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India’s growing shoe industry relies on women who work from home, earn less than the minimum wage and lack any legal rights, activists said, urging companies importing from India to check their supply chains for signs of labour exploitation.
Ambur town in Tamil Nadu is one of the centres of India’s export footwear industry, and has one of the highest concentrations of homeworkers in the country.While factories in the area employ people at higher salaries to assemble the shoes, manufacturers find it cheaper to outsource the labour intensive process of stitching uppers to women who work from home, using middlemen, the campaigners said.
“By doing this, they circumvent all labour norms that would ensure that the homeworkers had guaranteed work and basic rights under Indian labour laws,” Gopinath Parakuni, general secretary of Cividep India, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Monday.
“They don’t even get the minimum wage of 126 Indian rupees ($1.91) guaranteed by the Tamil Nadu government,” he added.
“These women from poor and marginalised communities … are part of a clandestine production that exploits their vulnerability,” said Parakuni, who campaigns on workers’ rights and corporate accountability.
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