Organisations based on the workplace are among the most stable and powerful, and historically have achieved tremendous benefits for their members. Yet women, although they do considerably more than half the work in the world, have never participated fully in these organisations nor fully benefited from them. As a result, women are even now the most down-trodden section of working people — overworked, underpaid or unpaid, subjected to the worst working conditions, harassed and humiliated. And this situation, rather than improving, threatens to get worse as employers consciously implement policies which erode the very basis of such organisation.
We can illustrate this by looking at three of the different types of women's employment in Bombay, each of which has its own problems and poses its own challenge to organisation.
Women in Large Scale Factories
In some of the large-scale modern factories, especially in the pharmaceutical industry, a substantial number of women are employed. Although the facilities available to them may not come up to ideal standards, they are yet very much better than the conditions which women in other types of employment have to put up with. By and large these women are paid the same as men who do the same work, although there are rare cases where they are given a different job title which goes with a lower rate of pay. In addition to the fringe benefits which male workers are entitled to, they also get others such as maternity leave of three months on full pay and the use of a company creche for their children. They have a five-day working week of not more than forty-five hours; many of them get free or subsidised transport for most of their travel to and from work.
Rohini Banaji is presently working with the Union Research Group in Bombay. She also working with a slum women's cooperative.
These facilities were not always there. At one time, women in the pharmaceutical industry used to have their employment terminated as soon as they got married. Moving from that situation to their situation at present has involved a coordinated struggle on the part of well-organised unions which have fought for and won benefits for male as well as female workers.
These facilities were not always there. At one time, women in the pharmaceutical industry used to have their employment terminated as soon as they got married. Moving from that situation to their situation at present has involved a coordinated struggle on the part of well-organised unions which have fought for and won benefits for male as well as female workers. It looks as if this is a case where workplace organisation has really scored a success so far as women are concerned, and in a way this is true. Yet there is discrimination against women too. Although formally there is equal pay for male and female workers, women are excluded from certain jobs which are traditionally regarded as male preserves. While many women themselves may agree with the reasoning which characterises these jobs as being unsuitable for women, they do not accept one of the consequences: namely, that women are by and large not represented in the more skilled grades with higher pay, and have more limited chances of promotion. Worse still, the prospects for the survival of this sector of women's employment are very far from bright. The grim fact is that for the last ten years or more, hardly any women have been recruited into it. Many of those who remain have been working at these jobs for twenty, twenty-five or thirty years. They will be retiring in the near future; and there is little chance that they will be replaced by younger women.
In part this is due to a management policy which hits all workers, male and female. More and more employers are going in for subcontracting, giving out their work to small and medium-scale undertakings where employment conditions are in every way worse. (The characterisation according to size is of course very rough - there are large factories where conditions are just as bad.) They do not seem to mind taking the risk that the quality of their products will suffer, and some are even ready to carry on paying wages to the 'surplus staff which is thereby created in their own establishments. They know that these people will sooner or later retire, either due to old age or due to frustration (such 'surplus' people being pushed into a situation where voluntary retirement appears attractive), leaving the employers with an arrangement which not only enables them to make use of cheap labour, but also gives them much more flexibility than they would have with their own permanent workforce.
The other management policy is one which hits women in particular, and consists, very simply, in replacing women by men. The arguments for this are precisely the gains which women have made through trade union organisation: it is not worth employing women because they have to be given maternity leave, they have to be provided with a creche, they cannot be asked to work shifts. We are almost led to the conclusion that when women are not organised, they lose, and when they are organised, they still lose. But this is not quite true, because one of the reasons why this situation has arisen is that women have not remained active and influential within their unions, they have not succeeded in ensuring that their interests are properly represented within these largely male-dominated organisations. Partly this is related to pressures outside the workplace — housework, childcare, family disapproval of their participation in union activity. But partly, too, it is related to the way in which unionism has developed, to procedures and modes of functioning which make unionism a totally alien world to most women. And this is a self-reinforcing process, since the more women withdraw from unionism, the more alien to them it becomes.
Women in Small & Medium Scale Factory
A second category of women workers are those who are employed in small and medium-scale concerns in garments, electronics, pharmaceuticals, etc. - typically the type of concerns to which the bigger companies subcontract their work or which are set up in Free Trade Zones. At first sight it appears that what the first section of women have lost in terms of employment, these women have gained. But is it really a gain? The same work which is done in the large companies is done by them for one-fifth of the wages or less. Working hours are much longer, and they have none of the facilities available to women working in the organised sector - sometimes not even basic necessities like toilets and rest rooms. And to top it all, they are often subjected to sexual harassment in the workplace.
