This is a report on a survey carried out in Bombay, India in 1976 - 77 by an informal women's socialist group. We are presenting here excerpts from this report.
The aim of this survey was to find out how the vast labour force of a metropolitan centre like Bombay is constituted, how and under what conditions it subsists and reproduces its labouring capacity. Particular emphasis was laid on the role of women in this process, both through their work outside the family in employment of various kinds, and through their work within the household. It was felt that an understanding of their work, the conditions under which they work,the way they experience these and their special problems would be a necessary precondition for undertaking the systematic work with such women which was envisaged for the future.
The nature of the project was such that a great deal of information was required of each family. This, combined with the fact that resources were somewhat limited, resulted in a decision to give up for the moment any attempt to obtain results which were statistically water-tight, and concentrate instead on obtaining information which would reveal areas both where further investigation could be undertaken and where action projects could be undertaken on an experimental basis. In a few cases only one woman was interviewed in each family, but in many it was found necessary to interview either a man or another woman in order to gather the required information, and in some instances three people had to be Interviewed. Thus forty-nine families were interviewed and eighty questionnaires filled out.
The sample was chosen by finding out from trade union contacts what families would be prepared to answer such a questionnaire. An attempt was made to avoid very skilled and highly paid worker's families on one side and totally pauperized families on the other, and thus to constitute a sample which would approximate to the average among working class families in Bombay.
Family Composition
The nuclear family was definitely an exception - twelve out of the forty nine studied. In two more cases a widowed mother lived alone with her child or children. In three of the families there was an unrelated person or persons from the village staying with them; in all other cases, the nuclear family was extended by the addition of one or more relatives. A frequent pattern was that a son or daughter who married would continue to live in the parental home; alternatively the mother and/or father of husband or wife would come to stay with a couple and their children. Various other relatives - sister or brother of the wife or husband, occasionally with their husband or wife, would be found living with the family. In view of various other factors, this pattern of family, neither the traditional joint family nor the nuclear family, becomes explicable. One is the problem of space. The rapid expansion of the workforce in Bombay has not been matched by a corresponding construction of housing facilities, with the result that a great deal of overcrowding has occurred. Thus in many instances housing is simply not available at prices which these families can afford, and they are forced to remain together with relatives. In some cases this is a temporary situation, as, for example when someone from the village comes to the city for the first time and stays with relatives or friends until alternative accommodation can be found. In many households a constantly shifting membership of this sort can be found. The other factor which makes the extended family a necessity even when alternative accommodation is available is the organization of labour within the family. At the income level of most of the men in the families investigated, supporting a family would have been very difficult without some supplementary source of income, and it was therefore more or less a necessity that someone else should work. Where the children are too young to work, the wife may have to do so, and then some other adult has to remain at home to do the housework and look after the children. In many cases the division of labour may be even more complicated, with more than two people going out to work and more than one person doing the housework. This explanation for the existence of extended families seems to be confirmed by the fact that in ten of the twelve nuclear families, the wife did not go out to work, and in one of the remaining instances there were grown-up daughters at home to do the housework.
The number of children in a family was not large, typically, a couple would have four or five children. A smaller number of children was rare and usually occurred in young families - i.e., more children might be expected in the future. On the other hand, larger families were also rare.
Living Conditions
Living conditions were almost universally extremely poor in the families considered. Extreme shortage of space and overcrowding were taken for granted with the average amount of space per person being 23.6 square feet. Only 19 families had all four basic amenities (water, electricity, lavatory, bathroom) and 13 had none. Every household had a ration card, but in some cases it was made out for fewer people than actually lived in the household and eighteen households had to supplement their diet with grain from outside because the rationed quota was insufficient. Three families had fewer members than were provided for on the ration card, and one of these sold all the grain it received as its quota and bought cheaper grain (this was a widow with three children). Milk cards were owned less frequently.
