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Lina Mathias

SWEAT shops and glass houses, are the new inheritors — the factory sirens that symbolised Mumbai's limitless potential for employment and a better life have fallen silent and the mill chimneys that rose proudly over the city's chawls are now simply shabby neighbours to fancy giants housing hyper malls and call centres.

It is not simply the skyline that has changed. It is the very ethos of a city that spelt `fighting spirit'. Older workers like Vasant Dandekar are convinced that even Mumbai's remarkable record of being safe for women travelling alone at night was linked to its working class progressive norms brought about through political and social consciousness. "The late night shift mill workers returning home were a reassuring presence. Alas, it is no longer so."

The over two lakh mill workers primarily along with the 1.25 lakh civic workers, the postal employees, dock workers, Government employees gave the city its politically conscious, ever-ready-to-protest image. The powerful public sector bank employees and officers' union too are a familiar part of the city's labour consciousness, proud of their role in winning for all an eight-hour working day. But for all these sections, dwindling numbers, competing private contractors, voluntary retirement schemes and freeze on recruitment have meant a dimming of their influence and prominence.

"There is a drastic reduction in secure, regular jobs," says Mr N Vasudevan of the Blue Star Employees Federation. "You can get jobs but they are in the shifting, contractual and unorganised sectors. This mean long hours and low pay in the sweatshops like garment and diamond cutting units and long hours and impossible targets in air-conditioned, plush offices like private banks, insurance companies and call centres. It is sweat shops or glass houses."

The courier industry is growing at a phenomenal rate in the city with a one-lakh strong workforce of mostly young under graduates who are ill-paid and work long hours for the subcontractors of the well-known courier companies, he adds.

But insecurity is now no longer a question of being in the low-paid segment. At a foreign bank recently, all the young executives had to appear at in-house interviews where they were told to convince the panel why fresh recruits should not replace them. And increasingly, appointment letters no longer carry familiar words like provident fund cuts, bonus hikes and permanent tenure.

As far as the island city is concerned, there is no longer even a pretence at debate over conversion of vast mill lands into corporate offices, pubs and bowling alleys. The only time the media takes note is when one more mill worker, unable to find employment anywhere else, commits suicide. Mr Suhas Abhyankar of the Hindustan Lever Employees' Union says that the exodus of workers from Mumbai's central areas is towards the Vasai-Virar belt because it houses a large complex of small-scale industries.

In the suburbs, especially the north eastern area stretching from Kurla to Mulund, many of the sprawling engineering and pharmaceutical factory premises are now either sites of huge residential complexes or are awaiting conversion to malls and multiplexes. The Kurla plant of Premier Automobiles now has a shadow of the 10,000 strong workforce of 15 years ago, Kamani Tubes which made history with a workers' takeover in the late 1980s is now desolate as is the Kurla plant of Mukand Company, the land on which the sprawling Consolidated Pneumatic Tools stood is the site of a multi-storeyed complex and sudden appearance of the glass and neon lit R-mall, Nirmal Lifestyle and McDonald outlet at Mulund in the midst of a drab industrial skyline is a portend of things to come.

In the last three years across the State, 18,000 industrial units were shut down throwing 3,25,000 workers into joblessness. In 2000, 4,641 units were closed down. In 2002, another 6,739 downed shutters. Out of the 8,425 units in Mumbai, Thane, Raigad, Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg districts, 1,402 closed down in 2002. Veteran trade unionist Mr D Thankappan says that nearly 30,000 workers from Mumbai's pharmaceutical companies have been forced to move away from the city when their companies shifted. So where do these workers' and their families seek alternate employment? Small scale industries or self-employment such as driving autorickshaws, hawking consumer and household goods, running wada-pau stalls and `dabba' services.

It is no wonder then that for 750 vacancies in the rank of police constable 15,000 short listed candidates turned up at the Police Gymkhana at Marine Drive in February this year. Among those who sat through the 6-hour exam were post-graduates and engineering graduates

However, for the English-medium educated young graduate, all roads lead to the call centres and hyper malls. Despite the criticism that young people working here are forced to adopt phoney American and British accents, pick up a veneer of telephone etiquette and even shallower layer of `social progressiveness', call centres have lost none of their appeal.

Prashant Sabnis in his early 20s, works a nine-hour shift at a well known coffee and pastry outlet in south Mumbai. Thrice a week he attends classes for a diploma in catering and has enrolled in the Mumbai university's distance education B.Com degree course. There are thousands of young people like Pashant working in the city's fast food joints and shopping malls. The pay usually ranges from R 5,000 to 10,000 a month. Almost all are graduates, work long punishing hours and are aware that they have to save for a `further' degree that will get them a `better and more secure' job.

"Most of my students who work have fathers who have taken voluntary retirement", says college lecturer Ms Anuradha Kalhan. Since the inflation and abysmal interest rate eats into the VRS amount, the eldest child finds call centres and malls good sources of fee and pocket money.

Twenty-three year old Drayton Fernandez worked for a call centre for five months until he `simply could not take it anymore'. Initially, he enjoyed the feel of a monthly pay packet of Rs 11,000 so soon after graduation. "Every two weeks, we had to do the long shift (11.30 pm to 8 am) alternating with the short one (6.30 pm to 11.30 pm). Every time there was a shift change, my digestion would play up and I would be miserable. I found I had no time for anything except sleeping and then rushing to get to work," he says.

The more calls you handle the higher the incentives. There is a 15-minute break every three hours and a half hour meal break. `Monitoring' takes place from the country the outsourcing is coming from. These `monitors' listen in on the extensions to how you are handling the call as do the Indian team coaches or supervisors. "I found it stressful but there are many who enjoy themselves."

Jayashree Shukla says she enjoyed her stint in two call centres, though she gave it up after a year. "There is the hip-hop crowd which just cannot handle the money and the serious ones who really save up for higher studies. We even had colleagues who were 50 plus. Most of them had taken voluntary retirement and were focused on simply earning the money for may be two or three years and then quitting." Call centres have a 30 to 40 per cent attrition rate.

But perhaps the less acknowledged impact of the last decade's increasing job losses and insecurity has been the loss of a well-defined role for the trade union leader, once Mumbai's familiar trademark.

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