“Our factory is huge, stretching far and wide,
The owner is a mighty man, with the COO by his side.
Cutting edge machines, and air-conditioned rooms so grand,
The cheapest of all were we, our labouring hands.
The owner’s greed knows no bounds, feeding on our blood and sweat,
For days, our address has thus been the locked factory gate.”
– Song by protesting women workers at a Bengal factory, translated by the author.
Ramchandrapur(Bengal): Over 15 kilometres away from Kolkata, around a kilometre off the main road there is a camp set up with bamboo and plastic. Inside, there is a festive atmosphere as women sit together cutting fruits, setting up iftaar. There is joy and laughter. As the sun sets and the clock strikes 5.48, the women all sit together covering their heads. One of them sit muttering a prayer while the rest listen with rapt attention. Tears roll down some of their eyes. As the iftaar comes to an end, some of the women bring gulaal. There is music. There is dance. There are slogans of, ‘Hip, hip hurrah,’ and ‘zindabad!’.
The campsite had been home to around 400 women for 25 days. They have sat at the gate of the factory they have worked at, day and night demanding five years’ worth of rightful dues of provident funds and salary. After 25 days of unrelenting struggle from February 21 to March 17, they were victorious. The locked factory gate opened on March 18.
The factory in question is Exodus Futura Knit Private limited, one of the leading apparel manufacturers whose buyers range from Decathlon, Pantaloons, and US Polo to Aditya Birla, FirstCry, Reliance, and Three Arrows. The factory is spread over six acres equipped with 800 cutting edge machines and state of the art facilities all geared towards producing 30,000 pieces of finished product per day. The company mission statement proudly claims to promote “women empowerment and social equality” as one of its core values. Yet, when the women workers demanded their dues, the owner hung a suspension of work notice and closed the gates forcing them to take residence at the factory gates for 25 days.
Posters at the protest site. Photo: Debalina.
Decade-long Struggle
Set up in 2011, garment production in Exodus is divided in three units: the knitting unit in Howrah, the dyeing unit in Bishnupur, and the garmenting unit in Ramchandrapur. The garmenting unit alone has around 900 women working 6 days a week for around eight hours. Protesters told this author that 700 among them are local women, 200 are Skill India trainees who are from Jharkhand. They have a hostel facility inside the factory where trainees stay. he trainees are discouraged from mingling with local women.
In 2011, the workers were paid a wage of Rs. 10 per day and provided with lunch for 8 hours of work. That year, their monthly wage increased to Rs. 2100 after a smaller protest. But even a day’s leave would cost them Rs. 350. It was only after 18 months that the women workers were able to get the owners into giving them their joining letter and committing towards a PF contribution
Everyday, the women workers enter the factory gate sharp by 9 am and are to work till their production targets are met, which often goes way past their official working hours. There is no casual leave. Earned leaves are promised, but workers are often manipulated saying they have exhausted their earned leaves – workers themselves often have no record of their earned leaves.
During the COVID-19 lockdown, the workers were called in to make PPE kits with the promise of double payment. Yet, all they received were mere promises. While employees’ share of the PF were deducted from their wages, the workers noticed that PF dues which are to be paid by the employer were not being transferred into their PF accounts for a long time. In 2022, the workers agitated demanding clearance of PF dues. The owners verbally promised that they would consider their demands. The workers went back to work, but the management went back on its promise. In 2024, the workers had a meeting with the owner where he even signed a contract promising to clear the dues within December 2024 yet the year passed on and no dues were cleared.
The company prides in its business model. In an interview with a business news site, the president of apparel manufacturing at Exodus, Gayan Ruhunage stated, “Our factory is located in the South 24 Parganas, a region that supplies 80% of the domestic manpower to Kolkata city. Hence unskilled manpower is present in abundance. We wanted to empower the unskilled and the unemployed, but promising female population of the region, a concept which has done wonders in other apparel manufacturing hubs within and outside India.”
He further mentioned, “We specified that they should be a BPL (below poverty line) card holder. We hired women below the poverty line to empower them as they had no source of livelihood, even getting the minimum wages means a lot to them, as it can improve their lifestyle significantly,”.
The idea is nothing new. It is what lays the foundation for what Alessandra Mezzadri describes as the ‘sweatshop regime’ in the global south. The horrifying stories of Rana plaza and the garment workers in Bangladesh, the reports of ‘production torture’ from testimonials of garment workers in Bengaluru, the frequent first information reports about ‘accidents’ of garment industry workers in Gurugram – all speak of the gruesome system of production and work shaped by factory owners, global brands, exporters to reproduce the working poverty in the sector.
While the garment industry contributes to about 2% to India’s GDP, making the country the sixth largest supplier in global textile and apparel exports, the hands that make the clothes have the least say in production. Furthermore, the reproduction of gendered division of labour in the garment factories make it acceptable to depend on cheap female labour as women are assumed to be more dexterous, more easily disciplined and less inclined to unionising. The devaluation of women’s work along with the fact that most of the women come from rural poor backgrounds makes the owners feel entitled to their labour and the workers are made to feel obligated for simply being given work.
