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Paper short abstract:

Women workers' discontent manifests in multiple ways, disparate, but a powerful potential tool of resistance. Fragmented, multiplying and patriarchy-marked trade unions highlight the limits of scaling up women's resistance, and the complex space where gender and class formation intersect.

Paper long abstract:

Work, Agency and Collective Action of Bangalore's Garment Workers.

Low wages and multiple vulnerabilities of workers mark the global value chain in the Ready-Made Garments industry (RMG), overshadowing gradual advances that have occurred in the establishment of certain rights-based institutional mechanisms in the sector. Drawing on recent research on the Bangalore RMG industry, this paper looks at three related questions: how do women workers perceive their work? What are the modalities of expression of worker resistance on an everyday basis as well as through organised action? Third, the paper would foreground these questions in the broader political-institutional framework of the sector’s trade union movement: two formal divisions have occurred, in 2012 when a split in the Garments and Textile Workers Union (GATWU) paved the way for the formation of the Garments Labor Union (GLU), and in 2023 when the GLU split, leading to the Independent Karnataka Garment Workers Union. Additionally, the Karnataka Garment Workers’ Union (KOOGU) has existed independently since 2009.

In a context where only 10% of the workforce is unionised, the existence of multiple unions, as well as splits, represent unexpectedly high levels of internal frictions within the trade union movement. Has the quick fragmentation of fledgling efforts at collective organisation impacted grassroots efforts of workers’ self-organisation? What roles have the national level NTUI (umbrella union of informal workers), as well as affiliate CSOs played in these contexts of organisational disunity? In what ways do these dynamics speak to the intersection of gender and class formation?