When They Sat Down

(Published in Fountain Ink, May 2015)

(The sleek malls and smiling staff of the retail textile sector hide a darker tale of exploitation. Few protest for fear of the boot. But six women of courage in Thrissur protested for 106 days to make sure their bosses did the right thing.)

***

On the 8^th of April, 2015, Kerala had its third dawn to dusk hartal of the year. The shutdown was called by various organizations in agricultural, fishing and motor transport sectors: the pro Left Democratic Front (LDF) farmers’ unions in protest against the fall in price of natural rubber; Kerala Fisheries Co-ordination Committee against the recommendations of Dr Meena Kumari committee report that allows entry for large deep sea fishing vessels into the territory of local fishermen; the joint action council of motor transport workers against the steep hike in third party insurance premium. This was the second hartal in a month’s span following the one called on March 14^th by the Left Democratic Front in protest against violence in the assembly against the opposition MLA’s. The other hartal of the year was called by the BJP on January 27^th demanding resignation of Finance Minister K M Mani in the wake of graft charges against him in the bar bribery scam.

There is a sense of disquieting calm that settles over the state on hartal days regardless of the party that has called for it and regardless of the nature of its incitement. Public life comes to a grinding halt: most vehicles keep off roads; markets and malls remain closed; attendance is abysmal in government offices and educational institutions; universities postpone scheduled examinations; there are stray incidents of stone pelting; a couple of KSRTC buses and a few government offices are invariably vandalized.  

And as has the norm been ever since the emergence and fortification of a globalised Malayali middle class in the last couple of decades, this is also a field day for all the hartal haters: in private discussions within cozy confines and on social media, rants charged with moral rectitude are vent out against human rights violations caused by a “barbaric, inhuman, outdated” mode of protest; there are laments made for losses incurred to the state exchequer; a few groups of volunteers (one of which is a Royal Enfield bikers’ group) venture out to make travel arrangements for those stranded in railway stations; #saynotohartal trends for a while on twitter.   

After dusk, a few state-run beverage outlets open their shutters, and before long the routine long queues—twitchy yet somehow scrupulously disciplined—appear in front of them. Next morning, the normal order of public life is restored with a nonchalant ease, almost as if the hartal was an imaginary detour. 

***

On the same hartal day, another protest, totally blacked out by print and visual media, reached its 100^th day. Irikkal Samaram (Sitting Strike), carried out by six women employees—five sales girls and one sales supervisor—of Kalyan Sarees, one of Kerala’s high-end clothing shops in its already overcrowded but still burgeoning textile retail sector, had began on December 30^, 2014. Since then, Padmini S K, Maya Devi P, Rajani Dasan, Devi Ravi, Alphonsa Johnson and Beena Sojan, under the banner of Asanghaditha Meghala Thozhilali Union-AMTU—(Unorganized Sector Labour Union) have been sitting outside the textile showroom at Kovilakathumpadam, in Thrissur district.

This is their charter of demands:     

·         Cancel the transfer orders.

·         Re-arrange the break timings and make provisions for the sales girls to sit.

·         Implement an 8-hour work schedule.

·         Stop the practice of making women employees work after seven in the evening.

In a nutshell, theirs is a protest to obtain legal acknowledgement from the textile sector management that the right of sales employees to sit during working hours is a basic human right that cannot be violated. It is a protest to let the management and the consumer world know that sales employees won’t stand anymore without breaks for ten or eleven hours like human mannequins; that they won’t anymore greet their customers with picture perfect smiles pasted on their faces when the only thing on their mind is a toilet break—in most showrooms there are no specific toilet breaks allotted which the management then conveniently interprets as no toilet breaks at all for sales employees; that they are now organized enough to collectively confront hitherto unchallenged violations of legitimate rights; that slavery is no more acceptable.    
     

With no public transport facilities available, none of them are in a position to make it to the strike site on this day. For protesters stranded at home, there are no volunteers or motorcycle clubs to arrange travel facilities. During this 100 day period, the three hartal days have been the only occasions when they have stayed away from strike. When they were working, hartals used to be a welcome relief, a rare day when they could afford to forget about most things and just chill. Now, however, a rest day at home is no more a welcome proposition.

In the absence of the re-assurance the strike site has come to provide them and the comforting solidarity of fellow protesters, dealing with various insecurities turns out to be a painful task. “When we are sitting there, there is this hope and determination that the strike will succeed. There are people all around. One discussion or the other is always going on. It is when we are all alone that the doubts start creeping in: what is going on in our lives? What have we gotten into?” says Alphonsa Johnson (42), one of the protesters. Her husband, Johnson, incidentally, has been waging a protest of his own for better salary at the medical shop he works.

Being at home for an entire day also means a longer than usual interaction with their families, something that with every passing day of the strike has gone on to become more and more stressful. All these days of striking have had their toll and resulted in strained family relationships. For Beena Sojan (39), who lives in a rented house with her husband and younger daughter, there has been very little support from her family since the beginning of the strike. Her husband, a daily wage labourer had lost his job while she was on strike. And after the recent marriage of their elder daughter, they have a debt of Rs 1.5 lakh to pay off. 

Padmini SK (42), a widow since her husband—her childhood sweetheart—died in a car accident fifteen years ago, has two sons, the elder of whom has given her an ultimatum of one week’s time to sort things out. A contract labourer himself, he is certain that the strike, of which his mother is the convener, stands no chance of success. Her younger son is sympathetic, but she knows that she cannot go on challenging her elder one. “In some situations, there is only so much a mother can tell her son”, she says.

For Devi Ravi (39), the situation is even more agonizing. Her son Akhil Vishnu works in the same showroom of Kalyan Sarees and is a trump card of sorts for the management, someone they front with relish as a clinching testimony to not just their own ‘righteousness’ but also to the ‘malevolence’ of the protesting women. “If we were intent on taking revenge against these women as they have been shouting around, why on earth should we keep the son of one of them here? In fact, after they started their strike, we even hiked his salary. And they are still spreading lies”, says Shiva Prasad, the public relations officer of the showroom.

