BENGALURU: Bengaluru’s labour rights movement started in the textile industry. Turn of the 19th C, the city was changing with dramatically, according to historian and independent researcher Arun Prasad. “Many institutions came up primarily because of Sir M Visvesvaraya and Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV, who was keen on developing Mysore as an industrial state,” says Prasad. This is known as the Golden Era in Mysore history.
“The labour rights movement started with the setting up of textile mills, particularly in Bangalore,” says Prasad. First was the Binny Mills (earlier known as Bangalore Cotton Silk and Woolen Mills) set up in 1884, other mills like Raja Mills and Minnerva Mills soon followed.
“The first 30 to 40 years went smoothly with no fight between the management and workers,” says the historian. “In the early 1920s, there was an awakening in the labour class. Workers started an informal kind of union to put forward their needs with their management.”
Around the First World War, there was a huge demand for mill products and factories started earning big profits.
“Workers wanted a share of the profits since they were putting in extra hours.” The management agreed and started giving them bonuses.
After the war, the demand fell and the management discontinued the benefits. “In the 1920s, the workers organised their first strike in Bangalore lead by KT Bashyam, who was a prominent member of the Indian National Congress,” says Prasad. “Bashyam Circle in Sadashivnagar is named after him.”
1926 saw the largest mill workers’ protest, organised by the Binny Mills employees. “Most of the people were out in the street, leaders were arrested, there were protests and firing, people died,” he says. “But there was no unity among the various groups and so, three years later in 1929, workers formed Bangalore Textile Trade Union.”
This solidarity paid off and the BTTU grew in strength. According to Abdul Aziz’s article ‘Labour Movement in Karnataka’, in 1938, when there was another face off between the workers and the state government, the government was forced to come for talks and release arrested workers’ leaders.
Two years later, another strike forced the government to appoint a committee to come up with a long-term solution. In 1941, the Mysore Labour (Emergency) Act was passed that put in place a redressal mechanism and legalised trade unions.