Fearless Freedom Read online

  It is hard to get much attention for the systemic, daily violence in such workplaces in the mainstream media. A khap panchayat that announces a ‘ban’ on mobile phones for women might make it to primetime TV news, where panellists shame them for holding back modernity and progress. But have you ever heard a similar discussion on television of corporations or a factory that bans mobile phones for women? Have you even heard of factories doing so?

  The fact is that global (and Indian) corporations and manufacturers, backed by governments, deliberately deploy patriarchal ideologies and strategies to discipline women workers and justify violations of labour laws—all the while claiming to ‘protect’ women. And yet, the same manufacturers project themselves as knights in shining armour, charging up on white steeds to rescue Indian women in distress! Indian governments as well as transnational corporations (TNCs) project jobs for women in TNC factories as a ‘way out’ of bondage and ‘backwardness’.

  Fairy Tales of Rescue and Liberation

  For instance, I was intrigued to find that in 2012, nearly identical ‘news’ stories appeared in several international print media outlets about the lingerie brand Victoria’s Secret providing jobs to lift Indian women out of poverty. These stories, some of which appeared under bylines of journalists, were less like columns or reports and more like press releases or advertisements for the lingerie company.

  It’s worth taking a close look at one such story published by Reuters:

  Indian villager Jaya places the bright pink, sequined, moulded C-cupped designer bra under the needle of her sewing machine and carefully stitches the seams together.

  The padded ‘Very Sexy’ push-up bra which 22-year-old Jaya sews is for American lingerie retailer Victoria’s Secret—designed to give a ‘boost’ to buyers in hundreds of high-fashion boutiques across the United States. But a world away in this traditional rice-growing region of southern India, these luxurious bras are—in a different way—enhancing the lives of poor rural women.

  ‘I knew nothing but the village before,’ says Jaya. ‘My parents just wanted me married as quickly as possible. They never saw me as an asset, just a burden . . .’

  For conservative India’s rural women—lucky to finish school, married before eighteen and confined to their villages—a project giving them jobs in the manufacturing sector is not just an end to poverty, but brings empowerment and respect in this deeply patriarchal society.

  Located 30 km (18 miles) south of Chennai, Intimate Fashions—which also produces bras for Victoria’s Secret brand ‘Pink’ and the La Senza brand—is one of thousands of firms that have set up in Tamil Nadu’s Kanchipuram district in recent years.

  Investment-friendly policies, close proximity to one of India’s largest ports and an international airport, and easy access to a large, semi-literate workforce has helped make the area one of the most industrialized in the country.1

  The story, by contrasting the words ‘sexy’ and ‘bra’ with ‘semi-literate’, ‘poor’, ‘rural women’ and ‘deeply patriarchal society’, and with an accompanying photograph of a dark-skinned woman worker working at a sewing machine to produce a pink bra, creates a seductive image for consumers in the West. The story plays on the word ‘boost’, suggesting that bras that push up or boost the bustline of women in the West can also boost the fortunes of poor women in rural India and push them up out of poverty and oppression. The message is that sexy lingerie consumed by women in the West can be liberating for the poor rural semi-literate women manufacturing them.

  The same story goes on, however, to reveal certain telling facts about whose fortunes are getting a boost thanks to the availability of a cheap female workforce from rural India. Prasad Narayan Rege, general manager of Intimate Fashions, which employs Jaya among its 2500, mostly female, workers, is quoted explaining:

  Thousands of companies have mushroomed here, and there has been increasing competition to get good employees . . . so when the World Bank and the Tamil Nadu government came to us with the idea of employing women from some of the poorest communities and give them training, we saw a good opportunity. If it wasn’t for this project, we would be in big trouble.2

  If it were not for the World Bank and the Tamil Nadu government scheme providing ‘good employees’ (read ‘docile employees’) to the companies, the latter ‘would be in big trouble’.

  The story claims that the companies use ‘culturally sensitive’ recruitment practices:

  Under the Pudhu Vaazhvu (meaning ‘New Life’ in Tamil) project, funded by a US$350-million loan from the World Bank . . . Firms are . . . in particular focusing on recruiting young female employees. But this is not so easy in these male-dominated communities . . . Officials say firms have to adopt “culturally sensitive” approaches such as bringing parents to see their manufacturing units to show them the environment their daughters will be working and living in as some girls must stay in hostels set up by employers . . . But now, these young women are breadwinners. Not only that, we are seeing positive social changes taking place due to these jobs. Girls who were married off straight out of school are now delaying their marriages by three or four years.3

  But behind the ‘rescue narrative’ reproduced in such advertisements/news stories is a dirty ‘secret’: companies like Victoria’s Secret employed women under what used to be called the ‘Sumangali scheme’, where children and young girls worked for three years to earn their dowry as a ‘lump sum’ amount.4 The Sumangali scheme was withdrawn after bad press about bonded labour and child labour, but many studies have documented how the exploitative practices and virtual bondage continue in the garment and textile factories producing for global brands. And the exploitative practices that enable and produce the bondage are disguised and legitimized as none other than ‘culturally sensitive practices’!