It is clear that the living conditions were such as to encourage the spread of disease. Overcrowding, lack of water or sanitary facilities, would all contribute towards the contracting and spreading of diseases within such households. The survey attempted, but unsuccessfully, to find out the prevalence of diseases within these families, both chronic and occasional. This is obviously an important area for further investigation, the existence of diseases would not only adversely affect the well-being of the families involved, but would also impair the quality of their labour-power, and this would be the case even if the disease was a relatively minor one but persisted over a long period of time (e.g. some intestinal parasites). In other ways, too, overcrowding would have adverse effects. Lack of space and comfort could lead to more tension, less possibility of resting or relaxing adequately, and thus the process of fully recovering from a day's work, fully reconstituting the capacity for labour, would tend not to occur. Further, certain modes of recreation such as reading, would be difficult if not impossible under such conditions especially if electricity is also lacking. Thus the development of mental capacities would be impaired, which would be detrimental on one side to children and young people who are being educated and who need to read and study, and on the other side to adults whose work denies them any possibility of developing mental capacities and who then cannot satisfy this need in periods of recreation either. Finally, the lack of facilities would cause inconvenience, wastage of time and additional labour - e.g. those households which lack water would have to carry all the water which is needed for household purposes.
Relations Between Husband and Wife
This was a difficult question to investigate, given the natural reticence about such a subject, and in many cases attitudes had to be gathered from unspoken reactions rather than from anything that was explicitly said. For example, one common response was that if a man was present, he would answer questions which were asked of the woman, on questions concerning her wages, he would clearly try to minimize their importance in relation to the subsistence of the family, dismissing them as merely contributing to the incidental expenses of the woman herself. Conversely, there was frequently an obvious reluctance on the part of the woman to answer questions in the presence of her husband, especially concerning such matters as conflicts and beatings. Consequently, a great deal of reliance cannot be placed on negative replies to these questions, and reliable results will have to await a more long-term investigation where time can be taken to win the confidence of the woman and obtain replies which are not marred by disturbing factors. However, the results obtained are by no means insignificant. (1) Control of income; in only four of the families investigated did a woman (two of them widowed) control the budget, and in only ten was there joint control by husband and wife. In all the other cases a man controlled the family income - either the husband, son or sons, or father of the woman interviewed. Although in a few cases the woman retained control over what she earned, in general her income too was subsumed under the family income and allocated with the rest. (2) General Decisions; with respect to more general decisions concerning the family, there were five cases where the woman took them, again two of them being widows. There was, however, far more collective decision-making on these matters; in 25 cases decisions were apparently made by husband and wife jointly, and in five more by the family collectively. In the rest of the cases a man made the decision, and it is likely that even in some of the former case the last word rested with the man. (3) Conflicts; nineteen families denied that any conflicts took place between husband and wife, but it is impossible to interpret this fact without more information since it could indicate either complete harmony between them or complete passivity on the part of the women which would preclude even the possibility of conflicts occurring. In eight cases the woman admitted to being regularly beaten sometimes fairly frequently (e.g. once a week), in other cases less (e.g. once a month or less). In one other case the woman was separated from her husband and living alone due to frequent conflicts, in two other cases she had separated and remarried. In six cases the women reported conflicts with their husbands but said they were not beaten, while in the remaining eight they reported conflicts but did not say whether they were beaten or not.
In many cases, ten, it appears that the women takes a subordinate position within the family which she may accept or may rebel against. Her whole upbringing from the stories she is told as a child to her own experiences, prepare her for such a position, and it is significant that 23 of the women replied in the affirmative when asked whether men are superior to women. However, there were many emphatic replies of an opposite type as well, and it would be useful to find out from a deeper inquiry what are the factors which lead to a challenging of the traditional subordinate status.
