All Aboard the Job Train
Government-funded training and recruitment in India’s apparel industry
Orlanda Ruthven, 13 April 2016
ABSTRACT
Every month, thousands of young women from poor eastern India are trained and brought to
Bangalore to work in the city’s apparel factories. Written from within a government-funded skill
and placement organization, the paper reveals the uncertain gain of contemporary employment
in a global value chain: on the one hand, a framework of labour rights and benefits promises
decent employment to youth who have known only underpaid and domestic drudgery. On the
other, the force of capitalist employer and patriarchal recruiter combine to stymie the
transformative potential of a regular job in the big city.
1. INTRODUCTION
Since 2009, a dramatic shift in the policy of the Government of India has vastly increased the scope for
young women and men to travel from interior rural areas to access organised employment in distant
industrial centres. The new vocational training policy marked a shift from government-run training
towards the promotion of a layer of private providers. It also marked the end of an era when informal
and self-employment was viewed as the solution to poverty, and the start of the era where wage
employment has taken centre stage.
Several hundred private sector training entities have been brought into being as a result of support
provided by government agencies such the National Skills Development Corporation (NSDC) and the
Ministry of Rural Development. These entities are charged with recruiting poor students, training them
and identifying jobs for them. Their mandate therefore straddles a role at source, from where the
neophyte workers hail, and destination, the location of the job placement, in a process which facilitates
migration. The majority of students pass through short-term, two month skill training courses in
programmes which are billed as ‘job-linked’: the government, not unduly concerned with the quality of
the training, views “placement in job” as the single indicator of achievementi. Thus, in order for the
private provider to receive payment for training, not only must 75% of students be placed in jobs, but
they must remain in employment for six months with the necessary payslips to prove it.
How are we to interpret this policy? Its declared purpose is to ensure that India reaps dividends from its
unique demography, i.e. from its exceptionally young, working-age population. But on the ground, the
programmes appear to function less to skill the workforce than to subsidise its supply to industry
(Ruthven 2013; Sarin 2012). Alternatively, could the government simply be offering a concession to poor
youth as compensation for unbridled support to capitalist elites (Chatterjee 2008; Munster 2014)? Or is
skills policy an undeclared component of security policy, a means to flush out the youth from the
countryside, where they may otherwise become troublemakers (Ong 1991; Ruthven 2015)?ii
Whatever the reason for the government’s policy, the significance of the torrent of rural youth newly
flowing in to the formal job market should not be underestimated. Government funds ensure the new
entities go deep into remote regions to recruit those who may otherwise have stayed at home. Once in
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the job, formal employment offers a framework of rights and responsibilities, of non-discretionary
procedures and a professional identity to young adults reared on the kinship and informal relations of
the village milieu. While jobs in capitalist enterprises such as apparel firms are inevitably extractive, they
are also potentially a force for development and can be a route through which youth, particularly young
women, can grow more independent and build careers.
Between 2013 and 2015, I had the opportunity to explore these issues while working with one skills and
recruiting organisation, which I will call Learn and Earn Odisha (LEO). Part of my job was to create a
range of post-placement support services in Bangalore in an effort to ensure a successful job experience
for these young people. This paper draws on notes from field operations, offering an insider’s
perspective of implementing government skills policy. The vista I had affords a granularity to the
description and highlights the multiple perspectives on a single issue which emerge from different
stakeholders even within the same organisation.
The paper describes the attempts by a group of LEO staff (“the Bangalore team”) to realise the
transformative potential of a formal sector job in Bangalore for young female migrants. It equally
describes the difficulties encountered by this approach, as the various forces which regulate the lives of
young women - families in the girls’ home village, the trainer-recruiter from Odisha and the employer
from Bangalore – combine to prioritize protection and discipline over learning and freedom.
The paper is organised in the following sections. The next section describes the two organisations
involved in providing a programme of post-placement support in Bangalore, the skilling and recruitment
agency (LEO), and the employer. Section 3 provides examples of recent operations in Bangalore that
highlight the challenges of the programme and the responses of the various stakeholders, for example
when young women drop out and return to the village, when they defy procedure to take leave in large
groups, the incidence of boyfriends, the management of leisure time, and the response to critical illness.
Section 4 discusses common themes that emerge from field observations: the tension between security
and freedom of young women, the link between ideas of freedom and moral purity, group power versus
individual rights, and the ambiguities of responsibility in government-funded skilling programmes.
Section 5 summarizes and concludes the paper.
2. ORGANISATIONAL CONTEXT FOR LEO’S POST-PLACEMENT PROGRAMME
The Training and Recruiting Agency
Learn & Earn Odisha (LEO) is a social enterprise with residential training centres across Odisha and other
eastern states. Offering skills training in multiple tradesiii, LEO’s single largest trade is industrial sewing
machine operation (SMO), for which it trains 2000-3000 youth per year for supply to the southern
apparel industry in Bangalore and Coimbatore. About 80% of these youth are women and about 60%
from the traditionally disadvantaged communities of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes (adivasi)iv.
