#4

In early July, I spent 4 days interviewing migrant workers in Tirupur with support from the SAVE field staff. I learned a great deal from these conversations, and the visit was incredibly useful for figuring out some of the logistics for implementing my survey. I’m extremely grateful to the SAVE staff for their assistance in conducting fieldwork.

During the scoping visit, I spoke to workers living in three different areas: SIDCO (a large industrial cluster located in a relatively rural part of Tirupur district), and two neighborhoods located in urban Tirupur: Chinnakarai and Karampalleyam. In the next two blog posts, I will share some of my observations from the scoping visit.

Visit to SIDCO

SIDCO is an industrial cluster of 200 garment manufacturing units within a gated compound. The area is somewhat like a “company town”, as the workers employed in these factories live in settlements surrounding the industrial compound. Around 100,000 migrant workers are employed in these factory units, most of them belonging to the states of Assam, Odisha, and West Bengal.

I interacted with several groups of workers In SIDCO across my 4 day visit, including some recent migrants as well as more experienced workers who had been in Tirupur for over 7 years. Although a large number of young, unmarried women do work in the garment sector, most of them live in hostels provided by their employers instead of rental accommodation. This severely restricts their mobility, and their ability to search for new jobs. It also made it very difficult to interview them, as a result most of the people I was able to interview included married men, married women, and single men.

Through these conversations, I learned a great deal about the working conditions of garment workers. Workers typically find their jobs through referrals from friends or family members or are hired by labor contractors working on behalf of the firm. Many of the workers from Bihar and north-eastern states said that they chose to migrate because there were no jobs for them in the village. Factories hire workers as “shift-workers” or “piece-rate workers”. Shift workers must report for duty at a fixed time and work for 8-12 hours a day. They are eligible for social security benefits such as the national pension scheme, under which workers and employers both make contributions. Piece rate workers are paid a fixed price for each unit of clothing they work on, for e.g. the number of collars stitched, or the number of zippers attached. They are hired by the factory through a labor contractor who gets to keep a cut of their wages. Although they are not eligible for social security benefits, many workers seemed to prefer the flexibility of being a piece rate worker, as they can set their own hours.

Some of the more experienced migrants mentioned that working conditions have deteriorated over the last 5-6 years. When they first arrived to work in Tirupur, factories were offering double the standard wage for working overtime hours, and triple the standard wage for working on Sundays and public holidays. Many workers said that they are now expected to work 11-12 hours with no overtime pay, even though their shift is meant to be 8 hours long. They also noted that there has been a rapid increase in the number of migrants coming from North-eastern states and West Bengal. According to the more experienced migrants, since these newcomers don’t have much exposure to the garment industry and there are very few opportunities for them back home, they are more willing to accept low wages and working conditions. Employers have taken advantage of this to push wages down, demand long working hours, and raise production targets.

SAVE is trying to address this issue by educating migrant workers about their labor rights in their native language. During one of my field visits to SIDCO, the SAVE field staff conducted a brief information campaign with migrant workers who had recently arrived from West Bengal. The purpose of the session was to inform them of their rights and the benefits their employers are legally required to provide, as well as grievance redressal mechanisms they can rely on if employers are not complying. Field staff shared information about: the duration of the shift (overtime pay must be provided if employees work over 8 hours), enrollment in social security benefits such as health insurance for the worker and their family members, paid maternity leave, paid time off, etc. It appeared that the migrant workers did not know they were entitled to many of these things. They also seemed hesitant to ask their employer for things they learned they were entitled to, such as an official appointment letter, monthly salary slip, and a statement of their pension account.

Workers are typically employed in specific occupations within the factory: tailor, packer, quality control, helper, etc. and they each perform a highly specialized role in the assembly line. For example, workers are assigned specific tasks such as: cutting fabric, sewing collars, attaching labels, trimming loose threads etc. I noticed that many women were employed in lower-paid occupations, such as packet/quality control/helper, relative to men who were more likely to be working as tailors.

The gender wage gap in the garment sector is one of India’s largest: women are concentrated in low-wage roles or earn less for the same job as men (Huynh 2016). I was particularly eager to learn more about women’s efforts to switch to higher-paid roles or negotiate for a higher wage. One woman reported that she had tried to pick up tailoring skills while working as a helper by practicing on the sewing machines during lunch breaks. Once she became proficient, she tried to ask for a promotion to a tailor position with higher pay, but her supervisor refused. Ultimately, she managed to move up the job ladder by getting a job as a tailor at another factory, through a referral from her husband. Another women reported that her factory actively tried to prevent helpers from practicing on the sewing machines because they did not want to promote them or increase their wages. Overall, it also seemed that women were less likely to try asking their employer for a raise. Among the workers I spoke with, it was mostly the men who said they had tried to negotiate for higher pay. Prior research on the Tirupur garment sector suggests that managers prefer hiring women as they accept low wages rather than negotiating or quitting (Crane et al. 2019). Consistent with this finding from the literature, I found that many of the women I spoke to also said they were “managing” and therefore not interested in seeking a raise or looking for a new job.

Job-to-job transitions are a key driver of earnings growth, and the ability to switch jobs helps to moderate employers’ monopsony power by improving workers’ bargaining positions. My conversations with workers suggested the presence of several frictions that were inhibiting them from switching jobs. Some workers said they did not know about the wages they could get at other factories, suggesting the presence of information frictions. Others said that when they tried to switch jobs, their employer did not pay them their full salary, which is a major deterrent to job-switching. Interestingly, a few workers in SIDCO said that they knew of factories in the New Tirupur neighborhood which were paying a higher wage. However, even though they had migrated thousands of miles from their home states to Tamil Nadu, they were not willing to re-locate to work in New Tirupur. They said that they were comfortable living in SIDCO and had established a community here. Through future surveys I hope to document these information frictions and learn more about the role that the local social network plays, for e.g. as a source of credit, a source of informal insurance, or emotional support.