Session Name: Emerging Industry and Labour issues in High-tech Asia
New Industries, ‘Ghettoization’ of Dalit/OBC Women and Failed Legalities: Mundka Fire Tragedy and its aftermath
Wednesday, July 31, 2024
14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)
Paper Abstract: Mundka Fire Tragedy is a fire accident that broke out in a four-storey building of Cofe Impex Pvt. Ltd, a micro-electronics industry, in Mundka Industrial Area on 13 th
May 2022. It shook the conscience of the capital city of India, as 21 out of 27 workers who died were migrant Dalit/Bahujan women. This was not surprising since 90% of the workforce in this factory were women. This also reflects the recent data that out of 23 % Indian women workforce, 91% are in the informal sector. Helen Safa (1981) while writing on the global supply chains in the USA, explains that labour-intensive industries have traditionally exploited women as cheap labour. Guy Standing (1988) writes that women as weaker bargaining agents have encouraged feminisation in new industries. This paper argues that the newly fragmented industrial manufacturing units in India are not only feminised but also caste-ridden, reproducing casteism in the urban industrial ecosystem. The ‘ghettoisation of marginalised women at the bottom’ provides servile labour for the employer. This paper problematises the state’s failure to monitor and prevent legal violations over women's labour that normalised vulnerable entrapping in new industries. This study analyses the multidimensional nature of vulnerability that spans across dalit/Bahujan
women workers’ lives. From the records of the victims, their precarity at home due to domestic violence, at the workplace as unskilled-marginalised women workers and by the state as not worthy of rehabilitation and compensation post-accident, constructs the ‘vulnerable subject’ of the law (Fineman, 2008) devoid of resilience.