LEO’s mobilisers recruit trainees through village networks and job fairs. They outline the opportunity at
hand: free training, board and stay at the training campus for two months, and a guaranteed job after
training. However, LEO mobilisers are sometimes prone to understate the commitment expected of
trainees to depart for jobs in Bangalore, a 35-hour train ride from their homes where they should
remain without leave for a minimum of six months. If it is discussed, parents are informed that their
daughters will be protected, looked after and – of course - delivered back ‘intact’ (Maehre 27).
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Once installed at the residential training centre in Odisha, students are required to give most time to
technical training to become a line-ready industrial sewing operator (SMO). However, girls also receive
‘life skills’ training, including gender awareness and employability skills such as problem-solving,
communications and self-management. The girls’ orientation extends into the hostel where they spend
long evenings interacting with wardens and engaging in cultural programmes. The high number of
adivasis among LEO’s SMO trainees is celebrated by the organisation as a marker of its depth of
outreach. But this aspect of the trainee’s identity is also considered to be in need of remediation. Hostel
wardens, for example, hold sessions during which “they teach the girls to control their behaviour” and
learn to dress according to a modest mainstream code, e.g., no skirts that show any leg (Maehre, 22).
Wardens interviewed by Maehre in 2014 interpreted their role thus:
We make sure they follow [the] rules, are hygienic and dress in a proper way.
We need restrictions for the trainees...they have limited independence. We cannot
control them if they have full freedom (32, 33).
Girls remark that during their two months in the LEO centre, their skin becomes paler as they remain
shaded from the sun, day after day; they adapt to a fixed schedule and learn to “speak respectfully”
(Maehre 30).
Following the lengthy transit to Bangalore, LEO’s Bangalore team and the employer take over and
provide the various post-placement functions. These consist initially of checking hostel accommodation,
joining and settling the new arrivals into their new job and at a later stage, tracking their retention,
collecting payslips, counselling and visiting those that are experiencing problems, delivery of further life
skills training on a daily basis after work, and assisting in addressing grievances. From the outset, the
hostel regime is distinct for the female majority and male minority. While male trainees have
considerably more freedom, they often have to put up with a lower standard of accommodation.
Employers at factory and hostel
After two or three weeks in the employer’s training room, the trainees are slotted in to assembly line
production, wherein garment parts are cumulatively sewn and assembled as they move across the shop
floor. LEO’s ten or so employer partners in Bangalore produce shirts, denims and knitwear for all the
global brands in units ranging from three hundred to a thousand workers. As firms struggle to fill the
factory with local labour, they have increasingly dawn on migrants from outside Karnataka state. A
requisite to drawing on this largely female workforce is to accommodate them, usually in apartment
blocks run as self-catering hostels in the proximity of the factory.
For an 8.5 hour working day, most of LEO’s trainees received a monthly gross wage of Rs.7076 in 2015,
to which was added an attendance bonus of Rs.200. The compliance expected by foreign buyers means
that the girls have little opportunity for earning overtimev. Their fuel and grocery costs tend to be well
above Rs.1000 per month. The employer accommodation is charged at Rs.600 per month. Once these
essential living expenses and statutory deductions have been paid for, the girls might end up with
Rs.4,000 for a month where they had not fallen sick. Most girls’ financial situation is such that they must
send as much money as possible back to their homes.
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The transition from rural Orissa to urban-industrial Bangalore is dramatic for all girls. The factory
environment, requiring “exact bodily posture and… tedious repetition of the same finger, eye and limb
movements, often for hours on end at the assembly line”, is said to be a form of body discipline that is
especially intolerable to neophyte factory women” (Ong 1991: 290). During the first month of stay, there
is a lot of ‘churning’, when new arrivals refuse to stay, arguing that they are homesick, dislike the food,
had not expected the wages to be so low, etc. The girls step into a closely surveyed regime between
factory and hostel, where movement outside of either is restricted and where welfare officers and
wardens, employed by the factory, play both disciplining and caring roles in the girls’ lives.
Alongside this protective nurturing, the girls are exposed to a set of more adult relations with men on
the shop floor. Supervisors push commands and instructions down the assembly line in order to extract
work as efficiently as possible, and the girls must subscribe to targets that are impersonal and arbitrary.
Young migrant workers are intermittently elevated to supervisor level, with the intent that the
progression of the few will calm the frustration of the many. It is common for floor managers to
proposition and even harass young women workers.
Such employment relationships both foster and erode solidarity. The shop floor sets up workers in large
numbers and within a shared, counter-relationship to management. The factory offers a new kind of
friendship and cooperation with co-workers who hail from both similar and different backgrounds,
including those who are native to the city. However, employment relationships can also frequently set
one young female worker apart from the rest due to, for e.g., her speed and dexterity, her potential as a
supervisor and her sexuality. The factory’s tight surveillance further impedes collective action.