Devi Ravi, whose husband is a hotel employee, would like her son to join her in protest—“which mother wouldn’t?” she asks—but concedes that she does not have the moral right to ask him to do so. Akhil is an under graduate student who funds his education from what he earns from the showroom. Even when Devi was working, what she used to earn—Rs 5,000 till a year ago and Rs 7,000 from August 2014, after the employees stood firm in their demand for a hike—was woefully inadequate to meet the needs of her family, so there is no way that she can now ask her son to leave his job. “It is our helplessness that makes us take up jobs like these. Can you then imagine how bad our working conditions must have been to be forced into a strike like this?”

Even those like Rajani Dasan (38) and Maya Devi (40) whose families have been supportive throughout are aware of, and affected by, the financial burden the strike has forced their dear ones to bear. Rajani’s husband works as a painter and the couple has two children. Maya Devi’s husband is a bakery employee, and they too have two children. “At one level, we know the importance of our strike, not just for our own sake, but for the sake of a larger community. But we also cannot remain blind to what is going on in our own homes. Even the Rs 7,000 that we earn means a lot to families like ours. Otherwise we would not have taken up a job like this in the first place”, says Rajani.   
 

None of the women come from a background of political activism. It is as “poor, ordinary women with not much education and a lot of financial problems” that they prefer to describe themselves. Irikkal Samaram, in fact, is not just the first strike they have participated in, but also the first one they have paid exhaustive attention to. “Earlier, when I used to see people striking, I used to sneer at them: couldn’t they just shut up and work?” says Maya Devi. But now she tells her son and daughter to always make an effort to find out what is going on if they were to chance upon a group of protesters.

She has given them one more advice: to be skeptical of what the media feeds them. “I have lost all faith in our print and visual media. All of them are slaves to money. If you have enough money, you can buy the whole media and create your own news. And if you have no money like us, there is no way you can find a space in the media”, she says.

In the first week of the strike, the women had organized a press conference at Thrissur Press Club. For this, they had to pay Rs 1,500 as rent. None of the news channels or newspapers, however, carried a report of this press conference. Though they were well aware of the magnitude of the management’s monetary power, and had a vague idea of the kind of money media organizations earn from the advertisements of Kalyan group and other prominent textile and jewellery retail chains—roughly estimated at around Rs 200 crore per month—the protesters were not prepared for such a complete blacking out of their strike. “It was not as if we expected them to strike with us. But they could at least have reported that a strike like this is taking place”, says Maya Devi.  

Padmini, who had once dreamt as a child of becoming a journalist, is now sympathetic to the plight of those reporters and ‘media labourers’ who she has come to think of as “very much like us: workers at the mercy of the management who has sold itself out to the corporates.” What fills her with anger and disgust, though, is the way the media—in particular television news media—posits itself as an ethically infallible institution. “Don’t they feel ashamed one bit to play God day and night?” She is quick to add that if she could have afforded to study beyond tenth standard she might have ended up asking the same question to herself.  She now counts it her good fortune that she did not end up as a journalist, and is grateful to the strike for having erased without a trace a lingering regret.
 

***

Like every other important strike in history, Irikkal Samaram, too, is the consequence of a protracted and firmly entrenched system of exploitation, the resistance to which has its loci in both trade union and feminist movements. The immediate reason for the strike was the transfer orders given to the six women employees, without prior notice, on the evening of December 11, 2014. While Kalyan Sarees management maintains that the transfers were routine official procedure, the women employees aver it was an act of vendetta aimed at muzzling the first voices of dissent against a work culture that both the management and to an extent the general public have come to take for granted. 

A week before they were given the transfer orders, the six women had attended the first state convention of Asanghaditha Meghala Thozhilali Union (AMTU) held at Kozhikode, and had got themselves the tags of the union. They had joined the union four months ago after they had come to know that a union existed for unorganized labourers. It was a decision borne out of an assessment that individually expressed voices of opposition against various human rights violations at their workplace was never going to yield success. From their numerous experiences, both at Kalyan Sarees and at the various showrooms they had worked previously, they knew that such singular acts of defiance invariably culminated in the abrupt expulsion of the dissenter. “Someone whom you work with today won’t be there tomorrow, and so frightened you would be that you wouldn’t even try to remember such a person existed”, says Maya Devi.

On May 1, 2014, AMTU, based primarily in the district of Kozhikode at that point in time, had organized a sitting strike of textile workers at Kozhikode. Until they heard about that strike, the six women had not even thought about the possibility of a trade union. “For employees in the textile sector, and in particular for women, there are no trade unions. The mainstream unions are least interested in our problems. What attracted us to AMTU was the fact that it was a union exclusively for workers in the unorganized labour sector, and moreover it was a union in which women had a great say”, says Maya Devi.    

They then took the initiative in inducting their fellow employees into the union. Stringent frisking measures—carried out by male security guards—and the presence of an intensive surveillance network—there is a camera even in front of the toilet—meant the act of peddling in a union notice inside and then passing it on to someone else turned out to be the greatest adventure of their lives. “There was fear and a kind of high we had never known before, but above all there was a sense of hope that had started to swell. We knew that we were on to something”, says Padmini. Out of the 21o sales employees in the showroom, they had managed to induct thirty one more sales girls into the union. The news was spreading fast; so fast that there was no option but for it to reach the ears of the management.     
   

Five women were transferred to Thiruvananthapuram, and one to Kannur. “It was their way of telling us to leave”, says Padmini. Transfers, according to her, are not common in textile retail sector, especially for sales girls who usually come from places in the vicinity of the showroom. “They could have just expelled us like they usually do with others, but maybe they wanted to a make a loud statement this time that there is no place for a union here.”

A localized labour force, in fact, is a key attribute of the work culture of women sales employees. It is the clinching bait a system of neoliberal market patriarchy dangles at them who are already firmly entrenched in a system of domestic patriarchy: husbands don’t find it a problem to send their wives to showrooms that are nearby and where the other employees are also mostly women.  

Padmini refused to put her signature on the transfer order. She asked for a meeting with the general manager and decided to put forward her resignation letter to him. She was, however, denied permission for the meeting and was asked to leave the showroom immediately. Padmini was under the impression that she was the only one to be transferred. But once she got out of the showroom, she realized that she was not alone. The next day the six women were denied entry at the gate.

The matter was then taken to the district labour officer who on December 16, 2014 and December 18, 2014 held compromise talks between the management and the employees. On both occasions, the talks failed. In his failure report on the conciliation talks, the labour officer notes that the transfer orders were a vindictive act on the part of the management. He writes: “All the six employees are women who stay in the vicinity of the showroom with their families. Transferring them to distant places like Thiruvananthapuram and Kannur can only be seen as strategy by the management to deliberately deny them their job.” He then goes on to recommend the dispute, in accordance with the 1947 Industrial Disputes Act Section 10 (1) (D), to the judgment of Palakkad Industrial Tribunal.

In the meantime, Sara Joseph, one of Malayalam’s greatest novelists, a pioneer of the feminist movement in Kerala, and presently the face of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in the state, made a futile attempt to arrive at a settlement with the management of Kalyan Sarees through an influential publisher based in the district. It was, in fact, through Sara Joseph that the six protesting women labourers had initially linked up with AMTU. After this unsuccessful compromise attempt, and after the management further toughened its stand in a meeting chaired by the district collector, a samara samithi (strike committee) was formed comprising the six protesters and their closest relatives—who in this case happened to be either their husbands or son. An aikyadardya samithi (Solidarity Committee) was also formed with P K Lijukumar, the state president of AMTU as its convener and Yamini Parameswaran, a human rights activist, as the chairperson. The charter of demands was prepared and the political agenda of the strike was laid out—the right to politically organize and claim their legitimate rights.  
  

As the arrangements were under way for the inauguration of the strike, the management, through a local television channel called Channel 4 U, approached the protesters with a compensation offer of Rs 50,000. It was promptly rejected. On December 30^th, 2014, a strike notice was issued under the banner of AMTU. The same day the strike was formally inaugurated by K Venu, a firebrand Naxalite during the much heralded Red seventies of Kerala who later went on to become a trenchant Communist critic in the globalised nineties, and who is now one of Kerala’s foremost political observers.  

***

If you want a primer about the major textile and jewellery retail chains in Kerala, all you need to do is to travel on a state highway for just half an hour or spend roughly about the same—or even less—time in front of a television set flipping through various Malayalam channels. 

From the giant hoardings that are ubiquitous on the roadside, you have, from Amitabh Bachan to Mohanlal and from Manju Warrier to Shreya Ghoshal, the biggest and most commanding names of Indian and Malayalam cinema persuading you to the ritzy showrooms of brands they are such proud and exorbitantly priced ambassadors of. The showrooms are numerous and they are all usually crammed full. If new players are not shy of jostling for space in a market that is seemingly already chock-a-block, this uninterrupted hustle and bustle explains why.

The textile and jewellery retail chain sector is also the biggest source of advertisement revenue for all Malayalam channels— entertainment and news.  The brands don’t discriminate on the basis of ostensible ideological positions the channels claim to be flag bearers of, and on their part, the channels are prudent enough to confine those positions within their editorial walls: even fiercely anti-corporate/anti-establishment news channels have no misgivings about being in compliance with, and profiting from, an ideology of business that aims at preying on the desires and vulnerabilities of a compulsive and way too easily gullible consumer society. And when, as in the case of Irikkal Samaram, there is a case of conflict of interest that demands a stand be taken, no one has to show them the arse to kiss.

The ads are invariably swanky, a riot of ostentation in the garb of celebrating a great and mythical Indian way of life—to be read as exclusively Brahmanical and upper class. All of them are premised essentially on selling the idea of jewellery and silk as the defining semiotic identities of a system of morals that delineate modern ‘dignified’ Indian families. And fittingly, they usually come with sleek taglines that call attention to such values that connote familial bliss and the sanctity of tradition. Kalyan Jewellers, for instance, has the smash hit tagline: Vishwasam, athalle ellam?  (Trust is everything/ Isn’t trust everything?) Jos Alukkas, another prominent brand, proclaims Ithu Ponnil Theertha Bandham (This is a relationship made in gold.).  
        

For Kalyan Sarees—part of Kalyan Group, Kalyan Sarees is owned by T S Ramachandran; his brother, T S Kalyanaraman who owns Kalyan Silks and Kalyan Jewellers is the more famous and richer face of the group with a net worth estimated by Forbes at $1.03 billion—the brand ambassadors are Jayaram and Shriya Saran, popular south Indian film stars. (Amitabh Bachan, Aishwarya Rai Bachan and Manju Warrier are the brand ambassadors of Kalyan Jewellers, while for Kalyan Silks it is Prithviraj, a Malayalam superstar.) The tagline of Kalyan Sarees reads Stories Crafted in Silk. It is a tagline that Padmini too uses for the narrative of her life as a sales girl. 
  

“My name is Padmini S K. I started working as a sales girl in 2005. It was a not-so-big shop at City Centre. My salary then was Rs 500 per month. When I first went there, I had no idea how the job would be. All I knew was that I did not have many other options.

On the first day itself, I was told about the rules of the job. First and foremost: A sales girl should never think about sitting down. Not even when there are no customers. You don’t have to ask why. That’s just how it is; that’s how it has been ever since there were sales girls.  So from 9: 30 to 7: 30, I should just stand there. There won’t be any specific toilet breaks in between. In the showroom that I joined, there was not even a toilet. So I used to go out to a hotel, or to the corporation office to relieve myself. That too, only once a day, maximum twice. Sometimes, not even once.

Through the course of my career, one thing I have heard many of my bosses say when we ask for a toilet break is this: “why don’t you attach a hose pipe under your saree?” People say a woman’s life gets better and she becomes stronger when she has a job of her own. But do you know what happens to her self-respect when she keeps hearing comments like these?

Things would get better if I moved to a better, bigger showroom, I thought. I did not have to wait for long to realize this is how life would always be from now on. The shop I was working in was suddenly shut down, and I had to find a job elsewhere. Luckily, more companies were entering the market at that point in time.  So finding a job was not that difficult. That, I would say, is the only good thing about this profession. There are enough shops and there are always new ones coming up. So there would always be a job for you if you are willing to be a slave.

