Tradeswomen Building Bridges: the North American Network of Women Working in the Construction Trades

Time

Laying in my king-sized bed in a 5 star hotel in Jaipur, I watched a short film on the crisis in rural India. One scene, repeated several times, showed a woman in a saree walking through a green field gently touching her waist high crop. I thought this was a romantic representation. About 16 hours later, I am on a train from Jaipur to Kota and through the window I see a woman in a saree walking slowly through a green waist high crop. Too far away to see if there was a caress.

Mountains in the far distance, highways and trucks in the background and farmland in the foreground. Two-wheelers (Indian for all motorcycles and scooters) race through villages. A small temple sits along the road. A couple, I can safely assume wife and husband, gather what looks to me (city kid) like wheat or hay tied into bundles just smaller than they are. Gray 4×4 squares of something that looks like canvas are laid out through several fields apparently to dry. Stopping at a rural train station, men make cement by hand with hoes. My father did this in the early 1950s when he rebuilt the wall in front of our house. But he had a wheelbarrow and a hose. These men have a pile in the dirt and pans of water that they bring from a nearby creek.

And the present? I just watched a young lesbian walk through this same train station. No doubt about it—baby dyke in a plaid shirt, tight jeans, short hair. Brave young woman.

Riding through the middle of the tourist city of Jaipur a couple of days ago, we passed several two wheeled carts full of sand pulled by camels. The drivers wore traditional lungis and the workers’ casual turban. In the rural areas, camels are common.

Cows are not everywhere, but they may appear anywhere. They are not tied or fenced. They are just among us. Goats are less common, probably because people are allowed to eat them. Cows are “sacred” and the hint or rumor of “cow slaughter” brings out the raging Hindu religious fundamentalists. There was a riot yesterday, suppressed only when it was proven that the dead calf died of natural causes.

Trash

Picture the fallen leaves of fall in New England as bleached and shiny plastic. My friend Veena, who grew up here, left at 20 and has returned, blames packaging. It has always been a take-away society. People eat on the street and buy their food in small lots from many vendors. But Veena says that things used to come in natural containers, plant leaves, or paper. Now small bags of many kinds of chips and other commercial snacks are sold on every street and the bags are thrown on the local pile where the wind, the dogs and the cows distribute them to gutters and corners. I asked Amit why there is no waste management and he said that there is indeed a Minister of Waste Management. I said he should be fired and Amit said that I should have seen it before. The trash is much less, he says. I am glad I am here now and not then.

There is a place where there is not trash. The poorest of the poor illegally cultivate plots along the railroad tracks. They eat some and sell most. These plots are free of trash and carefully maintained. I think the trash is not a people problem. It is a government problem.

Trains

This is my heresy. I do not love the cherished and much lauded Indian Railway System. Not that I wouldn’t agree that it is an authentic and efficient way to see India. I sit on a train now across from a single man. Across the aisle, a woman by herself has finished eating and is napping in her bunk. A couple and two kids are in the other bunks, mom and youngest—with a terrible cough, god help me—in the lower bunk. Dad and the older, about 6, on the top bunk. Vendors walk the aisles selling chai, sandwiches, those ubiquitous chips, and chains with which to lock up luggage.

The problem is not being on the train; it is getting on the train. My first trip was easy and that lulled me into a false sense of competence. Second trip, I discovered at 10 PM that I did not actually have a ticket. I was on the dreaded Waiting List. Too late, I discovered that the WL the top of my apparent ticket meant it was not a ticket at all. Stuck in Ahmedabad, I went back to the hotel and flew home the next morning. This trip, Jaipur to Kota, I had a ticket and I had it all figured out. The concierge at the hotel told me I did not need to take the 45-minute cab ride all the way to the central station. The train would stop for 2 minutes right down the street from the hotel—a Rs 40 tuk tuk ride. That is about 6 cents. Luckily, I panicked and decided I should spend the money and go to the central station because I got there and could not find my printed ticket and you cannot board an Indian train without a printed ticket—in a country where no one has a printer and everything is done by phone. I had time to find the Tourist Desk and a nice group of three people printed my ticket for me.

Next step is getting out of Kota on Tuesday. I am on two Waiting Lists– #1 on the train I really don’t want and #5 on the one I do. My new friends at the Tourist Desk in Jaipur said I have a “99.9% chance” of getting both tickets. Then the trick is canceling one in time so that I am not charged for both tickets. After this trip, I may be trading the authentic experience for less stress and flying.

My research

The five-day Fulbright conference in Jaipur—all expenses paid—was a great mid-trip opportunity to present an interim report on my research and to talk to the other Fulbrighters about their research and mine. I stayed in the fancy hotel an additional three nights because the construction union conference I am attending in Kota is only three hours away and it did not make sense to go all the way back to my home in Mumbai only to return to Rajasthan. I had time to think and reflect.

My mind has been a muddle with all I have learned, with both the impossibility and the inappropriateness of drawing conclusions (“the white lady becomes an expert in 6 weeks”) and with the isolation of doing this by myself. I am a Participatory Researcher. This has several key meanings for me. First, my work must be “of use.” It must be designed and carried out with purpose and the intent of improving the conditions of workers and promoting greater equality and justice. The knowledge generated in Participatory Research is collective. My role as the Researcher is to provide a theoretical framework, synthesize the knowledge of Participants, to reflect it back to then for validation and to document our collective findings.