The eight hour work hour too is just on paper. The workers are set targets , which they have to keep meeting every 15 minutes, and any failure to meet said target would mean them staying overtime with no pay to complete their work. They are required to submit their phones the entire time of their work. The workers are also put under constant surveillance and any form of solidarity or bonding is discouraged as the women are made to work like synchronised machines. Only fabrics exchange hands to get marked, cut, stitched, printed, ironed, checked, packaged. The pressure is such that they often have to forego their toilet breaks or lunch breaks to meet targets. This anxiety to meet targets also results in several health issues. UTIs, kidney stones, chronic back pains have become ‘normal’ occupational hazards. Furthermore, if the product submitted is anything less than perfect the workers are publicly humiliated by the management and made to redo their work entirely.
While the management clocks every movement of the workers as per their 15 minute work protocol, the same promptness cannot be expected of the management while paying the workers their rightful wages.
At the Ramchandrapur factory, for the past five years, PF have been due and after several meetings, the management had only cleared a meagre part of it. Not clearing PF dues is considered a criminal offence. A worker tells this writer that when the women demanded their rightful dues, the management responded, “Do women surviving on rice congee even know how to do math?” On demanding a meeting with the owner, a suspension of work notice was issued and the factory gates closed. A rumour was spread around the neighbourhood that the agitating workers are trying to close down the factory. For 25 days the women workers sat in front of the factory gates demanding the owners to listen to them, meet their demands and open the factory soon so they could all join work.
Solidarity
With the month of Ramadan going, fasting Muslim workers left the protest site around 3am for sehri and Hindu workers took their place. If there was a meeting at a Muslim household, everyone would lend a hand in preparing food for iftaar so the meeting could start on time. Every day each women worker prepared a little extra food at their homes and brought it to the protest site so they could all eat together. Even though the management discouraged any form of bonding between the workers, the women told this writer that there has always been resistance: of lip reading each other and knowing when to step in for the other, of stolen moments of solidarity, of sharing meals, of helping each other. It is these moments of friendship, that also sustained them during those 25 days under the makeshift tent during scorching heat, of spending nights in the dark while fighting off mosquitoes. The local people have also extended their solidarity – opening up their homes for women to use their washrooms, helping in whatever little ways they can.
Iftaar at the protest site. Photo: Debalina.
For Ansura, Masuda, Sukhi, Madhuri, and Sufi, whose day begins at 4 am with housework, followed by factory work, only to return to housework in the evening, these 25 days were spent dividing time between meetings, campaigns, protest site, and home. The campsite itself saw women making parodies of popular songs to express their demands, sharing food and laughter, listening and dancing to Md. Rafi, or singing songs of resistance, taking care of each other, being attentive to the other’s needs and stepping up whenever required. It was filled with images of raised fists, of eyes burning with rage, of fiery resolve to not be duped again, to not give in without claiming what is rightfully theirs. While the management kept pressuring the workers to let them take out the finished goods, the women were unrelenting in the face of threats, calmly stating that they are open to dialogue, that they want the factory to stay open, but that they would at no cost give up on their rightful dues.
Finally, on the 23rd day, with the intervention of the Labour Commission, the owners agreed to a bipartite meeting with the workers. While a representative team went to speak to the management, the others waited at the campsite. They had seen their products being sold at exorbitant rates in shopping malls, while the owner bought a generator with the very bonus that was owed to them, to speed up production. Even a demand for cleaner, better toilet facilities were met with humiliating remarks – a protester tells this writer that they were asked as to what kind of toilets they used in their homes. Finally, after 6-7 hours of negotiation, the owners relented, promising to keep the basic pay and increment as is, to clear their PFs by the end of this year, and to grant EL and CL in compliance with the Factory Act. Yet, the representative team refused to sign on the dotted lines on March 16, demanding that they be given time to discuss with their coworkers and form a consensus.
Iftaar at the protest site. Photo: Debalina.
At a time when reports keep pouring in of mosques being covered in trampolines for the celebration of Holi, of news of a muslim man being murdered for refusing to take part in the festival of colours, of the nation being marked irrevocably by the jingoistic religious fervour and imposition of celebration by Hindutva vigilante groups, Noor, Anima, Taslima, Swapna, Tumpa, and Baby prepared for iftaar to celebrate their much earned victory. Together they perform the dua. As they signed the contract agreement drawn from the meeting and prepared to join work, they were clear of the battle ahead. The hands that have been deftly bringing to life garments from fabrics, hands that have been each other’s support in these last few days, would return to work with renewed fervor, vowing to not be taken for granted, to claim their rightful shares.
In August, when Bengal was in turmoil with the rape and murder of a resident doctor in RG Kar Medical College and Hospital, the workers had taken out a rally in solidarity with the movement. The management made them work on a Sunday to meet the target of that day. In times of despondency, when the state blatantly fans Islamophobia, when new labour codes are being put in place to criminalise unionising, when factories are being locked out and workers are being pushed to submission, when the capitalist system invests in reproducing exploitation and divisiveness, the collective resistance, collectivised lifemaking, collective living of the women workers at the protest site opens up new possibilities of organising, resisting, weaving solidarities.
When the family member of one of the workers asked if the struggle was over, the women promptly replied. “No, this is just one chapter, the struggle is on…”. The struggle is indeed on. As the song made during the protest goes:
“Our demand for rightful wages is met with glares,
The owner neither relents nor cares
But we, women, stand strong with our song,
For us, the only place was the battlefield all along…”
Jhelum Roy is a PhD student at Jadavpur University in Kolkata.