After working in the showrooms of a few big brands, I joined Kalyan Sarees in 2012, about the same time when they opened the showroom. By that stage, I had worked my way through to be a sales supervisor. I should say I was fortunate in this regard. The standard hierarchy among sales employees is that men will be the supervisors and floor managers while women will deal with the customers. This works well for the management because the women who work in this field are usually meek and are afraid to challenge the supervisors.

I was offered around 8,000 in the interview. But when I joined, the management told me that even those with 10 or 12 years of experience was given only Rs 6,500. They might have lied to me about my salary, but what they said about the salary of those people was true. Most were paid around Rs 4,000 to Rs 5,000, and the really experienced ones were paid around Rs 6,000. None of us knew that there was a Minimum Wages Act or that we were rightfully entitled to a minimum salary.   

Once I became the supervisor, even those sales girls who were earlier my friends suddenly distanced themselves from me. It was not as if I did not know what their problems were. But once I was not one of them, I became part of their opposite camp. This was emotionally very draining for me. But that is a different story…

For a slaes girl, work starts at 9.30 in the morning. Imagine this: Rs 4,000 for a minimum of 11 hours of work. And from this, money is deducted for PF and welfare fund, and there wouldn’t even be any legal acknowldgements for these deductions. We were not given salary slips. Maybe I should have been careful from the start: after all I was not given an appointment letter either. Then we demanded that we need higher wages, and initially the salary was hiked to Rs 5,00o and in October last year to Rs 7,000. Even then we did not know that according to law, we should have got at least Rs 7,200. Or that according to law women were not allowed to work after seven in the evening.

We have two casual leaves a month. But it is the management that will decide the days on which we can take these leaves. We have a lunch break of 20 minutes. It is at the fifth floor that we have to go and eat. We are not allowed to use the lift to go there. And less said about the place the better. To even be asked to go and eat there is a punishment in itself. If it is raining we will be drenched. Many days, we don’t even bother to have our lunch.

Even when there are no customers we are not allowed to sit. So what we do is this: we will put already folded clothes on the floor and then we will pretend that we are folding or arranging those clothes again, and in between we will steal a moment to sit. But now with cameras everywhere, these stolen moments have become rare.

And yet, despite all this, if we have to attend to a customer, we will be ready with our happiest, prettiest faces. It comes naturally to us, like an addiction that cannot be chucked. Even today, if I were to go to the showroom from this strike site, I will straight away start smiling.

Because we keep standing for hours, and because we hardly ever relieve ourselves at work, most of us have uterus problems, urinary infections, back problems and varicose vein issues. Once, the varicose vein of a sales woman burst and she didn’t even know. The customer who saw the trail of blood on the floor fainted and only then the woman realized what had happened to her.”

***

The hundred days of Irikkal Samaram, conducted without the presence or assistance of mainstream political parties and trade unions, saw various civil society alliances form and collapse as part of it. The strike became the arena for a discourse on the dynamics of a non-conformist trade union strike; on the politics of various contemporary protest movements in Kerala that are characterized by formal attributes that denote a sharp rupture from traditional Marxist methodologies of protest and whose mobilization is achieved primarily through social media; on the nature of civil society participation in protests; and on the necessity of an exclusively women-led trade union.  

Initial mobilization of the strike was carried out through a poster campaign and an automobile rally. The poster campaign was targeted primarily at the sales employees of other shops who did not need much convincing. Soon, news about the strike started to spread within the district. On the third day of the strike, a group of employees of Kalyan Sarees who were already part of AMTU evinced their interest in joining the strike and offered to come out and sit with the protesters. One employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, says she was specifically targeted after she had expressed her support for her friends. “The work load suddenly doubled and I was constantly harassed by my floor supervisor”, she says.  

The strike committee and the solidarity committee, however, decided against involving more employees in the strike, as it was considered too big a move to be made at a stage when the strike was just about beginning to gather momentum. Yamini Parameswaran, chairperson of the Solidarity Committee, feels it was the wrong decision and in a way a betrayal of the stated political agenda of the strike which professed to create a space for union activity in the unorganized labour sector.  According to Yamini, the strategy to first mobilize various human rights organizations across the state and to garner a popular support base for the strike was a flawed one as the sterner and politically more relevant challenge the strike faced at that stage was the expansion of workforce participation.

“There is not much difficulty in convincing human rights organizations or likeminded civil society groups. The real difficulty is in establishing and spreading a sense of trade union culture among those who do not come from a background of political activism. We had a great opportunity when the women inside the showroom expressed their interest. And though we could not facilitate it, we could still have gone to their homes and campaigned. It wouldn’t have been difficult at all to convince them; after all they know better than anyone else what the strike is for. But we only went to one house and left it at that”, says Yamini, who feels clear distinction needs to be made between the goals of establishing and expanding a trade union in an abstract political space and the more concrete one of establishing and expanding a culture of trade union activity among members of a given set of workforce.

P K Lijukumar, the state president of AMTU and the convener of the Solidarity Committee, is in agreement with Yamini on this at the level of theory. But he says the task was virtually impossible on account of practical considerations. “The women start from their homes for work at around eight in the morning, and come back late at night. Tell me how then you can go and work amongst them? At what time? And it’s not as if we had a large number of women from the showroom coming out and supporting us. As far as I know—and I have been with the protesters from when they were transferred—only a couple of women had openly expressed their solidarity. I don’t blame the rest, but the claim that there was massive open support for us from within the showroom is just a fiction”, he says.

From the outset, all major political parties and the trade unions affiliated to them distanced themselves from the strike. Sara Joseph, known popularly as Sara teacher, was the most prominent mainstream presence in the sit-down pavilion of the strike site. In her inimitable style, she reiterated the significance of women’s movements like Irikkal Samaram; gave passionate exhortations to the six women to strike as hard as they could; shared jokes and anecdotes; and sang with them. But unlike in the past when she was part of various women’s movements as a writer and a feminist, this time around it was primarily as AAP’s face that she appeared in the strike. It led to edgy relations between her and the strike committee.