I love this process. I love seeing the patterns in how activists describe their work and being one of those charged with pointing to the patterns. I love listening to the chaos of people passionate about justice and asking questions that move them to organize the chaos into a new strategy. I love the responsibility of collecting the new knowledge and making lessons learned more permanent.

This has been a lonely project, but, with some conversations and reflective time, I have started to organize what I am learning. The lives of women working in the construction industry in India are desperate. The women are poor, they are at the bottom of all the Indian hierarchies of caste, region, religion and gender. They are married mothers working too long under terrible conditions with no opportunities to improve their lives. I have seen it and the women have told me so. There are two openings for change, training in higher skilled work and the presence of mobile creches (child care facilities) on a very few construction sites in three of the major cities. These are the two openings that Liz, Vivian and Connie brought home from Beijing in 1995 (see the Fulbright proposal on my home page for the history of this project and its origins in Beijing) and they have been the major focus of my fieldwork since I have been here. My emphasis has been on the training because that is my bias. Let’s get these women trained up and into better jobs. But it is clear that there are not really any good jobs in construction in India and that, if there were, gender bias is so strong that women will not soon be moving into them. And my biases have led me to underplay the importance of the mobile creche movement. It is a service based on motherhood. As a feminist, I am averse to defining women through reproductive work and biological determinants. I am a modern woman and – it came to me at about 7 am Saturday—I am making a modern error.

The mobile creche movement in India is a movement. It is women—cross class and in the absence of male support of any kind—organizing themselves to meet a basic need, the need for women working in construction to know that their children are safe while they are working. One the ground and right in front of me, it is a pipeline to literacy and education for the girl and boy children of today’s Indian women working in construction. There is even an unenforced law that says there will be creches on construction sites with 50 or more women workers (so they keep it to 49, of course) and this law has a mechanism for funding the creches. Most important for the future of this project and the plan to bring a delegation of tradeswomen and advocates to India in March 2017, India’s movement for child care for construction works may be small but they have one. In the US, we have talked about this issue for almost 40 years without making any progress. India has something to teach us.

So I am going back to many of my interviewees and asking more questions about the mobile creche movement. What can we in the US tradeswomen’s movement learn from you? What are the obstacles to making the creches more widely available to Indian workers? Who are the allies? What are the plans for the future? Will you assist in hosting the delegation from the US next year?

Postscript: That was yesterday. I spent today in a meeting of the Women’s Committee of the Builders and Woodworkers International Indian affiliates. All day was about getting training for women working as construction laborers so they can upgrade their skills and increase their wages. So there is a movement for training. I was able to contribute my findings that these are not just women workers; they are ALL working mothers who are responsible for 100% of the very labor intensive household work of poor women in India. They do not have time for training. Ellina Samentroy at VV GIRI Labor Institute in Noida brought the level of women’s uncounted labor to my attention weeks ago. To paraphrase Einstein, labor that is uncounted still counts. My findings made sense to the Women’s Committee members who then engaged in table discussions and flipchart report backs that would have made the union women of WILD feel right at home.

Tomorrow is the union meeting that is NOT the women’s committee. We will see. Then back home to Mumbai on a overnight train tomorrow night….I hope. I actually do not have that ticket yet, but that is another story for another time.

Love and peace to all.

I will be here for exactly 12 weeks—arriving on a Thursday and leaving on a Thursday. Today is exactly six weeks in and six to go.

The vitality of the public and not-so-public dialogue on caste, class and race is shaking me up. India is as ideologically polarized as the US, but the conversations—and rants—are more articulate and openly grounded in the struggle for power. Trump’s semi-literate followers cheer at his racist sloganeering. Here, when similar sentiments are expressed in Parliament by the national government’s Minster in charge of Human Resource Development, she quotes Cicero and, in an exchange with another woman legislator, shouts, “And if you are unsatisfied with my reply, then I will cut my head, and put it before your feet.” The idiom is lost on me, but not the passion. The HRD Minister is defending the government’s repression of student dissent. Student netas (leaders) have been jailed, journalists beaten in the courthouse and a professor was shot at. This in the name of nationalism, patriotism and a status quo wherein 800 million people live in the cliché of “abject poverty.”

Went out to clear my head and get some fruit from the vendor outside campus. Got a kiwi, bananas and a little potato-looking thing that tastes like caramel. Then a bird pooped on my head. I plucked a couple of leaves off a plant, cleaned up and contemplated the irony of “clearing my head.”

I spent last evening with a feminist collective that has been meeting weekly since the early ‘80s. We met in the Women’s Centre in Santa Cruz. So much was familiar to me–the space with posters, stacks of books and old flyers, the women of a certain age with short hair, glasses and comfortable clothes and the focus of the meeting on preventing domestic violence and promoting gender justice. The familiarity feeds me in this strange place where so much is unfamiliar. However, they speak loudly, interrupt each other and give freely of unsolicited advice without fear of hurt feelings and fragile psyches unrecovered from long ago traumas. Life is more present here and change more urgent.