  The Reuters story, and all the other identical or similar stories appearing under various bylines in 2012 and since,5 reproduce colonial notions of ‘rescuing’ and ‘saving brown women’ even as they give patriarchal surveillance a glossy shining makeover.

  ‘Culture’ as Cover for Exploitation

  In the garment and textile factories of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, where there is a considerably large female workforce, studies document how managements invoke patriarchal notions of ‘culture’ and morality, and methods of public shaming and sexualized abuse to restrict women workers’ mobility and access to means of communication, and thus deter and prevent women workers from unionizing.

  A study of textile factories in Tamil Nadu titled ‘Flawed Fabrics’,6 exposes a range of exploitative labour practices, including child labour and bonded labour as well as a range of gendered disciplinary measures for women workers. The mills are part of the supply chains for major European and American clothing brands. The hostels for the women workers, which are usually located on the factory grounds, severely restrict autonomy and mobility. Staying in the factory hostel is compulsory for workers who migrate from other districts or villages. ‘Flawed Fabrics’ found that:

  At all five investigated mills . . . workers are not allowed to leave the hostel on their own. There is hardly any outside contact . . . Workers may only contact their parents through the hostel phone. Mobile phones are not allowed and after-work activities are limited. Under the pretext of cultural traditions, girls and women are effectively locked up.7

  We saw in the third chapter how households and social and political groups confiscate mobile phones and surveil communications of women in the name of protecting them from ‘love jihad’. These globalized factories use the same methods:

  If workers want to make a phone call, the warden will check the number they are dialling. The workers may only contact their parents if their number has been given to the warden. Phone calls are always made in the presence of the hostel warden . . . The warden will check the girl workers; where they are going, which shift they are doing.8

  The things the women workers are scolded for include talking to co-workers (all mills), and
talking to male workers (at the Premier, Super and Sulochana mills).9

  Studies of the neighbouring state of Karnataka also document similar work conditions. ‘Production of Torture: A Study on Working Conditions Including Work Place Harassments Facing Women Garment Workers in Bangalore and Other Districts’, a report by civil liberties and feminist organizations (PUCL, et al), found that here, too, women were prevented from communicating with the outside world: ‘Once workers enter the factories, they are required to be cut off from all contact with the external world, even in case of emergencies.’10 The report found that banning workers from carrying mobile phones in the workplace was widespread.

  Upon a violation of the rule, some confiscate the mobile phone, others impose a fine, and some others compel the worker to give a written apology and guarantee that she will henceforth not carry the phone into the workplace. Many workers surreptitiously carry their phones into the factory and keep them on a silent mode, as they wish to be contacted at a time of emergency.11

  As in the Tamil Nadu factories, workers are prohibited from talking to each other:

  Since the shop floors are arranged one behind another, it prevents any form of interaction between the workers except during the 15-20 minutes’ lunch break—this prevents any form of cohesion among the workers . . . When not being present at the work stations, workers are consistently questioned about their whereabouts. Even toilet and canteen visits are monitored by security.12

  Like those used by university and college administrations to justify discriminatory hostel rules for women students, arguments used by the factory management invoke ‘culture’ and parental concerns about ‘safety and security’. For example, responding to a draft version of the ‘Flawed Fabrics’ report, the management of Sulochana mill wrote:

  [Because] of our state Tamil Nadu culture and the expectation of girls’ parents, they have been provided accommodation in the hostel of the management. Only for safety and security, the parents and girls decided to stay in the hostel and come for work.13

  These studies also offer insights into how women themselves can internalize patriarchal ideologies of ‘culture’ and morality. The report describes how women workers, while resenting the ‘prison-like’ conditions, also subscribe to the idea that such restrictions are to be expected for Indian women:

  In rural Tamil Nadu, it is generally felt that it is not safe for young unmarried women to stay on their own, in a place where there are no parents, relatives or community members to keep an eye on them. As one of the workers at the Premier mill put it: ‘We are girls; we must follow some values in society.’14

  Humiliation and Harassment as Disciplinary Methods

  Studies from both Tamil Nadu and Karnataka document the extreme emotional distress to which women garment workers are subjected. The demeaning, exhausting and exploitative conditions of work, which, in some cases, include humiliating corporal punishments, have made some women workers suicidal.

