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How upgrading the roles of Trade Unions can help to redress power imbalances – and not just between the worker and management

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In this blog, Nandini Ramamurthy looks into how different worker empowerment techniques and organisations can benefit and redress power imbalances. Not only through the traditional power imbalances between an owner and worker, but also gender imbalances. Digital initiatives, in particular, can be used to counter gender-based discrimination and violence at work, including in the case of garment factory workers in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, India.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio

Capital and labour are in antagonistic relationship because of the nature of the power embodied in them. For workers, the power comes from their sheer numbers, integral role in the production process, and participating in trade union and collective bargaining activities. Companies and the people that run them, on the other hand, derive their power from owning the means of production (whether in technology and fixed asset terms, or through employment contracts). A recent development that seeks to further empower companies and owners is dismantling trade unions and removing their power of collective bargaining, and replacing it with workers committees – which are non-binding and do not have official power. In the era of economic globalisation, these practices are becoming more and more common.

The main argument of this blog is to highlight how workers are addressing their precarious situation in the digital realm (online). Airing grievances and highlighting injustices online means that a worker can be anonymous: so they do not need to fear reprisals from management. Digitalisation is particularly useful in supporting victims of sexual and verbal abuses, especially women. Therefore, this blog aims to further highlight how upgrading trade unions roles and expanding collective bargaining is relevant for gender studies in understanding inequalities and power imbalances.

The gendered perspective of trade unions is understood by examining union bargaining agendas for gender, and looking into the women’s roles and their leadership. Co-operative and self-help groups are described as alternate forms of trade unions (Sundar 2007). In this model, the purpose of trade unionism is about building on social unionism. A report by the Indian Committee of the Netherlands (ICN) highlights that the state of Karnataka has about 1,200 factories, employing about 5,00,000 workers and that 80 percent of them are women. The Tiruppur Export Association (TEA) suggest that there are 8,300 factories employing more than 1,500,000 workers, of which about85 percent are women. Typically, women’s wages, working conditions, including in trade unions and use of collective bargaining are inferior. It is apparent that the traditional approaches of trade union and collective bargaining are not bringing any significant changes in integrating women workers into the mainstream labour market institutions.  One way to ameliorate the situation could be using more digital tools.

To write this blog, I have used a digital ethnography as the research method. Gram Vanni and 90.4 Radio Active are the two radio stations used as sources. The 90.4 Radio Active station uses Behind the Label program, while Gram Vanni engages through Namma Kural, Tholilalargalin Kural, Urimai Kural and Vandu Murugan. These shows/podcasts are popular amongst and aimed towards garment workers.

Looking more closely at the cases of Tiruppur and Bengaluru, it is clear that the range of people taking part in labour markets in the two states (migrant workers, local workers, male and female workers, child labour, and workers with varying shades of socio-economic and demographic features), makes it difficult to make generalised statements. So, given this context, this blog narrates the experiences of workers that are exposed to digital methods for raising grievances, taking part in collective bargaining, and getting representation from a union. This is the voice of a female garment worker Geeta Bhonsle from Bengaluru. The worker deliberated on supervisor’s behaviour when asked for a 5 minutes break “…. the supervisor said this is workplace and not Dharmashala”. Vasantha, a garment worker from Bengaluru discussed about the dourjanya (forceful) working conditions. Latha and Vijaya complained about disrespecting women bodies within and outside the factory site and on safety issues during night duty. Savithriamma discussed the problems she faced despite having an ESI (insurance) facility “… it resulted in loss of workdays and ended up paying more money on diagnosis and medical treatments”. Muddu Raj a male garment worker elucidated his discontent when management applied discriminatory practices at workplaces.

In the case of Tiruppur, Vijayalakshmi explained that through using digital platforms, workers do not get into unnecessary saitchchavaravu (controversy) “…. the management has no idea which worker is on the other side”. Even though there is suspicion the workers are free from allegation of participating in trade union activities. Deepa said that on a digital faceless platform she has the courage to speak about kattupadu illatha kodimiyana thakudhal (atrocities). Moreover, the workers can freely discuss ‘forbidden’ subjects such as mental health, work pressure, sexual favours, maternity issues and mensuration related problems. Another innovative digital technique comes from the Gram Vanni podcast, which hosts Vandu Murugan: a drama show on labour welfare issues. At the end of the show, the presenter asks questions on labour-related issues, and rewards workers for correct answers. Workers also call IVR to record violations and grievances, and Gram Vanni then helps them to connect with trade unions or legal assistance. Sathya, a female worker, benefited from such interactions.