And here in India my wishy/washy frigging “progressive” politics feel dull, benumbed and useless. There is a battle between the powerful and the powerless, between those who take and those who produce. Here 800 million people provide the labor that builds all wealth. Caste reinforces divisions of labor and the social oppression of many for the benefit of the few. Religious differences are fanned by elites to control festering frustration. Women are at the bottom of all hierarchies and their unpaid and uncounted so-called “household” labor holds the entire pyramid up. And there is a left and a right: the right defends the status quo and “stability” while those on the left, in spite of many differences of analysis, strategy and tactics, speak clearly about who is on what side of the battle between the elites and the people. And that battle has a name and it’s name is capitalism.

But at home it is Bernie v. Hillary. It seems pathetic from here. Hillary Clinton, by birth, experience and positions, is a member of the capitalist elite. She has never been and never claimed to be of the left. (I have not read US papers today so she may have actually claimed this by now.) I have many friends who are political centrists and their support for her makes sense. But for my friends and comrades who have spent their lives organizing against racism and sexism and for the rights and power of a united multi-racial US working class, my unsolicited advice from India is that support for Hilary is support for capitalism and the continued political and economic supremacy of the elite oligarchs.

Support Bernie because he comes close and because he is raising the problem of class. Or sit it out because he does not go far enough and the revolution will not be won by voting in bourgeois elections. Ah, the language of my youthful conversion to socialism has been liberated in India! Feels very good.

My head is exploding with all that I have learned. I have not written in almost three weeks because I am overwhelmed by the data. Since my last blog post, I have interviewed seventeen individuals, attended meetings at eight different organizations, visited two construction site creches (day care centers) and observed two organizing meetings of workers and advocates conducted in Hindi.

My social science mind wants to make sense—to observe, analyze and conclude. Behold western arrogance. India’s layers and contradictions of modern and traditional, urban and rural, internal migration, caste, religious differences, powerful patriarchy and residual feudalism are a gourmet stew while I have spent my life and work in the simple broth of the USA.

Walking among and looking through, I am a “sister from another planet.”

The first organizing meeting I attended included labor and worker leaders, organizers and researchers. It was a two-hour meeting on plans to pressure the Centre government and Parliament to improve the Social Security Act to more effectively cover workers in the informal sector. There were about 20 people in attendance and five women, not including me and the young graduate student who brought me to the meeting. I could understand quite a bit of what was going on despite the language barrier. The notes written on the white board were in English and provided an outline, but I could also tell when the “experts” –academics and lawyers –were dominating the discussion of the details of the proposals and when the labor leaders and workers took over to shape the strategies for outreach and organizing. Some things translate easily.

The term “informal sector” is used to mean workers who are outside of the legal system of workers rights and benefits. The outdated and racist term that was commonly used in the United States was “black market.” One might think of the “black market rum runners” of the Prohibition Era. Today we speak of the “underground economy” of under-the-table employment and flea markets in today’s US. In the construction industry, the underground has come above ground with the common practice of misclassifying workers as self-employed independent contractors. The unions are exposing the practice of “misclassification” and pushing for government enforcement to bring employers and employees into the legal system. Misclassification pushes the boundaries of the informal sector and absolves employers and government of their legally mandated responsibilities for fair pay and worker protections. Uber, AirBNB and the so-called “sharing economy” all open holes in the formal economy and add to the expansion of the informal economy. In addition to reduced protections for workers– which few in the US outside of unions and Bernie Sanders seem to care about– reduced tax revenues hurt almost all in the long run. The super rich who have created their alternative nation state of private security, banks, transport and school systems are the exception.

The underground economy in the US is estimated at about 8% of the Gross National Product (GDP). Eight cents out of every dollar is untaxed. That’s a lot of money lost to our common wealth, funds that could improve our schools and roads, reduce the cost of health care, expand education to pre-school, reduce the costs of higher education. Pick your cause.

India’s informal sector is over 90% of their total economy. Every 90 rupees of product and services produced in the Indian economy is extra-governmental and technically illegal.

The organizing meeting that I attended was a coalition formed to pressure for publicly funded benefits– health insurance, pension, maternity leave, etc.—to the 400 million workers in India who are in the informal economy.

But I am here to talk about the construction industry. Seventy percent of all construction in India is generated—that is owned—by government, mostly defense and infrastructure construction. It is publicly owned. So, based on my experience in the US and Europe, it is publicly regulated and therefore in the formal sector. No, I was told, 95% of construction is in the informal sector

This is a puzzle for me. How could an industry that is 70% publicly owned be 95% informal?

I asked Subhash Bhatnagar, lawyer, advocate and longtime leader of the movement for construction workers’ rights, how this could be. He explained how government contracts are given to large contractors who then bid the work out to subcontractors who bid it to smaller contractors who bid to smaller…. on and on through several tiers. I understand this because this is the organizational structure of construction in Boston and globally. On a project in Boston, there might be 500 workers who were employed by two dozen different companies. But if they are working on a public project, all the bosses and all the workers would fall under the relevant wage, hour, health and safety and workers’ compensation laws.

