Visit to Chinnakarai and Karampalleyam
Chinnakarai and Karampalleyam are both residential settlements in a more urban part of Tirupur compared to SIDCO. Both are primarily inhabited by migrant workers, including those from Odisha, Bihar and West Bengal. There are several garment manufacturing units located near the settlements, where migrants work. Unlike SIDCO, where nearly everyone was working in one of the garment manufacturing units, the migrants who live in urban Tirupur do have some other options, for e.g. working in the construction sector.
The settlement I visited in Chinnakarai consisted of 50 rooms rented by 200-300 people from Odisha. The compound was owned by the owner of the garment factory, and all the residents in this settlement worked in that factory. Our team had to seek the factory owners’ permission to speak to the workers, and since he was not very keen, we couldn’t interview them for very long. This reinforces how housing is a major issue that limits job mobility for workers employed in the garment sector in Tirupur.
Language barriers make it difficult to find housing and rents are high. If the employer is providing rental accommodation, it is likely that workers will continue working at that factory rather than trying to search for a new job, even if they could get a higher wage or better working conditions elsewhere. Young, unmarried women living in factory hostels also face the same challenge. According to factory owners, parents are concerned about their daughters’ safety and will only allow them to migrate for work if they live in a hostel which has strict rules about where they can go. Therefore, the hostels often require the young women to return right after their shift ends at the factory, impose strict curfews, and in some cases may not allow them to move around the city without a chaperone. This makes it virtually impossible for them to find out about jobs at other factories or try to switch jobs. I plan to dig deeper into the barriers to job search when I implement the full survey.
While most workers I spoke to in SIDCO said they were unhappy with their wages and working conditions, the migrant workers employed in urban Tirupur seemed to be paid higher wages, and a few of them said that they were happy working at their current jobs. They mentioned that their factory management had taken good care of them during COVID by sending free groceries and coming to check up on them at home. Garment workers living in SIDCO have very limited outside options – the cluster is located in a remote area, and most of the jobs are in the garment factories inside the SIDCO compound. Therefore, employers may be taking advantage of this by colluding to pay them lower wages and setting high production targets. On the other hand, it is easier for workers living in urban Tirupur to commute to another garment factory or work in another sector such as construction. Since they have better outside options, they have higher bargaining power, which might explain why factories felt pressured to treat them better. I’m look forward to formally exploring these theories using my primary survey data.
Overall, the field visits were an incredibly rich learning experience. I gained several new insights into the challenges faced by migrant workers employed in the garment sector, specially women and recent migrants. Through my surveys, I aim to gain a comprehensive understanding of the heterogeneity in wages and working conditions across different factories, and barriers to job switching faced by migrants. Is there a set of factories which offer better wages and non-wage amenities than others, as suggested by the qualitative interviews? What are the key frictions preventing workers from switching to better factories? The survey data will help substantiate the patterns indicated by my qualitative research, and help me identify which interventions might be most effective at overcoming these frictions and helping workers move to better jobs.
Commentaires