The sparse evidence from qualitative surveys, as well as the continued success of recruitment efforts,
suggests that the basic opportunity offered by employers in Bangalore is attractive to Odisha’s youth
because they come from poor backgrounds in regions where such a wage can achieve much. On the
other hand, the scope for positive impacts from migrant wage work is diluted by early dropout and a
return to the village (only 30% of LEO’s trainees last more than a year in Bangalore). But the reasons for
early departure are not related to the basic opportunity per se, but rather, to pressures from home and
the wider aspects of living in an industrial zone far removed from home (Pathak 2013; Ruthven, Patnaik
et al. 2013; Maehre 2014)vi. These feature in the next section.
3. VIGNETTES FROM FIELD OPERATIONS
Premature departure
In December 2013, three young women, Monica, Mamta and Mehek joined one of India’s largest
apparel exporters after training in Odisha. Despite high living costs and paltry wages, they stayed in
Bangalore for several months. They said they liked being there, were making friends and enjoyed the
work. One of the three, Mamta, was noted by staff to have supervisor potential.
Five months later, only Monica remained. Hailing from the impoverished and drought-prone west of
Odisha, Monica’s family had no land and few options for earning an income. Her father had encouraged
her to go to the city, knowing that any income she contributed while staying in the village would be
swallowed by his drinking habit. In contrast, Mamta and Mehek came from higher caste families on the
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developed coast of the state. Both their brothers were in regular employment. In these families, the
girls’ marriage prospects and status trumped any income they were able to bring home.
From her third month, Mamta began requesting leave. The trigger for her change of mood was the new
hostel warden, an Oriya woman promoted from the shop floor and enjoying her newfound power over
her wards. There was also pressure from Mamta’s mother, calling every night, crying on the phone and
worrying about her daughter’s safety and honour.
Leaving before six months have passed is against LEO’s ‘rules’. This rule helps to persuade new recruits
to remain in employment, despite the difficult period of adjustment and homesickness. It is also a way
to of assuring value to employers who are desperate to retain skilled workers, and to collect the
evidence on placement after training that LEO requires to report to the government.
For these reasons, LEO refused Mamta’s requests for leave many times. However, in May 2014, her fifth
month in the city, Mamta left with her best friend Mehek, at her mother’s insistence that she attend a
family gathering. But on arrival, Mamta’s mother presented her with an ultimatum: get married now or
you’ll be on the shelf. You’re dark-skinned and so you can’t be choosy.
Mamta felt betrayed. She begged her parents that her marriage be delayed and in return, agreed to stay
at home and complete grade 12, something that would add to her marriage prospects. Mehek, her
friend, now faced a dilemma. She wanted to go back to Bangalore but was not confident without her
friend. Her brother further discouraged her. While his sister’s earnings were a benefit to the cashstrapped family, he was beginning to sense the risks: could he be sure to protect her honour in
Bangalore? Or even to keep control over what she earned?
So Mehek stayed. In the end, she was safely married off before Mamta. On the rare times she is able to
devote a few hours away from her domestic duties to meet her friend, the two girls weep about cutting
short their stay in Bangalore. “Why were we in such a rush?” Mehek reminisces wistfully.
Female jungle, male factory
Every so often, an employer demands LEO’s intervention to ‘counsel’ a group of girls, or simply
announces that they are dismissing them and requests that LEO inform their parents. The reasons
behind such calls are usually the girls’ “disruptive” or “unruly” behaviour. But the incidents serve to
highlight the cultural gap between the poor rural girls from eastern India and their male managers from
the cosmopolitan south. One HR (Human Resources) manager called up in horror after witnessing a
physical altercation between two girls from neighbouring communities as they grabbed each other’s hair
and bit one another. “They are acting like savages! They should go back to their villages”, she insisted. In
another, more prolonged incident in September 2014, two girls were reported to be ‘possessed’ by
ghosts. We were asked by HR to facilitate their departure. Instead, we spent the day at the hostel.
One of the two girls, Lalita, had been going into periodic trances during which she would murmur things
about unknown people while remaining calm. Once she regained consciousness, she would explain that
a god comes to rescue her and offers her comfort when she is stressed or frightened. Her friend, Gauri,
on the other hand, had episodic fits of screaming and, the HR explained, this was disturbing hostel
mates and “setting off” other girls. Gauri would wake from sleep in a fit-like state during which, she
explained later, she was being haunted by a dangerous man called Ram Babu.
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Concerned about the disruptive effects of one such episode, management sent a delegation of four
men, who held Gauri down, put tulsi water on her, recited some mantras and put a coin on her head ‘to
get the devil out of her’. They then advised a visit to the local mosquevii. In the end, management
showed willing to avoid the knee-jerk response of dismissing the girls and sending them home: Lalita
would not be sent home and for Gauri, a temporary leave period was negotiated during which she was
able to recover in her village.
Gauri’s hostel mates were matter-of-fact. They explained that wandering souls sometimes get into
people’s bodies and the hostel cook added that this was most common during festival periods, when the
gods are busy with pujas and demons are left freer to roam.