Digitalisation and using digital tools and techniques increases the rate of mobilisation and solidarity among workers because it can minimise discrimination and provide a place for people to express their grievances. Furthermore, digital spaces can transcend borders, break cultural barriers, and build collective strength and network. With the help of the digital realm,  we can collect information globally, and use it to challenge the powers held by buyers and suppliers in the global production system. It provides opportunity for workers with repressed voices especially when trade union and collective bargaining is beyond their reach. From the discussions mentioned above, it is evident that digital tools and spaces have rekindled the interest of solidarity.

Reference 
Sundar, Shyam K.R. (2007). Trade Unions And Civil Society: Issues and Strategies. Indian Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 42(4), pp. 713-734.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author:

Nandini Ramamurthy holds a PhD degree from Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS). Her doctoral work focused on understanding governance, work and value share of local clusters in global production system, Tamil Nadu, India. Currently, she is working on ‘Odisha Migration Study’ project as a Senior Research Associate at Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad. Some of her research interests are migration and development, work and employment, trade union and role of digital tools in bringing solidarity among garment and textile workers. She has more than 10 years of industry experience in Micro Finance and MSME sectors, and specializes in digital financing.

 

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Transformative Methodologies | A reflection on collaborative writing across sex worker organisations and academia

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We – members of Empower Foundation – a sex workers’ rights organisation in Thailand – and two scholar-activists from International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS) in the Netherlands, reflected on our experience of collaboration in light of our search for social transformation.

 

About us and what brought us together

Empower Foundation is a leading organisation in the defense of sex workers’ rights, and is located in Chiang Mai, Thailand. It has almost 40 years experience of working with creative and transformative methodologies – doing community-based research which then feeds into policy proposals, that are brought to the attention of governmental and international organisations, such as International Labour Organisation (ILO). It models best labor practices in their own ‘Can Do Bar’. Empower is the space for sex workers to exchange experiences, organise and create ways, often using art and culture, to inform and influence society on many issues, including the harms caused by anti-trafficking policy and practices.

What brought us together initially was the interest in bringing insights from labor studies – Karin’s area of research – on the one hand, and gender and sexuality studies – Silke’s field of expertise – on the other, in conversation with each other, in order to explore how that could contribute to proposals for structurally improving labor conditions of sex workers. Our first paper was on analysing ILO discussions around decent work, and how sex work and sex workers have been systematically excluded from conversations around the decent work agenda. It was in this context that in 2014 Silke and Karin contacted members of Empower Foundation that Silke had met the year before at an event co-organised with Mama Cash at ISS.

Trying to make a difference in the way we collaborate

While Silke and Karin had an initial idea about the paper, there was explicit room for adapting the focus, approach, and language. Neither of the three partners had experience in this kind of joint project, so we had an open conversation about the ways in which we wanted to collaborate from the beginning, thereby establishing some common guiding principles – that we would explore how to go about it along the way, keeping in mind that the contribution of the expertise and perspectives of Empower was crucial to the paper, both in terms of the kind of knowledge that we wanted to produce, as well as in terms of the social impact that we were seeking, namely, to improve sex workers’ labor conditions. We also agreed that Empower’s involvement could be more or less, depending on their availability, while our shared preference would be to have the collective as co-author.

This conversation was particularly important given the previous negative experience of working with academics. Liz Hilton from Empower Foundation summarised: “We’ve had one or two earlier experiences with people who wanted to collaborate and that was really terrible. The whole premise of collaboration was theft, of stealing our work.” Liz mentioned the importance of being aware of the differences in our language – “…not just the difference between Thai and English, but also the difference between sex worker language and academic language. We don’t see this as an obstacle, but it will be an adventure!”. The problem with academic jargon, as Empower also explained in a preparatory note for a meeting of sex workers organisations at ISS that took place at a later stage, is not that sex workers are not able to understand it, but that it does not reflect their experiences or realities properly, and it often operates with implicit assumptions that are problematic.

