The Hindu Business Line : On the magic of being work sisters

What began in 1972 as a lone mission to bring women together is today a 7-lakh-strong movement. Determined to organise women workers so that they could enjoy the same benefits that organised labour received, Ela R. Bhatt founded the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA). We Are Poor but So Many tells the story of how SEWA has come to be the largest primary union in India. Ela weaves in her story too, says D. Murali, making the book a worthy read for the weekend.

CAN you name the largest primary union in the country? The answer is SEWA, Self Employed Women's Association (www.sewa.org) with a membership of over 7 lakh. And Ela R. Bhatt, the woman who started it all in 1972, tells the story of SEWA in We are poor but so many, from Oxford University Press (www.oup.com). She weaves in her story too. Rewind, therefore, to 1949, when as a shy student, Ela was "wandering in dirty neighbourhoods' of Surat with a young man" named Ramesh Bhatt, "collecting primary data on slum families for independent India's first census of 1951". Fighting her own inhibitions, Ela admired Ramesh, who was "listening and laughing and teasing and gathering data from the slum dwellers like a nosy new neighbour", and who became her husband later.

In 1955, with a degree in law, Ela joined the legal department of the Textile Labour Association (TLA) as a junior lawyer. Anasuyaben Sarabhai and Mahatma Gandhi had founded TLA in 1920. "My early days in labour court were tense," reminisces Ela. "The slightest comment about my clothes or my short height would upset me, and I would begin to stammer." She was then arguing cases "on matters like inadequate leave compensation, lack of staff in the mill canteen, or denied requests for shift changes." But Ela discovered a new dimension when she went about taking a survey of families affected by the closure of textile mills in 1968. "While the men were busy agitating to reopen the mills, at the end of the day, it was the women who were earning money and feeding the family." This was how: "They sold fruits and vegetables in the streets; stitched in their homes at piece-rate for middlemen; worked as labourers in wholesale commodity markets, loading and unloading merchandise; or collected recyclable refuse from city streets." These were "informal, home-based jobs" operating outside of any labour laws or regulations, describes the author. "I learned for the first time what it meant to be self-employed. My legal training was of no use in their case. "In 1969, you find Ela in Tel Aviv, learning about labour and cooperatives. She returned to TLA with "a head full of ideas" and a heart that wanted to do something for the women working in their homes. "I wanted to organise the women workers in a union so that they could enjoy the same benefits that organised labour received," writes Ela. She realised that women did not need to come together against anyone. "They just needed to come together for themselves. As a result of coming together, they had a voice." Thus was born SEWA in April 1972, with the support of TLA leaders.

Head-loaders, vegetable vendors and economists

Ela learnt her first lessons in collective bargaining from Soopa, who "slept by the sidewalk by night and during the day carried bales of cloth on her head", making twenty trips at Rs 2 per trip. "Half of her income went directly from her employer to the contractor who had brought her from her village to work in the city." Ela's "first real effort at organising" bears fruit in Ahmedabad: "The women's piece rate went up by 30 per cent." Take a walk through Poori Bazar that merges with "the gujari — the flea market that has gathered on the riverbank for many centuries."

Women are usually the producer-vendors in the market, such as "carpenters, tinsmiths, quilt makers, idol makers, painters, cigarette rollers, and incense stick makers." They were deeply in debt, Ela found. They were not lacking in enterprise or hard work, but working capital was scarce; nor did they own their tools of production. "The interest the women paid on their borrowings were exorbitant! They ranged from 10 to 20 per cent a day! No one could afford to pay such high interest and get out of poverty."

Beginning with help in obtaining loans by mediating with banks, SEWA established its own cooperative bank in due course. Ela speaks about Chandaben, her sounding board, Lakshmi Teta, a vegetable vendor, and the couple Devaki Jain, an Oxford-educated economist, and L.C. Jain, "first allies outside the TLA". The idea of Women's World Banking (www.swwb.org) took shape in 1975, during the International Women's Conference in Mexico, recounts Ela as one of its founders.

Read also about Renana Jhabvala, with degrees both from Harvard and Yale. "She helped us think about issues more analytically — how to weigh risk and consequences and how to value experience. She came to conduct field research for one year; she never left," writes Ela. You can read many anecdotes and meet interesting personalities in the chapters on rag-pickers, chindi stitchers, banking, health care, and so on.

On own feet

Year 1981 was when caste violence was bitter, narrates Ela. The trigger was reservation of two seats in the medical post-graduate course for Dalit and adivasi students. Upper-caste people targeted the Dalits in slums. "Because of the violence and the curfew, the daily wage earners and the self-employed in the city had no work, and therefore no income." SEWA organised prayers for peace and appealed for peace.