The social regulation of leave-taking
In March 2014, the Bangalore team was bombarded with requests from our training centres in Odisha to
arrange leave for girls in various Bangalore factories. Rather than instructing their daughter to request
leave from the company, families were approaching LEO’s training centres to demand the ‘release’ of
their daughters. Where requests were not quickly granted, some families were even approaching
government offices or politicians back home to step up the pressure. By the time such requests reached
the Bangalore team, they were more like orders: speak with the respective HR department and “release
so-and-so girl” since “her relatives are calling her home”. The first time the girls heared about such plans
was when they were called to the HR office and told to take their ticket and collect their wages.
One of our challenges in the Bangalore team was to convince our colleagues back in Odisha of the
problems of this approach. One senior staff argued that he knew the correct procedures (i.e., the girl
should apply for leave herself from the employer). But when parents’ requests come in, he said, “it is
our duty” to respond. We’ve taken them away, he seemed to be saying, so it is our duty to get them
back when their parents demand it. Surely, I replied, it was our duty to ensure they behave as adult
employees. Had the girl in question even requested leave from her employer, I asked. The answer was
‘no’. Leave-taking for young migrants, it seemed, was regulated by the family and the village, with the
recruiter acting as the family’s agent.
Since joining their employment in Coimbatore in early 2014, a small group of girls had reportedly been
complaining to their erstwhile trainers in north Odisha that they wanted to leave their employment. But
when the Bangalore team visited the factory - a few hours’ drive away – it reported that the company
appeared to be discharging its duties well and the majority of girls were content to continue working.
But the rumours had gathered momentum and our staff in north Odisha now demanded that the
complete group of girls be taken out of the company immediately. Some parents, we were told, were
demanding ‘instant release’. Eventually, it was agreed that we would offer the trainees the choice, to
follow procedure and leave the company, to stay on, or to join an alternative company in Bangalore.
I thought about how LEO’s centres in Odisha continued to exert influence even in distant destinations,
and how neither the girls’ families nor LEO’s own staff cared for building the relationship which the girls
had with their employer. Such relationships require a respect for procedure, an understanding of the
law, and a commitment to the moral authority of the employer. Yet it seemed some of LEO’s Odishabased staff might view this authority as an affront to their own. In spite of long days working as
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employees in the factory, the girls respond to another set of values – the patriarchal force of family and
the recruiter.
Boyfriends and marriage
In May 2014, I heard about a girl being targeted and punished by the hostel staff for having spent the
day out with her boyfriend. Some recently arrived girls were adding their opinions, referring to those
who “bring down the reputation of others, who can’t be trusted”.
Pushpa was placed in work in 2013. Some months later, the warden and HR became aware that she had
got married in Bangalore without informing anyone including her parents. Despite this not having
influenced her work, she was asked to leave the hostel and her job, on the grounds that married women
cannot be accommodated and that her behaviour set a bad example for the other girls.
Rather than arranging her departure as requested by the company, the Bangalore team decided to get
more information about the situation. If the couple had entered into marriage with clear minds and was
happy with their decision, we would help Pushpa to stay in Bangalore. After meeting the new bride, my
colleague sent a note to the rest of the Bangalore team:
They have been dating for four years and have been very happy
together. Regarding the girl, the husband has been very supportive
through difficult times, never abuses her and they had no physical
relationship prior to the marriage. Now, she wants to work for a year
in Bangalore before setting up a home with him. He seems like a 'nice
guy'.
After a final unsuccessful attempt to persuade her employer to take Pushpa back, we found her a new
job in another firm, where we informed HR that she was married and needed the freedom to meet with
her husband who was living and working in Bangalore. However, the incident continued to bother me:
why did the first company feel the need to dismiss her? What underlies such a response?
Freedom at leisure
In March 2014, we finally won the support of LEO’s largest employer to implement an eight hour open
door policy in the girls’ hostels on Sundaysviii. Many HR staff were against the idea. Their reasons ranged
from genuine safety concerns, to the need to confine the girls in order to secure their workforce.
However, those in support of the change won the argument and recognised such confinement as a legal
offence and a compliance riskix.
We began with a trial in one hostel in which 130 girls lived. We offered all the girls the opportunity to go
on an escorted tour of the city. The Bangalore team prepared itself well in the run-up to the date,
providing girls with a map, a preparatory training session and informing them of emergency procedures.
Five staff members took part in these activities.
The employer also made preparations. The HR manager, cautious but tireless in her care of the girls,
changed the hostel warden to one who would be strict in order to prevent the experiment getting out of
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hand. A couple of days prior to the date, the employer produced a disclaimer in Hindi, announcing that
the girls would only be allowed to go out after signing it. The disclaimer stated: “I am going out of the
hostel today of my own free will. I take full responsibility for my behaviour while outside”. I did not think
the disclaimer was a bad thing, as it would make the girls think about their responsibility. However, I
was mistaken.
The symbolic power of the written notice, requiring both a signature and thumb-print, was not lost on
the employer. A rumour spread through the hostel: if the girls signed the declaration, the company
would henceforth not be responsible for them. Caught in a dilemma between curiosity and fear, the girls
called their parents and even their trainers back in Odisha. The advice was clear: do not sign anything
and do not go out if you have to sign anything beforehand. LEO’s provincial staff, concerned to enforce a
protective role of employer over their girls, was helping to derail the experiment.