But what is different in India, Subhash explained, is that once the governments of India—municipal, state and national—award their contracts to a private construction contractor, the entire project moves into the informal sector. There is no monitoring or enforcement of workers’ rights. There are, of course, symbolic exceptions to this practice but government overwhelmingly walks away from the workers who will produce the publicly owned final product. They leave those workers to the market forces that rule in the informal sector.

I think a lot about Milton Friedman’s theory of the “economic man.” He might object to my oversimplification, but he is dead so here goes. The guru of Reagonomics, “trickle down” and the neoliberal renaissance claimed that, given the freedom to do so, people will make the choice that maximizes the benefits to themselves. I agree with Freidman. Given absolute freedom to exploit others and make more profit, business owners do. That is why we need the collective expression of the citizens’ desire for fairness, that is, effective government regulation and enforcement. I am sure that most of the large contractors of India are good people who love their families and wish no harm to others, but they pay their laborers pennies a day* with no benefits and drive to work past the shacks in which people live because they can. As many of the people I have interviewed have said, “The government of India does not take care the poor.”

Not to get ahead of myself, but I have been thinking about a question. What if the people of India threw out all the western charities that “care” for the poor and demanded that their government do its job?

*”Pennies a day:” I exaggerate for effect. Women I met yesterday who are working as labouers on a very large and very expensive commercial construction project in Navi Mumbai are paid $3.80 a day at today’s exchange rate.

When I started this, I was afraid I would annoy all of you with too many posts. Now I am not posting enough for some! I have been very busy with field work and trying to keep up with my notes and travel logistics. I spent 9 days in Delhi, interviewed a lot of folks and learned a lot. I leave for four days in Ahmedabad on Wednesday. I am working on some ideas for things to say about what I am learning and I’ll be posting something soon.

In the meantime, today I took my first day off since arriving. Here are a few pictures from a 13 hour excursion to Matheran, India’s smallest– and very cute– Hill Station.

Thursday, January 28, 2016

I have seen the monkeys and they want my orange

Today is my two-week anniversary in India. Ten weeks exactly to go. I hardly know how I will get everything done. I am in academic paradise, working 10-12 hours a day on the computer, on the internet, in the library and meeting people for interviews. Have not done much observation yet but it is coming. I have found some wonderful contacts or, as we say in my work jargon, key informants.

I usually only eat only two meals a day and then have fruit for the third meal. The food is (mostly) delicious and there is a lot of it. [Not sure what the yellow thing in the little bowl was yesterday morning, but it did not appeal to me.] I bought some fruit last night from the stand just outside the campus gate and planned to eat it for breakfast this morning. My roommate was sleeping in so I got dressed and headed to the canteen for a cup of chai to enjoy with my orange and a banana. And the monkeys swarmed toward me and the big one was right next to me and he was baring his teeth and the students in the canteen yelled, mostly in Hindi but I all of a sudden understood, “Put the orange away!”

Have I told you that India is full of homeless dogs? You rescue-hearted folks out there would go crazy. Dogs everywhere. All medium size, except the puppies, different colors and not aggressive. But they bark—some of them all night. According to my friend, Chandra, “dogs on campus” is the most controversial student issue. Until this morning, I was with the anti-this-many dogs camp, but my orange and maybe my knapsack were saved by a cute brown shaggy-haired pooch who went after that big monkey. The dogs have a job to do and I can use earplugs.

After breakfast and my monkey learning experience, I headed to Colaba, the most southern part of Mumbai (a long and narrow peninsular reaching to the Lakshadweep Sea), to meet with Vrishali Pispati and Devika Mahadevan of Mumbai Mobile Creches. Vrishali is the Director and Devika is a Board member and a friend of my friend, Julie Smith-Bartoloni. Julie made the introduction. Vrishali and Devika told me of the founding of the Mobile Creches movement in India in 1969 and how it has evolved to provide day care and education services to the children of construction workers who are living on the construction sites. I had a basic knowledge of the movement and its organizations but they added a great deal more. They have introduced me to the directors of the mobile crèches in Delhi and Pune who I hope to visit. Vrishali is setting up an opportunity for me to visit some sites, with a translator, and speak to some of the women workers. For those interested in more details, see the page My Field Notes on the blog. My deepest thanks to Vrishali, Devika and Julie for this entry into the lives of India’s women construction workers.

I took the train down to Colaba at 9 am. It was an indescribable experience so I will use a picture from the internet to illustrate.

I would be the one on the far left inside the train if I had had a long enough selfie stick.

I presented my research to a Women’s Studies class this evening. I think it went fine, but I am deeply immersed and passionate about this subject and it is difficult to distill it into 40 minutes for an audience that is has no previous knowledge. And the students were shy. All the same, I learned things from the questions and discussion and I appreciated the opportunity to do a first draft of a presentation that I will do again here.

Friday, January 29, 2016

I spent all day finishing my Friday night presentation, “The Peculiar History of the Labor Movement in the United States.” I was asked to present on the political economy and labor movement to a school-wide seminar for the School of Development Studies. Although their conversation was all in Hindi, I knew that the organizers, Bindu and Meena, were very nervous about the turnout. I could have understood that in any language and I told them I have been in their shoes many times and don’t worry. I have invited guests to UMass Boston from very far away and had 5 people show up. It is an academic hazard. But I had a great turnout of over twenty students and faculty, almost all women. They loved the presentations and I loved the discussion. I have been asked to do it again in a couple of weeks when I return from Delhi.

Saturday, January 30, 2016

On my way to Delhi for 9 days. I just got used to Mumbai. Marashtra from the air looks a bit like Ohio in September. Small farms and dry, but no hills.

A little time to reflect in the airport and on the flight

The pollution has been quite bearable in the two weeks I have been here. It is reported everyday in the paper and the TISS campus is a little enclave largely without vehicles. However, on Thursday the Deonar dump caught fire. It is only a couple of miles from the campus. This morning the campus was in a smoky haze and I had to cover my mouth with my scarf as I walked down the road to get a cab. I passed a few “autos” (3 wheeled auto rickshaws) on my way intending to take a 4-wheeled cab, but an auto driver pulled up beside me. I said nei, nei, Mumbai airport, and he nodded yes. I said it again, Mumbai airport and he nodded yes. So I got in. I had plenty of time and the traffic is so bad that the cabs can’t go much faster except on the highways. I thought we would stay off the highways but I was wrong and twice we were in the left hand lane on a flyover. I got here fine and it cost Rs 300 instead of 500. (That is 50 cents instead of 75 cents for a 40-minute ride).

Sounds and smells of Mumbai

Mumbai does not smell. Some places in Mumbai smell. One day this week, something reeked all of a sudden and then I passed a 4-foot high pile of garbage that had been gathered for pick up sometime soon. The Deonar fire smells when the wind is blowing to campus—smells like a fire, not like a dump. There are smelly places but they are occasional and situated and then you walk or ride past them and Mumbai smells like any city—a mashup of people, animals and vehicles. Mumbai adds more animals to the mix than I was used to. In the auto on the way to the airport this morning, I momentarily admired the beautiful brown coat on a dog beside the road, but it was a goat. The other night, an auto I was in had to slow down for a donkey.

There is an unbelievable amount of trash. It is as if it comes up from the earth like the rocks in New England soil. Like the New England farmers, the people are constantly managing the trash, cleaning it out, piling it up, sweeping the streets, trying to stay ahead of it. But, for now, the trash is winning against a people who clean all day long, from bathing with buckets in the morning, to washing laundry by the side of the road and hanging it on balconies and fences each day. The women in sarees and orange safety vests sweep the roads and highways all day. The people clean their bodies, their homes and their bastis day in and day out, but the trash wins.

Women can do anything in sarees, including riding sidesaddle on the backs of motorbikes and taking a brisk morning walk in bright red sneakers.

Bidets are everywhere in private and public bathrooms. I love it and want one.

Perspective is fluid. A line of shacks two weeks ago is a thriving commercial area today and I am looking for the fruit vendor.

Mumbai is loud. First the horns. They beep incessantly. It is the weirdest thing about this town and the thing that can most get under my skin if I do not let it go. Also people talk loud but that may be so they can be heard over the horns. The cawing of crows is constant. But the sounds can be musical. For a week or more, I could not make out the source of the harmonic hum that I hear every night from my room. Was it a distant religious ritual or a concert? It is the traffic and the horns on the road a half-mile away merging into a rhythmic cacophony. It puts me to sleep now and the call to prayers from the mosque on the other side of the Deonar Farm Road wakes me in the morning.

Be aware that the line you are standing in may just be a family stopping to catch up or make plans. Look around each group to see if the passage resumes on the other side.

The one thing I wish I had brought is Visine. I never use it at home, but would here. I bought an Indian version at a Chemist shop but it is loaded with percents of this and percents of that and I don’t like to use it too often.

Things I was told that are not true:

• “Nobody walks in Mumbai.” In fact, Mumbaikers walk all the time. And I have a FitBit to prove it. At least 5-6 miles a day.
• “Everybody speaks English.” Not. This morning I have had encounters with the guard at the dorm, the auto driver, the security at the airport, the airline employees at the gate. None of them spoke English although most can understand a bit. That is typical and it is fine. It is their county and they have their languages—700 of them. The announcement to raise the tray tables and seats for departure was just made by a recording in English, Hindu and Marathi. I am going to work on speaking more with the Indian lilt because I have noticed that those who do are more easily understood. Sometimes I am just stubbornly attached to my Boston accent. See here.
• “Be careful. It is not safe.” I have walked all over day and night. I take the same precautions I take in Boston and I am fine. It is a city like any other—no more, no less. But of course, I have magic hair. In any city, young men don’t see me and the older ones are not interested. Perfect safety gear!

The absolute hardest thing for me is remembering to walk on the left. Here they drive on the left so they walk on the left—mostly. Completely counterintuitive, but very important when you are always waking in crowds and in traffic. I have to remind myself all the time.

The term “crowd” is insufficient to describe what I am talking about. Have you been in a crowd leaving a concert or a sporting event? People jammed into a narrow passage, but patiently and calmly moving forward? That is Mumbai, but there is seldom an exit. And there are cars in the crowd.

