I

n the export processing zones of Bangalore, in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, stand large modern garment factories.  Some are more grand than others, but they are all large, each employing thousands of workers in multi-storey buildings which line both sides of the unmade, dirt roads in this area of the city.  In the late afternoon, the vehicles which will transport workers to their homes at the end of the working day begin to arrive. Around 5.30pm, workers emerge from the gated factory premises. Their bags are searched by the security guards who patrol every factory unit, and they run to pile on to the waiting (by now dangerously overcrowded) buses and trucks for the journey home.  Inside the factory, however, work will be continuing.  It is routine for managers to hold workers behind, to lock them in, as a means of meeting factory-wide production targets.  The workers who remain at their machines are extremely unlikely to be paid overtime for their (probable) eleven hour day, and as the transport has long departed, they are left to walk home alone, after dark.

This paper examines what these working hours mean, in real terms, for the women forced to work them.  In our research we identified three main areas where long-hours working was associated with serious and adverse implications for the status and well-being of female garment workers.  First, the women suffered great anxiety about the welfare of their children as they were forced to leave them for very long periods of time during their working day.  For those women whose children were at school, they worked each afternoon in the knowledge that their offspring would have been sent out of the safety of the school premises when schooling finished at mid-day, and would be alone, unsupervised and at risk until they returned home. Women used a range of strategies to keep their children safe from harm: some delegated the care of their youngest children to their older siblings; others locked them in their houses all day; some had no option but to let them fend for themselves. In every case, though, the safety, well-being and educational potential of the child was put at risk in one way or another. (In the case of children who act as carers, for example, we see that unpaid child-labour is situated within the home in order to support paid work outside the domestic setting).  Second, in a society where there is a strong social taboo towards women who are away from home after dark, female garment workers are vulnerable to being labelled as promiscuous and morally loose.  This is a phenomenon seen elsewhere in South East Asia, targeted specifically at garment workers, and is compounded by late-hours working.  In this there are major implications for women’s physical safety, both inside and outside the workplace.  Third, these factors combine to present a multi-layered set of social disadvantages for women in their society, and these factors traverse the domestic and work settings to make them vulnerable both inside and outside the workplace.

The paper concludes that arbitrary, employer-driven determination of working time remains a central concern in international employment relations. Forced long-hours working is the unacceptable face of flexibility and has major implications for this generation of workers, and their children.