Fearless Freedom Page 11

  We have no outside contact so how could we ever join a trade union? . . . I am a female worker then how can I become a member of trade union? . . . I don’t think that the workers are having much freedom of joining the trade union because all the workers here are girls.24

  The fact that unions, far from being able to recruit women workers as members, are prevented even from meeting or interacting with them, means that exploitative practices in the Tamil Nadu factories are able to continue unchallenged. The ‘Flawed Fabrics’ report also establishes that the infamous Sumangali scheme—which subjects women workers to bonded labour on the pretext that they will earn their own dowry in the form of a lump-sum payment—continues undeterred by the fact that the scheme stands officially abandoned.25

  In many cases, employers fail to transfer the required amount to the provident fund or cite various minor infractions on the part of the worker to deny them due payment. Such practices are illegal—which is why the Sumangali scheme is no longer formally in effect—and yet they are rampant.

  A Global Phenomenon

  Globalized workplaces across Asia, not just in India, draw on familial patriarchal norms and moral regimes to discipline women workers. These gendered forms of discipline and surveillance infantilize women workers and place managements ‘in loco parentis’, or in the place of parents. Melissa Wright documents and analyses similar forms of discipline invoked by Chinese managers of multinational factories in China.26 She notes that while both male and female workers were expected to live in dormitories, female workers were ‘forbidden from leaving the building at any time and on any day except for Sunday’ while the male workers ‘walked between the two facilities on a regular basis’. Male workers ‘took breaks outside the doors, where they would smoke cigarettes and talk until a manager walked through, when they would head inside’. The gendered explanations offered by Chinese managers for the stricter control on women workers are similar to those offered by managements of Indian factories; they describe their roles ‘as those of a parent with an unpredictable teenage girl who requires a strong patriarchal hand to keep her under control’.27 One manager said ‘that his own knowledge of Chinese culture and his own experience as a father meant that he was particularly suited for his job as production manager over a young female Chinese labor force.’28

  The Chinese raise their daughters to be very obedient . . . The family is strict, more strict than in America . . . The girls, sometimes, do not know what to do when they move away from their family. They can lose their obedience. They are naïve. I have two daughters, and we are very strict with them. Chinese daughters are good daughters, but you have to protect them from dangerous things in the city.29

  The gendered methods of disciplining women garment workers in Bangladesh, as described by Dina Siddiqi, have striking parallels with the methods we have discussed in Indian contexts. Siddiqi observes:

  [The women workers are regulated] through a distinct moral regime, separating the ‘good’ girls from the ‘immoral’ ones. A highly sexualized regime of verbal discipline, as well as more overt forms of sexual harassment, also serves to keep women in their place. In this universe, the good woman is the good worker—those who are morally disciplined; that is, those who do not protest or draw too much attention to themselves—are deserving of managerial protection. Those who challenge such norms are much more vulnerable to managerial sexual advances.30

  As in the Karnataka factories, sexualized abuse—such as hurling insults that question the morality of the worker’s father or mother—are common in Bangladeshi factories.

  Such practices are found even in other locations where women are part of the globalized workforce. One such instance can be found in the export processing zone of the Dominican Republic, as outlined in a study that enquires into the deployment of practices of sexual harassment to keep women from organizing.31

  Relying on Women’s Unpaid Work

  Patriarchal ideologies and methods, which draw on assumptions that a woman’s place is in the home and that domestic labour is not ‘work’, have come in very handy when exploiting women workers and invisibilizing their labour.

  In the liberalization decades since the 1990s, much of the ‘increase’ in women’s employment has been in ‘self-employment’ rather than in paid work. The phrase ‘self-employed’ is highly misleading, suggesting that the woman has control over her work and is free from the exploitation associated with, say, work in a factory or a field.