"Communal harmony was a union issue and a feminist issue. It was fundamental to our existence." But TLA took no sides, for political reasons. "Despite the curfew, all the mills in Ahmedabad continued to operate under government protection, while workers in the informal economy starved." On May 1, 1981, TLA leadership asked Ela to move SEWA out their headquarters, short-sightedly disowning it from the fold of organised labour.

"At the time of the break from the TLA, SEWA had 4,900 members, a small cooperative bank, an office building, a rural centre, one vehicle, and a few typewriters. But we also had a ten-year history of organising," remembers Ela. Declining offers from national unions to join them, SEWA decided to stand on its own. "We gathered all our strength and did not look back," writes Ela, chronicling the magic of being work sisters. Elsewhere in the book, there are grim accounts of the Hindu-Muslim riot in 1969, and the outbreaks in 1993 and 1999. All of which pulled "Rahimas and Ramilas, Jetuns and Jayas, Sharadas and Salmas — who all worked and laughed and sang together — in different directions." Sadly, "the scars left within the hearts of the wounded are deep. It will take a generation to forget or forgive the dark happenings in their lives, and the shadows linger on," as Ela rues. She highlights how poverty, self-employment and being a woman are "interrelated states of vulnerability". To the poor, their own bodies are the main asset. "As long as they have physical strength, they can dig, carry, haul, and cut to earn some money."

But the nourishment they get can't sustain a healthy body that hard labour demands. "In regions where water is scarce or unsafe to drink, dehydration is common, as are water-borne diseases." Do you know that "malnutrition, compounded by diarrhoea and dehydration, is a routine illness among the poor"? Government relief, especially after declaring an area as drought-stricken, takes the form of "digging and filling holes", writes Ela. Large-scale projects get started, such as building roads and bridges. "With the first rainfall, the road and the job wash away. Workers return to their fields, and the pockmarked earth fills up with water and becomes a breeding ground for mosquitoes."

The author's suggestion is that money may instead be spent on building water ponds, communal buildings and work sheds so that the villagers have a stake in seeing their efforts bear fruit. "Environmental work, such as nursery raising, water harvesting, recycling and sanitation, should also be considered part of relief work, she suggests.

Cooperatives

SEWA has 84 cooperatives, informs the site. These are dairy, artisan, service and labour, land-based, and trading and vending cooperatives. Ela informs that the Registrar of Cooperatives didn't first register SEWA Bank because its members were illiterate women. "Literacy was more important to the registrar than the women's dynamic economic productivity. I've often felt that the real illiterates are on the other side of the table," jibes in Ela.

Similarly, the video producers' cooperative was denied registration "because the directors, the producers, and the sound and camera technicians were illiterate." Ela frets that the officials had no concept of "how much more powerful a visual medium is in the hands of those not enslaved by the written word." There's more: "Rag-pickers' cooperative was suspect because they did not make any product; the midwives' cooperative was asked why delivering babies should be considered an economic activity.

The most difficult part of SEWA's journey has been "removing conceptual blocks", says Ela, recounting some of her biggest battles "over contesting preset ideas and attitudes of officials, bureaucrats, experts, and academics." Definitions added to the confusion, she points out. For instance, "Without an employer, you cannot be classified as a worker, and since you are not a worker, you cannot form a trade union." The author is sad that millions of people get excluded by the web of terminology, and therefore remain invisible to policy-makers. "Dividing the economy into formal and informal sectors is artificial — it may facilitate administration, but it ultimately perpetuates poverty," opines Ela.

Would you believe that there has been pressure from men who want to join the organisation, because they work alongside the women in the same occupations? "Initially, I was open to the idea of men joining our union struggles, because I felt that they would lend more strength to SEWA; however, the women emphatically refused." Why? Because they felt they'd feel inhibited with men around, and that men would dominate and create tensions.

Also, issues that were important to women were different. A secret that Ela shares is this: "Another major but unspoken reason was that the women wanted to keep their earnings and savings private — if not secret — from the men." Worthy read for the weekend.

Economics@TheHindu.co.in

More Stories on : Gender | Trade & Labour Unions | Books | E-Dimension

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
Moving ahead with SAFTA

Putting life into the letter of law

The long and short of rights

The promotion commotion

Logistically speaking

Hot chase of an architect amidst office furniture

An unwitting tax liability?

On the magic of being work sisters