Strong Women, Strong Voices: Interview with Ashmita Sharma
The mission of the Society for Labour and Development (SLD), led by Ashmita Sharma, is to help build a democratic and just society that is free from economic exploitation and social discrimination, with a focus on the rights of workers and marginalized people. In the pursuit of that mission, SLD, headquartered in New Delhi, India, maintains five core areas of work:
- Social and economic welfare and the wellbeing of working people
- Migrants’ rights and urban development
- Women’s voices and participation
- Cultural renewal among disenfranchised and working people
- Building a broader social movement
Founded in 2006, SLD now works across seven states in India. In August, we interviewed Ashmita to learn more about SLD’s work.
Our Interview with Ashmita Sharma
WomenStrong: Thank you for joining us today, Ashmita, and for SLD India’s partnership with WomenStrong. We wanted to start off the interview by asking you about your own journey. What drew you to SLD India? What issues were the most important to you? And what led you to your role as Executive Director?
Ashmita: Thank you for your question, and I’m thrilled to be here today having this discussion. I have a Master of Philosophy degree in Women’s Studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, a premiere institute in the field of social sciences. Women’s Studies is a subject that has always been dear to my heart, towards which I endeavor to do my bit to meaningfully contribute towards society.
Mainstream subjects, like history, mathematics, etc., trace their roots to antiquity. Women’s Studies is a relatively new discipline, which grew directly out of the women’s movement in the 1970s. As a response to the many systemic inequities in higher education and society, the goal of Women’s Studies is not merely to study the position of women in the world or in society, but to change it. It is with this motivation that I came to SLD.
Our work at SLD, actually, is informed by an intersectional methodology – primarily the intersections among gender, labor, and migration in numerous industries in the global supply chains, as well as some informal sectors, such as domestic work. In the thematic areas of labor education, gender-based violence, migrant workers’ rights, the global production network, the leather and seafood processing industries, we have also done a lot of action-research with an aim to better the lives of millions. These are challenging terrains which ultimately contribute towards building a broader social movement where the rights of workers and other marginalized groups are protected and respected.
Blending theory and practice is the cornerstone of the women’s movement, and the purpose of our work in SLD is also to map and understand the entire global value chain and draw lessons for the working-class movement and the women’s movement in India in order to drive research and advocacy.
Regarding your last question about my role as the Executive Director: When I was offered the position, I was both elated and overwhelmed. My first reaction was, “Do I feel like I am in a position of power? Do I feel powerful?” No, not at all. Instead, I felt a greater sense of responsibility and accountability towards the organization and my colleagues.
After assuming the position, I started thinking, “What would leadership look like for me?” As a woman leader, I thought it was very important that I create safe space for my colleagues at SLD. This can happen only by sharing power, co-creating ideas, building self-reflection, and ensuring [that] collaborative decision-making is used in all organizational processes.
WomenStrong: According to SLD’s website, the organization has touched the lives of around 10,000 people employed in different sectors of the Indian economy. Since you started working at SLD India, what is one specific example of how the organization has made an impact?
Ashmita: Firstly, I would like to provide a little background to the kind of work that we do in SLD. We believe in implementing impactful interventions through collective action and knowledge building, where we take a very qualitative approach. Our methodology draws from the lived experiences of workers in the community and knowledge from the field. We’ve also believed in and implemented a bottom-up approach for the past 17 years.
Our longstanding work in the global supply chain industries is very important in the garment, leather, seafood, and in the informal sectors that we work in. This overall intersection is very significant, considering we have workers from different industries and diverse sociocultural groups. The intersection between gender and labor comes into play when we analyze different situations in the workplace — in the community, or at home — also when we try to link and draw a continuum among these three domains of work.
Collective action and community-based work, when they occur concurrently, facilitate the growth of leadership and workplace voice. Without collectivization, it is difficult to access voice at work, and the fear of losing one’s job in these industries makes it difficult to access grievance mechanisms. To address this, SLD is working towards creating an enabling environment for social dialogues between workers and management on the challenges facing workers – with an increased focus on having insightful conversations about the advantages and gaps in existing grievance processes.
