Travancore Labour Association

The Travancore Labour Association, which was established in 1922,

Those circumstances became poor when financial promises made by those who had recruited them were abandoned from 1931 onwards, with the onset of the Great Depression causing a plummet in the price of coir flooring products and the wages paid to produce them. The economic irony was that employment in the industry grew during this period because demand for simple, cheap floorcoverings increased.[4]^[a] Changes in census definitions may affect the enumeration but it seems clear that there had been a disproportionate increase in the number employed in the coir factories of Travancore around this time, with the figure rising from around 7,000 in 1931 to 32,000 a decade later, whilst the cottage worker element grew from 120,000 to 133,000.^[4] Although demand for labour increased, the turnover of employees was high and there was a surplus of people looking for work both in the 40 factories of Alleppey and in the numerous small, often short-lived factories that were set up in rural areas around the town. Jeffrey estimates that as many as 50,000 people had been exposed to factory employment by 1939 and

... the fact that many of them moved back and forth between their villages and the factories meant that the number of people exposed to ideas of class struggle were larger than they would have been if the labour force had been static. ... And when a youth came to a coir factory for the first time, talk of unions, strikes, and capitalists, need not have been totally new to him: he may have heard it all in his village ... Since ideas of class-consciousness did not have to be learned completely in the factories, more people could learn them.^[5]

Origins

The coir workers became dis-satisfied with the ability of their communal associations – most notably, the

The TLA developed close connections at first with the Congress Socialist Party (CSP), which organised that conference,^[2] and later with the Communist Party of India (CPI).^[7] The influence of the CSP became apparent from 1934 when it began to radicalise the organisation, simultaneously using it as a political vehicle to support demands for "responsible government"^[b] in a campaign that favoured Indian nationalism and challenged the authority of the princely state, the role of the higher castes and the influence of colonial business investment.^[c] Manali Desai says that it used the travails of the Depression era "to justify demands for a halt to cuts in wages, provision of unemployment, old-age and sickness benefits, regulation of wages, elimination of sub-contracting of work, and an end to petty exactions and retrenchment".^[11]

The first

Two things stand out about the organisation of workers in the coir industry centred around Alleppey in the 1930s. First, in contradiction to one strand of conventional wisdom about labour, the coir workers' union grew in strength and militancy during Depression. Second, the union successfully sublimated the deep caste and religious antagonisms of Kerala society – similar communal fissures elsewhere in India ripped unions apart – such that by the 1940s it could fairly describe itself as a class-conscious organisation.[4]

Membership of the TLA grew from around 3,000 to over 7,000 during the Depression era, although this has to be placed in context with the growth in the number of people employed in the industry.^[4] In 1938, when the Travancore Trade Union Act became law, the Association was the first to register itself under the terms of the Act and did so using the name of the Travancore Coir Factory Workers Union.^[7]

References

Notes