Justice for Rohith

India is unsafe for some people. The prejudice toward Dalits is comparable to the institutional racism against African-Americans. It has made me think about “caste” as a component—a complicator – of the position of African Americans within the broader concept of People of Color. Rohith was a student who, along with four comrades, was unjustly expelled from his university for political reasons and because he was Dalit. He committed suicide, a part of this story I find hard to grasp. Was it a political act, a martyrdom, or was it an act of despair or shame because a Dalit’s position in society is so very tenuous and he was knocked off the ladder by the expulsion? It does not matter to the student movement here. They have taken his name and the unjust act that was done to Rohith and made it a national movement for justice for Dalits. Google Justice for Rohith to learn more about students’ protests across India and politicians’ responses –ranging from stupidity to repression with heavy doses of opportunism in the middle.

I am safe and happy and I love it here.

Love to all.

I am in the library working – struggling –with two presentations I will be making on Thursday and Friday. The first is on my research here on women in construction. I will be presenting to Women’s Studies students. The second, by request and to a larger group, is on the US labor movement. I have titled it, “The Peculiar History of the Labor Movement in the United States.” I say ‘peculiar’ because, with the absence of class consciousness among American workers, why do we have any unions at all. And will we have any unions at all when Friedrich v. California Teachers Association is decided by the Supreme Court in the next few weeks? Anyway, that’s depressing so I thought I would share my day in the Mumbai slums.

And that is the last time I will use the word ‘slums.’ The poor of Mumbai live in settlements, resettlements and nagars (nagar: a town or a suburb). Their homes are nearly entirely self-constructed from found materials. But over time, people pour concrete or use bricks and build permanent housing and then, like my grandparents did, they build up and out. On Tuesday of the past week, I went on a tour of Mumbai’s M-Ward that was sponsored by the conference I was attending on Rethinking Cities in the Global South. Mumbai is divided into administrative districts designated by letters of the alphabet. M-Ward has the lowest Human Development score, which measures health, education and income, of any place in Mumbai.

TISS, where I am living, is located in the M-Ward and has had a long time partnership with residents and organizations. They have an 8 1/2 minute video, M-Ward: From the Margins, that is better than any pictures I took.

I will tell you about what I saw and who I met.

First we went to Cheeta Camp. We went to one of the settlements’ schools and met with community activist Abul Hassan. Classrooms are around a large center courtyard. Chairs were set up for us to sit in a circle in the courtyard and talk with Hassan. We were not there long when bells rang, children from all directions cheered and the courtyard filled with kids on their break. Many stood around the circle and listened, some played games including the ubiquitous badminton.

After the bell.

Cheeta Camp has about 110,000 residents and 11,000 households. They have 14 schools and 95% school attendance. Some kids go onto higher education and go to work in call centers. Some become laborers and migrate to the Gulf to work. This settlement has been moved at least twice since 1950. They were originally in many areas in central Mumbai but were forced out when their land became valuable. They were moved to Janta Colony, a marshy area near the docks where they became the dockworkers. After 25 year, they were forced to move again. However, the government determined that only a small share of the residents were entitled to resettlement (lots of legalistic bullshit about who has some land rights and who has no rights), but the community created what Hassan called a Mighty Alliance and refused to move without everyone. The alliance prevented any single political party from cutting deals for their supporters and the residents engaged in civil disobedience. They won and all the residents moved to their current location. They continue to fight for legal title to the land and continue to be threatened by government and developers who see the land as having increasing value. You can see the contrast in the photos where some residents have been able to make improvements in their streets with tile and a roof that makes a very big difference in monsoon season.

Maharashtra Nagar Transit Camp is not so settled, not so unified and its residents are living in substantially worse conditions. Seventy-six thousand people live there in 5850 households. The oldest part of the camp is ten years old. The camp spreads along open fields for about a half-mile. The end nearest the main road has electricity but none of the residents have running water. Water must be carried from a great distance. There are no toilets and residents use the field across from the camp. There is only one school and no health services. There is a pre-school in the camp but residents said that they resell food that they have received for the kids. (If you have not read Beyond the Beautiful Forevers, I recommend it. Small handouts to very poor people do not help and do perpetuate divisions among neighbors.)

Before the bell.

But there are community leaders in the settlement and they are organizing. They are part of the Make Your House/Save Your House campaign and the citywide people’s movement to secure the right to housing for all.

The best time I had in Maharashtra was in a section that is built along a trench next to the railroad tracks. The small shacks on the left are the toilets people have built. The city and/or the railroad will come along regularly and bulldoze them down. Then people rebuild them. The tarp on the right are the residents homes. The buildings are nearby apartments.This settlement seemed to belong to the women and children. The kids followed us and asked questions in English, “Whose your mom?” and copied our answers. “Dorothy.” “Dorothy!” from a chorus of 7 to 8 kids. Me: “But she died.” “But she died!” “Whose you dad?” “Henry, but he died.” “Henry, but he died!” The moms invited us into their homes and offered us sweets and desserts. We all had a very good time together.

