– Suresh P Thomas
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, began on December 30, 2014. For the next 106 days, Padmini S K, Maya Devi P, Rajani Dasan, Devi Ravi, Alphonsa Johnson and Beena Sojan, six middle aged women, under the banner of Asanghaditha Meghala Thozhilali Union-AMTU—(Unorganized Sector Labour Union) sat outside the textile showroom at Kovilakathumpadam, in Thrissur district, famed as the cultural capital of the state. Their charter of demands read thus:
- 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 a 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 now greet their customers with lifeless smiles pasted on their faces when the only thing on their mind is a toilet break; that they are now organized enough to collectively confront hitherto unchallenged violations of legitimate rights; that slavery is no more acceptable.
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. 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 asks.
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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.
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.
In spite of this 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. Out of the 210 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. A localized labour force, in fact, is a key attribute of the work culture of women sales employees.
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.
After a couple of failed compromise talks, 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.
***
The giant hoardings that are ubiquitous on the state highways, and the TV ads on Malayalam channels are flush with pitches by Amitabh Bachan, Mohanlal, Aishwarya Rai,Prithviraj, Manju Warrier and Shreya Ghoshal, the biggest and most commanding names of Indian and Malayalam cinema. 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.
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 a business that aims at preying on the vulnerabilities of a compulsive and 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 whom to side with.
Kalyan Sarees, part of Kalyan Group, 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 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. 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 has been ever since there were sales girls. So from 9: 30 to 7: 30, I should just stand there. No toilet breaks. 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.
After working in the showrooms of a few big brands, I joined Kalyan Sarees in 2012. By that stage, I had worked my way through to be a sales supervisor. I was fortunate — 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.
For a sales 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 acknowledgements. We were not given salary slips. We did not even 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 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. It was so bad that to even be asked to go and eat there is a punishment. 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 uterine 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.”
***
All through the strike, there was 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 in for 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, motivating 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 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 be interfering with 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.
***
On April 15, 2015, the 106th day of the strike, the management and the protesters reached an agreement. Of the four demands, the protests had laid out in their charter, two were fully met: cancellation of transfer orders and stopping the practice of making women work after seven in the evening; while one was partially acknowledged: the demand to re-arrange the working hours and make provisions for sales women to sit. The demand to re-arrange the working hours to an eight hour schedule was not even considered.
The social and traditional media have been silent since.
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Suresh Thomas is an award winning novelist and journalist who lives in Kottayam.
sureshpthomas@gmail.com