  The ‘Flawed Fabrics’ report records an attempted suicide by a seventeen-year-old worker at Best Corporation’s spinning mill in Dharapuram, one of the units investigated, which was reported in Tamil newspapers on 12 October 2013. The young woman attempted suicide after she was ‘scolded and hit in front of the other workers because she had used a cell phone inside the spinning mill’ and ‘charged a Rs 500 penalty and was forced to clean the wall where the workers spit out’. She could leave the factory premises only after the intervention of a trade union.15

  The report from Karnataka also documents how women workers are subjected to continuous surveillance and humiliating corporal punishments to pressurize them to meet production targets. The punishments include:

  Being scolded in public at the shop floor in the presence of all other workers, or through the public address system . . . Forcibly switching off the machine and being compelled to stand at the shop floor for long in front of other workers . . . Being made to stand outside the work place/gate of the factory for a long period of time for taking leave without prior permission or for reporting for work a few minutes late; When a woman garment worker goes to the toilet, sending someone to follow her to ensure that she does not waste time.16

  The PUCL report documents how ‘male supervisors, floor in-charges, including managers, call the women workers by abusive names . . . and cast aspersions on their character’. Such ‘scolding’ includes asking the woman worker ‘if she ate food or shit, whether she is a woman who lives on the streets, and asking her why she was late to work’ and so on to suggest that she is a sex worker.17 Such abuse draws on forms of humiliation that are shaped by caste and gender. Cleaning or touching human excreta is associated with the oppressed Dalit castes and forcing people to ‘eat shit’ is a common caste atrocity to which Dalits are subjected. This particular abuse amounts to caste atrocity against a woman worker if she is a Dalit and can also be experienced as demeaning and humiliating by a woman who is not a Dalit. Saying that a woman belongs ‘on the streets’ suggests she is a sex worker—to call a woman a sex worker is to slut-shame her.

  The punishments and ‘scoldings’ are designed to be exemplary: their public, performative character enables them to be used to discipline, demoralize and control the entire body of workers, not just the individual worker who is being chastised. The report observes:

  A worker is sometimes made to stand aside for an hour as punishment before the assembly. This often reduces the humiliated worker to tears. Equally, this isolation of worker from the assembly of the workers, who look on helplessly and silently, makes all of them feel lost and incapacitated.18

  Women in the Karnataka factories are frequently subjected to physical violence, ‘including throwing the garment at the worker’s face [most frequently reported by the workers], hitting the woman worker on her back, dragging her out from her workstation, and physically compelling her to stand away from it’. Sexual harassment is also common, including ‘staring hard at a woman worker in a sexual manner; making obscene threats, such as saying that chilli powder will be applied on the woman’s vagina if she does not work efficiently’; as well as ‘scolding’ using sexual expletives.19

  In the globalized workplace, then, surveillance, sexualized abuse, sexual harassment and public humiliation are not aberrations—these are integral to the production process, and are used to keep the women workers insecure by pressurizing them to meet impossible production targets. The PUCL report notes how the systemic harassment at work keeps women in an emotionally fraught state, given to frequent bouts of weeping, depression, suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts and humiliation at the social shaming associated with garment work.

  The workplace harassment also strains family relationships. The women workers do a ‘double shift’, that is, bear the entire social reproductive burden20: ‘caring for children/aged people in the family, cooking/cleaning and running the house are solely her responsibilities’. While their husbands or in-laws ‘do not object to her work’, they ‘are nasty when she is late or is unable to complete household work’. The social reproductive burden of providing emotional support is also largely borne by women rather than by men; as a result, ‘most women garment workers expressed an inability to share such feelings [of depression, job-related stress, etc.] with their husbands, as they feared that the husband would compel the woman to leave the job, which she desperately needs to financially support her family’.21

  Moral Shaming to Deter Solidarity

  The reports from both Tamil Nadu and Karnataka indicate the systematic way in which the garment industry uses the precariousness and vulnerability of women to exploit them financially and ‘fashion a more disciplined and hence cheaper workforce of women’.22 Women’s vulnerability to suggestions of sexual immorality helps deter their mutual solidarity—in communities as well as in factories, women are expected and encouraged to maintain a distance from the ‘immoral’ women, and to strive to prove they are ‘respectable, good women’ by their willing submission to regimes of surveillance and res
trictions on mobility and means of communication.

  In the Tamil Nadu factories, the women workers are younger and unmarried—and in their case, factories draw on parents’ anxieties about dowry payment as well as about preventing daughters from contracting ‘unwanted/undesirable’ (read ‘in violation of caste and community boundaries’) romantic/sexual relationships to justify their incarceration in hostels.

  The women workers in the Karnataka factories tend to be older, married women. In their case, sexualized shaming tactics also help deter them from seeking support from husbands or in-laws. The abusive conditions of work at the place of production (the factories) strain the conditions of life and social relationships at the site of social reproduction (the households). Likewise, women’s vulnerability to or fear of violence or humiliation in their own households, and the pressures of having to earn to support economically precarious families, make them more likely to submit without complaint to the abusive disciplinary regimes at work.

  Though the rationalizations for gendered restrictions on the freedom of women workers invoke concerns of ‘culture’ and ‘safety’, the fact is that these restrictions have the immensely practical value of deterring unionization. By preventing women workers from interacting with male workers or activists from outside and discouraging socialization even among women workers on the factory floor, they are effectively prevented from even visualizing the possibility of unionizing.

  The ‘Flawed Fabrics’ report notes that the right to association and the right to collective bargaining, though recognized in India’s labour laws, are widely violated in the garment factories.23 Interviews with workers in the report illustrate how the gendered restrictions on them make it difficult for them to consider joining a union: