A day off from work:
Struggle of the mill workers of Mumbai

Recently, some well-known industry chiefs have been prescribing a long work week of 70 hours and even 90 hours in the name of contributing to our country’s development goals. They are ignoring the fact that an 8-hour day with one day of rest in a week is the law. It is important not to allow the capitalists to get away with this. This is an occasion to recall the history of struggle through which the working class of India succeeded in establishing this law.

File_photo_Mumbai_Textile_strike10 June 1890 marked a historic victory for the mill workers of Mumbai. They had forced the Mill Owners Association to concede to their demand for a day off. The weekly off on Sundays was officially granted. This was the outcome of a persistent struggle of the workers since 1884.

Till then, Indian workers worked seven days a week. According to the Factory Inspector Reports from the period, workers toiled for over 15 hours a day without lunch breaks, often eating while working on the factory floor. The mills were congested, poorly ventilated, and suffocating. They worked 15 hours every day of the week, without a break.

The struggle for better working conditions began to intensify in 1884. During the decade1851-61, the numbers of workers working in Bombay’s textile mills increased rapidly. The severe droughts of 1871-72 and 1876-77 forced a massive migration to Mumbai. By 1871, over 8,000 workers were employed in 10 mills. Over the next 25 years, this figure swelled to 78,000 workers in 71 mills.

But life for these workers was anything but easy. Workers started raising their voices in 1884 under the leadership of the Bombay Mill Hands Association to voice their demands for a weekly off from the drudgery they were forced to bear. The mill owners  dismissed the demand, arguing that workers already took time off during festivals and that women took leave during their menstrual periods. But the workers refused to give up their struggle. After a long and relentless struggle by workers in the country’s first industrial town, the leave was granted.

It was a hard fought battle but victory was theirs! This hard earned victory of Mumbai’s mill workers is a stark reminder that the right to rest was won through grit, sacrifice, and struggle. The weekly off is not a perk but a hard-fought right.

In 1946, an amendment to the Factories Act of 1934 made the 8-hour day a law in India. However, even since this amendment, the bourgeoisie never gives up trying to push for longer hours.

For those enterprises that do not come under Factories Act, the specific state’s Shops and Establishment Act applies. The IT and similar service sectors seek exemption from this law. It is common knowledge that workers in these sectors work more than 12 hours a day. This has become a norm in the service industry. Due to the large numbers of unemployed in our country, those who have a job are squeezed by their employers.

Today, the government of the capitalist class is waging a ferocious onslaught on these hard-won rights. The bourgeoisie is calling on workers in every industry to work 14 hours a day and seven days a week for the sake of “nation-building.” What they want it is the right to intensify the exploitation of the workers to rake in maximum profits. They want to push back on more than a century old right won by the workers. Workers must unitedly resist this attack of the bourgeoisie on their right to an eight-hour working day.

International context

Internationally, the 1820s and 1830s had been full of strikes for a reduction of work hours. This struggle started almost from the beginning of the factory system in Britain, the US and European countries. Workers were resisting the long workday of 14-16-18 hours. In England, fierce struggle raged between the workers and the capitalists over the length of the working day. The passing of the Factories Act in 1847 by the British parliament, limiting the working day to 10 hours, was an important victory for the working class.

The International Workingmen’s Association, founded by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, called for the workers of all countries to fight for an eight hour working day at its Geneva Congress in 1866.

On 1 May 1886, there was a decisive protest by some two lakh workers who laid down their tools and marched up Michigan Avenue in Chicago, United States. Their slogan, which was to become the refrain of workers all over the world since that day, was “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will”.  The strike centre was Chicago, where the strike movement was most widespread, but many other cities were also involved in the struggle on May First. Workers in large numbers participated in the strike in New York, Baltimore, Washington, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and many other cities.

Three years later, the Paris Workers’ Congress demanded the legal enactment of the eight-hour day and in1890, 1 May was declared as International Workers’ Day.

 

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