It’s all toil, no pay for women workers at cloth market

For the more than 8000 workers, at least 5000 of which are women, their daily 12 –hour work of packing, loading and transporting bales of cloth is done at a workplace that has no facilities for resting and drinking water and no common area and adequate toilets.

Chanda Thakore, who has worked in the market for more than 30 years says, “We do not even have basic facilities here. Children keep running around or have to sit on the handcart. The market survives because we do our jobs. Adequate facilities is the least the employers can do for us.”

The women are the backbone of the cloth markets. They pack the cloth pieces into bundles, stash them in sacks, load them onto handcarts and push them all the way to wherever the wholesalers wants them to be delivered. Generally, the destination is the office of the private transporters in Kankaria, a round trip of about 5 kilometres on foot.

Another worker Gita Thakore says, “Most of the women here have been working for generations. We grew up in this market and yet do not get treated nicely. The shop owners object even when we drink water from their pitchers. Most of our children come with us. We need a crèche for them.”

The cloth market was set up more than a 100 years ago when the textile mills in Ahmedabad were flourishing. While the men ended up working in the mills, women invariably took up jobs in the textile market. When the mills started closing down in the 1980s, men became unemployed or took to drinking and the women ended being the sole breadwinners in many households.

Most of the women are members of the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), a trade union and a tripartite labour welfare board comprising the employers, workers and the Labour Department, but basic facilities under labour legislations are still a far cry for the women.

Even an increase in piece rate from the five-year old Rs 10 to 15, payable for every round of delivery of sack filled and sewn, the workers had to resort to a three-day strike a month back.

Manali Shah, vice-president of SEWA says, “One worker works in eight to nine shops and establishing an employee-employer relationship becomes difficult in such a case. Also, many shopkeepers do not get themselves registered with the welfare board.”