The Well-Being of the Labor Force in Colonial Bombay by Priyanka Srivastava

Author:Priyanka Srivastava
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Modes of Managing the Mill-Working Population

The educational and propaganda methods of the YMCA’s welfare department served as examples for a variety of employers, showing them ways to engage their workers. In 1927, the Bombay, Baroda, and Central Indian Railways invited the YMCA to manage welfare issues among their workers. Simultaneously, the Bombay Municipality hired the YMCA to organize games and literacy classes for municipal workers. 209 By the late 1920s, many mills in Bombay had inaugurated sports and cultural activities to establish contact with their workers. Those who established these programs modeled them after the initiatives of the social service groups. In the years following the long and financially damaging textile labor strike of 1928, many mills organized recreational and welfare programs for their workers. The Bombay Labour Department reported that during the first months of 1930, seven mills held social gatherings, two celebrated religious festivals such as Ganapati Mahotsva, while a group of four mills created a common sports club that arranged cricket tournament matches among the teams of workers from various mills. 210 In 1936, during the Dussehra festival holidays, the Manchester Mills of the E. D. Sassoon Group in Bombay took its workers by train to Ahmedabad. 211 The report of this excursion commented that “if employers of labour follow the example of Manchester mills, they will be able to create a bond of sympathy between themselves and their employees.” 212

Although welfare measures were neither uniform nor adopted by every mill, by the late 1930s they became a means to promote workers’ well-being , contentment, and discipline. Discussing the welfare policies of millowners , the Textile Labour Enquiry Committee of 1939 recorded that twenty Bombay mills provided recreational facilities of various kinds. 213 Many of them had gymnasiums, akhadas, and clubs where they arranged for sports events “with a view to the encouragement of sportsmanship, discipline and healthy recreation amongst cotton millworkers.” 214 The government reports on labor regularly recorded how several mills had arranged libraries and reading rooms while others organized bhajan mandalis (group singing of devotional songs) and provided space for theatrical performances. 215

By the 1940s, these employer-sponsored sports and social gatherings of workers increased and became institutionalized. From 1941 onward, the Millowners’ Association organized an annual all-India inter-mill wrestling tournament for millworkers . 216 Industrial groups such as Sassoon established social clubs to coordinate their annual volleyball and football tournaments. 217 The employers acknowledged that “games and physical exercise are conducive to good health, and good health makes for greater efficiency and contentment.” 218 These gatherings and programs also indicated millowners’ intentions to forge amicable, albeit hierarchical, relations between the employers and employees. To symbolize their direct participation in recreational and cultural events, millowners and managers held concluding ceremonies at which they presented awards to the participants. 219 The ceremonies also included songs and speeches in Marathi that “eulogized the directors and management.” 220 Although millowners were unwilling to increase wages or provide clean housing, they readily adopted recreation and cultural programs as techniques to control the leisure time of their workers and to portray themselves as their concerned patrons.

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