  The truth is that ‘self-employed’ more often than not means ‘self-exploited’, where women workers have to ensure a do-it-yourself home-based exploitative routine to serve their employers’ interests. Home-based subcontracting or ‘putting out’ is increasingly being resorted to by manufacturers internationally. The reason is that the workers thus employed (very often women and children) are out of the protection of labour laws and trade unions. Economist Jayati Ghosh notes that the increase in women’s self-employment in India, in large part, is ‘a distress-driven phenomenon, led by the inability to find adequately gainful paid work’.32

  The title of Ghosh’s book, Never Done and Poorly Paid, refers, appropriately, to the expression that ‘women’s work is never done’: that is, domestic labour is never-ending and unpaid to boot. And nowhere is this title more appropriate than in the context of the government scheme workers.

  The World Bank-supported Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) is supposed to be India’s answer to the country’s appalling hunger, malnutrition and mortality indicators among women and children. The entire scheme rests on the anganwadi workers and helpers—one of each is allotted to an anganwadi centre, which is supposed to cater to a population of 1000 (and 700 in tribal areas). Despite the Supreme Court’s repeated instructions, the government is yet to expand the scheme to provide universal coverage. An enormous burden of work rests on the shoulders of the only two women functionaries at each centre—providing nutrition, immunization and basic health check-ups, antenatal and postnatal care to children and expectant mothers as well as the care of newborns and small children, nutrition and health education to womens, referral of cases of malnutrition and illnesses to hospitals, and even daily non-formal preschool education to children between three and five years of age. In addition, due to their dedication, other government schemes and initiatives also come to routinely rest on them—total literacy, election duties, awareness and health-related campaigns and so on. Yet, they are not treated on a par with other government employees, and called ‘social workers’ or ‘voluntary workers’, who are not paid wages!

  It is much the same case with the ASHAs (Accredited Social Health Activists) who are the backbone of the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM). They have a mind-boggling range of seemingly endless duties, yet they are called ‘honorary volunteers’ as a pretext to underpay and deny them rights. The NRHM mission statement says that the ASHA will be a health activist responsible for creating awareness in the community on health issues, a promoter of good health practices, and ‘will also provide a minimum package of curative care . . . and make timely referrals’. Sounds like a lot of work? Well, as Ghosh observes, NRHM piles on a whole lot more on the ASHAs’ shoulders: they must create awareness on nutrition, sanitation and hygiene; counsel women on birth-preparedness, safe delivery, breastfeeding, contraception, prevention of common infections and care of young children; facilitate access to immunization, antenatal and postnatal check-ups, ICDS, sanitation, etc.; arrange to escort pregnant women and children requiring treatment and/or admission to the nearest health facility; provide medical care for minor ailments such as diarrhoea, fever, first aid and TB treatment; provide ORS, iron and folic acid tablets, chloroquine, disposable delivery kits, oral contraceptive pills and condoms; inform health authorities at primary health centres or sub-centres about births and deaths and the outbreak of diseases; promote the construction of household toilets; and work with gram panchayats to develop a comprehensive village health plan. ASHAs (local women with at least
eight years of schooling) are expected to do all of the above skilled work with just twenty-three days of training!

  ASHAs work eight hours on normal days—and, of course, since deliveries and sicknesses do not follow any set time schedule and tend to come unannounced at all odd hours of day or night, the ASHA is on call 24*7.

  Ghosh adds:

  And, then, amazingly, the proposed remuneration for this woman worker is—nothing at all! The NRHM envisages that the ‘ASHA would be an honorary volunteer and would not receive any salary or honorarium’. State governments pay a miserly ‘incentive’ amount of Rs 500—which women in some states have through struggles managed to increase to Rs 1000–1500 per month.