They tolerate all this for an obvious reason: they have no choice. With the number of jobs in the large-scale sector static or shrinking, there is virtually no chance of their ever getting one. And since they need the money, they cling to whatever employment they can get. A similar situation exists with women employed on a temporary basis in industries such as textiles.
But why don't they organise and fight for better conditions? Some do try, but the very high failure rate inevitably acts as a discouragement to others. The main problem is job insecurity. There is nothing to stop an employer from throwing out a worker whom he discovers or even suspects to be trying to form a union. And even if she gets past this initial stage and the workforce as a whole is successfully organised, most employers of this type prefer to close down their operations rather than face a unionised workforce. They either wait till the rebellious workers have been starved into finding other jobs and then restart in the same place with new recruits or else shift to some other place altogether. These workers, therefore, cannot fight for better pay and conditions unless they are prepared to lose their jobs — and for many who may have others dependent on their pay, even a few months without a job can be a frightening prospect, nor is there any guarantee that they will find another job even then. Consequently, even women who begin by being militant often react to experiences of defeat and dismissal by becoming passive.
Slum Women
If the first group of women have, in the past, been able to organise themselves successfully, and the second group is finding it difficult to organise, a third group has in most cases not even begun to do so. These are slum women who cannot find employment even in small-scale sweat-shops, but cannot survive without employment either. Most women living in slums fall into this category, although there are a few who are purely housewives, a few who work in small-scale factories and a few more who are self-employed — keeping a vegetable stall, making garlands which their husbands sell, brewing illicit liquor, tailoring with their own machines and so on.
Without any capital to start anything on their own, unable to find regular employment, the majority of slum women have to take whatever work they can get. Most of them work as domestic servants, their workload varying from one or two houses every day to eight houses or more. Young girls of barely ten years old are often taken out of school either to do the housework and look after smaller children while their mothers go out to work, or to go out to work themselves, or both. Women who work in many houses often suffer from sores on their hands and feet because they spend so much time washing with very strong soaps or detergents. They have no security, since there is no formal contract between employer and employee, and everything — whether they get a weekly day off, whether they get paid for days when they are too sick to work, how much work they have to do and how much they get paid for it, whether they get tea and food or not — depends on the understanding between them and their employers. Festival holidays are the opposite of holidays for them, with extra work at the houses where they work as well as at home.
Many women work at home for factories — plaiting leather straps for chappals, fitting hair-clips onto metal strips, detaching plastic buttons, making bead-chains, etc. In many ways, this is the most insidious form of exploitation. The pay is incredibly low (e.g. 30 paise for fitting 1 kilo of hairclips), yet women take such work because they can do it at home in the intervals between their other work even if they have babies whom they cannot leave. However to compensate for the low pay they have to do more work, so the whole family gets drawn into it, even very small children, and women sit up late into the night working by candle-light, ruining their eyes and general health. In practice this means that not one minute of leisure is left to them; if they ever get a chance to sit down, they feel compelled to pick up this work.
Economic need to some extent breaks down caste taboos - e.g. many domestic servants say that in their caste they are not supposed to do this work - but there are limits to this process and scavenging, for example, a dirty and unpleasant job, is seldom done by women of other castes.*
What is common to all these women is that they are constantly in need of money, and usually in debt. The nature of their work, the fact that it is isolated rather than collective, prevents them from organising themselves to improve their terms of employment; instead they compensate by working longer hours. Long hours of work, coming on top of a heavy load of housework in very primitive conditions, further restricts their chances of organising by leaving them no time to meet other women: on the contrary, competition for scarce resources like water often leads to squabbles and fights. The constant struggle for survival makes any improvement in their living standards seem like an impossible dream.
*According to Hinduism, the Indian people is organised into hereditary social castes. Members of each caste are restricted to particular occupations.
Organising
There are enormous differences in the conditions of life and work of these three groups of women workers; in fact, women in the first group often employ women from the third as domestic servants. Yet all three have problems which can only be solved by organising in some new way which has not been tried by them before. This is not to say that the traditional types of organisation are impossible for them or cannot help at all. There have been successful cases of organisation into unions of women of all three categories, with consequent improvement in their employment conditions. But the inadequacy of these efforts is shown by the fact that the problems still remain. Is it possible to find ways in which they can organise so that they can help not only themselves but also each other?
