Abstract

This seminar shares the rationale and findings of a recent ILO project and report on The Social Life of Industrial Disputes (Mezzadri and Sehgal, 2023). The report traces the social biography of industrial conflicts and explores the links between regional labour regimes in the Indian garment industry and the evolution of industrial relations from a worker-centred lens. It analyses the features and outcome of industrial grievances filed by workers in three garment clusters, Gurugram (National Capital Region), Bengaluru (Karnataka) and Tiruppur (Tamil Nadu), and reads them in the light of the specific industrial systems which have historically dominated specific locales. By centring workers’ action, the study analyses how workers articulate their own claims towards social justice from the shopfloor, even in the absence of mobilisations. Through a labour-centred approach to industrial relations focusing on workers’ experiences, and by investigating workers’ industrial grievances either filed individually or through unions, the study reconstructs the ‘social life’ of industrial relations as drawn by labour. The evidence discussed here is based on the study of 25 industrial disputes in each location, totalling 75 disputes. The analysis shows that disputes can be formal, semiformal, and informal, individual, or collective. Yet, different typologies intersect and are better understood as placed on a spectrum, where conciliation and litigation processes interplay. The trajectory disputes may follow depends on these intersections and interplays and shape a complex legal chain, made of many nodes involving different legal offices and entities. The study of workers’ disputes reveals great regional variation in labour practices and malpractices, also along gendered lines. For instance, it offers insights into the need to understand sexual harassment as a key aspect of labour disciplining on feminised shopfloors. Yet, it also shows commonalities, particularly with reference to illegal terminations, wage-theft, and forms of shopfloor harassment workers endure. Overall, the successful resolution of disputes remains strongly correlated to collective mobilisation through union action, setting freedom of association as paramount to protect all other forms of labour ‘freedoms’ in labour-intensive sectors like garment.

Speaker

Alessandra Mezzadri

Alessandra Mezzadri is Reader in Global Development and Political Economy at SOAS, London. She is a feminist and development political economist of labour and social reproduction. She is the author of The Sweatshop Regime (CUP, 2017.2021), editor of Marx in the Field (Anthem, 2021, 2023), co-editor of a new Handbook of Research on the Global Political Economy of Work (EE, 2023), and lead-author of the ILO report The Social Life of Industrial Disputes: Exploring workers-centred industrial relations in India’s garment labour regime (ILO, 2023).

Chair

Humaira Chowdhury

Dr Humaira Chowdhury is a Research Associate at the King’s India Institute, working on the ongoing Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project, ‘Enablers and Obstacles to UK-India Trade: Banks and Diasporas’. Before joining King’s, Humaira received her MPhil in Modern South Asian History and PhD in History from the University of Cambridge.

She also has a background in Sociology and Social Policy. Between 2013-2016, Humaira worked on a number of interdisciplinary developmental projects in India exploring themes such as contraceptive use among Muslim women in Kolkata; learning disabilities among young girls in West Bengal, Odisha, and Jharkhand; and an ethnographic study of Muslim fishing communities in the Sundarbans archipelago.