ABSTRACT
Indian women have a vibrant history of leadership and participation in the social, economic and political development of their country (Omvedt 1979; Gandhi and Shah 1992; Kumar 1993). But the same cannot be said of their trade union experience. Women have not been well served by India’s trade unions and are largely absent from the movement’s history (Menon 1992; RoyChowdhury 2005). Forged within the factories and smelters that drove the early days of India’s industrial development, the Indian labour movement is premised upon a gendered construction of ‘worker’ defined as a male, factory-based employee. The wages and conditions of women working in the same factories or beyond the factory gate as daily labourers, vendors or home-based industrial outworkers have traditionally registered little interest with male trade union officials who fail to conceptualize women as workers.
