Why India’s Garment Factories Are Unreliable for New Workers
In recent years, India has sewn its way toward a more reliable income for nearly 35 million garment industry workers. Agricultural laborers left the fields to work in factories that sprouted up as the economy gained steam. But as demand for exports has dropped amid the global financial crisis, hundreds of thousands of Indian garment workers have found their new line of work is on shaky ground. Sudden job losses highlight an industry where workers have few rights and where the support systems that help laborers in developed markets are lacking, according to experts interviewed by India Knowledge@Wharton.
Brown light filtered through dust fills a nearly empty railway station in the state of Karnataka in south India. A vendor pours milky, brown tea back and forth between a glass cup and a metal beaker to cool it. He hands it to the stationmaster, who sips and waits. The station, in the town of Gauribidanur, about 45 miles from the technology hub of Bangalore, starts to fill up as men and women arrive by the hundreds. They are on their way to jobs in textile factories in Doddaballapur, about 30 miles away, and in Bangalore.
Two whistles set the tone of the daily commute. The first is the 4:24 a.m. Bangalore Express, which chugs its way through a landscape that becomes progressively drier as it winds toward Gauribidanur from Kacheguda, in the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh. The second is the 6:20 a.m. Udyan Express, which carries passengers from Mumbai. The trains stop for precisely one minute to load their coaches with more than 1,500 laborers going to work in garment factories. Many more travel by bus, run by both government and the private sector.
In recent years, India has sewn its way toward a more reliable income for nearly 35 million garment industry workers. Agricultural laborers left the fields to work in factories that sprouted up as the economy gained steam. But as demand for exports has dropped amid the global financial crisis, hundreds of thousands of Indian garment workers have found their new line of work less than reliable.
Job losses can be sudden. They highlight an industry where workers have few rights and where the support systems that help laborers in developed markets are lacking, experts say.
One Rider Fewer
Nagaraj Kondavi of Gauribidanur took the train until he lost his job earlier this year. He worked at a ready-made garment factory in the Peenya Industrial Estate in Bangalore, an immense area with some 2,000 factories that supply, among others, JC Penney, Sears and Kmart. Then, as textile companies consolidated amid a drop in global demand, three units of a single factory, Sonal Garments, shut down. About 1,500 workers were laid off, Kondavi notes. He was one of them. Kondavi is now trying to get a job in the textile factories of Doddaballapur. More than 500 people, or 25% of Gauribidanur’s workforce, have lost jobs since 2008, according to Pappana Narayanappa, a local journalist and language professor at National College in Gauribidanur.
Still, the job losses in the state of Karnataka have not been as dire as in other parts of the country. Job losses have totaled about 500,000 across the sector in the last year, as thousands of factories have shut down, notes Rakesh Vaid, chairman of the Apparel Export Promotion Council, an organization of garment exporters that is affiliated with the Ministry of Textiles. The number could reach 1 million, the council says.
Palagummi Sainath, a veteran rural journalist, reported in June that 50,000 workers had been laid off in a single district in the northeastern state of Orissa. Layoffs have been reported in Tamil Nadu and other states since the middle of 2008. A recent survey by the apparel council estimated that nearly 94% of garment manufacturers had been “moderately or severely” hit by the economic slowdown. “The entire textile supply chain is going through this crisis, and exporters in Pakistan, China and other countries are under pressure,” Mr. Vaid notes.
Despite the uncertain times, garment-sector work is still the most profitable livelihood in Gauribidanur. “There is a handsome salary at Doddaballapur factories,” says Jayalakshmi Ravikumar in her native language of Kannada. For under-educated workers, the factories provide an opportunity to earn a consistent wage. Ms. Ravikumar earns 3,000 rupees a month ($64) at Denim Works Garments. In contrast, a life in the agricultural sector would be as undependable as the rains.
Hard Times for Farmers
The farmers from around Gauribidanur congregate outside the government building that anchors the town. They squat and wait to meet low-level officials to discuss soil programs, negotiate produce prices and seed subsidies, and catch the local news. They come from the 219 villages for which the town is the administrative headquarters. They wait in the unforgiving sun, chewing betel and spitting out the juice, serving as customers for one of the few businesses that thrive: the selling of coconut water. “They come here because they have no other work,” says Madanahalli Shantakumar, the office manager and record-keeper at the government building.
Agriculture has fallen on hard times in the region. It seldom rains, and when it does, it pours, as over the last month. The water level has plunged to lower than 800 feet below ground level, according to M. Anuroopa, assistant director of the Department of Agriculture in Gauribidanur. This forces farmers to use pumps to irrigate their fields – if they have the money. If the rains are not consistent, as in 2009, the region’s economy, which depends on agriculture, sericulture (the raising of silkworms) and animal husbandry, stagnates.
In 2008, a domestic clothing brand named Raymond’s opened Gauribidanur’s first garment factory. It now employs 800 workers, but pays them just a third of what factories in Doddaballapur or Bangalore pay, notes Narayanappa, the local journalist. Many of those who still have jobs have to travel to them. In effect, they’ve become intrastate migrants. The pattern is consistent across much of India as once-rural workers find jobs in urban areas. Such laborers make up 36% of the Indian workforce, according to the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector. They do not receive job perks such as leave or social security.
In Karnataka, which is among the states least affected by the global recession, about half a million workers are employed in the garment sector, according to a budget speech in May by the Chief Minister, B.S. Yeddyurappa. Across India, 35 million workers stitch collars, sew sleeves, dye cloth and perform all tasks that lead to the tiny “Made in India” tags being affixed to apparel sold in stores such as H&M and The Gap. Since the expiration in 2004 of the global Agreement on Textiles and Clothing, which imposed quotas on developing countries’ garment exports, India’s textile industry has become extremely profitable, contributing as much as 4% to gross domestic product.
Hurt by Currency’s Strength
But in 2007, a strong currency gave the industry pause. The rupee rose sharply and buyers shifted their attention to Bangladesh and other countries with lower costs, according to the Apparel Export Promotion Council. The economic downturn of 2008 reached further into the textile sector. Exports fell 4% from April through December, compared with growth of 21% in the same period of 2007, according to the Confederation of Indian Textile Industry.
Hundreds of thousands were left unemployed. Karnataka’s textile industry has weathered the storm a little better than those of other states. Still, some factories consolidated, notes Gopinath Parakuni, general secretary of Cividep, a non-governmental organization based in Bangalore that helps garment workers unionize.
As in many mergers, job losses followed. While the cutbacks barely registered on the state unemployment rate, they left nearly a quarter of Gauribidanur’s labor force unemployed, or back in the fields. “The industry has exaggerated the extent of the crisis as a pretext to lay off middle-level factory staff and force workers to take wage cuts,” K.R. Jayaram, the Garment and Textile Workers Union leader in Bangalore, told Business Line, a local business daily.
Workers in the unorganized sector have little representation with their employers and typically are hired through informal referrals. “Laborers are hired through contractors and not employers, so they can’t negotiate wages,” says Dibyendu Maiti, an assistant professor at the New Delhi-based Institute of Economic Growth. “There is no clear instruction in the Contract Labor Act of 1970 that there should be accountability between the contractors and laborers.” This makes laborers easier to dismiss, according to Maiti. And rules that state that employers should lay aside money to compensate for sudden termination are rarely followed. Loopholes allow laborers to be exploited, and existing laws often aren’t upheld.
The Apparel Export Promotion Council wants a loosening of the Contract Labor Act to allow companies to adjust quickly to global demand. Laws should promote economies of scale and competitiveness in a battle for global markets that India is already losing, the group says. But greater competitiveness comes often at the expense of workers’ rights, notes Mr. Parakuni of Cividep. Unionization may be the best way to protect them. “The managers in factories have no inkling about how to manage, and have a ‘rule-the-cattle’ mentality,” he says. “The workers are helpless.”
Meanwhile, the important Christmas shopping season arrives soon around the world. Its success could well determine how crowded the morning trains carrying garment factory workers from Gauribidanur to Doddaballapur and Bangalore will be next year.
Evolution: A One-Way Street
Since Darwin, evolution has been in vogue. Most scientists take it on principle that accumulation of mutations in DNA over million of years leads to new life forms.
But a question that has intrigued researchers for some time is whether organisms can go back to their ancestral forms. Is evolution is reversible? Conventional wisdom—known in the sphere of evolutionary biology as “Dollo’s law” after pre-eminent dinosaur researcher Louis Dollo—says no. A recent study published in the journal Nature has elegantly confirmed that evolution is a one-way street by studying the process at the molecular level.
As evolution occurs, the changes are so intricate that it becomes nearly impossible for the organism to go back to its original form. Freshwater fishes that live in a dark cave will lose their eyesight over generations. Even if a landslide creates an opening in the cave and lets in some sunshine, it is highly unlikely that the eye will reform.
Dollo’s theory has remained mostly unchallenged, except for a few works that say that evolution is reversible. In 2003, a team of scientists said that they’d found a species of snail that had regained its ability to coil into a loop after having lost the trait in previous generations.
“But their methods were unreliable,” said Boris Igic, a professor of biology at the University of Illinois in Chicago who was not affliated with the study. The snails could either have gone back to their original genetic makeup, or they could have gained new proteins that give it the old coiling.
