Anumeha Yadav - Bengaluru protests represent a new wave of militant worker expression
Trade union leaders
have expressed surprise at the intensity of protests by thousands of women
workers from garment factories over two days in Bengaluru, which forced the
Union government to defer a proposal to amend Provident Fund rules.
Early on Monday
morning, workers, of whom over 80% were women, left factories and poured into
the streets. Within hours, workers from adjoining factories joined them,
blocking the highway connecting Bengaluru to Mysuru and Chennai that cuts
through industrial areas on the edges of the city. As protests intensified, the
workers entered a police station and set fire to vehicles in the compound. They
also damaged 50 buses across Bengaluru.
The protests forced
the central government to respond immediately. It first offered to hold off for
three months the changes that made it more difficult for employees to withdraw
from their provident fund before retirement. But by Tuesday, as the protests
grew in scale, engulfing more industrial areas near the city, the labour
ministry had to withdraw
the proposed changes entirely.
Employers as well as
union leaders have since used the words “spontaneous”, a “massive
flash-strike”, and “leaderless” to describe the protests. The majority of the
workers in this area are rural migrant workers, typically seen as vulnerable to
whatever employers dictate. Most of the over 1.2 lakh workers who led the
protests were not members of any union either.
Bafflement of
unions
Then, what explains
the ferocity of the protests? Senior leaders of
central unions affiliated to political organisations said that they were unable
to explain how the protests swiftly engulfed the area, and gained intensity.
Local union leaders also said they were surprised at the extent of the workers'
resistance to the change in Provident Fund withdrawal norms, and said they could
only partially explain it.
The Employee Provident
Fund, or EPF, is a savings instrument that comprises a contribution (12% of an
employee’s basic salary) each made by the employer and employee every month. So
far, the practice was that a worker was unemployed for two months could
withdraw the entire provident fund savings. But the labour ministry, in a
February 10 notification, had revised withdrawal norms from this fund. The new
rules said that employees could only withdraw their own contribution, and that
the employer’s contribution could only be withdrawn at the retirement age of 58
years. Of the 12% of a worker’s salary that employers contribute to the
provident fund, only 3.67% goes to the provident fund, the remaining 8.33%
becomes part of a pension fund. The new order applied to this 3.67% of workers’
savings.
AK Padmanabhan, the
president of the CPI(M)-affiliated Centre for Indian Trade Union, who is who is
a member of the Central Board of Trustees of the Employee Provident Fund
Organisation, said when the labour ministry in February first proposed the
restriction on withdrawals, the union leaders had asked that workers be given
the option “to withdraw or keep the savings in.” “But the word went out that
workers will not be able to access the employers' share of the savings at all,”
he said.
Padmanabhan added that
since several state governments and private corporations did not permit
unionisation, only eruptions could take place.“This eruption is a result of the
situation prevailing in the garment industry, its rate of exploitation, and
workers' lack of job stability and social security,” he said.
Virjesh Upadhayay,
general secretary of the Bhartiya Mazdoor Sangh, a wing of the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh, who is also a member of the Central Board of Trustees of the
EPFO, said the protests were a political conspiracy. “Some restrictions on
withdrawing the provident fund have always existed and are decades old,” said
Upadhayay. “[For instance], the number of times an employee can withdraw PF,
and the reasons for withdrawing.”
He added that women
workers were “misled” to protest at a time when Assembly elections were ongoing
in other states. “They are cheated of wages, and work in poor conditions,” said
Upadhayay. “Gussa phootne ka toh ek karan chahiya tha. Their anger
needed a spark, that is all.”
Spreading like
wildfire
Trade union leaders in
Bengaluru admitted that the protests had little organisational backing or
support. Meenakshi Sundaram, the state secretary of the Communist Party of
India (Marxist), said that the struggle was spontaneous, and not backed by any
large unions.
“We have only around
300 members in the garment factories,” said Sundaram. “In fact, most central
unions have minimal presence in the sector. It is very hard to organise the workers.
If the workers give a notice to the management that they are planning to form a
union, the factory owners who employ 100-200 workers threaten to shut down
factories and remove them from employment.”
Sundaram added that he
had not witnessed protests of this magnitude in any industrial sector in
Bengaluru in the last 10 years.
Madeena Taj, who has
worked in the garment sector since 2000 and currently works at Bombay Rayon
Fashions earning Rs 287 per day, said most workers did not find it easy to
formally organise themselves because of pressure from factory owners.
"They scare and threaten us saying that the factories will shut down and
our wages will stop, and ask us where we will go then," said Taj. "If
they find out which workers have joined the union, they harass them and
increase their work-load."
KR Jayram, who has
worked in garment factories for 22 years, is a member of the executive council
of Garment and Textile Workers Union, one of the few unions with a substantive
presence among women workers in Bengaluru. The union boasts of 8,000 members,
and Taj too is a member of this union. But the union’s membership is still a
fraction of the over five lakh workers employed in Bengaluru’s apparel
manufacturing sector.
Most workers earn Rs
6,000-Rs 8,000 a month and work eight to nine hours a day without weekly offs.
The factories run under the “chain system” in which many tailors stitch
different parts – collars, sleeves, back – of the same garment. A group of
30-35 workers stitch a shirt every 40 seconds, and 70 workers stitch a pair of
cargo pants every minute. The gruelling schedule leaves workers with little
time for water or toilet breaks.
Jayram said the
Garment and Textile Workers Union was planning a campaign around their work
conditions and social security in the last week of April after which the union
was going to send 1 lakh signatures to the President on Labour Day, on May 1.
But when workers at Shahi Exports Private Ltd started a protest on April 18,
and it spread from factory to factory, Jayram and other union representatives
could only try to prevent it from turning violent in areas where they had
substantive membership.
The Hindu had earlier reported that the protests began from Shahi Exports, a
factory off Hosur Road after a news report in a Kannada daily on the new norms
for PF withdrawal was photocopied and distributed by some workers. “By 9 am on Monday,
workers from Shahi Exports had come out and blocked Mysore Road,” said Jayram.
“As news spread to workers in another unit of Shahi Exports 80 kilometers away
in Bommanahalli, those workers came out on the streets. This is an area
densely-packed with garment units, one by one workers started coming out, soon
around a lakh workers were out on the roads.”
On the night of April
18, the women workers returned to their homes or factory hostels, but after
security personnel and policemen beat the workers with sticks and detained more
than 20 of them in Peenya Industrial Area on the second day, the workers' rage
intensified, Jayram said.
“We tried to keep the
protests at Mysore Road regulated and there was no violence there,” said
Jayram. “But Peenya, Bommanahalli, we have fewer members and we could not
control what happened there after 35,000-40,000 workers stopped work and came
out of factories.” He added that the majority of the workers were permanent
workers on the rolls to comply with requirements of international apparel
buyers. But workers changed jobs, and factories also hired and fired workers
frequently. Both permanent and contract workers took part in the protests, he
said.
Alternative forms
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