Organizer: Jayati Lal, University of Michigan
Chair: Douglas E. Haynes, Dartmouth College
Discussant: Shelley Feldman, Cornell University
This panel consists of three papers on women’s labor in different industries
and sectors in India and the recent efforts at and problems of organizing in
each of them. The papers cover several forms of labor, from servitude and sex
work to plantation and factory work. Each paper examines a specific form of
work in historical and comparative context to address the broad question of
what enables or hinders women’s organizing. Grounded in the specific conditions
and histories of tea plantation workers (Chatterjee), garment workers (Lal),
and prostitutes (Shah), the panel will collectively challenge constructions
of third world women workers and labor politics built on traditional notions
of “workers”. What these diverse industries share are the ways in
which labor relations are gendered and feminized in ways that destabilize traditional
class identities. They are variously located in spatially fixed to mobile workplaces,
informal to formal sectors, intimate to impersonal labor relations, and agricultural
to industrial labors. The papers will explore these industries’ recent
histories of local and/or global organizing and their implications for comparative
labor history, global feminisms, and the challenge that they present to traditional
categories of social science.
Piya Chatterjee, University of California, Riverside
In the tea plantations of eastern India, oppressed-caste Nepali and adivasi/Dalit
women constitute about 70% of the field labor force. Trade union activism
in these North Bengal plantations is closely allied to West Bengal’s
Communist Party of India (Marxist) rule. It has also been the site of one
of the most important revolutionary movements in postcolonial India: the
Naxalite rebellion. Within this complex history of revolutionary mobilization
and left governance, plantation women are largely “invisible”—despite
their extraordinary visibility within labor practice and organization. In
the paper, I will examine grassroots organizing efforts underway since 1999
to address issues of political literacy, public health, and women’s
labor rights in this region. In 2003, in direct response to a major starvation
catastrophe in the tea plantations of North Bengal, we became a state-recognized
NGO. Because we work in a highly volatile trade union scenario, women workers
could not be perceived as challenging union—and party—control
of labor politics. From the outset, then, this mobilizing had to be perceived
as working within “soft” issues—health and literacy, and
not explicitly challenging the ambit of male-run trade unions: wages, bargaining
rights, and so forth. More importantly, this nascent organizing could not
be perceived as threatening the voting base of the left political parties
that control formal organizing in this sector. In the first instance, the
paper will examine the ways in which dominant left political discourse demarcates “real” labor
issues. It will argue that such a discourse is not only limited (in the
framing of labor rights), it is profoundly gendered. In the second instance,
the paper will explore our attempts at building a plantation women’s
leadership core and the contradictions which emerged through the process
of formalization as we became a state-recognized NGO. Since “formalization” engages
the politics of capital and literacy, the paper will end with a discussion
of how organic women’s leadership can actually be threatened by the
middle-classed, caste-ist, and gendered logics of “formal” NGO’ization.
Jayati Lal, University of Michigan
The global anti-sweatshop movement in the garment industry has instituted “codes
of conduct” for third-world garment manufacturers producing for western
markets to ensure that the t-shirts and sweatshirts that they consume are “sweat-free”.
The codes are also intended to ensure workers’ rights in the global
workplace. This paper brings a historical-ethnographic perspective to this
debate from the point of view of Indian women workers’ life-worlds.
I argue that Indian women become workers through the gendered language of
protection and their containment as embodied women and not as the disembodied
subject of individual rights. Examining the circulating texts and bodies
on the shop floor, I show how the category of “worker” who is
the subject of the global corporate codes of conduct is construed instead
as a universal subject of rights. Building on feminist criticisms of the
bourgeois public sphere through the constructs of “subaltern” female
and proletarian public spheres, I examine the clash of these constructions
of the public on the shop floor to ask the question “who represents
whom?” The codes of conduct are visible in the scopic regime of the
factory but are tagged by workers as part of management discourse because
of their proximity to the new disciplining technologies of surveillance,
such as hourly productivity charts, on factory walls. The codes thus circulate
as part of a bourgeois public sphere that workers inhabit but do not themselves
contribute to or participate in, except as the objects of discourse. Like
all rights-based discourses, the codes are only as good as the conditions
of possibility for workers to claim their rights. Using the notion of representation
in its double sense (as political and ideational representation) by workers
of themselves, and of them by others, this paper seeks to uncover the continuous
trajectory in contemporary labor internationalisms where the older binarisms
of modern and pre-modern workers are not transcended but merely reproduced
in and displaced onto different arenas of conflict and sites of representation—most
particularly, onto the body of “third-world” women workers.
Svati P. Shah, Wellesley College
Global debates on prostitution have included many different kinds of actors,
including governments, feminist, health and development-related non-governmental
organizations, academics, and sex workers’ advocacy groups. These debates
have had profound impacts on discourses of border crossings and border controls,
neoliberalism, and HIV/AIDS, as well as juridical responses to prostitution
itself. As the debate has evolved, so has the participation of organizations
from various regions. Over the past 15 years, a sex workers’ rights movement
has evolved in India that has a key role in propelling extremely varied sets
of policies and interventions that affect sex workers and female migrants in
South Asia. In this paper, I will discuss the historical development of a sex
workers’ rights movement in India and efforts to unionize sex workers.
Unionization has met with varied success and has been one of several strategies
that aim to work with sex workers as member of India’s vast, unorganized,
informal sector. In discussing strategies for organizing that have been attempted
in different sex worker communities throughout India, I will also discuss the
sex workers’ rights movement with the Indian Left and, ultimately, with
international discourses on labor, prostitution, and governmentality.
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