Housework
Nineteen of the families investigated had no water supply; only 5 had gas stoves, 4 cooked on coal, 16 on kerosene and the rest on a combination of kerosene and coal, wood, or sawdust, often relying less on kerosene. These factors alone indicate a considerable addition of time and arduousness to the housework. Where there is no water supply, all water for drinking, cooking and washing has to be fetched, sometimes requiring to be carried over fairly long distances; kerosene, firewood or coal also has to be fetched; lighting a fire for cooking may take time and effort; pots and pans get charred and blackened, thus requiring more cleaning; the fire may need constant attention to keep it alight and at the required pitch; and so on and so forth. The totally unprocessed nature of the food which is bought is another factor adding hours of labour-time to the housework, for example, cleaning grain, getting it milled and making chapati's for a large family would take up many hours of work which in more advanced countries would be totally eliminated because cereals are purchased in a form in which they can be consumed immediately. All this is done without mechanical aids (one family had a mixer, four had sewing machines, but no other machines were owned by the families in the sample). Thus although the food was extremely simple and the living requirements minimal, the time and effort involved was disproportionately large because everything had to be done by hand.
It was difficult to get precise estimates of how much time was spent on housework, the more so because it was often divided up between many members of the family. Moreover, wide variations between one family and another made the calculation of averages somewhat meaningless. Nonetheless, it is possible to obtain an impression of the way in which housework is organized in most families of four or more members.
On average, the labour-time involved in maintaining a moderate to large household would be around twelve hours a day, more if there were small children. In only three of the families was any outside (i.e. paid) help for half an hour to two hours per day employed. In many, on the contrary, the woman was going out to do just such work for more prosperous families. How then, was this problem solved? The solution almost universally employed was to constitute the household in such a way that at least one woman could be engaged in housework on a full-time basis, and in many cases more than one woman was so engaged. When asked how much time they spent on housework, such women would generally reply that they spend 9 to 13 hours per day, or sometimes simply the whole day. Given the nature of the work, the primitive means employed and the poor conditions under which it was carried out, it is legitimate to assume that the labour-power consumed in the course of it was as great in amount as the labour-power consumed in a moderately strenuous job. It was all the more shocking, then, to find that almost all the women who worked outside would come home and put in 4 to 9 hours more of work. Given that some of them were doing part-time work, their working day in most cases was 12 to 14 hours, and sometimes even longer. There can be no doubt that in such cases the woman was suffering from over-work which could not but have an adverse effect on her health and well-being and capacity to work. It was surmised that this situation would be intensified where there was a fall in real wages because there would be an attempt to compensate for the reduction in use-values purchased by performing more work at home. However, this aspect has not been adequately investigated during this survey and awaits further study.
Very few men reported any engagement in housework at all. Of the handful who did, only one reported engaging in it for 4 hours a day,the others all reporting around one hour or less. This becomes more significant when we take into account the fact that in a substantial number of the families studied there were unemployed men who were not prevented by any physical reasons from undertaking some of the burden of household labour. Clearly the factor operating in these cases is the convention that household labour (however grueling it may be) is women's work, and that a man found to be engaging in it would be considered strange or ridiculous. 34 women replied in the affirmative when asked whether it is a woman's duty to look after the house and only 8 gave a definite negative reply. 21 thought that a man should not even help in the house, even though twelve of these very same women replied, some quite emphatically, that housework was boring. In general it would not even occur to a man to offer, or a woman to ask a man, to help with the housework. It is taken for granted that the women of the household have to distribute the work amongst themselves and manage the best they can. And because it is accepted as something like a law of nature rather than a socially determined fact, the callousness involved in expecting women to drudge all day is not perceived as such, but is seen as unavoidable and necessary.
The practical consequences of this division of labour are far from negligible. The widely observed phenomenon of lower militancy among women workers despite their lower pay and worse conditions is surely linked to the fact that it is they who are given the final responsibility for assuring that the family is kept alive, for pacifying hungry children and so on. The factors which prevent them from engaging in any action which endangers the meagre living they already have are far greater than the factors operating on male workers; and unless some attempt is made to understand their special problems and take them into account, it is likely that they will continue to play the kind of role they have played in the past. Likewise with working class housewives. In the scattered instances where working class women have in the past become involved in struggles, they have shown considerable militancy, indicating that they are by no means inherently passive. But their large-scale involvement in the struggle to achieve a decent standard of living can occur only once it is seen as necessarily involving the total transformation of their own role within the family.