When the day of the outing finally arrived, only nine girls showed up instead of the 50 or so we had
expected. A couple of coquettish girls kindly tried to explain to me their refusal to sign. “We don’t trust
ourselves Ma’am, how do we know what we might do in this city? Better we stay here. Better we keep
the company looking after us!”
After an enjoyable day, we returned to the hostel in the evening to find the warden fuming at other girls
who had left the hostel without signing the declaration. However, rather than staying out for the
customary 1-2 hours, they had stayed away for the entire eight-hour period.
Over the following weeks, we faced a bout of dropouts. I began losing the slim support I had won from
my male staff members, with our operations officer in Bangalore commenting via email how girls were
‘abusing’ the freedom given to them. Mindful of LEO’s own strict hostel rules in its training centres,
LEO’s VP stated, “Let us not expect the firm to do something we cannot implement on our own
campus”.
A death in Bangalore
In October 2015, after three months in her job, Sarita Khora died of organ failure as a result of
contracting dengue fever. Her death occurred around 10:00 am; we had only received our first alert
about her being sick three hours earlier. Sarita’s roommates had attempted to alert us at 2:30 am, but
my colleague, asleep, didn’t hear her call. The male security guard on duty had told the girls they
needed to wait until morning to take an auto-rickshaw to the hospital.
At 6:00 am, Sarita was taken by the same guard to a nearby clinic, which was ill-equipped to deal with
serious illness. After giving her saline for two hours, the duty doctor advised the HR staff – which was
now present at the hospital – to move her to a hospital with an ICU facility. However, her admission was
refused and doctors referred her to the ESI hospital. En route between the two, Sarita died. What
followed was a nightmare of paperwork to get the body cleared for post-mortem, acquire a death
certificate and organise its release back to Odisha.
The bureaucracy of death was not the only challenge. By the next morning, 230 Oriya hostel residents
had gathered inside the hostel and declared they would not report to work, demanding that the
company demonstrate how they would care for the son Sarita had left behind. While an ambulance with
the body finally started the 35-hour journey by road to remote southern Odisha, the hostellers
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expanded their demands to better drinking water, reduced confinement and attention to health
problems on the part of staff.
By now, Sarita’s body had reached her village. But her family refused to receive it until the company
provided evidence that they would pay compensation. LEO’s provincial staff played a key role in this
stance, quietly supporting the family and mediating the demand to the employer in Bangalore. After a
tense few hours, during which negotiations continued between the family in Koraput and the employer
in Bangalore, a cheque for Rs.3 lakhs was received by LEO staff and its photo sent by phone to our rural
staff, who eventually persuaded the family to initiate Sarita’s last rites.
I wrote to my colleagues to reflect on what had gone wrong. I advocated that the girls needed to be
better equipped by us and by their employers to manage their health in a foreign context. My seniors
were quick to react. The Bangalore team is doing too much women’s empowerment and not enough
protection, they said. From now on, the focus would be on protection and rapid response in emergency.
The idea of women living independently and managing their own lives was relegated back to being a
distant pipe dream. With the death which stood before us, it seemed impossible to argue the case
anymore.
4. DISCUSSION
This section draws on literature from women in industrial work elsewhere to build a discussion around
the vignettes described above, highlighting their central and shared themes into an analysis. Each
vignette has shown how forces from “back home” – the girls’ families and LEO’s provincial staff continue to play influential roles in the lives of young women in new employment relationships. These
forces combine with the capitalist employer to argue the case for protection, security and surveillance
and stymie the nascent moves made by young women towards realising empowerment through their
jobs.
We divide the discussion into four topics: first, ideas of freedom with respect to young women; second,
the ways in which ideas of purity and morality enter the transition from the village to Bangalore; third,
the uneasy relationship between two types of power – vested in patriarchal-led groups and vested in
rights for individuals; finally, the ambiguous nexus of responsibility created in such governmentsponsored training and placement programmes.
Freedom and young women
The experience of the girls in LEO’s Bangalore programme resonates with evidence from elsewhere. Ong
(1991:287) writes about the claims that Chinese families have on their daughters’ labour in the context
of export-led industrialisation during the late 1970s in Hong Kong and Taiwan. These claims serve to
enforce workers’ compliance to the industrial employment regime, while also diminishing class-based
solidarity in instances where family ties rule. As the months pass, the girls from LEO discover that they
are essentially living in a silo or factory-cum-hostel, wherein almost all decision-making is shared
between their families in the village and the company’s HR department, with the training and recruiting
organisation viewing themselves as family representatives.
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All three institutions (the family, the trainer-recruiter, the employer) share an interest in the girls’
safety: each stands to lose a great deal from a ‘mishap’ or a ‘scandal’ involving young female migrant
workers; each stands to gain from a regime that manages to extract work and thus income on the one
hand, while maintaining the integrity (corporeal, behavioural) of young female workers, on the other.