Our final stop was at Mandala where the women welcomed us with garlands and anointed our foreheads with bindis.

The men took over to tell us the story of the 16 year old camp which is very well established with 1200 homes and a commercial area. But they still battle the government for land rights, water, sanitation, electricity and education. The final speaker, Ateek, was the young—or maybe not so young—lifetime guy organizer we all know, sometimes get annoyed by but love all the same. Not listing them by name but I am tempted. He taught us the Hindustani call for collective action in the settlements and maybe among social justice activists everywhere. Zindabad!

Our very able guides on the tour, Richa Bhardwan (I think) and Purva Dewooklar, who works at the M-Ward Initiative at TISS. My thanks to them and to Leena Joshi for an education in the settlements of Mumbai.

Richa Bhardwan and Purva Dewooklar

I am still unsure of the balance of the personal and the political here on my blog, but I am clear that the main purpose is to document my research on women in construction in India—my fieldwork, in the lingo of my trade. That might get tedious for you. I have witnessed the glassy stares of loved ones as I have passionately described the intricacies of implementing and evaluating best practices through multi-stakeholder partnerships. I lost the attention of more than a few a couple of months ago when I compared the Policy Group on Tradeswomen’s Issues to the Tunisians who won the Nobel Prize for Peace.

So my thought on this at the moment is to put headers on sections so you can know what is coming and skip it if you like. I like to report chronologically and not topically and that means you could be reading an interesting—to all, I think—story about the cab ride I took this morning, followed by some notes on housing and research paperwork at TISS (the Institute that I am affiliated with) and then a meeting I had the Dean of the Social Work School.

So here is what happened today.

My morning cab ride

This was my first day going to TISS, the Tata Institute for Social Sciences, the university that is hosting me. I went to meet Jennifer at the International Office to get my paperwork going for my official research status with the Indian government (all called FRRO). TISS is in Chembur in the northeast section of the city and I have been staying in Churchgate in south Mumbai. It is akin to going to Queens from Lower Manhattan. I could take the bus or train but the bus is slow and the train involves a couple of changes so I decided to get a cab. The first two taxi drivers would not take me. I was not sure if they knew where Chembur is, but I remember when I drove a cab and did not want to take a fare to someplace distant where I would not get a fare back. It is like being paid for half the trip. The third driver said yes and off we went—for about five minutes. This was about 10 am and that is heavy rush hour because the Indian business day starts and ends later than the US. Something very ordinary happened and then something extraordinary. The ordinary thing is the driver went through a red light and crossed in front of a line of oncoming traffic complicated by about 30 pedestrians crossing in the street at the same time. The extraordinary thing was that a traffic cop stopped the driver and waved him over! The driver then started screaming at the cop and tried to drive away but had nowhere to go. As the traffic ahead moved, the cop stood front of the cab. The driver inched forward, the screaming continued from both cop and the driver, and then the driver cut across three lines of traffic and pulled to the side of the road. The left side. I am still getting used to that. Screaming recommenced unitl the cop walked away and then the driver got out and followed the cop. He turned back once, took the key from ignition and told me to wait. That is the end of the story. I waited a couple of minutes then got out of the cab to see what was happening. Neither the driver nor the cop were anywhere around. I tucked Rs.25 into the meter and went looking for another cab.

I got to TISS about 11 by way of a very unusual driver who actually asked directions twice.

New Place to Stay

I did a lot of paperwork with Jennifer, Zuzubee and the staff at the International Office. They were very helpful and gave me a really nice TISS bag. I am moving out of the downtown hotel on Wednesday and into the hostel at TISS. By “hostel” I mean the girls’ dorm. Triple room so I may have roommates but the most exciting part is that there is a locked cabinet where I can leave my big bag while traveling.

Made three new friends. Hannah, Batseba and Daniella are Swedish undergraduates studying social work who are at TISS on a semester abroad. We had a tour of the campus and—jumping into the future—will take a trip downtown on Wednesday to get our research permits and do a little shopping in the Fort.

Vocabulary interlude: A “chowk” is a square, as in Harvard Chowk or Trafalgar Chowk.

Figuring it out as I go

I am writing this two days later. Two thoughts:

• It is always hard to find time to write—no easier here.
• I have changed the tab “Evolving research questions” on the blog to My Field Notes. I will give a heads up in the blog when some readers might want to check out how my field work is going., but I will mostly use the blog function for reflection—like I am doing right now!

Meetings with two professors

Joined Heather Ridge in two very good meetings with faculty members: the Dean of the School of Social Work and the Dean of the School of Management and Labour Studies. The latter is where I am affiliated. I got a lot of information about how TISS operates and good leads for interviews. Details can be viewed—soon I hope—in My Field Notes.

An Ugly American mistake

I forgot it was Martin Luther King Day on Monday and there was no reminder here, nothing in the morning paper, no one mentioned it. I did not remember. I was reminded when I went on Facebook later. Of course Indians do not acknowledge, or even have knowledge of, MLK Day. However, my inner American exceptionalist was still surprised. Not logically, but emotionally. Another lesson learned.

The next day- Tuesday, Jan 19—I participated in a field trip, “Making Homes in M Ward Mumbai: the City’s Dumping Ground.” That’s the next post with pictures.

