Industrial Relations in India’s Export Garment Industry: Mobilizations & Employment Law Cases from Bangalore, Gurgaon, Tiruppur

Lead Technical Project Advisor

• Alessandra Mezzadri, Professor, SOAS Department of Development Studies

Partners

• ILO, READ, Alternative Law Forum, and Gurgaon Shramik Kendra (GSK, Gurugram)

Funders

• ILO and READ

Duration

• 2020–2023

The project “Industrial Relations in India’s Export Garment Industry: Mobilizations & Employment Law Cases from Bangalore, Gurgaon, Tiruppur”, funded by the ILO’s Work in Freedom Programme via READ, examined industrial grievances filed by garment workers in three major clusters—Gurugram, Bengaluru, and Tiruppur. 

It analysed how these disputes reflected local labour relations and regimes. Led and designed by Alessandra Mezzadri as the lead international technical adviser, the project was managed in India by READ, Tiruppur, with Rakhi Sehgal as national coordinator. 

Field partners included READ (Tamil Nadu), the Alternative Law Forum (Karnataka), and Gurgaon Shramik Kendra (GSK, Gurugram). The advisory committee comprised Alessandra Mezzadri (lead), Ashim Roy, Gayatri Singh, and Shyam Sunder, as well as Prabu Mahopatra and Saba Joshi, who oversaw the documentation and storage of all industrial disputes and related documents collected. 

The project produced an ILO report, “The Social Life of Industrial Disputes”, and a repository of analysed grievance cases, publicly available at the Archives of Indian Labour (joint initiative of V.V. Giri National Labour Institute, VVGNLI, and Association of Indian Labour Historians,  AILH, New Delhi). Findings were disseminated in various fora, including in a dedicated SOAS-ILO panel at the Indian Society for Labour Economics (ISLE) in 2023, financed via an ODA-SOAS grant.

Report

Mezzadri A. with Sehgal R. (2023) ‘The social life of industrial disputes: Exploring workers-centred industrial relations in India’s garment labour regime’. New Delhi: ILO. Available at https://www.ilo.org/publications/social-life-industrial-disputes-exploring-workers-centred-industrial 

Blog

Mezzadri A. (2024) ‘Debt, wage theft and coercion drive the global garment industry – the only answer is collective action’, The Conversation, 2024, available at https://theconversation.com/debt-wage-theft-and-coercion-drive-the-global-garment-industry-the-only-answer-is-collective-action-220924 

Media link

Coverage of Mezzadri,  A. (2024) The Conversation piece above, as ‘Exploitative practices are a common thread in the garment industry’, Freedom United, Let’s End Modern Slavery Together https://www.freedomunited.org/news/exploitative-practices-garment-industry/ 

Repository link:

All disputes analysed are stored at Archives of Indian Labour (joint initiative of VVGNLI and AILH) https://indianlabourarchives.org/handle/20.500.14121/2935 

Discussants in the ISLE panel included Ravi Srivastava (IHD, New Delhi), Supriya RoyChowdhury (NIAS, Bangalore) Manimekalai and Indrani Majumder (CWDS, New Delhi), Sujata Modi (NTUI) and Neha Wadhawan (ILO, New Delhi) (see picture). 

Image credit: ISLE.