“They Bowed down, because We Work for Justice!”: Everyday Struggles and Victories of the Domestic Workers Women's Union in Kanpur

Shubham Yadav, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Kanpur, previously the hub of textile mills and labour unions, saw its textile workers rendered jobless when the mills operated by the National Textile Corporation Limited closed in the early 2000s. The ‘men’ who lost their jobs had to stay at home while their wives started working, and ‘stepped out’, to earn a livelihood and find means of surviving in a city that was previously known, amongst unionists, as the ‘Russia of India’. The paper looks at this period of turbulence and theorises the transition through the new ‘everyday’ of these women who had to ‘step out’ and work to provide for their families while facing gender oppression, simultaneously. The added layer of routine labour exploitation in their work, due to harsher working conditions and the absence of socio-legal protection, transformed the ‘ordinary everyday’ of these women into sites of political and legal assertion through their efforts to unionise into a domestic workers' women’s union. These women, through their union, not only sought recognition and benefits from the state as workers, but also resisted gender oppression through public hearings, women's courts, protests, demonstrations, and collaboration with other activists in the region. The union also ensures that their children avail themselves of the benefits of the statutory right to education. The paper documents the impact of turbulence, both material and moral, on the families of workers employed in textile mills and later as domestic workers, while examining the response of women to their new ordinary - in the form of unionising and asserting rights as workers, parents, and equal citizens of the polity. Based on narratives from the union leader and workers, the paper seeks to theorise the politics of unions and the struggle for justice through a novel framework: ‘tal-mel’ (synchronicity) as an instrument of collaboration, assertion, and resistance.

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 Presented in Session 143. Grassroots Labor Activism and Worker Solidarity