Foreword and Preface of To Do Something Beautiful (a novel)

 

Foreword to the Kindle Edition

     This novel was inspired by many of the women and men I have met in the course of my work: by their ability to keep alive their dignity, humanity, and even sense of humour in the midst of poverty and overwork; by their aspiration not merely to survive but to create a better world, to do something beautiful. However, poor people in isolation are powerless; if they compete with one another as individuals or groups, a few may come out on top, but the majority always lose. Therefore one of the most crucial and admirable qualities of these women and men is their capacity to build relationships of solidarity, friendship and love across traditional barriers of caste, religion, language and even nationality. The spontaneous warmth and generosity I have encountered among working women in widely separated parts of South Asia never fails to move me, and I think it would not be an exaggeration to talk of a common culture which they share despite superficial differences.

     There have been many changes since I wrote this novel in the 1980s. For example, information and communication technologies have been revolutionised, and the value of the rupee has fallen to less than a quarter of what it was then. The prices of essential commodities, utilities and services, especially food and public transport, have risen correspondingly or even more. Wages have increased, but at the lowest levels have not kept pace with inflation. At the opposite pole, there has been a vast accumulation of wealth, and consequently the gap between rich and poor has widened to obscene proportions. Lured by sky-rocketing real estate prices and the prospect of union-free workforces, many industrialists have sold their factories in Bombay and either subcontracted their work to small enterprises or shifted production to other locations where vicious union-busting is the norm even in large-scale industry. The big pharamaceutical factories have disappeared, as have many other large factories, and along with them the relatively well-paid and secure jobs they represented. On a more positive note, formal workers are now more aware of the importance of fighting for the rights of informal workers, democratic independent unions have proliferated, and these unions have formed an all-India federation that counteracts the earlier isolation of independent unions.

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.