The problem was that there was no real test to prove these theories. Evolution of organisms takes millions of years, making it difficult for scientists to make any direct observations.
Joseph Thornton, a biology professor at the University of Oregon, and his colleagues went around the problem by examining a single protein that helps humans and vertebrates cope with stress.
Millions of years ago, a fish existed that lacked bones. It is the ancestor to most life forms on earth today. That fish contained a small protein called the glutocorticoid receptor, which became active in the presence of two distinct hormones.
Over the course of the next 40 million years, the receptor evolved and became more specific such that it activated in the presence of only a single hormone—cortisol. It had accumulated 37 changes, but only seven were necessary to make it into the new receptor.
The researchers wanted to find out whether evolution could reverse at the level of the protein. To do so, they reversed the seven changes.
“But to our surprise, we got a dead receptor when we reversed,” said Thornton.
They found that the only way to make the protein reverse completely was to make five extra changes. These five fine-tuned the receptor, but did not give it a new function.
The probability of all five of these changes getting reversed is highly unlikely since they don’t confer a new advantage to the organism. They act like brakes that have to be removed to make evolution a two-way street.
Once the scientists fixed these five, they found that making the seven key changes reversed the protein to the ancestral form. They called the five brakes “ratchets” that prevented reverse evolution.
“This is not to say that the ancestral function cannot be re-acquired,” said Igic. But the function will come from forward evolution rather than a reversal. When whales evolved from a four-legged terrestrial ancestor, they evolved new proteins that resulted in fins. It was a reversal in function toward an ancestor of tetrapods that could swim, but in biochemistry, it was a movement forward.
Natural selection can take numerous paths during evolution but once those paths are chosen, reversal is highly unlikely. This is the first study of its kind, but Thornton does not expect this to be a rare case.
That an experiment at the molecular level can deliver a decisive conclusion about higher-order evolution is testament to the elegance of life.
“Everything that makes us who we are is stored in DNA,” said Ortlund, a biochemistry professor at Emory University, and co-author of the study. “Changes at the macroscopic scale have to start at the molecular level.”
Elixer Of Old Age
The indigenous people of the Ryukyu Islands have, it seems, the elixir of old age. They live on average for 110 years.
They longevity has been tied to their eating habits, and termed the Okinawa diet by commercial interests. The islanders consume only 1 calorie per gram of food, primarily through green and yellow vegetables, grains and very little sugar. Essentially, they are eating a nutrient-rich, low-calorie diet that triggers a stress response within their cells.
The years of low calorie consumption leads to a long, healthy life, say the proponents of the diet. A recent article by Dr. Sandy Westerheide and colleagues in the journal Science provides support for this theory, although in organisms several orders of magnitude less complex than humans.
The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans responds similar to human cells in times of calorie restriction. Within the millions of cells that make up the tiny nematode, there are specific pathways that act in concert to keep the organism going.
In response to stress such as reduced calorie intake, the cells adapt by changing their pathways, according to Dr. Westerheide. They do so in tiny increments that, in the way of life, have amplified results—in this case, increased longevity.
The key players in the pathway that get changed are highly conserved proteins that are the master controllers of the microscopic world of the cell.
They are called transcription factors. They tell the cell whether to grow, divide, fight invaders, specialize, or commit suicide. Their functions are as ubiquitous in humans as the nematode, although small differences in sequence may exist.
Dr. Westerheide focused on two proteins, the enzyme sirtuin 1 (SIR1) that increases the production of the second protein, heat shock factor 1 (HSF1). Both increase in concentration within cells when the body consumes fewer calories.
The ultimate result is an increase in HSF1 production. This protein works entirely by binding to DNA, and sending signals that promote growth.
In aging individuals, there is less SIR1, and in the absence of this protein, HSF1 can no longer bind DNA. There is no growth. Instead, there is aging, and eventually, death.
But in an individual who meticulously controls his or her calorie consumption, a stress response is triggered. These responses, learnt early in evolution, are protective mechanisms that allow cells to remain alive in the face of harsh conditions—thermal stress faced by single-celled bacteria on hot sulfur springs, oxygen toxicity faced by the lung cells of scuba divers, and calorie restriction faced by cells in Ryukyu islanders.
In the nematode, the stress response increases the levels of SIR1. This leads to increased binding by HSF1 to DNA, leading to growth signals even in an aging cell.
That is the secret of the long life of the healthy nematode. Whether HSF1 has a part in the response in higher organisms remains to be seen, but SIR1 looks important.
And given that cancer cells have strong stress responses, Dr. Westerheide’s work indicates a role for HSF1 in forming tumors, something that has been hinted at already by other researchers.
Small proteins have big roles in the elixir of the Ryukyu islanders.