Understanding Women's Resistance Movements in Labor Struggles

Across India’s bustling markets, construction sites, garment factories, and farms, millions of women power the economy with their labor. Yet many of them earn meagre wages, work without contracts, and remain invisible in official records. The story of how these women have pushed back, organised, and demanded dignity is one of the most powerful chapters in modern labor history. Their resistance reshaped how the country thinks about work, gender, and economic justice.

The invisible backbone: Women in the unorganised sector
Low wages, long hours, and layered exploitation
The wage gap and the care gap
Economic growth vs. gender equality
Why prosperity has not closed the gender gap
Quality of work, not just quantity
Collective action and the rise of women-led movements
SEWA and the breakthrough of 1972
What collective action has won
Why women’s leadership matters
The unfinished agenda

The invisible backbone: Women in the unorganised sector

The unorganised or informal sector refers to economic activity that is largely unregistered, lacks legal protection, and offers no formal job security. According to government data, the unorganised sector accounts for over 94 percent of India’s workforce but produces only 57 percent of national domestic product, reflecting low productivity and even lower wages. Women form a disproportionately large share of this workforce, clustered in jobs that society values least.

These women include vegetable vendors, domestic workers, bidi rollers, garment stitchers, agricultural labourers, head-loaders, waste pickers, and home-based artisans. Informal workers make up almost 90 percent of India’s workforce, yet they remain excluded from government support such as health insurance and maternity benefits. For women, the exclusion is sharper because they often combine unpaid domestic labour with paid informal work.

Low wages, long hours, and layered exploitation

A typical day for a woman in the informal sector begins before sunrise and stretches into the night. Wages are kept low through a combination of surplus labour, low skill recognition, and weak bargaining power. Researchers studying women in the unorganised sector have found that insecurity, harassment, and threats of dismissal are common features of their employment. Without written contracts, employers can dismiss workers at will, manipulate piece rates, and demand favours.

The reasons women remain trapped in this sector are structural. The unorganised sector accounts for roughly 90 percent of manufacturing establishments in India, which means most new jobs available to women are inherently insecure. Add to this the burden of unpaid care work, restricted mobility, and limited access to education, and the picture becomes clearer: women are not choosing informality; they are pushed into it.

The wage gap and the care gap

Even when women do enter paid work, they earn less than men for similar tasks. A recent policy analysis notes that women in India spend 363 minutes a day on unpaid work compared to 123 minutes for men, leaving them with far less time and energy to claim a fair share of paid employment. The “second shift” at home effectively subsidises the economy by absorbing care responsibilities that would otherwise require state or market provision.

Economic growth vs. gender equality

One of the most striking puzzles of recent decades is that India’s rapid economic growth has not automatically improved women’s status as workers. Material progress, measured in GDP and per capita income, lifted millions out of absolute poverty but did not deliver gender parity in the labour market.

The numbers tell the story. The female labour force participation rate stood at 33 percent in 1972, but steadily declined to its lowest level of 23 percent in 2017, even as the economy grew at historic rates. Female labour force participation has remained low despite rising education, falling fertility, and high economic growth, defying the pattern seen in many developed countries where economic expansion drew women into work.

Why prosperity has not closed the gender gap

Several forces explain this paradox. As household incomes rise, social pressure often pulls women out of paid work as a marker of status. Job creation in the formal economy has been concentrated in male-dominated sectors like manufacturing, construction, and IT services. Safety concerns, lack of childcare, restrictive social norms, and the undervaluing of care work all reinforce one another.

The economic cost is enormous. It is estimated that the Indian economy could grow by an additional 60 percent by 2025, adding 2.9 trillion dollars, if women were represented in the formal economy at the same rate as men. This is not just a moral concern; it is a strategic one. Raising female labour force participation is not just a gender equality imperative, but an economic necessity, with research indicating that parity could boost India’s GDP by more than 25 percent.

Quality of work, not just quantity

Recent data does show an uptick in women’s participation, but the kind of work matters as much as the count. The rise has been dominated by rural self-employment and unpaid family labour, which often counts as employment in surveys but offers little autonomy or income. As one analysis puts it, India’s rising female labour force participation reflects resilience rather than empowerment, and true progress lies in turning the quantitative surge into quality employment, fair wages, and equal access to opportunities. Growth without justice can produce a statistical illusion of progress while leaving the underlying inequities untouched.