After their arrival in Bangalore, women discover that behaviour which used to be viewed as acceptable
and routine in the village, such as mobility in the neighbourhood or the playing out of possession by
spirits, has now become transgressive and disruptive, defined as such by dominant groups, i.e., senior
male managers. While certain behaviour, for example, engaging in pre-marital affairs, may be no more
acceptable in the village, the scope for clandestine conduct is shrunk by new surveillance (Ong 1991:
293). Patriarchy from the home state is therefore acting in concert with capitalism at job destination, in
a new combine, which risks putting women in the contradictory bind of being “whore” and “prisoner” at
once (Ong 1987).
Hartmann (1976) elaborates the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism: patriarchy adapts to
capitalism to the extent of releasing young women into new male-led environments of exposure, while
capitalism adjusts to patriarchy by responding differently to female and male workers and by adopting
kinship idioms alongside more class-based forms of control. Thus, there is a promise of freedom that is
directly related to the intrusion of capitalism into patriarchy. Ong and Hewamanne (2008) show how
industrial employment, alongside the claims of family, offers young women new freedoms in the form of
friendships, buying power and the postponement of marriage. In Bangalore, the leaders and the staff of
export firms do not necessarily women’s freedom and empowerment but face challenges in its
execution.
During our Free Sunday experiment, for example, the problems and inconsistencies of confining working
adults outside factory hours were clearer to the capitalist employer than to the patriarchal recruiter.
LEO is used to running hostels for studentsx and saw nothing wrong with applying the same stringent
standards to adult working women (for example, a gate time of 7.30 pm, no permission to leave the
campus). In contrast, the HR chief of LEO’s largest employer partner saw the need to encourage migrant
women to live outside, and was critical of his own staff’s decision to dismiss migrant couples who
married in Bangalore. “Ideally we should offer mass marriage services” and encourage couples to settle,
he remarked.
While capitalist tactics of surveillance and targets are given a masculine flavour by the overwhelmingly
male management on the shop floor, the masculine face of authority is not inevitable. Several exporters
show themselves committed to promoting women operators as supervisors and managers. One
example is the sadly unsung supervisor training programme for women operators, organised by three
exporters in Bangalore in 2014 (Meta-Culture 2014). The results: all 34 women who attended the
programme were subsequently offered supervisory roles.
Capital, for all its extractive relations of production and the associated controls, is not the sole or even
the main proponent of norms of confinement and transgression. Instead, such norms stem from
capitalism’s adaptation to and accommodation of patriarchy, vested in the family and village milieu of
the girls and their provincial trainer-recruiter. For the moment, in Bangalore, freedom and safety is
experienced as a trade-off in a zero sum game; one is only available without the other. The idea that
freedoms and rights can be guaranteed alongside safety remains a luxury of the rich. In the family, as in
the factory, the one precludes the other. If a woman marries the man of her choice she is told she’s on
her own; if she wants protection from the employer, she must stay in on Sundays.
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The impurity of transition
In the context of young women migrants in Bangalore, ideas of freedom and empowerment become
mixed up with those about impurity and shame. A girl who moves around the city, lives outside the
hostels and negotiates her way in and out of jobs, is viewed as somewhat sullied. By allowing herself to
realise her potential as a worker in a set of adult, employment relationships, she unwittingly leaves her
integrity and honour open to threat. There is a proportion of young women, originally placed by LEO,
who have since left their first jobs and have found their own way in the city, earning significantly more
from jobs they have independently accessed. However, these women – rather than being role models
for those less bold and brave – are frequently frowned upon and criticised by girls and their families for
negatively affecting the reputation of “Oriya girls” in the city.
While we have shown that even behaviours established in the village elicit new criticism once in the city,
neophyte migrants also cultivate new behaviours, beginning with their stay on the patriarchal campus of
the skilling and recruitment agency (see section 2). Some of these provide a route to a higher status and
can be viewed as mimicking the behaviour of higher caste and urban women, but inherent in them is
also new notions of freedom. Patrick Neveling (2006) describes how working women in Mauritius
acquired a reputation for dating and using their wages as ‘lipstick money’, while at the same time
subscribing to new social norms of monogamy and religiously moral behavior to aid their social status”
(op cit, 9).
Ong suggests a third aspect of impurity from new transgressions, which helps to explain the “savage”
and unruly behaviour of some girls discussed in section 3. Ong (1987, 1988) interprets spirit possession
as a response to the sharp break with village traditions made by young Malay women moving into work
in factories. This geographical break forces a break with norms, leaving them vulnerable to spiritual
attacks. Far from being viewed by women as a safer and purer environment, the factory is often viewed
as dangerous. “The modern factory is an arena constituted by a sexual division of labour and constant
male surveillance of nubile women in close, daily context… Young factory women themselves placed in a
situation in which they unintentionally violate taboos defining social and bodily boundaries” (op cit, 34).
The association of garment factory life with new impurities for young female migrants is also highlighted
in studies conducted in Sri Lanka (Hewamanne 2008) and Bangladesh (AWAJ Foundation; AMRF Society
et al. 2013). Thus, the idiom of purity is used in different contexts to refer to these girls’ origin (as
uncivilised and low caste) and to what they become in the city (sullied, but also vulnerable on account of
the village codes they have broken).
