by Santhosh Chandrashekar
Daily Lobo columnist
Padmavathi, a 39-year-old factory worker employed at Shalini Creations in Bangalore, India, collapsed at the factory gate and died soon after in a hospital on Sept. 18. Earlier, Padmavathi met with her manager and asked for leave to go to the hospital, only to be verbally abused. Though her request was later conceded, it proved to be of little use in saving Padmavathi's life.
This, according to The Guardian, is not uncommon. Earlier in March, Rathnamma, 27, lost her child after she was forced to give birth on the street outside the same factory when she was refused leave after she went into labor. Rathnamma's case is sandwiched between those of Padmavathi and Pushparaj, who died in October 2006 under similar circumstances.
Shalini Creations, where the three worked, is an overseas supplier for Gap, a clothing major. It is also other things depending on how you see it - another node in the transnational flow of capital, a cheap pool of labor, a space where labor laws bow out to the potent clout of global capital or a dehumanized space where people are labor-expending machines that need to be put to good use so returns can be maximized on investments.
Expected to meet daily quotas that are impossible to achieve even with superhuman capabilities, workers in the Third World enter hazardous work settings knowing what awaits them. For many, such jobs are a Hobson's choice, a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, amidst ever-shrinking job opportunities wrought about by neo-liberal restructuring of non-Western economies.
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With the successful dismantling of the government sector in the name of cutting unproductive spending and the resultant loss of public-sector jobs, the blue-collar work force with low-skill sets readily takes up jobs that come with a rigorous schedule. Such jobs are characterized by sweatshop-type conditions, low remuneration, dismal job security and aggressive supervisors who even log in employees' toilet breaks.
When labor must contend with the excesses of capital, women take the brunt of it, illustrated by the episodes at the Bangalore factory. This is pronounced with the recent tilt toward the service sector under liberalized regimes, a tilt that is the only way to attract transnational capital. Women are forced to work under unruly conditions that leaves them at the mercy of target-obsessed managements, making them liable to labor exploitation and sexual exploitation. With the state turning askance and even helping managements by relaxing labor laws, women have little protection. Often, they face long working hours, fewer breaks, limited facilities and denial of such basic benefits as maternity leave.
They get a raw deal even in the sphere of labor as trade union activities are dominated by men, who may be in favor of clinching a better pay scale rather than looking at working conditions such as a gender-friendly working atmosphere.
While women are forced to enter the labor force with poor-skill sets and under conditions of low job security, their position is doubly jeopardized as there are no concomitant changes in the family, which is perceived to be the original sphere of women. Women have to put their labor on the market for dismal remuneration, even as they toil within families enacting their roles as mothers, wives, daughters and caregivers to the sick and the elderly. This leads to their exploitation in the private as well as the public sphere with no benefits in return.
The global conditions of economic reorganization that have forced such conditions need scrutiny. With centers of production increasingly losing their proximity to the centers of consumption, there are no social ties between the anonymous producer and the consumer. This is also facilitated by a system that facilitates capital accumulation where companies trying to escape labor obligations outsource production to small organizations in Third World countries whose only goal is to meet the target by employing coercive methods. So while a trendy clothing line could come from anywhere - India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka - global transnational companies steer clear of responsibility by blaming the firms to which they have outsourced their work.
There is another bit I want to draw attention to before I close. There is the allegation that Third World countries are "taking our jobs." But the jobs go there at enormous social costs - costs that the host country fails to comprehend. In the zealousness to maximize profits, corporate organizations increasingly duck labor and humanitarian obligations, buying or arm-twisting governments to dismantle what little labor laws are left.
