“Human Beings Are Too Cheap in India”: Wages and Work Organization as Business Strategies in Bombay’s Late Colonial Textile Industry.
This paper addresses the under-analyzed strategies that Bombay millowners adopted in the early twentieth century, regarding work organization and gender wage differentials. Work organization formed a critical strategy for millowners to navigate market fluctuations and increasingly supply a highly segmented internal market from very high-quality to low-quality cloth, which was catered to by traditional handloom products, imported factory-made textiles, and Indian manufactured goods. These strategies comprised maintaining a flexible pool of workers, product diversification catering to different segments of consumer demand, sales strategies adopted in the segmented Indian market, and strategizing in terms of labour inputs where the quality of raw material was poor. The empirical core of our analysis is located in the ways employers in the late colonial Indian textile industry used methods of payment as a production or management strategy.
We use a dataset containing thousands of observations from between 70 and 80 textile mills in the Bombay Presidency in the 1920s and 1930s, complemented by more qualitative sources that reflect on the motivations of businesspersons and workers to implement or resist changes in wage payments. We provide detailed analyses of wage data for selected departments directly related to the production process, such as spinning, weaving, reeling, and winding. It is investigated how and why men and women were paid different wages for both similar and different work activities in the mills. We also compare the use of piece or time rates, because these may have adaptively been used to depress wage payments in the textile sector. Ultimately, a complex of factors relating to fluctuations in demand, monitoring costs, and bargaining between workers and management determined Bombay’s work organization and wage setting.