Group power versus individual rights
After finding jobs for trainees in Bangalore, LEO does not leave the girls to fend for themselves. It does
not “dump and run”. Everyone in the organisation realises the need for various types of support to
young women that are employed. However, the type of support activated is rooted in the patriarchal
power of the group: representative power under the leadership of men from the home districts (such as
trainers and centre heads), to whom the young women attribute moral authority. Even several months
after arrival in Bangalore’s factories and hostels, it is at the instigation of male leaders from provincial
Odisha that girls resist and protest, while these leaders use their ability to disrupt as a bargaining tool
for better conditions. But, under this same leadership, girls also fall in line and accept, for example,
being sent back home against their will or being locked up on Sundays.
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The legal framework has a small role here. Just as the patriarchal power exerted over the group can at
times help to get laws enforced, so, too, can it help to push for conditions that have no legal basis. There
is thus a gap in what the law promises (for example, employee rights in return for duties, limits to the
employer’s power, social dialogue) and what patriarchal leaders tend to demand (for example, unbarred
access to females by visiting male relatives, extension of employer protection to the hostel,
compensation for a death outside work…). The individual basis of jurisdiction is also in contrast to the
group basis of this patriarchal authority.
While provincial leaders face limits to their influence because they are not always present or available in
Bangalore, the alternative - the framework of individual rights and rules - remains remote. Hence, the
group responds in an unruly manner in response to rumours, possession and death. In Ong’s study of
young women workers in Malaysian electronics factories, managers tended to bundle such group
responses as “mass hysteria”, seen as a response to the strain of the job (1988: 36). In LEO’s case, it is
also linked to “primordial loyalties” (Chandavarkar 1994) of caste, community and region, aspects that
these provincial leaders play up to. Young migrant women assert their identity neither as adults nor as
employees but instead, as daughters, as trainees under the tutelage of leaders, as community members.
In such a context, the realisation of their rights as individual employees still requires significant work.
Who’s responsible?
While ours is the story of neophyte migrants travelling for first-time formal employment, it is shaped
deeply by government funds and the parties who mediate these funds: trainer recruiters. The fact of
government funds increases the velocity at which new migrants flow into the sector, as also the depth
of outreach at which young people are sourced. It is because they are financed by government that
LEO’s young female migrants are who they are, i.e. from far-off poor states, vulnerable and ill-equipped
to assimilate. The extent to which girls align with group patriarchal power (rather than branch out in
search of other forms of power, such as associating with peers or exploring their rights) is also a function
of their coming through government schemes, linked to their relatively short stay in the city. This is in
contrast to both Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, where young unmarried women have trickled into apparel
zones using their own resources and have stayed much longer, during which they appear to form
subcultures of their own (Hewamanne, 2008; Ruthven, 2014).
The combine of government and trainer-recruiter act to check the power of the employer but also
create a new ambiguity in the employer’s moral authority. Southern apparel employers are among the
safest and most legally compliant factories in the country. As capitalist enterprises, they will extract
what they can from workers, while they remain disciplined by the law and less so by workers’
associational power. They are also integrated into global supply chains and build their business in an
environment of submission to the ‘soft power’ (Ponte and Gibbon 2005) of contractual terms and
quality, social and environmental standards, and in the context of competition with lower-waged and
less regulated countries.
The advent of the government schemes, however, creates some ambiguity in the responsibility of this
principle employer. First, trained neophyte workers have arrived at the behest of government and
trainer-recruiter, not through their own networks. While this means these parties share responsibility
for the job outcomes, it also means that employers are dealing with a profile of worker (origin,
education level, mother tongue etc) which they are not used to. Further, the motivation and orientation
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of these workers is influenced by those of the government and its agents, the trainer-recruiters. The
government’s goal, after all, is to place in jobs (almost any job!) but only for a short period (the
mandatory six months). This goal stands in clear contrast to that of the employer, seeking to build a well
skilled and loyal workforce. Third, we have shown that inter-state female migrants cannot be lured to
the factories without accommodation. Yet their attempts to provide accommodation (and related
services such as water and transport) draw employers into new responsibilities which they had previous
not taken and which has implications for city infrastructure and services. Predictably, the government at
job destination (particularly municipality and local labour department) is unwilling and/ or unable to
respond.
Nonetheless, the failure of government to install an alternative framework of responsibility consequent
to its skills programmes, means the onus will and must remain with the employer. There tends to be
only a partial overlap between what employers should do, legally speaking, and what they must do in
order to run their operations. Employers circumvent some legal requirements, while moving beyond
others. In this way, several practices that are illegal have nonetheless become standard operational
procedures. For example, running hostels without declaring them as such (the law governing hostels is
considered too bureaucratic and punitive); confining young women to hostels because of a genuine
concern for their safety, and hiring workers casually without registering them to the Provident Fund
(PF), enabling them to wait out the mandatory period in Bangalore before withdrawing their savings.
