I should have written this update a long time back. I am just about 5 months late. But then these things happen like that, unless you are regular blogger! You need a trigger, like I did. Just so you get a sense of the place where all this action is happening, here's my terrace where I am writing my first entry...
Last night I thought of quitting! Yes indeed, quitting my PhD! For past few days or is it weeks, I have felt a strange kind of inertia, sort of a block, where you don't even feel like picking up the phone to make an appointment to follow up! Its not like me, a completely alien feeling. I felt disturbed.
After a restless night, mulling over what's happening, going over my note to the supervisors and their comments on it, which by the way are very encouraging, I decided I had to do something about it. I felt sure that almost all PhD students go through this phase at some point of time during their PhD. I remembered a kind email from a fellow PhD student which said "Please email me if you feel frustrated or low, as I know how this felt during my own time speaking to people, getting lost in the process (metaphorically and physically) and finding it difficult to even pick up the phone and chase up my emails with potential participants etc." Thanks Jane, your email came handy. Read it a few times last night!
For me writing out my thoughts and feelings is the most therapeutic exercise. So I decided, that the first thing I needed to do before I headed out to the field this morning is to write something in the blog!
'Field' is a perpetual conundrum, one never knows where the twist lies, the riddle seems insolvable.
I had a few questions-why do workers work? How is production and labour arranged? Does everyday experiences of work inside the factory and the life outside create a sense of freedom or more bondage? Are all these experiences individual or collective? How does individual experience, aspiration gets translated into a collective aspiration? Does it lead to new collectivities at work and at places of living?
Each of these question is knitting a more complex web than I could have imagined. How do I keep my focus on 'labour and space'? To understand world of work, one will need to go beyond the space of work.
7/4/2014
Am I an insider?
Haven't written anything on this page for a long time. I started my fieldwork in June 2013 after I returned from the UK in late May. I was excited to be back in the field, back home, meet my friends and colleagues. While my field area, geographically was known to me, the people weren't. I knew the trade unions in the area and some local organisers, but not the workers. Initially, it seemed that i will be able to contact workers through the unions and activists I knew and would be able to start the project as I planned. But within a month I knew that its not going to be easy. No one really had any contacts with the workers whom i wanted to work with. I realised that I will have to begin from the scratch. This started my long journey almost every day from Adyar-Chennai to Sriperumbadur, a journey of almost 90 kms daily! I tried to exhaust almost every contacts, every leads that i would get to reach the workers, wait at the bus stands for hours or at a shop or at the CITU union office. Each time I would meet someone or the other and we would part with a promise to meet again. But that hardly ever happened. After the first meeting, the second one didn't happen.
For almost two months this pattern continued. I would go all the way, wait, and if i am lucky meet someone, have a chat and chai at the street corner and come back. Feeling more and more dejected as weeks passed, but continued to persevere, not giving up. Then in August, I decided that I will start my fieldwork in the shopfloor. That was an amazing experience. Having been an activist who has been mostly at the factory gate and not inside the factory, atleast not a formal factory, this was and an eye opener for me. I tried to understand in detail the production process, the various managerial controls, the everyday work inside the factory, the travels from homes to factory. I could not do the night shifts and the 2nd shifts in the factory with the workers due to various constraints, but tried to spend as much time in the shopfloor as I could during the 8 hours morning shift. For 15 days in August and 7 days in September, I observed work in the shopfloor, interacted with the management staff.
During this time, I started interacting with the members of the Nokia employees' union. Quite a remarkable association, given that forming labour unions is not an easy thing in Tamil Nadu, especially in the newly industrialising areas of Sriperumbadur. The union members were polite with me, but weary, unsure who I was, why I was there and why was I so interested in workers. Their experience of forming a union under challenging situations (which I have documented) had made them a bit suspicious of 'outsiders'. The members of the union seemed quite in good terms with HR personnel and i would often see them in the HR cabin. Sometimes they would be just chatting with the senior male management staff or drinking coffee outside the HR cabin or discussing issues with the management. Overall, for an observer, it seemed that the union and management had struck a 'working relationship' and seemed to be in 'conversation' with each other.
As for the workers on the shop floor, they would view me with bit of a suspicion too, especially if they would see me 'in rounds' with one of the junior HR staff on the shopfloor. I was introduced to the shop floor by the HR and in the shop floor would sit in the small HR cabin. Initially, the HR staff in the shopfloor would take me an introduce me to the supervisor of a line (TL) and then I would be left there to observe work. It was strange dynamics, where I was viewed with suspicion by the operators, supervisors and HR. I was an 'outsider'!
But then slowly things started changing. After I finished my shopfloor work, i also started visiting women workers at home. I had made some good friends amongst them and started getting introduced to more women. I also met some women in the shopfloor, whom I later started meeting outside.
During all this time, as my research started picking up steam, suddenly a few major upheavals took place in Nokia. Nokia's major handset operations got sold off to Microsoft, Nokia got embroiled in a major legal fight with India government over tax evasions and finally court orders restraining Nokia from handing over its Chennai plant to Microsoft till the tax issue gets resolved.
Between the state and capital, labour got caught. An interesting game began. Nokia threatened lay offs and factory closure if the Chennai plant doesn't transfer to Microsoft, the centre and state govt started scaling up its noose around Nokia with slapping more charges and mounting up the tax amounts. An interesting dynamics started shaping up between the labour-capital and labour-state. Workers's through their association (union) started demanding answers from the management, questioning them on their new business model of splitting the operations (that would ensure continued sale and profit for the company, but not protect the jobs of the workers), the 'working relationship' was increasingly getting shaky. The workers even went to the court to implead in the ongoing legal case between Nokia and the Central govt. Their contention being, the tax issue is between the company and state, why threaten the jobs of the workers. This move, actually plays very well for the company, which can then use workers to arm twist the govt. to let the Microsoft deal come through. But then workers didn't let off the company and demanded that if the Chennai plant can't transfer to Microsoft, then even the Sales division of Nokia, which the company had cleverly split from the plant and which is free of any tax issue, can not also be transferred to Microsoft. It also demanded the state to be fair to the workers and come up with a solution so that workers don't loose their jobs.
At the moment, things are very challenging for the workers. They are running pillar to post, strategising, dialouging, reaching out for solidarity. In all this, given my past few months of association with the workers through my research and a slow relationship of mutual trust with the Union members that built over time, I became an 'insider'. I became a confidant of sorts, for the workers pouring out their anxieties and for the union to help them build larger public opinion and solidarity. The advisor of the employees union asked me to help the union make a documentary film about the workers and their lives. They want to tell 'their' stories to the world, reach out to the international Unions, media, public-Nokia consumers.
I didn't have to think for a moment whether I could support them or not. I knew I needed to support them. My research can not be more important than thousands of people loosing their jobs. This a moment for them to fight for their rights and also for others. They reached out to me. And I joined their fight in whatever way I can.
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