We started out by using collective action to intervene in the garment industry, but over time, we’ve gradually expanded to other important supply chain sectors. SLD’s strategic focus places a strong emphasis on this intersectional work, which includes both community-based interventions and research into new organizing methods. By “new organizing methods,” I mean, “attempting strategies and methods of organizing that are primarily sector-based by supporting new types of workers’ collectives or organizations to develop in industries.” It is important to try to organize by using new strategies, such as through global supply chains. Having said that, we also closely work with industry stakeholders to support implementation of best practices in their global supply chains.
WomenStrong: SLD’s services are specifically focused, as you said, on workers, primarily women, in the garment, leather, and seafood processing industries. What roles do women have in these industries, and what are the challenges they face?
Ashmita: So, women in these industries are mostly confined to the production spaces. I mean, we know that women are considered cheap labor. Therefore, they are mostly confined to these very specific skill-based jobs in these different industries. Even though we are working in different industries of the global supply chain, which are so-called formal spaces, there is a great deal of informality in the formal sector, whether it’s leather, seafood, garment-manufacturing — whatever you call it. A large number of workers are engaged in informal spaces as home-based workers, contractual workers, daily-wage workers, piece rate workers, who on the one hand contribute to the formal sector, but they’re not visible as part of the formal workforce. Their labor is largely devalued and made nearly invisible.
Additionally, there are extended working hours and unrecorded overtime, unrealistic production targets, illegal terminations, lack of severance pay, extremely low wages, and the like. Most women workers are hired on a temporary basis. There are no formal, stable work contracts, no living wages, etc.
Women workers in the garment, leather, and seafood processing industries are hired through recruitment intermediaries, who are contractors or subcontractors. These women workers do not have any direct employment relationship with the factories. Subcontracting is an illegal act even in the company’s rule books, but subcontracting as a practice is rampant. This puts home workers in an even more disadvantageous and vulnerable position, where they’re not able to raise their concerns with contractors or do not even know who their principal employers are. So, we see that employment relationships, even within formal work spaces, are highly unregulated and informal.
There is also a strong push from the global supply chains, who are our major stakeholders in these organized spaces, and they’ve made rigorous efforts to meet compliances. This also has an impact on their brand value and stature in the competitive environment, but the question is: is it only about meeting compliances, or meaningful compliances, in terms of ensuring responsible business in practice? So, my ask is, do brands recognize sexual harassment, for instance, as a human rights risk?
To this point, in a recent joint study carried out in India by SLD, Asia Floor Wage Alliance (AFWA), and Business and Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC), we interviewed women in 31 factories across India who reported that they had witnessed or experienced supervisors or managers committing gender-based violence (GBV) and harassment in their factories. GBV in the workplace is a serious human rights violation. According to the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, businesses are responsible for identifying and preventing human rights risk in their supply chains. Companies primarily depend on internal codes of conduct and social audits to tackle and keep track of GBV in their supply chains. But our experience shows that such voluntary standards or methods are inadequate to prevent GBV in the supply chains. These are some of the overwhelming issues that directly or indirectly impact women workers in the global value chains.
WomenStrong: What does growth look like for women in these industries? Are the barriers they face, like those you mentioned, insurmountable, or are you seeing change in the industries?
Ashmita: As I said, women are mostly confined to the production spaces. Upward mobility in the occupational hierarchy looks like a huge barrier for these women workers. You will hardly find women supervisors or women managers, and intersections of class, caste, gender have a huge role to play in obstructing women’s mobility in these occupational spaces.
With recent regulations and the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, you don’t [actually] see the change in the brands’ approach towards the issue of human rights. But what is worth mentioning is that they have at least started recognizing our efforts — or the efforts of worker collectives and other stakeholders in the civil society spaces who are working towards improving wellbeing of the workforce in the supply chains. Today brands are willing to participate in discussions about how a certain business model and purchasing practices impact working conditions.
There’s also SLD’s intervention in terms of training and capacity-building of workers to facilitate their voice at work. We are seeing that women workers have started opening up, by identifying different forms of violence that exist in the workplace, public spaces, and in their homes, which were otherwise normalized. For example, mental harm was never recognized as a form of violence, but because of our training initiatives and leadership development, women have started recognizing these as serious forms of violence and have shown interest in coming together to share experiences, to collaborate, and to network and explore their sisterhood. This is where SLD’s “Workers’ Café” intervention has played a significant role. Through the Workers’ Café, we offer women and other members of the community a safe space to express themselves. The cafe approach intends to be interactive, inclusive, and collaborative, giving all participants a chance to voice their ideas and opinions without any fear.
