Author : Priyanka Srivastava
Release : 2012
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Book Synopsis Creating a Healthy and 'decent' Industrial Labor Force by : Priyanka Srivastava

Download or read book Creating a Healthy and 'decent' Industrial Labor Force written by Priyanka Srivastava. This book was released on 2012. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation brings together scattered strands of labor, urban, gender and social reform histories to examine the discourse of labor welfare in colonial Bombay and its implication for the city's cotton textile millworkers. It highlights that because of uneven economic and urban growth; millworkers lived in the overcrowded outskirts of the city that lacked infrastructure, especially for sanitation. Unforeseen crises such as the devastating bubonic plague of 1896-97 triggered sanitary housing schemes that targeted the poor. But as the epidemic-induced urgency diminished, procuring funds for these projects became harder. By the early twentieth century, systemic failures to extend healthy living to working class families produced alternate forms of urban governmentalities. The emerging educated, middle class public in Bombay increasingly became anxious that conditions of poverty and insanitation not only contributed to the recurrence of diseases and high rates of infant mortality but also threatened the aesthetics and moral fabric of the city. Assuming the roles of responsible citizens, social activists formed voluntary associations that aimed to 'uplift' mill populations, instructing them about the rules of a healthy and 'decent' living. Simultaneously, social activists lobbied the Municipality to improve the sanitary conditions of working class neighborhoods. Reflecting a nationalist desire to construct a harmonious nation, the programs of social service groups also aimed to create non-confrontational and non-trade union forms of associations among millworkers around various recreational activities. The concerns of social activists for women millworkers were limited to enhancing their roles in social reproduction. Influenced by the labor welfare rhetoric of the post First World War period, social activists waged campaigns and collaborated with the Municipality and millowners for ensuring facilities such as paid maternity leaves, creches, medicalized child birth, and ante and post natal care for mill working women and their infants. The contemporary nationalist desire to create a physically strong nation and the urgency to prevent high rates of infant mortality in Bombay city fueled these campaigns. Although important, these infant-centric programs constructed women millworkers as the mothers of future citizens of the nation, overshadowing their identity as productive and conscious wage earners. The emphasis on reforming the 'backward' infant care practices of mill working women obscured structural factors such as poverty and dismal sanitation that endangered infant health. This dissertation argues that despite creating greater awareness about millworkers' dismal living; the discourse on labor welfare strengthened the construct of a 'culture of poverty' that interpreted dismal health and insanitation as essential cultural attributes of the poor.