On the other hand, there are several ways in which employers do more than what is required by law,
e.g., buttressing the ESI emergency system by organising transport and paying cash up-front; organising
gas cylinders to enable migrant workers to cook; paying compensation to the family of workers who die
outside of working hours. These efforts can be seen as compensating for the failure of government to
follow through the effects of its own programmes and to provide a basic infrastructure like migrant
support centres in consequence to its programmes.
5. CONCLUSION
The paper has described the transition of young rural women from poor backgrounds travelling from the
eastern state of Odisha to work in Bangalore’s apparel industry, through the sponsorship of central
government schemes. Formal jobs in the apparel industry offer a framework of benefits and rights which
make them attractive to migrants from India’s poor rural heartlands. And yet, the transformational
possibilities are stymied by the combined force of capitalist extraction and patriarchal power emanating
from the Bangalore-based employer, the trainer-recruiter and the girls’ own families back in the village.
Drawing on experiences and events from field operations in Bangalore, the paper explored ideas of
freedom, (im)purity and power as they play out for young women newly placed in jobs. The promise of
employment, implying adulthood and individual rights and responsibilities, is mediated by patriarchal
norms of protection and the confinement of young women and their rendition as “daughters” and
“trainees”. Women discover that they can be assured security only by accepting limitations on their
freedom. Ideas of transgression and purity play a key role here, wherein the regimes of factory and
recruiter combine to critique behaviour from ‘back home’ and influence it towards “mainstream” ideas
of dress, manners and seclusion. Young women respond with new behaviours mimicking the status
markers and also the freedoms of urban educated professionals. In doing so, they implicitly reference
the individualism (and associated rights and responsibilities) at the base of these behaviours. But the
power of male-led groups from home tends to override that of individual rights in Bangalore and plays
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out even when young women live far from provincial patriarchal leaders. Individual rights may therefore
have little influence for these workers until group patriarchal power has faded.
The entry of patriarchal power into the capitalist context is facilitated by the particular circumstances
and pressures exerted by government schemes. To reach placement targets, for example, trainerrecruiters like LEO must find jobs outside the source state, and this in turn creates the need for a
framework of migrant support. The deeper dive to find adequate numbers of recruits from poorer
backgrounds creates a profile of trainees which is more vulnerable and less equipped than that of more
seasoned migrants. The key role of trainer, in recruiting for jobs and marketing the opportunity,
disperses responsibility for safety and other outcomes, from the employer and from the girls
themselves, towards these new intermediaries. The speed and scale of the government-led scheme map
on to those of the industrial employer as surveillance is used to monitor and curb unacceptable
behaviour.
While government schemes have vastly increased the opportunity for young workers to access formal
sector jobs, the same schemes thwart the scope for empowerment through these jobs. This is not only
when they help to ease patriarchy’s entry into industry, but also when they obfuscate responsibilities
and purpose among the expanded stakeholders involved. The transformative role of employment will
require renewed focus on the moral authority of the employer and on installing the tools of self-efficacy
and empowerment in the hands of young workers.
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i
At the time these schemes began, few standards were in place to assess training quality. Now, these standards
are available (through the NSDC-promoted National Occupational Standards governed by the Sector Skills
Councils), but the ministries that fund the running costs of training remain uninterested in whether a student
passes a test or not.
ii
See for example http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/roshni-will-light-the-way-for-rural-youthjairam/article4792240.ece
iii
Other trades in which LEO offers skills training include machine operation for automotive manufacturing, call
centre roles, hospitality, motor maintenance and electrician.
iv
The government identifies certain social groups as Scheduled i.e. qualifying for positive discrimination (or
reservation) with respect to access to government jobs and institutions. While Scheduled Castes refer to the
lowest castes of the Hindu caste hierarchy (also known as Dalits), Scheduled Tribes refer to groups who have been
categorized as indigenous people or adivasis, living in remote regions prior to, and separately from, mainstream
Indian society, particularly in India’s centre, east and north-east.
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v
Curbing levels of overtime to India’s relatively restrictive Iegal norm of 50 hours per quarter (an average of 40
minutes per day) has been a key thrust of global buyer compliance.
vi
Also see Steinisch, M., et al. (2013). "Work stress: its components and its association with self-reported health
outcomes in a garment factory in Bangladesh – findings from a cross-sectional study." Health & Place 24:123-130.
vii
The management’s response appeared to combine elements of Hinduism, Christianity and Islam in an effort to
cover the religious bases for this tribal girl.
viii
It is standard practice to permit girls only two hours outside the hostel (enough time to do their shopping) on
Sundays.
ix
That is, if hostels – generally hidden from the buyer auditors – were to be discovered, it is better if girls are not
locked up.
x
Stringent regimes are routine in girls’ hostels in India, though confinement is illegal under Section 340 of the
Indian Penal Code 1860. Recently, there has been a spate of newspaper articles in the national press highlighting
and questioning the regime of girls’ hostels in colleges. See for example,
http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/chandigarh/girls-staying-at-pu-hostels-lament-late-entry-fine-universitydefends-ageold-tradition/
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