Love to all.

This blog was created to report on my research. It was in my proposal to Fulbright in response the question of how I would make my work known to others. I could not decide before I left if it would be strictly research or also my personal experiences while being in India for three months. I still can’t decide, but today I have decided that I would like to share some thoughts about the three questions above with my family, friends and community. Or maybe I have decided.

I have been here for less than 48 hours. I know it but it can’t be true. You know the theory that time is slower when we are young and speeds up as we grow? The idea behind this is that the more stimulation we are receiving, the slower everything seems and as we age and newness recedes, time goes by. Songs have been written and time, for me here and now, is nearly at a standstill as all I see and hear is new and unique to me.

What is it like?

Today is Saturday and the streets and parks are full of temples and cricket. Sounds of drums, crows and car horns. My hotel room is in the back and five floors up. It is quiet at night. The crows are different, beautiful and everywhere. People walk in the street because the sidewalks are too crowded, someone’s home or popup shop, or just not there. Horns blare constantly as drivers honk in anticipation of the green light, to let pedestrians know they are going to run them down, to move a car over another foot so that three cars can fill two lanes. Motor bikes pay no attention to traffic rules such as lights or one-way streets. It is not true that everyone speaks English. Not true that most people speak English. Cab drivers, clerks and vendors, staff at the hotel, understand a little, but we are communicating through universal sign language and willing bystanders who see the predicament and step in to translate. Four people helped me get a cab an hour ago. Earlier, I asked two men sitting/working in a park for directions. They were unable to help me, but a minute later, an older man came up behind me and asked if he could help. He showed me where to go and said it was his duty to help me, “his elder sister.” I went into a café for chai and, only after taking a table just inside the door, did I realize that there were all men there and women sat upstairs. No one bothered me, just my mistake for not paying closer attention. Again, the stimulation can be overwhelming.

How’m I doing?

I am doing very well although I woke up scared this morning. Only two days gone and three months to go, but I know I will settle in and it will be fine. I am exploring my neighborhood a block at a time. I just keep taking rights until I get back to the hotel. Today I made it to the ocean, the Arabian Sea. It was midday and very hot so I had to head back to the neighborhoods for shade. I automatically stay to the right when walking and that is wrong because walking and driving are on the left. I have a technique for crossing streets: get into the middle of a crowd and just go with it. But don’t fall out of the scrum or you will be standing in the middle of the road with traffic whizzing by.

I have been twice to the khadi emporium. Beautiful clothes made by fabric made and dyed in the villages. This continues Ghandi’s movement for the economic and spiritual benefits of spinning and homespun fabric. I thought I might go to the museum today but it was too ambitious. Got my culture fix by shopping instead.

I found myself at the train station early this afternoon. Walked off the end of platform like everyone else and crossed the tracks to get to a southbound train that had just pulled in. Mumbai is a peninsular and there is nowhere for a southbound train to go so I thought I would just take the train to wherever it went and take a cab back. Second thoughts can be good because, while I was mulling this idea over, the train pulled out of the station going north again. The station is the terminus of the line and I have no idea where I would have gone if I had gotten on that train.

I am still figuring out food. The hotel serves breakfast and that is my only regular meal so far. I am following the advice to not eat street food, but that makes eating complicated as that is how Mumbaikers eat. I know there are restaurants somewhere but not so much in my part of town. I search for bananas and today I went to Starbucks for a predictable meal—hummus and pita—and a cup of Earl Gray. It was a nice break.

Where’s my stuff?

This is my biggest challenge. By vocation and habit, I am an organizer but not organized. Now I am carrying all my stuff for three months on my back figuratively and in three bags literally. My natural impulse is to buy more bags. But I know this is oh so wrong. So I search… for the camera, the money, glasses, medications, passport, a pen, the phone receipt I suddenly need, the box for the phone I should have had when I returned to the store and now have to go back a third time.

I don’t know if I will solve this or not. I am keeping my expectations very low. Today I made small improvements. I will not carry more than 2 pairs of glasses at a time (reading plus sun OR not). I exchanged all my US money for rupees so I only have to keep track of one currency. I am packing up and stowing the last minute clothes I packed out of panic but will not wear. Will probably just give them away when I get a chance.

Where is my stuff will be an ongoing issue because I will be moving often. I will leave the West End Hotel in another 5 days when I move to a B&B in northern Mumbai. In the meantime, I soak up the opportunity to experience time as a child does, filled with newness and excitement.

Love and peace to all.

No problem finding women working in construction in Mumbai.

These women are digging a trench right outside my hotel in preparation for pipe work. They appear to be family units. The women work in the trench shoveling and removing cobblestones and dirt. The men work the pike loosing the materials. The workers spoke no English. The woman in the blue sari on the sidewalk spoke a bit. She seemed to be the supervisor. She wants 10 rupees apiece if I want to talk with them tomorrow. I might try to find a translator. They were still working when I went for a walk at 7:30 tonight. Not sure if these kids are the workers’ but they could be. They were at the site all day. Maybe the workers children or could be part of the many families that live along the side of the rode.