The Home & The World Of Work

Between 2022 and 2024, a Cividep team, led by Rekha Chakravarthi (Director, Research & Advocacy) and Research Associate Kaveri M.T., joined forces with Prof. Supriya RoyChowdhury from the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) and they set out to follow the lives of 184 women garment workers. With support from two labour unions and one community-based organisation – the Garment Labour Union (GLU), Karnataka Garment Workers Union (KGWU), and Munnade Social Organisation – the team was able to do extensive field research in Bengaluru, Mysuru, and Kanakapura. The workers were a mix of intra-state and inter-state migrants, working intense shifts in garment factories across Karnataka. 

The team documented continued prevalence of harsh working conditions, harassment and violence, low wages, and poor unionisation among garment workers, all well-known to observers of labour conditions in the industry. The point of departure of this research, which was conceptualised against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2022, was to understand the impact of garments work on workers and their households, looking at the intersection of gender, labour, and capital. “The pandemic had brought to light a long-held observation by feminist scholars that economic crises are crises in social reproduction. The pandemic not only halted economic activities but also intensified the crisis of social reproduction, the costs of which are often borne by women, especially among the working class and poorer sections of the society,” recalled Rekha.

The impact of low wages on the worker and their households, often whose principal earners are the women workers the team interviewed, is that their wages do not allow them to rely on the market for the transference of social reproduction. “Thus women workers spend a total of 9-10 hours in a gruelling work environment in factories and then expend another 5-6 hours of labour within their homes. In addition, sometimes, women spend another two hours doing an additional job to supplement their income,” said Rekha.

As women workers choose between time poverty and income poverty, the impact is most acute on their labouring bodies, until they are finally worn out, depleted, and ejected out of productive work. For workers who are unable to find a foothold in the city, they return to their rural natives constrained by the high costs of social reproduction entailed in living in the city. Most crucially, the impact of time poverty and income poverty is significant among the children of workers – their earnings are not enough to afford quality education for their children, who more often than not end up in irregular, low-paid informal work as adults. “The narrative reveals how women workers and their families struggle to educate the next generation, who are often found to join the low-wage urban workforce, illustrating the continuation of informal, low-wage labour across generations,” observed Deepika Rao, Executive Director of Cividep, at the launch of the research report on October 3rd at the Bangalore International Centre.

This was just one of many critical findings from Cividep’s two-year research project on the garment industry in Karnataka, which culminated in the release of The Home & The World of Work report and the premiere of the documentary Garment Kelsa: Women & Work on October 3rd. Both the report and the film paint a stark picture of exploitation and persistent low wages in the absence of an organised labour force, physical and mental depletion of the labouring bodies, time poverty, and limited intergenerational mobility.