“There is no question of doubting Sara teacher’s integrity”, says P K Lijukumar. “Teacher was in fact a major presence in the sitting strike conducted last year at Kozhikode too. But now when she joins this strike as an AAP representative, wearing the cap of the party and all, it complicates matters a lot. What, for instance, is AAP’s political stand on unorganized labour sector and trade unions? When they have not clearly stated their position on such questions, how can AMTU enter into a political alliance with her and her party? And moreover her presence creates the impression that the strike is organized under the banner of AAP. One cannot blame the protesters if they felt that the strike was being hijacked.”

Amid all this, for the six protesting women, the initial days of the strike came as a massive cultural shock. This was not something they had ever anticipated in their lives, and it took a while for them to figure out what exactly was going on. “For the first few days, we were sort of numb”, says Maya Devi. “Numb both with excitement and a kind of helplessness. Things were happening too fast. There were discussions going on all around us, people were formulating strategies, too many people were discussing too many political theories and in the middle of all this, we felt as if we were stranded”, she says. It did not, however, take long for them to recognize and assert their political identity. “It was after all our strike and our lives that were on the line”, she says.

The management, in the meantime, again approached the protesters with a compensation offer mediated through an AAP leader. This time, the protesters were offered Rs 1 lakh. Like the previous compensation offer, this one also was promptly rejected.

The strike then had its first major success when the management implemented a host of changes which addressed some of the major issues the protesters had raised. The salary of the employees was hiked from Rs 7,000 to Rs 7,200, in accordance with the provisions of the Minimum Wages Act. Stools were provided to the employees, thus meeting one of the demands the protesters had formally stated in their strike notice. The employees, however, were still not allowed to sit. The space on the fifth floor of the showroom where the employees have their food was cleaned up. A register with employee details appeared for the first time. Employees were given salary slips. Documents were provided for the money deducted from the salary for PF and welfare fund.

Ironically, once these demands were met, support from inside the showroom vanished almost entirely. For the protesters, this was a painful and incisive blow that scarred them deeply, so much so that even close friendships were broken beyond repair. “We are not saying they should have come out and protested with us openly. But they could at least have acknowledged that the benefits they now enjoy are a result of our strike”, says Maya Devi. She is sensitive to the kind of pressures the employees are under, but is disappointed that even in private none was willing to recognize the value of the struggle the women were waging. “Now they think these benefits are some sort of gifts Saami has given them (T S Ramachandran, the owner of Kalyan Sarees, is known to his employers by the moniker Saami). I know they will be targeted if they were to openly express their support. But even after seeing us strike, why should they think that what they have got owes to Saami’s mercy? Why can’t they consider it as their legitimate rights?”

The employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity, however, feels she and her fellow employees who had taken AMTU membership were let down by the protest leadership. “Even after we expressed interest in joining the protest, they never made an attempt to reach out to us or to understand the kind of duress we were under. The strike was always about people from outside and their support. And for people from outside, this is all like one big drama, a war between the hero and the villain. But for us it is first and foremost a question of livelihood”, she says.

From that point on, the strike was mostly about negotiations and hectic parleying pertaining to the cancellation of the employees’ transfer orders. The six women stood firm: getting back to work at the showroom from where they were transferred would be the only acceptable solution. On the other side, the management made it clear that no talks would be held with AMTU: the whole issue, according to them, was an internal matter, a family problem, and as such one that warranted a solution without the presence of an external entity like a trade union.

The management’s stance was emboldened by the fact that AMTU did not have official registration. To complicate matters further, there was another barely functional trade union registered in the same name. Given the gravity of the struggle that was being waged, many in the solidarity committee held the view that in such circumstances adopting an inflexible position could only be detrimental for the larger cause. “All that the union needed to do was to change its name to say AMTU (K) (K for Kozhikode, the district where it is primarily based) or something like that, and a lot of headway could have been made”, says Yamini.   
    

For Lijukumar, a young man from Kozhikode who had shifted to Thrissur for the sole purpose of coordinating the strike, the management’s refusal to engage with AMTU represents the political crux of the strike: “One has to understand”, he says “that this is fundamentally a trade union issue, and not just a women’s issue or a case of human rights violation. What annoys and worries the management is the organizational power AMTU endows the women with. That was the only reason why they felt threatened and transferred the women in the first place. So when we are fighting for taking the women back to the same showroom, what we are in essence fighting against is the violation of basic trade union rights.”

As the strike gained impetus—via both mobilization in the district and on the social media—a solidarity convention was announced on January 21^st, 2015, at Kerala Sahitya Academy at Thrissur. The evening before the convention was to be held, the management made an offer to take the employees back to a different showroom in Thrissur. The strike committee replied that the offer would be acceptable only if three are taken back to the showroom at Kovilakathumpadam and three to the showroom the management proposed. The management did not respond to this condition.

The solidarity convention held next day at Sahitya Academy witnessed a large crowd, unprecedented for a trade union protest not conducted under the aegis of CITU or INTUC. Various eminencies from social and cultural spheres attended the event. Even trade unions that had till then stayed away from the strike sent their representatives. But interestingly, despite repeated requests from the strike committee to send women representatives, every single trade union had men representing them.

In a memorable speech made on the occasion, C K Janu, the iconic leader of Adivasi political movement in Kerala said: “Adivasis have many problems, but they don’t have to deal with bosses who prevent them from urinating. Is this system of modern slavery the price to pay for what we so passionately call as development?” Incidentally, Janu herself was at the forefront of another struggle a few months back—Nilpu Samaram (Standing Protest) where the Adivasis stood in front of the secretariat demanding the government fulfill the various promises of land allotment it had made to them.

On the same day, Sara Joseph informed the strike committee about another offer made by the management according to which the transferred employees would be taken back to the same showroom, albeit as clerical staff. The protesters cried foul, and said it was a sly move by the management to permanently get rid of them. “They know that women like us with little education will not survive as clerical staff”, says Maya Devi. “We have the greatest respect for Sara teacher and we understand and appreciate her deep concern for us. We know she only has our wellbeing in her mind. But we have been working in this sector for years now; we know what that offer really meant and there was no way we could have agreed to it.” It was a resounding assertion, the first in the course of the strike, of their political agency and of their status as the principal protagonists of the protest. This position, unsurprisingly, further strained the strike committee’s relationship with Sara Joseph.   