Wage Labour
83.5% of the women in the sample engaged in some kind of paid employment mainly as factory workers or domestic labourers. The most striking aspect of wages earned was the wide differential between the amount earned by men and that earned by women. Men were earning average of Rs. 290 per month, and where wages fell below Rs. 100 it was usually in the case of very young men or boys. Women were earning an average of Rs. 120 per month. Only a few of these were cases of part-time work; in a large majority the total wage was so low because the rate per hour was itself very low. It was difficult to find instances where women were paid less then men for the same work because, typically, women were employed in jobs which were confined to women. In a large number of cases they were engaged in domestic labour, for example, or in sewing or packing in factories or workshops. But one would find, for example, a male supervisor getting Rs. 500 per month while a female supervisor got Rs. 250 a month, male factory workers getting an average of Rs. 300 per month, while full time female factory workers got an average of Rs. 219 per month. While factory wages for women were considerably higher than the small sums they earned doing domestic labour or hawking, there was still a differential with male wages which could not be accounted for by differences in skill. Only 5 of the women (as compared with 18 of the men) belonged to any union, and many of them complained that women were not made permanent and were retrenched as soon as they got married (whereas 26 of the men had permanent employment). Thus while wages in general were quite low and often working conditions were not good, women at all levels were somewhat worse off than men at the same level, and tended in any case to be concentrated at the bottom of the spectrum. They were compelled to accept such conditions by sheer economic need, and many of them expressed their experience of the forced character of their work by saying that they would stop working if their husbands earned enough money to maintain the family. Most of them, however, had a somewhat contradictory attitude to their work, because they did appreciate the relative independence that came with a wage, and in some cases the variety afforded by outside work as compared with the monotony of continuous household drudgery. The conditions under which women work, outside the home, their attitudes to it and their special needs and problems are questions which require further investigation as well as action.
Conclusions
The survey indicates that on the average, labour-power is being bought and sold well below its minimum legitimate value: in other words, the collective wage of an average family is not sufficient to ensure a standard of living which satisfies even minimal physical needs not to speak of basic intellectual and cultural needs. In many instances this leads to the phenomenon of working class indebtedness, which requires further study. This condition must be related to the specific character of capitalism in India, to the fact that it is a country which has been industrializing within the context of a world economy dominated by far more advanced capitalist countries. A backward rural economy constantly forces the migration of large sections of its population into the urban areas in search of work, and their situation is so desperate that they are compelled to accept work at incredibly low wages in order to subsist. Over 90% of the families who had migrated to Bombay originated in families which were either totally landless or had a purely nominal amount of land. Often being unorganized and difficult to organize, they have great difficulty in obtaining higher wages and better conditions of work, especially in a situation where the constant inflow of destitute proletarianized elements from the countryside tends to depress the wage-rate. There is thus constituted a massive surplus population which not only depresses the wage-rate on one side, but constitutes a drain on wages on the other, because its subsistence has to be taken out of the mass of wages earned by the employed workers. What is definitely suggested by this is that any attempts to raise the average wage-rate cannot succeed unless there is a simultaneous and co-ordinated attempt to organize the unemployed and casual workers.
