I’m extremely grateful to the Women and Public Policy Program at HKS for supporting my research project this summer. Thanks to the their generous support, I was able to implement extensive qualitative interviews with 35 migrant workers across 10+ garment factories in Tirupur. This background research was instrumental in helping me develop a plan for implementing a survey of 600 migrant workers that I will launch in September. I will use the remaining grant funding to implement the surveys, and will post updates about my findings.
My plan is to first implement a brief door-to-door census in 2-3 neighborhoods inhabit by migrant workers employed in the garment industry. I will use this to identify eligible respondents, and collect information that will help me implement stratified random sampling to achieve a representative sample: gender, factory, type of contract (shift worker v.s. piece rate worker), occupation (tailor, packer, helper, quality control, other), and experience (less than 2 years of work experience in the garment industry v.s. more than 2 years). I plan to select a mix of urban and rural neighborhoods since I observed differences in the wages and working conditions reported by workers in SIDCO (rural) and Chinnakarai and Karampalleyam (urban). After the door-to-door census, I will select a random sample of 600 respondents using stratified random sampling based on: gender, contract, occupation, experience, and (if possible) factory. Survey enumerators will then approach the selected respondents and invite them to participate in the survey. Including both men and women in the survey sample will be critical to document gender gaps in wages, job quality, and career trajectories.
Based on the qualitative fieldwork I completed earlier this summer, I’ve identified a number of potential barriers that make it difficult for migrant workers to switch to better job opportunities at other factories or demand improvements from their current employers. This contributes to firms’ monopsony power, and enables the persistence of factories that pay low wages and offer hazardous working conditions. Information frictions prevent migrant workers from easily learning about their outside options, so their job mobility is low. High living costs, the pressure to send remittances, and liquidity/credit constraints imply that workers cannot afford to skip work and forego wages to enquire or interview for jobs at other factories. Finding housing is a challenge, which limits people's outside options to the job opportunities located close to them. Finally, language barriers and lack of experience make workers (specially women) less willing to negotiate with their employers to ask for a raise, promotion, or improvements in working conditions. I will use the survey data to confirm the presence of these barriers and their relative importance. This will then inform the research design for an RCT testing the effectiveness of interventions to mitigate the most salient barriers to job search and job switching.
Strong cultural norms about which jobs are deemed suitable for women tend to limit women’s outside options, conferring immense monopsony power on employers in industries such as the garment sector where many women work. In spite of this, there is little research on the degree to which the presence and impacts of employer monopsony power are different for female and male employees. My project aims to address this gap in the literature by examining whether reducing information frictions and raising women’s bargaining power can help female garment workers in Tamil Nadu, India demand better wages/working conditions or switch out of jobs that might be harming their health and safety.
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