However, such was the force of persuasion Sara Joseph’s stature as a writer and a feminist carried that there were apprehensions of a potent backlash if the offer was rejected. For a protest heavily reliant on civil society goodwill, perceptions matter a great deal; so the strike committee, according to Lijukumar, could not have afforded to give the impression that they were clinging on to obdurate positions. After various rounds of deliberations, it was eventually decided to accept the management’s offer and call off the strike. But when the letter of appointment arrived the next evening, the stand taken by the women was vindicated: it was not as clerks in the showroom at Kovilakathumpadam, but as employees at a godown that was yet to be opened that they were posted. The offer was duly rejected. It also marked the end of Sara Joseph’s association with the strike.

In the following days, many others withdrew from the Solidarity Committee, citing differences with the way the strike committee was conducting the protest. Among them was K Venu who had inaugurated the strike on December 30^th, 2014. Venu felt the strike had started to resemble the ways of a traditional trade union protest. This stance was keeping in line with the trajectory of his political thought after he had moved away from an ideology of radical left and reinvented himself as a zealous advocate of parliamentary democracy. For a long time now, Venu has been unrelenting in his denouncements of a Marxist trade union culture, dismissing it as anachronistic, anti-democratic and against the interests of labourers in the modern world.

***

All through the strike, there has been steadfast support for it from an enthusiastic section of the social media. A facebook solidarity committee was formed which planned a march to various showrooms of the Kalyan group. Mainstream media came for vicious and widespread denigration. On March 8, as part of Women’s Day, a solidarity march was held by this facebook solidarity committee. For the women, this support came as a welcome surprise, a source of motivation which helped them to carry on with the protest. “We never thought people would be interested in our strike, especially after print and television media had snubbed us from the outset”, says Padmini. “It was not just moral support, they supported us financially too. And we are grateful for that.”

There were interesting asides too. After she put up a facebook post thanking her ‘dear Kalyan family’, there was a torrent of raving and ranting—supposedly motivated by political rage but blatantly chauvinistic in its indulgence—against popular actress Manju Warrier, the brand ambassador of Kalyan Jewellers and a blockbuster feminist icon of sorts ever since she split from her superstar husband and made a comeback last year following a fifteen year hiatus from the film industry.

Social media mobilization of protest movements has been a prominent feature of Kerala’s political topography in the last couple of years. Some of the major protests that were mobilized in this fashion include the Nilpu Samaram conducted by Adivasi Gotra Maha Sabha; a chain of Kiss of Love protests against moral policing after a restaurant in Kozhikode was vandalized by Yuva Morcha; the campaign of mailing sanitary napkins to the managing director of ASMA Rubber Products Private Limited Ltd based in Kakkanad, Kochi, following allegations of fifteen employees being subjected to strip search after a sanitary napkin was discovered in the company bathroom; Pampa Menstruation strike which asked women to fill the KSRTC special buses to Pampa, Sabarimala after Naseera, a journalist with TV Now was asked to step down from one such bus by its staff since they felt the presence of women would have catastrophic implications on the purity of the pilgrims.

Of these protests, all of which are characterized by a marked departure from forms of traditional Marxist practices of dissent like hartals and blockades, only Kiss of Love was covered by mainstream media; in fact it was turned into a festival of sorts. While the role played by social media in campaigning for such protests has been acknowledged as pivotal in the state’s contemporary culture of political dissent, there has also been criticism against it, targeted in particular against its apparent lack of political focus.

According to Yamini Parameswaran, the inevitable floating nature of the participants of this mobilizing medium—a majority of whom profess to a canon of left liberal ideology that distances itself from all rigid frameworks of institutionalized Marxism—is bound to culminate in a carnivalisation of sorts of the protests, so it would be calamitous on the part of both social media activists and the civil society if they were to approach such processes of political mobilization without subjecting them to constant critical audits. “Today you are here in one protest, and tomorrow you are there in some other protest; as if you are changing from one profile picture to another”, Yamini says. “This will create a situation where the political focus of any given protest is likely to be lost, resulting in chaos and anarchy. A mob is a mob, in real or virtual space. This is not meant to devalue the power of social media. After all, in this day and age, social media political activism is a norm. But one must always guard against narcissistic indulgences sabotaging the political focus of protest movements.”  

***

The strike might have been against Kalyan Sarees, but it was Kalyan Silks whose image suffered the greater dent. Owned by T S Kalyanaraman, the elder brother of T S Ramachandran who owns Kalyan sarees, Kalyan Silks is the bigger and more prominent of the two companies. So the strike committee had made it a point to publicize the strike as a strike against Kalyan group, and social media mobilization campaigns followed suit. “The situation is not any better in Kalyan Silks, or for that matter in any of the showrooms of the big brands. So I think we were ethically vindicated”, says P K Lijukumar. “And even the brand ambassadors of Kalyan Silks and Kalyan Jewellers address the group as their dear Kalyan family. So why shouldn’t we do the same?” asks Yamini. The management of Kalyan Silks was prompt in addressing the issue and sent out messages to the strike committee asking it to specify the strike as one against Kalyan Sarees, and not against Kalyan group. The strike committee, however, refused to change their strategy.

The management of Kalyan Sarees kept dismissing the charges as baseless and motivated by dubious political agenda. According to Shiva Prasad, the PRO of Kalyan Sarees, it was because of the objection raised by the employees that the management decided not to take them back to the showroom. “You ask any employee in the showroom and they will tell you that they won’t work with these women. It is because of this tough stand taken by the employees that the management does not want them back in this showroom. Despite everything the management has done for them, these women still keep tarnishing the company’s and Saami’s image. You don’t have to take my word, but listen to what the son of one of the women has to say. If we were intent on taking revenge against these women as they have been shouting around, why on earth should we keep the son of one of them here? In fact, after they started their strike, we even hiked his salary. And they are still spreading lies. I know it is not right to tell this, but the truth is that almost everyone here knows that these women are not so straightforward.”