WomenStrong: SLD India also supports domestic workers, who historically have been undervalued, underpaid, and underserved. Their contributions to society are unquantifiable, though more recent efforts globally and in some local contexts are aiming to assign a value. What do you see as the value of domestic work, and why is it important to raise awareness and show that value?
Ashmita: In the informal sector, we have been extensively working with domestic workers since 2012. Our Gharelu Kamgar Sangathan program has been working tirelessly to mobilize and organize domestic workers in Gurgaon, Haryana. Since our intervention, domestic workers have started addressing their problems as a group and recognizing the value of their work.
For a long time, when we questioned them during our trainings and capacity building exercises with, “Do you consider yourself as workers?” They did not. They had very little idea of the value of their work. Additionally, their workplace is also very informal, unregulated, and scattered. For workers in the garment industry, there is a sense of comfort that everyone is working in the same organized environment. However, for domestic workers it is quite the opposite, giving workers very little chance of actually getting together and debating their problems on a single platform. That is why we created the GKS programme, which we are currently rolling out across the Delhi NCR region.
Recently, we have started conducting focused group discussions with domestic workers. Through these conversations, we are attempting to evaluate not just the nature of tasks they are performing in the households, but also the problems and difficulties they face on a daily basis at work. Through this exercise, we are trying to get domestic workers to form a collective and to strengthen their voice at work.
Eventually, SLD’s role will be limited to being a facilitator. We do not want to take over the entire movement of domestic workers; rather, we want them to eventually become autonomous and have their own constitution, so that they can support and maintain themselves in the long run. The past few years have seen a rise in women’s collective action. The idea is to support these women to explore their potential in different aspects of life. Because the struggle for gender equality will not be successful until women have economic security and self-sufficiency. This is difficult and challenging, but I think these piecemeal changes will show us the way towards a bigger transformation in the future.
This is crucial because for those of us who work in formal workspaces, domestic workers subsidize our work. The employers’ residences serve as their workplaces. They simply make our lives easier and more convenient. Nevertheless, we are unable to contribute value to the job that they are performing. You know, in addition to being unorganized, their employment also poses significant risks. They are not only low-paid, but they also suffer various forms of violence and discrimination at the workplace, with very limited or no access to grievance mechanisms. Through our program, we are trying to support domestic workers [in reclaiming] their space. Our objective is to restructure the program so that we may seek sustainable solutions that would allow domestic workers to manage the program by themselves; a program that would be by and for domestic workers.
WomenStrong: SLD India emphasizes the importance of knowing, establishing, and upholding rights – of workers, migrants, women. This type of work has been going on for centuries. While we have seen change over that time, there has also been significant pushback. Why do you think it is so difficult to bridge rights-based gaps?
Ashmita: I would not say that there are a lot of organizations working towards the wellbeing of workers in the labor rights space. One thing I’ve seen is that whenever you try to bring about change, there is a backlash that serves as a wake-up call. You are aware that some of the work you are doing in this sector is difficult, and you are attempting to bridge existing gaps – not only in the field of labor rights, but when you talk about labor rights, you are inevitably talking about the rights of women workers because gender is an important of the labour framework.
Human rights due diligence has emerged as a concrete tool for identifying gaps in human rights protections and working towards change, and that is very important for us to acknowledge and adopt when we are devising our strategies to be implemented in the labor rights field. When we talk about sustainability, climate change, and human rights, we see that they still tend to be built mostly in silos as separate from each other. I think it’s very important that we try to focus on the areas of convergence. It is very important for us to identify and recognize the intersectional work towards common goals. Human rights is not very different from the concept of sustainability or climate change. They’re all interdependent; when we protect one, we promote the other.
Today, there is a tremendous push to shift away from a rights-based approach and toward more of a service delivery model, a mechanism through which social benefits and programs are given to the poor and needy. SLD is attempting to achieve the correct balance in order to remain relevant in an ever-changing sociopolitical setting. How do we keep working while maintaining our focus and carrying on the vital job we’ve been doing for years? It is, indeed, really difficult.
WomenStrong: Where have you seen progress?
