“Workers think they are masters in the mill”: Workers’ Shopfloor Committees in the Bombay Cotton Textile Industry, c. 1927-1930
Zaen Alkazi, Postdoctoral Fellow, New Political Economy Initiative, Indian Institute of Technology – Bombay
In October 1928, in the face of the looming Great Depression, the Indian-dominated Bombay Mill Owners’ Association attempted to ‘rationalise’ the work process in their mills through tightening labour discipline and mass retrenchments. Organised in the mill committees of the Communist-dominated Girni Kamgar Union (Textile Workers’ Union), millworkers responded by openly defying work orders, speed-ups, and shift timings. Within weeks managerial authority entered a period of crisis as mill committee activists claimed the union was the only legitimate authority on the shopfloor and issued orders to supervisors and jobbers which conflicted with those of mill management. The union organised a paramilitary organisation (the Lal Fauj, or Red Army) as millworkers attacked moneylenders and neighbourhood strongmen in Bombay’s industrial districts. Workers claimed ‘labour raj’ or the ‘rule of labour’ was imminent, while mill officials armed themselves with revolvers to re-establish their authority, bringing working-class Bombay to the brink of violent class conflict.
Such largely forgotten moments of labour mobilisation provoke us to rethink nationalist historiography which narrativizes the end of empire as a period dominated by Gandhian non-violent nationalist mobilisation. Factory committees were a powerful presence in the major industrial centres of South Asia and studying them allows us to reassess the political sphere of the late colonial world. Engaging with debates on shopfloor politics, trade unionism and the interwar global revolutionary moment, my paper will explore the hitherto neglected history of workers’ committees in interwar Bombay and discuss their importance for revising our understanding of South Asian politics at the end of empire.
Online event – register here: https://tinyurl.com/ds547d7k
Organised by the Labour & Empire Working Group of the European Labour History Network – labourempire.elhn@gmail.com
Image: Wiki Commons