If the average wage-rate is too low, then clearly the wage-rate of female workers is much too low. Wherever it was possible to find male and female workers with comparable levels of skill, the female workers were found to receive a substantially lower wage, and this was correlated with their being less often organized, more often temporary or casual labourers, and thus being unable to obtain the statutory minimum wage of Rs. 300 per month. At the same time, it was very commonly the case that women were engaged in the very lowest forms of labour, those which were least skilled and most monotonous. Again, this must be at least in part related to the recent emergence of much of the labour force from a backward rural setting. Traditionally, little emphasis has been given to the education of women, the attempt being rather to marry them off as soon as possible. As a result, they have come to constitute the very lowest section of the labour-force, illiterate or semi-literate, unskilled, ill educated. The fact that by and large the labour-power is of inferior quality because it has been produced in this way tends to reinforce passive acceptance of a position of inferiority, both within the family and in the labour-market. The transition to the city has, however, brought about significant changes in attitudes and cultural patterns which need to be studied further. Most importantly, the position of inferiority assigned to women is being questioned, and the demand for equal wages could constitute the basis for militant struggles. What emerges very strongly from the data on wages and living standards is that the assertion often made that workers are being corrupted by excessively high wages is utterly nonsensical, it is true that the families investigated here did not belong to the highest wage-bracket, but they did not belong to the poorest position either. They all had at least one wage-earning member and a roof over their heads which is more than many other families have.
And yet they live and work in conditions which can only be called sub-human; their lives are inevitably stunted and they never get the opportunity to develop their capacities or express them creatively. To compare these conditions with the even more abysmal conditions in rural areas is beside the point. The fact is that the living standard of average working class families falls for below the level at which even basic health can be ensured. The incidence of malnutrition and diseases both chronic and occasional, as well as conditions such as anemia in such families, is a problem which requires further investigation.
Closely related to the low wages and poor living conditions revealed, was the widespread occurrence of overwork. The incidence of overtime and excessively long working hours among male workers was not investigated here and needs to be studied. But it was clearly indicated and can surely be confirmed by further investigation that the majority of women had an excessively long working day, if the working day is defined by the time spent on the reproduction of labour power and not simply the time spent in wage-labour. Since in many cases the lowness in wages is partially compensated for by an increased load in terms of housework - e.g. where water has to be carried because only premises without water can be afforded, or where a great deal of time has to be spent cleaning grain or dal because it costs too much to get cleaned food, or where all clothes have to be washed at home because it costs too much to get them laundered - the struggle for an adequate living wage is clearly linked to the necessity to limit the working day to a length which allows sufficient leisure time for rest and recreation. It is the illusion that the wage is the price of labour that leads to a de-linking of wage-labour from domestic labour. When it is recognized that the wage is, on the contrary, the price of labour-power or labouring capacity, which is sold on the labour-market as wage-labour, then it is apparent that wage-labour which obtains wages, which are used to buy commodities for subsistence, and the domestic labour which further contributes to the production and reproduction of labour-power, are merely different stages in the production of the same thing: labour-power.
Important conclusions follow. Firstly that working class women, through their labour, play a crucial role in the reproduction of society. As this survey shows, their labour plays an essential part in (1) the production of the commodity labour-power, (2) the production of other commodities for sale by capitalists, (3) the maintenance and reproduction of a reserve army of labour and (4) the performance of circulation and servicing functions necessary for the reproduction of capitalist society. But it is evident that in the performance of these functions they are compelled to carry out excessive amounts of labour and to receive in return less then the necessary means of subsistence. Thus it can be concluded that the struggles which appear to be relevant to them alone - such as that for equal wages, that for domestic facilities like a water supply or socialized children, or that against rising prices - are in actuality an integral part of the total working class struggle to achieve conditions in which it can satisfy its human needs and develop its human capacities. And conversely, that struggle itself can succeed only to the extent that it involves these women and posits their emancipation as an essential aspect of its goal. An approach which integrates, both in analysis and in action, the struggle in the factories with social struggles of this type, is thus a precondition for the ultimate transformation of the conditions which at present exist.
Sisters, don't say you can't do anything...
No more lack of confidence
No more hesitation.
Let us ask ourselves clearly this question.
What do we want?
We want total and complete liberation.
Let them mock us, a day will come when they will no longer laugh.
Is this day far away?
What does it matter.
We will have difficulty, suffering, struggles.
Happiness will be for our sisters, for the women born after us.
(from La Voix des Femmes, March 1848, a socialist feminist daily newspaper published by women of Paris and quoted in Sheila Rowbotham's Women, Resistance and Revolution)