Ashmita: I think the progress is that we’ve been able to cooperate and dialogue with a lot of stakeholders working in this space — be it civil society organizations or women’s organizations or workers’ organizations or industries, for that matter. We’ve been able to bring businesses to the table, and the fact that we’ve been able to engage with suppliers to support implementation of ethical and best practices in the supply chain is something that I see as progress, and that is also something that gives me hope, which was not the case four or five years back when we were working in the same field with the same set of workers and business houses.
And over the years, more and more workers have become associated with us, which I see as a case of trust-building, in some sense. You know, both ways. I know it’s challenging, but these are some things that give me hope and keep us going.
WomenStrong: In the next few years, what will SLD India’s work look like? What are your aspirations for workers across industries and at home?
Ashmita: While SLD will continue to work towards the welfare of workers in the garment, seafood, and leather industries — along with domestic workers and migrant workers, with a special emphasis on women workers — we hope to see more proactive steps from the industries, governments, and various authorities taking a deeper cognizance of the larger wellbeing of workers. While most industries know the critical role that grassroots workers play in their production hubs, they need to recognize this, not only through adequate compensation but also by protecting and promoting their rights in the workplace, which is critical.
Furthermore, the welfare of women workers, prevention of numerous forms of harassment in their workplaces, is also critical. Correct and just redressal of grievances is also needed. Therefore, to answer your question in short, at SLD, we aspire for a future where the aspirations of workers are met, while at the same time, industries thrive; and where going to work feels safe and does not overwhelm one with a sense of toil. Ethics and social sustainability should form the core of any industry’s values, and that is what we envision and hope to see in the near future.
WomenStrong: The work you all do at SLD India is challenging and also more important than ever. With that in mind, what gives you hope?
Ashmita: I agree with you that the work that we do is challenging, and yet it is very important. But then again, individuals like us, in organizations such as ours, we have set out on a mission to take on these challenges and try and make a difference to the lives of hundreds and thousands of people.
For development practitioners like us, when we pour in our time, our energy, expectations, and hope into the movement, we are bound to face a wave of rejections, which at times can be very disempowering, I must say. But it also means that something is happening. We are inspiring change. – Here is why I’m more excited than ever to be engaged in this fight. Also, there’s a sense of achievement that you feel when you’re able to execute a project or a task impactfully, with both the industries as well as the government acknowledging your work and thereafter implementing corrective paths and changes. These things give me hope.
Today, people — that is, the common man — are aware of ethical practices. I just want to see a growing sense of common responsibility by society towards the workforce; people who make our lives easier with each passing day. Hope, at the end of the day, gives us the energy to continue striving for change towards a better world.
WomenStrong: Thank you so much for your time today, Ashmita. We appreciate you and the work of SLD India. As we wrap up, do you have any final thoughts or inspirational words for those who are trying to create social change?
Ashmita: I would like to recite two or three lines from Maya Angelou’s “Still, I Rise.” She has been my driving force and my source of inspiration, and I’m sure everyone out there trying to make a change has somebody that they look up to. And I would say follow your dream, your vision, and look beyond the hardships and the pain. There is, and always will be, a silver lining. So, I would like to use a small quote from Maya Angelou:
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.
About Ashmita Sharma
Ashmita earned her Master of Philosophy degree in Women’s Studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai and received the Professor Chhaya Datar Award for her research, “Experiencing Widowhood in Vrindavan.” Prior to her role as Executive Director at SLD India, Ashmita served as Lead for Research, Training, Communication. Before moving to SLD India, Ashmita served as a curriculum developer in the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). Ashmita’s work is focused on the interdisciplinary perspectives of gender and labor, and she has contributed to numerous journals on the subject. Through her work, Ashmita aspires to reach large audiences, not only to improve the working conditions of workers, but also to bring about cordial and mutually respectful relationships between workers and industries.
About the Society for Labour & Development (SLD) India
SLD India was founded in 2006 under the Indian Trusts Act, a law in governing private trusts and trustees. The Act was established at a time of rapid growth around India. While wealth and prosperity grew exponentially, these benefits were not trickling down to the working class and socially disenfranchised communities. Very often, these communities were deliberately denied basic human and civil rights. It was in this atmosphere that SLD India was established to support initiatives for labor rights and human rights. For more information, please visit SLD’s website: https://www.sld-india.org/.