This was not the first time in the course of the protest that the women had heard a barbed insinuation of this sort aimed at character sullying, and they know that it won’t be the last time they would be attacked with allusions such as these to their moral laxity—mankind’s oldest and most trusted weapon against women who challenge status quo. “Initially we were affected by it a lot, but now it’s like, who cares?” says Padmini.  P Viji, the secretary of AMTU, says responses like these are why she now believes in the necessity for a trade union led and run exclusively by women. “There are certain things that only women face, and only women can find a solution for. It is high time we thought of an exclusive trade union space for women. Or at least a trade union where women hold the leadership and decide things. Right now, the situation is such that, in addition to dealing with patriarchal systems of domination at home and workplace, women have to deal with the same in a trade union space too.”

AMTU, in fact, was formed as an extension of one such exclusive women’s group formed by Viji in 2008. Penkoottu, a collective of 25 women employed in the unorganized labour sector at S M Street (known popularly as Mittai Theruvu) at Kozhikode was shaped with an objective to address and find solutions for the issues women in the sector faced. After Penkoottu succefully organized a few strikes like Moothrappura Samaram (Toilet Strike), men working in the same sector approached them, and subsequently the collective was transformed into a trade union.

***

In the second week of March, the strike achieved its second major success when the management decided to re-schedule the working hours of women sales employees from 10 am to 7 pm. (They were still, however, expected to be present at the office by 9:30.) Breaks were also provided in between. The strike by now had gained enough mobilization for V S Achudanandan, the Leader of Opposition, to raise a submission about it in the Assembly. In his reply to the submission, Shibu Baby John, the Labour Minister of the state, said the existing labour laws were inadequate to take action against the said company, suggesting the need for laws that address the complex nature of problems faced by labourers in a modern neo liberal market world. In fact, it was following the first sitting strike conducted by AMTU at Kozhikode on May 1, 2014 that modifications were made for the first time to the 1960 Kerala Shop and Establishments Act. Till then, the fine levied against companies for flouting labour laws was Rs 500; now it is Rs 15,000.

In the first week of April, the management invited the six women for compromise talks. It had made it clear that talks will not be held in the presence of AMTU representatives. By now, it was clear that AMTU was waging a losing cause. Interestingly, the negotiations were mediated through AITUC, the trade union affiliated to CPI, after V S Sunilkumar, a CPI MLA expressed interest in finding a solution to the issue.

In this meeting, the management put forward a compromise solution according to which the women would be taken back to a depot to be soon opened at Chembukavu.. This was the same offer that was made through Sara Joseph in January. But if it was just a letter that was offered then, this time the management proposed to enter into a legal agreement with the protesters. They were also assured that in case the depot closed down, they will not have to fear for their jobs and would be relocated to branches of the company in Thrissur.

This compromise offer split the protesters into two camps. Padmini and Rajani argued that it would mean a total failure on their part if they were to agree to this offer. “This was the same offer that was made three months back. We did not accept it then, so why should we give in now? And in any case, it was for the right of trade union activity that we had fought. If were to sign this agreement individually, it would only mean that we have conceded defeat in that fight”, says Padmini. She also points out that none of the women have any experience in working in a depot where the tasks include sorting, tagging and billing. “We will be totally lost there, and moreover, a depot is almost like an exclusive male space”, says Padmini.

The other four women counter argued that the offer can, and has to, be agreed to given the circumstances they now find themselves in. “For starters, it is a legal agreement. That itself is a victory for us. And our demand was to cancel the transfer orders, so that too has been achieved at least partially. I think we have already achieved a lot, and the fact that that we agree to this offer does not mean that the strike comes to a permanent end. Should not we understand our strike as part of a long political process? Why should we reduce it to a clash of egos?”

The solidarity committee too was split along similar lines. For Lijukumar, any agreement that did not acknowledge the trade union rights of the protesters meant a failure of the protest. For Yamini, since the union had failed in even finding a space for itself in the compromise talks, carrying on the strike would have only meant prolonging the suffering of the women in the name of an already lost cause.

***

On April 9^th, 2015, the day after the hartal, five of the six protesters, P K Lijukumar and Augustine, a retired irrigation officer and a man of very few words who comes to the pavilion every day in solidarity with the women—“like a caring guard”, according to them—arrive at the strike site by around nine in the morning. Devi Ravi has taken a leave due to health issues. The women, as they have been from the first day of the strike, are dressed in their uniform sarees. These sarees, Padmini says, are expensive ones. When sales women join a showroom, companies provide them with uniform sarees. Once those sarees get old, they have to buy new ones for which they have to pay from their meager salary. And in a line of work that is reliant entirely on the mores of commodity fetishism, and where they have no choice but to present themselves as perennially smiling, perennially pleasing-to-the-eye commodities, to appear at the workplace dressed in a worn out or shabby saree is an option that simply does not exist. “Because we go to work like this, meticulously dressed and all, even those who are close to us tend to think we lead a cozy life. The saddest part of our lives is that even our stories of misery are sometimes taken for granted as small sacrifices to be made for a glamorous life”, says Padmini.   
        

The sit down pavilion of the strike site, made of thatched coconut leaves held together by posts of arecanut wood, is on the highway side, opposite Kalyan Sarees showroom and in front of a high rise building under construction. The entire area was once a paddy field before it was leveled and turned into commercial land. A pile of red sand abuts the pavilion on one side. A surveillance camera attached to a beam in front of the showroom is pointed directly at the pavilion. The banner of the strike, a red cloth on which a brief description of the strike is printed, is tied and held aloft between the peaks of two posts on either edge of the pavilion.