One common assumption in both academia and policy for instance is the conflation between sex work and trafficking that occurs when using the term “sexual exploitation”, to refer to what in any other economic sector would be called either “forced labor” or “labor exploitation”. Moreover, even within academic language, there were many different ways of talking about sex work with important political implications. Empower has published a dictionary that provides many examples of such – often problematic – assumptions and disconnects that occur. So, one of the first things that Silke and Karin asked was: how does (or doesn´t) the language that we use speak to members of Empower Foundation? In which ways do they think we should change it?

We also talked about timelines, and the need to adapt those to the realities of the different parties involved. For Empower, this compared positively with earlier collaborations with academics: “Other people that we were collaborating with didn’t want to give us the time to properly translate, think, come back to it, put forward what we can do, will do, and what we think. They were very rushed. Everybody has deadlines, we know that, but their rush was quite rude. They were continuously trying to fit us into what they already decided.”

Final reflections

We co-authored the paper that came out two years later. Empower Foundation made a tremendous contribution to the paper by critically analysing the language used, and by bringing in the findings of the community-based research that Empower was conducting independently –  both through previous research on the adverse impact of anti-trafficking measures, published under the title “Hit and Run”, and the study on “Moving Toward Decent Sex Work”. This contributed towards a very nuanced and very tangible understanding of what decent work and labor exploitation means for sex workers in Thailand, by looking at these not as a binary, but as a continuum and as multidimensional.

Finally, and most importantly, in this process we developed a relationship of trust, friendship, and deep appreciation that became the basis for our further collaboration.

Now, has this collaboration lessened the precarity and contributed to more decent working conditions experienced by sex workers, as our chapter’s title suggests? Probably not. Yet, in a context in which sex workers’ knowledge about their lives and work is continuously devalued and ignored, we like to believe that a respectful collaboration that challenges these hierarchies of knowledge, and augments sex workers’ own voices can make a small, yet, meaningful contribution to a changed discourse on sex work – and ultimately to more respect and rights for them.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the authors:

Sex Worker Networking Zone at the International AIDS Conference 2018, Amsterdam.” by junomac is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Empower Foundation is a Thai sex worker organization promoting opportunities and rights for sex workers for more than 30 years

 

 

 

 

 

 

Silke Heumann is a Sociologist and Assistant Professor (Senior Lecturer) in the Major Social Justice Perspectives (SJP). Her areas of expertise and interest are Gender and Sexuality Studies, Social Movements, Latin American Politics, Discourse Analysis and Social Theory.

 

Karin Astrid Siegmann is Associate Professor in Labour and Gender Economics at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS).

 

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The revival of Brazil’s cacao sector: is anything really changing? by Lee Pegler and Luiza Teixeira

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Bouncing back from a devastating crop disease (vassoura de bruxa), Brazilian cacao producers are showing a different face. Many of the old plantations have been ‘taken over’ by younger family members who seem keen to present more sustainable products and methods. As discussed here, a 2017 visit and forthcoming research seek to evaluate the development significance of these changes.

In a 2017 seminar, the State University of Santa Cruz (UESC) brought together farmers, buyers, technicians, and governmental experts (plus a few academics) in an attempt to discuss challenges and prospects of a sustained revival of Brazilian cacao and chocolate production. UESC and the town of Ilheus are pivotal as they sit at the northern edge of the main cacao-producing region of Brazil[1], an area that still boasts over 40,000 farms/farmers. Brazil itself seems set to move from number 5 to number 4 in the ranking of global producer nations. What difficulties are involved in such a move and, more pointedly, what do the various actors really mean by sustainability?

In fact, this question concerning the (social) sustainability of the Brazilian cacao chain has a very pertinent historical precedent. When we look back to the novels (e.g. Gabriella) of Jorge Amado (a hero of Ilheus himself)[2], with their vivid dramas highlighting powerful farmers (treated as Coronels/coronéis), hierarchical social relations, slave-type conditions and sexual exploitation in the cacao sector, it comes as no surprise that Brazil is the only one of the large cacao producers for whom small-scale farmers have not dominated national production estimates. This concentration of wealth and power also came to be reflected, at a consumption level, in comments about local farmers “travelling to Paris to have a haircut” (during the heyday of local cacao production).

