About The Archive

At the turn of the 21st century, Bengaluru’s predominant image was that of an IT city—a city flooded with people and companies from across the globe cashing in on the information technology boom. Homegrown companies such as Infosys and Wipro and their top management officials became household names, even as they received unprecedented access to corridors of state power. In the academic realm, scholars demonstrated with painstaking detail that the IT sector in the city was not built merely on the talent and entrepreneurial skills of these companies but rather on the long history of public sector industries and the ecosystem they had fostered in the years immediately after independence.

In this period of the ‘IT boom’, as it is popularly known, another employment-intensive industry was also growing rapidly in the city. This was the export-oriented garment industry where factories manufactured high-end, fast fashion fulfilling orders received from transnational apparel corporations in the global north. The industry drew in a vast army of poorly-educated women from areas surrounding Bengaluru, offering them low-paid, moderately stable employment. Garment women workers, clad in colourful, inexpensive mass-produced sarees with handbags slung over their shoulders, striding briskly towards their factories were, and continue to be, a common sight in many parts of the city. The textile industry remains one of the highest foreign exchange earners for the country as well. Yet, neither the industry nor its workers have found any representational space in dominant imaginations of what Bengaluru is. The garment city and its workers have for long remained invisible to the middle-class eye, trained to look with awe and aspiration at the glass towers of the IT city and its legions of office employees.

Similarly, the efforts to organise the exploited garment workers in the city has also received very little attention or captured the imagination of news media. Public memory regarding worker strikes in Bengaluru is generally rather sparse; even where it exists, it is limited to the public sector strikes of the 1980s held under the leadership of politically-affiliated trade unions and dominated by male, factory-going workers. Public sector employment may have been steadily decreasing as also the organising power of their trade unions. But factory work has continued, albeit under the aegis of private capital. The typical image of a factory worker in Bengaluru, for atleast two decades if not more, is no longer a unionised male worker. Rather it is the garment woman worker who works under immense ‘production torture’ who is the most representative factory worker in the city.

Within this larger context of invisibilisation, the work of unions such as the Garment and Textile Workers’ Union (GATWU) becomes extremely crucial to document, foreground and represent. Organising efforts among garment factory women workers have been quietly afoot over the last two decades in Bengaluru and GATWU has been central to these efforts. This work of organising gives lie to the fact that the city is middle-class, dominated by IT companies and their office employees and, is no longer host to any serious labour movement. Focussing on GATWU and other similar organisations helps us unsettle some hegemonic representations about Bengaluru and reveals how much of the city’s—and even the country’s—economy is upheld by the back-breaking work undertaken by unprivileged women workers.