Wages for Housework in India?

 (This is a slightly edited version of a presentation at a panel on ‘Herstories of Wages for Housework’ on Day 1 of the Symposium on Wages for Housework, 4–6 March, 2021, organised by the Laws of Social Reproduction Project (Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London); Initiative for What Works to Advance Women and Girls in the Economy (IWWAGE); and the Feminist Economics Saturday Discussion Group (FESDIG), New Delhi.) 

The Covid-19 Lockdown in India: A Predictable Catastrophe for Informal Labour

The first case of Covid-19 in India was detected in Kerala on 30 January 2020, with two more on 2 and 3 February. All three were students who had returned from Wuhan. By then it was common knowledge that the virus was spreading around the world. The World Health Organisation had declared a global health emergency, but the Indian government made no move to restrict international travel, test arrivals for Covid, or ensure that the infection did not spread. On the contrary, the main preoccupation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was hosting Donald Trump, and especially organising the ‘Namaste Trump’ event in Motera Stadium in Ahmedabad in the PM’s home state of Gujarat, ensuring that more than 100,000 people attended the event and lined the streets from the airport to the stadium.

By 4 March, 26 more people had tested positive: one who had travelled in the United Arab Emirates, others who were either Italian tourists or had returned from Italy, and those who had come into contact with them, including family members. More people who had travelled to Iran, Malaysia, Thailand, South Korea, Oman, the United States, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, Greece, Qatar, Spain, Russia, the UK, the Netherlands, Finland, France, Indonesia, Germany, Ireland and the Philippines tested positive in the first three weeks of March. By this time, local transmission was taking place.    

The first response to the crisis from the government was Modi’s address to the nation on 18 March announcing a ‘Janata curfew’ on Sunday 22 March from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., during which only essential workers would be allowed to leave their homes; at 5 p.m., people were asked to come out on their doorsteps or balconies and clap or ring bells to express gratitude to frontline staff. Then, at 8 p.m. on 24 March, he announced a three-week total lockdown beginning at midnight, in just four hours. There was panic buying as people rushed to the shops to stock up on essentials, throwing social distancing to the winds. But the worst impact was on informal workers, especially inter-state or intra-state migrants. As transport shut down and they lost their livelihoods and were evicted from their accommodation, tens of millions of them trecked back to their villages on foot, on bicycles, or in any way they could: desperate journeys over hundreds of miles. The sheer scale of the exodus and the heart-breaking scenes, including of hundreds dying of exhaustion, dehydration, starvation, accidents and police brutality, compelled the mainstream media (apart from BJP propaganda outlets) to cover what was happening.

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.

Alternatives to Neoliberalism in India

 

Introduction

Modern India’s relationship with the capitalist world economy has been through three broad phases. First, British colonialism ruined a flourishing textile industry in India and converted the country into a source of raw materials for its own manufacturing industry, forcing India into the position of a colony subordinate to an imperial power. Second, the post-independence Indian National Congress (hereafter Congress) government embarked on a process of industrialisation in an economy that was heavily protected though not completely cut off from global capital. The third period, globalisation and neoliberalism, is usually traced to the economic liberalisation of 1991, when India began a process of re-integration into the world economy 

This chapter will sketch an outline for each of these three periods, introducing the social forces and struggles that could constitute the basis for moving forward from neoliberalism to an economy where production is for need, not profit, and working people control their lives and work.

The Politics of Globalisation: Theoretical Debates

 Defining globalisation

Globalisation has become a buzz-word, yet there are widely differing conceptions of what it means. Part of the problem is that those who use the word seldom bother to define it. Prima facie, it would appear that a globalised world is one in which there are no barriers (other than purely natural and technological ones) to the movement of people, products, money and ideas around the world. But globalisation in this very general sense pre-dates capitalism and the formation of nation-states. Clearly, this is not the subject of current debates about globalisation, although it is not irrelevant to them. It is presumably in order to clarify this point that various adjectives are used to qualify ‘globalisation’, such as ‘capitalist’, ‘imperialist’ and ‘neoliberal’. However this creates new problems, because these adjectives have their own meanings. When they are combined with ‘globalisation’, where do these meanings end and the meaning of globalisation begin? 

Introduction to Workers, Unions, and Global Capitalism: Lessons from India

 

The politics of globalisation

Globalisation has had a profound impact on labour worldwide. But what, exactly, has this impact been? Enthusiastic proponents of globalisation in its heretofore dominant form argue that it levels the playing field between developed and developing countries, creating employment in the latter and enabling them to pull themselves out of poverty (cf T.Friedman 2005). Diametrically opposed to them are the passionate proponents of de-globalisation, who see globalisation as synonymous with inequality and oppression, and advocate disabling the World Trade Organisation (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and transnational corporations (cf. Bello 2000).

The economic crisis, which started in the US in September 2008 and swept through the world, left the first camp in disarray. With financial institutions collapsing, millions of jobs being lost, GDP shrinking and world trade contracting (Wade 2009), even Thomas Friedman (2009) had to admit that the market was ‘hitting the wall’. The opposite camp, predictably, was triumphant: ‘The current global downturn, the worst since the Great Depression 70 years ago, pounded the last nail into the coffin of globalization,’ proclaimed Walden Bello (2009).

However, there is a third position, which represents the majority of workers throughout the world. They have been fighting a losing battle for jobs, better employment conditions and social security for over three decades, a struggle that has become more desperate since the downturn. While it is clear that the model of globalisation pursued so far has been a disaster for them, de-globalisation would mean a further loss of jobs for workers in exporting countries, and raise both costs of production for companies using their products and the cost of living for consumers. Dissatisfied with both these positions, international unions have advocated building workers’ rights into the new global order (cf. ICFTU 1999), but this has yet to emerge as a concrete alternative.

This book argues that it is not globalisation as such but the dominant neoliberal model of it, alongside traditional authoritarian labour relations, that have exerted downward pressure on labour standards.  It attempts to put flesh on the bones of the third alternative by looking at workers’ responses to globalisation: responses which indicate that labour is ‘a social force which is central to the development of the international political economy and international relations’ (Harrod and O’Brien 2002a: 8).

Women Workers and Neoliberalism

Book review of Women Workers and Globalization: Emergent Contradictions in India, by Indrani Mazumdar, Stree, Kolkata, for Centre for Women’s Development Studies, Delhi, 2007. xxiv + 349 pages.

The bulk of this book consists of four sectoral studies of women workers in Delhi and its satellite townships of Noida and Gurgaon, through a combination of structured questionnaires and individual and group discussions conducted in 2002-2004. 

Trade Unions and Women's Autonomy: Organisational Strategies of Women Workers in India

 

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.

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.