Inside the pavilion, there are two wooden cots and a few plastic chairs. There are posters and banners of various organizations that have pledged their support to the strike. An assortment of notices and posters lie scattered on the floor. Paper toys made by Subid Ahimsa, a human rights activist and a post graduate from IIT who found his life’s vocation in the art of making toys from waste materials, are strung to the arecanut posts or edges of the coconut leaves. Subid has been a regular presence at the sit down pavilion, someone for whom the women have great admiration. “Had it not been for this strike, we would never have had the opportunity to meet and interact with interesting people like Subid, and to listen to his views on life”, says Padmini. “There were musicians who came and played songs for us, ordinary workers who came and shared their grief…In many ways, the greatest lesson the strike taught us is that there is life outside the showrooms and outside our homes. It might seem like a simple, straightforward thing to you, but for us, the realization has been nothing short of enlightenment.” 

It’s a sweltering summer day, made even more insufferable by a dizzying cloud of smoke and noise from an endless stream of highway traffic. Consumers keep going into and coming out of the showroom. The strike, unlike what optimists and idealists would like to believe, has had little impact on the consumer society. Labourers, mostly migrants from the east of India, toil away in the building that is under construction behind the pavilion. There are curious glances cast at the pavilion and the protesters from inside passing vehicles.

Inside the pavilion, there is not much activity. The women keep mostly to themselves, staring at the maze of traffic, as if staring at an invisible secret world. The two middle aged security guards of the showroom on the other side of the road also seem to be lost in the same world. A couple of the protesters doze off in between. There is not much conversation made except for an occasional joke or two cracked, or an odd chat on the latest political gossip—“Did Saritha Nair list that man too in her letter? Is this politician too involved with her? What about that actor? Will PC George topple the government? Who will be the new chief whip? How much money K M Mani must have made from bar owners?”

A few familiar and regular visitors come and go. In between, a stranger comes to the pavilion, expresses his solidarity, and sits with them for a while. Once he leaves, Padmini wonders with a hearty laugh if he was a Maoist. An intensive and much publicized Maoist hunt has been going on for a while now in the state, as part of which a few human rights and environmental activists have been targeted—a couple of them were arrested and released on bail. The office of Keraleeyam, a Thrissur based magazine that focuses on environmental issues, was raided for alleged Maoist links. “Not that I have an issue with them. I don’t know anything about Maoist ideology, but having sat here for 101 days, I can guess what makes people Maoists”, says Padmini. “The only fear that I have, though, is that if some Maoist were to come here, we won’t even have this pavilion to sit. The police will come and destroy everything; they are just waiting for a chance.”  

A while later, another man, the leader of a different trade union, comes in and asks about the present status of the strike. He is in a hurry and does not bother to even sit down. Before he leaves, he does not forget to offer the women an unsolicited advice: “You know, just sitting here won’t do any good for your cause. This is not how strikes should be done. Just take out a march tomorrow, and destroy everything that comes in your way. All your demands will be met the very next day.” The women, with a visible discomfort, laugh him off.

At noon, a couple of copies of the mid-day news paper are bought from an old man who sells them in the middle of the traffic. Another round of political banter ensues. In between, they have lunch after which they go to the corporation office to relieve themselves. “Wherever we are, this will always be our major problem”, says Padmini. “When we were in showroom we were not allowed to go to the toilet. Here we don’t even have a toilet to go to.”

In the evening, there is an open discussion on the stance to be taken regarding the new agreement offer. Padmini and Maya Devi take opposing positions. The rift that has now emerged after all these days of striking together have left them visibly disturbed. They both struggle to choke back their tears as they speak. For Padmini, agreeing to the offer will be as good as conceding defeat: “Is it for this that we kept struggling? Weren’t we offered the same depot job in January itself? Why should we take it now?” Maya Devi counters by arguing that the strike has unfortunately started to move away from being a political struggle to a clash of egos, and for her and three others—Beena, Alphonsa and Devi—to get embroiled in a spar of images is not a privilege they can afford. “I concur with Padmini in that if we agree to this offer, we will be reneging on our demand of taking us back to the same showroom. But hasn’t our strike already achieved a lot? Is this not how political strikes are meant to be conducted? You make your demands, you strike, and you negotiate. And in the process you achieve a lot, but you also may have to concede that not all demands can be met at once. Why should we think that if we take the job at depot, the strike will end forever? Already, we have managed to create a public discourse on our rights. Can’t we take that forward? Why should we take an extremist stand? Can we afford something like that now? Don’t we all know about the problems we all face in our families?”

Both Padmini and Maya Devi, after having made their emotionally charged statements, make it clear that the differences they now harbor are entirely political, that their friendship remains unaffected by what is now going on. As the evening gets darker and sales women from the showroom start coming out after the customary security examination, the five women get ready to go home. There is a conscientious effort on the part of the sales women to avoid eye contact with the protesters. But once they leave the strike site and reach the bus stop, there is no way to distinguish them from the sales women: they are all wearing the same uniform.

***

On April 14, 2015, the 106^th day of the strike, the six women accepted the offer made by the management and signed the agreement. None of the representatives of the union was present. Yamini Parameswaran signed as a witness representing the Solidarity Committee.  The women were paid the salary for the 106 days they were on strike. The case at Palakkad Industrial Tribunal Court was quashed as part of the agreement.

For Padmini, this was a victory just for the eyes of the world. “If you ask me what I think, I will say we failed”, she says. For Maya Devi, the occasion was not one for introspective analysis. “Tomorrow is Vishu—Kerala New Year—and I think I deserve a break from all this now”, she says. For Lijukumar, the climax of the strike pointed at a political failure for the trade union he heads. “We fought for trade union rights. But we couldn’t win them. The strike is a victory in terms of the kind of public discourse it was able to generate on the nature of unorganized labour sector, and in terms of even the kind of changes we were able to force the management to make. But the political agenda of the strike remains unfulfilled.” For Yamini, the experience was one more reminder of the perils protest movements face in the absence of a sharp political focus and a leadership vision to ensure its realization. “If there is no deep conviction about the political dimensions of a protest movement, we will always end up with temporary solutions like this which we will be forced to celebrate as victory. I have associated with a few contemporary protest movements in the recent past, and have come to the conclusion that I need to say good bye to protests that only create victims.”

Of the four demands the protesters had listed in their charter when they began the strike, two were fully met, one partially acknowledged. The demand to re-arrange the working hours of sales girls in textile showrooms to an eight hour schedule was not even considered.