In India at least, such attempts are in their very, very initial stages, barely more than ideas really. Yet it is only by describing the embryonic experiments and discussing the ideas that we can progress towards realising them in practice.
Some women in large-scale industry are thinking of forming women's cells or committees which can find out women's problems, formulate demands or programmes to overcome these problems, and represent women's interests on the union committee. The advantage of having a separate committee is that women can be encouraged to participate much more fully and express themselves more freely in such a context. Often everything about union meetings, from their timings to the fluency of practised male speakers, combines to discourage women from taking part. At their own meetings, organised according to their own convenience, women will find it much easier to discuss and make up their minds on not only their particular issues but even on general issues which are common to both women and men. They will thus be able to take an independent standpoint within the union rather than either passively accepting decisions made by others or ineffectively complaining about them.
A more difficult step, but one which is not impossible, is to organise meetings which bring together women from different factories. This has been done, in an informal way, and has resulted in a useful exchange of information and ideas. But if we want to achieve real mutual support and coordinated action on common issues, much more sustained and systematic contact will be required; and this in turn presupposes women who take this work sufficiently seriously to spend their own time on it - because while women's committee meetings can be arranged during working time or lunch breaks, it would be necessary, initially at least, to hold inter-factory meetings outside working hours. As yet there are few women prepared to make this sacrifice. Probably only if women's committees within factories gain sufficient momentum will enough enthusiasm be generated to enable women to spend time in meeting women from other factories without feeling that they are unduly neglecting their families for an activity whose usefulness they are not very sure of. Alternatively, getting time off work for such sessions also presupposes that they are a sufficiently strong force within the factory to make such a demand with any hope of success. In either case, then, organisation of women within the factory seems to be a necessary first step, along with, perhaps, informal inter-factory meetings to sustain and encourage the women who are most enthusiastic.
For women of the second group to organise themselves is a much greater problem altogether. In the case of the first group there at least exists a fairly strong workers' organisation, even if it is male-dominated, whereas in this case there is nothing at all. The vulnerability of these workers on the one side, the flexibility of their employers on the other (their ability to dismiss workers, to lock-out, to close down and move elsewhere) makes it difficult to see where to begin. Any struggle launched by a particular workforce, without support from other women of the same category or women workers of other categories, is almost certain to be defeated. So it seems that whereas the first group can best start by organising within their own factory, this second group may have to start the other way around — by contacting women in other factories, in secret, trying to form a general union which encompasses all these women. And even when they begin to launch struggles, it would be better if initially these were unified struggles over common issues — such as implementing protective legislation or gaining basic facilities — which will make it difficult for employers to pick off and victimise individual women, or close down individual factories.
All this is a very difficult proposition. These women have none of the facilities enjoyed by the first group of women, and inordinately long working hours make it almost impossible for them to find time to meet one another outside the workplace. In many cases, too, their homes enforce strict control over their non-working time, which adds to their problems. When all this is added to the fact they may have to organise for a very long time, patiently and secretly, before they can hope to achieve any concrete results, the prospects seem quite discouraging.
They enjoy one advantage, however, over their more highly-paid sisters. Many of these latter are more or less satisfied with their situation, and indeed, their wages and conditions seem quite enviable in relation to those of every other group of women workers. Even the danger that as a group they may be becoming extinct does not worry such women unduly, since it does not affect them personally and problems of a future generation do not strike them as being their concern. Consequently, women from this group who do worry about discrimination against women and want to do something about it, often find themselves isolated in the midst of general apathy and indifference. By contrast, the problems of the second group of women are so immediate and palpable that there is much more readiness to struggle, though this may be damped by fear of losing their jobs. This enthusiasm is their greatest strength, and the only thing that can sustain them in their long struggle for organisation.
