prejudice and discrimination. Domestic violence was seen as an important issue in the MMM, and the beedi workers’ union tackled it directly. Women in all the organisations were unhappy about the gender division of labour in the home, MMM discussed it extensively, and the Women’s Wing of AIBEA took demands for greater equality back into the mixed union. The fact that women expressed appreciation of being members of a women workers’ organisation or group suggests some potential for mobilising as women workers around equality-related issues (Hensman 1996a), and the success of the anti-marriage-clause agitation shows how powerful such mobilisation can be.
However, it would be foolish to underestimate the difficulties. Neither the feminist movement nor women politicians have taken much interest in issues of equity in employment, and women in the trade union movement have been so marginalised that the solidly male leadership finds it easy to ignore them. Moreover, women workers themselves, extremely vulnerable to victimisation and without any social security to fall back on, would be unwilling to risk their jobs unless they see some prospect of victory. Hence the importance of support from outside. The ILO Core Conventions, which uphold the rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining as well as equal remuneration and equality of opportunity among others, have so far lacked any mechanism by which they can be enforced, but the current context of globalisation provides resources and opens up possibilities previously non-existent. International Trade Secretariats and other union organisations assist organisations of women workers like SEWA, while NGOs like Traidcraft help to market the products of SSA. Codes of Conduct, forced on European and North American retailers by consumer campaigns, and claiming to guarantee basic rights to workers in companies supplying their products, may not work in India, with its long and shifting subcontracting chains in the informal sector; but solidarity action by consumer campaigners in particular cases can help women workers in the formal sector to win their rights. Another possibility is to work for a labour rights clause in World Trade Organisation agreements which can be used by women workers and activists to put pressure on the government to enact and implement legislation based on the ILO Core Conventions. The current proposal for a social clause by the ICFTU has drawbacks, but women activists can participate in the debate around it, and help to draw up a proposal which can be used to fight for women workers’ rights in the informal as well as formal sector. Women Working Worldwide, based in the UK and linked with women workers’ groups in several Asian and Central American countries, is one organisation exploring these possibilities, as well as attempting to link women workers in different countries working for the same multinationals. Such strategies offer opportunities to build solidarity with women workers, trade unions and labour rights groups in other parts of the world in a common struggle.
(This essay was published as Chapter 5 in Gender and Diversity: International Perspectives, ed. Fiona Colgan and Sue Ledwith, London and New York: Routledge, pp.95-112.)
Notes
1. I would like to thank all the women who participated in these interviews and discussions, and especially those who helped me to set them up and carry them out: Sujata Gothoskar, Vasuda, Ilina Sen, Subhashini Kohli, Mirai Chatterjee, Asha Mokashi and Chanda Korgaokar. [I would also like to thank Amrita Chhachhi, Renée Pittin and the Institute of Social Studies (The Hague) for organising the project ‘Women Organising in the Process of Industrialisation,’ for which some of these case studies were carried out.]
5. Group discussions with women garment workers conducted by Chanda Korgaokar and myself between 1998 and 2000, as part of an education and consultation exercise on Codes of Conduct by Women Working Worldwide. Over this period, participants from one sweatshop were first locked out and then dismissed for joining a union.
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