  Exactly as the women’s work in the home is famously ‘never done and unpaid’, the work of the women employed in the anganwadi, ASHA and midday-meal schemes is ‘never done and poorly paid’. It is indeed a shame that major large-scale government programmes have been ‘designed and launched by explicitly relying on the unpaid labour of women’, to provide essential public services, ‘trading on the time-worn stereotype of caring women who serve their families and communities selflessly without any thought of return’.33

  The case of another flagship government scheme, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), also World Bank-supported, is a comment both on the state of women in public employment as well as on the substandard schooling being passed off as the World Bank–approved model of ‘parallel primary schooling’ in India. SSA teachers, a very large number of which are women, usually have some schooling (Class VIII or more) but no pedagogical training. Their monthly wages are as low as Rs 1000–3000. Such teachers constitute nearly 16 per cent of all school ‘teachers’ in the country!

  The Political Economy of ‘Familyism’

  The organized attacks on women’s autonomy (in the name of curbing ‘love jihad’ or ‘protecting women’) by Sangh outfits and caste bodies are often portrayed by the media as being at odds with the Government of India’s proclaimed aim of promoting corporate-led ‘development’. We may reassure ourselves with this imagined contradiction, but it is little more than a piece of fiction. In reality, as we have seen above, corporations, manufacturers and the forces of the globalized market are interested and invested in suppressing women’s autonomy to create a docile workforce and to deter unionization. When it comes to appeasing corporates and weakening labour laws, most governments in India have been on the same page. The UPA government that ruled between 2004 and 2013 also battled unions in the attempt to erode protections offered by labour laws, and deter and punish unionization. Some of the most militant struggles of the Indian workers’ movements have been fought to claim the right to unionize, such as the Honda workers’ movement in Gurgaon–Manesar in 2005 and the Maruti Manesar workers’ movement in 2011–12, which were met with severe and unrelenting repression by Congress regimes, both in Haryana and at the Centre.34

  Since 2014, the Government of India led by the BJP has been inviting global corporations to come and ‘Make in India’, promising ‘low-cost manufacturing’.35 ‘Low-cost manufacturing’ demands low-cost labour. One of the ways in which this is achieved is by flouting labour laws and preventing workers from organizing and unionizing to seek implementation of those laws.

  Why does a government that welcomes Indian and multinational corporations to ‘Make in India’ also patronize outfits that attack women’s autonomy, especially in the matter of inter-caste and interfaith marriages?36 This question ceases to puzzle when we see how an ideology of conservative paternalistic protectionism towards women (an ideology that is condoned by the Indian state and most Indian political formations but which achieves its most virulent form in the Sangh Parivar) has its uses in disciplining women’s labour both in the spaces of social reproduction (households, communities, schools and colleges) and production.

  The twin uses of this ideology become especially apparent when we look at how the image of ‘family’ and ‘home’ is deployed in the literature and propaganda of the BJP and its parent organization, the RSS.

  The BJP manifesto for the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, in its section on labour reforms, declared:

  [We] propose to encourage industry owners and labour to embrace the concept of ‘Industry Family’. This concept, in which industry owners and labours bond as a family, is guided by the principles of efficiency, skill development and upgradation, productivity, appropriate wages and perquisites, and security towards this end.

  The ‘family’ metaphor for industrial management and labour relations is used to recast relations between workers and bosses as harmonious relations within the ‘industry family’, thus justifying erosion and dilution of the labour laws. The implications of this metaphor for women workers are obvious: the denial of autonomy to women in the name of ‘protection’ inside families is rendered ‘natural’ in factories as well.

  The same metaphor serves the Sangh’s efforts to legitimize other hierarchies too. The RSS often refers to its constellation of organizations as a ‘parivar’—a family. The family metaphor is evoked by the RSS to valorize the patriarchal family and subjugation of women—even to the extent of justifying wife-beating as necessary chastisement of erring wives. The Rashtra Sevika Samiti cadres describe themselves as ‘familyist not feminist’;37 feminist assertions of women’s autonomy are painted as Western-inspired disruptions of the harmonious Indian family. Oppressive social practices are all rationalized as having evolved to ‘protect’ women from rapacious Muslims.38