For the third group of women, something entirely different has to be thought of. Their employers are so scattered and disparate, their own employment so unstable, that to organise on this basis is of very limited value. But unlike the case of the other groups of women, it is rare for their places of employment to be far from their place of residence. Hence it makes sense for them to form collectives or cooperatives in their residential area and start work on a collective rather than an individualised basis. If, for example, the services they normally perform as domestic servants (washing clothes and dishes, dusting and cleaning, occasionally cooking and looking after children) were to be offered by a collective, the relationship would be entirely different. A laundry which washes clothes and a creche which looks after children have a totally relationship with their customers from the relationship of domestic servants, who perform the same services, with their employers. And instead of working at home for factories at a pittance, they could collectively make and sell useful products such as weaning foods which are as nutritious as the commercial ones but only a fraction of their cost. Our very backwardness can be made into an advantage here, because so many processes which in other countries have already been taken over by large-scale industry - food-processing, for instance — are in India by and large still performed at home, and offer a fertile field for collectivisation. Moreover, organising in this way would enable these women to rationalise their own housework — e.g. instead of all wasting time waiting in a queue at the water-tap, they could depute two or three women to collect water for everyone.
If these three types of workplace organisation get off the ground, they will be able to offer immense help and support to one another. Even today, many women in the most highly-paid group feel much sympathy and concern for their less fortunate sisters, but at present the only outlet for such feelings is 'charity' or 'social work' which can alleviate but not change their condition. If, on the contrary, they themselves become organised, they can offer help of a very different sort. Their experience of unionism, of procedures and formalities which are necessary for registration, and so on, can be a valuable resource for women in small and medium-scale concerns who are struggling to get organised. In fact, if they themselves were to play an active and prominent role in setting up these organisations while the women who were mainly concerned remained initially in the background, this would be one way of avoiding many victimisations. The feeling of being a privileged group can have a positive conclusion ('Therefore we must ensure that other women workers have the same facilities and advantages') rather than a negative one ('Therefore we need not do anything').
It has already been mentioned that these women make use of the services of the third group of women as domestic servants. If they were to get the same services from women's cooperatives, this would create a market for the cooperatives, and would have the added advantage of abolishing the uncomfortable employer-employee relationship which at present exists between these two groups of women workers. They could help in other ways too. Many slum women are illiterate, and keeping accounts etc. is a problem for them. Women working in large-scale industry could help them to learn how to do this, as well as helping to market their products through their much wider social contacts.
If women workers in small and medium-scale industry get organised and improve their wages and conditions, this in itself would reduce one source of threat to the jobs of the first section of women. The main incentive to ancillarise and subcontract from the standpoint of employers is the wide differential between the conditions and degrees of protection enjoyed by workers in the two sectors; and once this differential is reduced, the disadvantages of the system — lack of control over quality, etc. — are likely to loom larger in their minds. This may sound as if women in the second group are going to lose their jobs, but this is not necessarily so. Someone has to do the work; and in the small-scale sector, as a result of longer working hours and higher workloads, it may well be that fewer people are doing the work than would be doing it in the organised sector. Hence the total number of jobs will increase rather than decline. So far as slum women are concerned, this second group of women, like the first, would provide a market for their goods and services.
One of the main reasons given by women workers in the organised sector (especially those without servants) for non-participation in union activities is the pressure of work in the home. Of course, this may not be the only reason, but quite often the need to rush home after work in order to look after children and cook the evening meal does impose severe constraints on their ability to take up after-work activities. These constraints would be eased by the existence of women's cooperatives able to provide such services at a reasonable rate. Resistance from their families might still have to be faced, but it would be much easier for them to argue that this resistance lacks any rational basis. Similarly, the second group of women would benefit from having available to them a variety of services which they can call on as and when they need them, especially since they cannot usually afford regular servants. Even more important, the existence of some alternative source of income, which they themselves can fall back on in the event that they lose their jobs, would counteract the fear that they feel on this score. However cautiously these women conduct their struggle, it is a fact that some small-scale employers — those who can survive only by super-exploitation of their workers - will be thrown out of business if compelled to pay higher wages and conform to statutory limits on working hours etc. This means that the women employed by them will immediately lose their jobs, even if in the long run the result is the creation of more jobs. This is a difficult prospect to face unless there is at least some temporary alternative, and such an alternative could be provided by women's cooperatives.
As yet, these perspectives for organising at work are little more than ideas; but some women workers in Bombay are attracted by the ideas, and in a few cases are even making tentative attempts to put them into practice. Really concretising them will be a long and hard process. But if such attempts are successful and spread, the present insecure, vulnerable and down-trodden situation of women workers will be totally transformed.
This article was written on the basis of work done with Sujata, Neelam and Dipa, many discussions with Sujata. (Writer's Note)