Most importantly, from a global development and social justice perspective, what is important to examine is the likelihood that the sector’s revival will mean real change to both the social mindset and practice of a resurgent farmer class. Has the recent shake-up in the market, production quality/reliability, and a new era of farmers been enough to lead to substantive change in social relations on farms and within the chain? On this, the seminar and field visits canvassed a very practical range of concerns and viewpoints on what was needed for a revived and sustainable sector.

Discussions in the seminar and at technical facilities focused on scientific quality processes in the field, the laboratory, and on production and marketing. The greatest strains appeared evident between established/large producer families and new or smaller facilities, social actors (communities/cooperatives), and the like. Sustainable production and commercial practices remained fundamental to all, but as this moved to questions of collective action, inter-group cooperation, and substantive changes to social relations on the farm, a sense of unanimity became far less clear.

Without doubt, all agreed that they had moved substantially from earlier modes of production and that child labour, bonded conditions, and the like no longer existed. Field visits even gave good impressions that more participative production, land sharing and autonomy had emerged alongside some impressive on-farm ‘tree to bar’ and social cooperative ventures in local communities (assentamentos) and within some large-scale farms.

Yet the extent to which this has changed and implications from a labour security or social justice perspective could not be gleaned from this brief visit. Even from a solely production point of view, the question of sustainable practices is strongly debated, as is evident from issues such as whether random planting, full sun, or shade tree plantation areas (let alone mixed crop/multiple livelihood strategies!) should be promoted. Yet each has quite specific implications for worker/small scale farmers and community development.

Not uncommon questions about the reach and depth of local (e.g. Project Cacao), sectoral (Cacao Connect), company (Body Shop/Tony Chocolonely), and multi-actor/international coalitions (e.g. Coco Action via UTZ, ICCO) to promote ‘best practice’ have also arisen. The community does not appear to be united in terms of what the various forms of multistakeholder alliances might be able to do in terms of representation and ‘teeth’ (to enforce any common agreements).

Further work on this case study (as part of the ISS Brasil Plan/GOLLS project) took place during 2018, involving staff of ISS and UESC. We soon plan to provide a more consistent overview of ownership and production models in the south Bahia/Ilheus region and to set up a series of case studies of: a) local social sustainability, and b) the governance of sustainability processes, for staff and students to pursue during 2019.

The broader question behind this research is whether structural, market, and generational change has allowed a greater link to be made between economic upgrading (of the cacao chain) and the upgrading of social conditions and relations (i.e. greater social justice) in a situation where Brazil is seeking to find a stronger place in the global market (for cacao/chocolate). This requires not only a methodical analysis of chain governance and of production and social relations (at market, community, and family levels), but also further reflections on how we study, interpret, and classify ‘well-being’. How far have we really moved from the vision of Jorge Amado?

[1] And all exports (both raw cacao and more finished goods from the area) move out of the Port of Ilheus.

[2] The well-known Brazilian romantic/historical novelist – see for example Amado, J. (1958 – 1ST ed.) Gabriela, Cravo e Canela, Livaria Martins Editora, Sao Paulo.

About the author:

IMG_0726Lee Pegler spent his early career working as an economist with the Australian Labour Movement. More recent times have seen him researching the labour implications of “new” management strategies of TNCs in Brazil/ Latin America. This interest expanded to a focus on the implications of value chain insertion on labour, both for formal and informal workers. Trained as an economist and sociologist (PhD – LSE), he currently works as Assistant Professor (Work, Organisation and Labour Rights) at the ISS.

Foto_Bliss copy.jpgLuiza Teixeira achieved her PhD in Public Administration and Government, in 2016, and her dissertation theme focused on Public Participation in Municipal Legislative Branches in Brazil. Luiza is a Professor at Santa Cruz State University, in the Administration and Accountancy Department. Recently she has been involved in research projects on the field of Public Administration, especially with the themes of Public Participation, Social Control, Accountability, and Local Development.