  Autonomy Should Not Be a Luxury

  The RSS shares with the forces of corporate globalization a deep hostility to and fear of women’s autonomy. Why do modern global corporations fear women’s autonomy in their personal and sexual lives? They fear it because women’s vulnerability in their personal lives contributes to their precariousness and exploitability at work; and moreover they recognize that such autonomy cannot remain hermetically sealed in personal spaces of family, household, caste and community—it is likely to leak into workspaces as well, spurring unionization and collective social and political action. A woman worker, for instance, may use her mobile phone and her freedom from surveillance at home and work to keep in contact with a male friend or lover from some other caste or community; and she may also use it to be in touch with her comrades, and to organize and attend union meetings and even to organize flash strikes, as garment workers of Karnataka have indeed done on more than one occasion!

  That’s why ‘autonomy’ is by no means an ‘elite’ concern. In fact, the notion that autonomy is only for urban-middle-class or upper-class women, while working-class women must only worry about bread-and-butter issues and gas cylinders, is elitist! It’s no coincidence that women workers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries demanded ‘bread and roses too’: the right not only to subsistence and survival but to all the good things in life as well.

  Think about what a campaign like Why Loiter?—which asserts the right of women to access the city for pleasure and leisure and not only for work—could mean for a Dalit woman sanitation worker. When sanitation workers of Bengaluru (powrakarmikas, which means municipal employees) went on strike on International Women’s Day (8 March) 2017, demanding unpaid dues as well as a range of other rights, a journalist came up to ask Meena, a powrakarmika, what her demands were. Meena’s teenage daughter, Monisha, was by her side, and interrupted her mother to tell the journalist, ‘My mother has always wanted to visit Cubbon Park, I want her to get a weekly day off, so that I can take her to spend the day at the park!’ The right to relax and loiter in the public parks, to watch a movie, to simply enjoy oneself is as much a basic right as food, education and health.

  Noting that Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes that ‘everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay’, Kalpana Wilson points out:

  The question of the lack of time and leisure is a particularly important one for women agricult
ural labourers, who work extremely long hours both on the fields and in the household. The right to leisure time has been central to struggles of labour everywhere, but like economic rights in general, it is ignored in neoliberal ‘rights-based’ development discourse . . . Assumption that the time of women in poor households is infinitely elastic, and can always incorporate more income generating activity has come to be taken for granted in development discourse and policy, even when the notion of a double or triple burden (of productive, reproductive and community labour) is acknowledged. For example, a recent study of the conditions of women agricultural labourers in Orissa published by the state government, while noting that the women in the study worked for an average of 14–16 hours in the lean season, and more in the peak season, still insists that ‘leisure time’ income generating activities should be promoted among them, because currently leisure time is ‘sometimes non-productive’ involving ‘gossiping, sleeping, playing cards and watching TV’!’39

  A poster from the early-twentieth-century workers’ struggle in the US for the eight-hour day declared that the twenty-four-hour day must be divided into three parts: eight hours each for work, rest and ‘what we will’ (whatever we like or enjoy). Of course, the capitalist employer wants to increase the ‘work’ part of the day as much as possible and shrink the ‘rest’ and ‘leisure’ part of the day as much as possible. Think about this twenty-four-hour day from the point of view of a woman. Even if a woman is not a paid worker, she is actually working twenty-four hours a day—because domestic labour has no fixed working hours: if a baby cries in the night or wets itself, it must be attended to immediately. Domestic labour involves collecting fuel and water as well as the actual process of cooking. It involves playing with children, making them do homework, wiping the tears of a crying child, waking up in the middle of the night to care for a baby, a sick child or a sick adult. If she is a paid worker, she is doing a double shift, because after a hard day at work, she still has to come home and cook and care for others. She does not have eight hours for rest and eight hours for ‘what you will’ (which can include leisure, enjoyment as well as attending meetings of unions and women’s organizations). She has a much harder struggle than men to make time for these activities.