|
Magazine
SOCIETY
A legacy of protest and resistance
NILANJANA BISWAS
|
The recent struggle for better conditions in Bangalore’s garment industry bears a striking similarity to New York’s 100 years ago.
|
Outsourcing is Bangalore’s lifeblood. But the city’s outsourcing operates at two levels. The dazzling world of software outsourcing is the city’s pride; the other — outsourcing in the garments sector — is what the city would rather not think about.
PHOTO: NILANJANA BISWAS
Collective resistance: Resisting exploitation in India’s Silicon Valley.
In software corporate world of Bangalore where I used to work, no year went by without a great deal of fuss over March 8. Female employees were urged to embrace their femininity. Many turned up in saris (‘the traditional look’) and makeup
(‘the modern touch’). The first message in the inbox would typically be from HR: “Happy Women’s Day!” it said, with pink roses circling madly in the background. Female colleagues had no doubt that March 8 was the day that celebrated “womanhood”.
It did, did it? If, at the turn of the 20th century, New York’s garment workers were told that their struggles were precursors to a global celebration of the accident of being born female, they might have been horrified. Womanhood was no cause for celebration; rather it was a reason for their unending exploitation.
Hundred years ago
Let’s go back in time for just a moment. Imagine long lines of immigrant women on the spring morning of March 8 1908, walking down the streets of New York, their wailing children quietened with bottles of sugar-water.
Fists in the air; eyes burning with anger and hope, what slogans were they shouting, these women of New York’s cramped needle thread factories who, at the end of a 70-hour workweek, took home six one-dollar bills? Shorter workdays; better work conditions; better wages certainly so that the children may survive. Listen to the clip-clop of horses trotting along, bearing baton-wielding policemen — a reminder of the strong arm of the law, ever ready to beat the marchers back into the unbearable conditions they wished so desperately to change.
In 1910, two years after this and other militant protests by garment workers, when the Socialist Congress in Copenhagen resolved to observe March 8 as the International Women’s Day, a signpost was planted.
This, said the signpost, is the long and winding road to women’s freedom; from here on, there is no map; only cues you may take from the past. And women took to that seemingly endless road in thousands. It was no less than a miracle, this ability to beat back the crushing circumstances of one’s life and find common cause with one’s sisters in struggle. March 8 symbolises that indomitable spirit of unity and militancy.
However, 100 years since those historic garment workers’ marches, little has changed for garment workers in another part of the world, this time in the globalising city of Bangalore.
Outsourcing is Bangalore’s lifeblood; its arterial network of roads and flyovers ever expanding to allow the pump and flow of outsourced goods and services. But the city’s outsourcing operates at two levels, so unalike that you could think of them as two separate worlds. The dazzling world of software outsourcing is the city’s pride; the other world — outsourcing in the garments sector — is what the city would rather not think about.
With 5,00,000 workers working in garment factories in and around Bangalore, the industry is Karnataka’s single largest industrial employer.
Similarities
The profile of Bangalore’s garment industry bears a striking similarity to New York’s a hundred years ago. Like 19th century New York’s, Bangalore’s garment workforce is overwhelmingly female. If Italian and European Jewish immigrants, fleeing poverty or persecution in their homelands, formed the pool of cheap labour at New York’s needle thread factories; first-generation migrants from rural Karnataka, pauperised by recurring crop failure, queue up at Bangalore’s garment factory gates.
Forced migration creates a cheap, vulnerable and docile workforce, fuelling vast profit margins for Karnataka’s Rs. 7000 crore per annum readymade garment industry. Looking to the city for a better life, migrant women instead find themselves facing grinding poverty and horrifying work conditions.
Like their New York sisters did, Bangalore’s garment workers typically work between 60 to 70 hours a week; but in real terms, for less wages. Under a dollar a day was the norm then; Rs. 100 a day is what a garment worker here gets. Overtime is rarely or fully paid.
A recent study found that the basic expenses of a garment worker — just food, rent, education, medicines and transport — work out to Rs. 150 a day. As a result, indebtedness stands at an average of Rs. 24,000 per family, with most families depending on two or more incomes.
The industry makes mockery of the concept of the minimum wage. On the one hand garment workers are denied the minimum wage; on the other the Garment Manufacturers’ Association moves the court for a stay whenever a wage revision is announced. As a result, the minimum wage remains what it was the previous year, with a small adjustment for inflation.
No such stay of course on production targets. The number of minutes every cut, trim and make operation may take is finely calibrated according to scientific time-and-motion studies. These are then used to set and raise production targets. Verbal abuse and sexual harassment are routine shop-floor practices to ensure that targets are met. And to do so, garment workers report that they often skip lunch and toilet breaks, with disastrous health results: severe backaches, piles, headaches, urinary tract infections, menstrual disorders, dust allergies and tuberculosis.
In the news
In recent times, Bangalore’s garment industry has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. Even as I write, at least 260 employees of a company in Tumkur Road lie in two ESI hospitals in the city, admitted with gastroenteritis caused by contaminated water supplied at the workplace. In 2004, one worker died and several others fought for their lives after being exposed to chemical poisoning at their factory, a charge that the employers got away with just denial.
In the last one year, several untimely deaths and suicides have taken place among garment workers. In February 2007, 25-year-old Ammu, a single mother mired in poverty, hanged herself in the factory toilet, following alleged harassment by her supervisor. On September 19, 2007, 39-year-old Padmavathi dropped dead outside her factory gate. Eighteen-year-old Renuka killed herself at her residence in Peenya on October 12, 2007 again following alleged harassment at her workplace by her superiors.
More awareness
If the New York protests were often violently put down, and if key organisers like Clara Lemlich, who led the massive strike of shirtwaist workers in New York in 1909, were beaten and arrested, the story of those resisting exploitation in Bangalore’s garment factories is no different.
V.P. Rukmini, General Secretary of the Bangalore-based Garment and Textile Workers Union (GATWU), was suspended from work merely for advising workers of their rights. Countless others too have faced suspension. Protesters, including international campaigns expressing solidarity, have been gagged through court injunctions. Peaceful condolence meetings have been attacked, while the police watched.
A hundred years of struggle, but what has changed? Perhaps the fact that there is today a global awareness of injustice and human rights at a scale unknown at the turn of the last century. Bangalore’s garment workers, led by GATWU, are today organising themselves, with widespread support from national and international fair trade campaigners.
Email: nilanjanabis@gmail.com
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
|