Collective action and the rise of women-led movements

If growth alone cannot deliver gender justice, what can? The history of Indian labor offers a compelling answer: collective action led by women themselves. When women organise around their shared conditions, they can challenge wages, hours, working conditions, and even the social meaning of their work.

This is not a new idea. Early Indian trade unionism began in Bombay in 1875 under the leadership of S.S. Bengalee, but it largely focused on the formal sector and on male workers. In the early industrial era, workers were unorganised and industrialists made them work long hours at low wages, with women and children most affected. For decades, the women who worked in factories, fields, and homes were treated as supplementary earners whose interests did not require separate representation.

SEWA and the breakthrough of 1972

The turning point came in 1972 with the founding of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in Ahmedabad. SEWA grew out of the Women’s Wing of the Textile Labour Association, the union founded by Anasuya Sarabhai and Mahatma Gandhi in 1918. Its founder, lawyer and organiser Ela Bhatt, had spent years in the formal trade union movement before turning her attention to the women who had no union at all.

Bhatt described her insight in plain terms: she became aware of the informal sector while working in the formal sector, recognising that one was protected and the other unprotected, even though both contributed to the national economy. SEWA’s first members were head-loaders and cart-pullers in Ahmedabad’s wholesale markets, then bidi rollers, garment stitchers, and vegetable vendors.

The organisation grew dramatically. SEWA had 30,000 members in 1996, 318,527 in 2000, and nearly two million members by 2023. Today, SEWA is the single largest national trade union centre in India for women workers of the informal economy, with 3.78 million members across 20 states. Its strategy combines union organising with cooperatives, banking, healthcare, and education, an approach that recognises that workplace problems are tied to housing, debt, and family life.

What collective action has won

The victories of women-led labor movements have reshaped policy. In 1974, SEWA started the SEWA Bank, which gave birth to the microfinance movement worldwide; in 1996 the ILO recognised home-based workers as workers; and in 2014 India passed the Street Vendors Act recognising vendors’ rights to earn their livelihoods. These are not abstract policy wins. The Street Vendors Act, for example, gives lakhs of women a legal shield against harassment and eviction.

Other women-led organisations have followed similar paths. The Working Women’s Forum in Tamil Nadu, formed in 1978, has organised lakhs of women in fishing, vending, and home-based work. Organisations of self-employed women such as SEWA and the Working Women’s Forum are among the best-documented examples of worker organisations in the informal sector. More recently, garment workers in Bengaluru, Tiruppur, and the National Capital Region have begun forming unions to challenge wage theft, sexual harassment, and unsafe factories.

Why women’s leadership matters

Collective action led by women is different from mainstream unionism in three ways. First, it links workplace demands with demands for childcare, healthcare, and protection from gender-based violence. Second, it builds institutions like cooperatives and banks that respond to women’s actual lives, where work, family, and survival blur together. Third, it changes how members see themselves. As one SEWA study found, the majority of members who completed leadership training reported greater confidence at work and higher status within the family.

This is the deeper meaning of resistance. It is not only about higher wages, though that matters. It is about transforming the conditions that made the wages low to begin with: the assumption that women’s work is secondary, that informal work is unworthy of protection, and that growth alone will eventually fix things.

The unfinished agenda

Despite these achievements, the challenges remain vast. Informal women workers still face wage gaps, sexual harassment, and climate shocks that hit them first. Poor women workers of the informal sector are disproportionately impacted by increasingly frequent and intense climate shocks, requiring resilience strategies that secure their income and work. Many trade unions still under-represent informal workers, and labour laws remain difficult to enforce in scattered workplaces.

The next phase of women’s resistance will likely combine on-the-ground organising with digital tools, climate adaptation, and stronger links between rural and urban workers. The platform economy adds new fronts, since women gig workers face many of the same vulnerabilities as informal workers, only digitally mediated.

What do you think? If economic growth alone cannot deliver gender equality, what role should collective action and policy play in making women’s work visible and fairly paid? And how should younger women workers in gig and platform jobs build on the legacy of movements like SEWA in an increasingly digital economy?

References

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Table of Contents

The invisible backbone: Women in the unorganised sector 🔗

Low wages, long hours, and layered exploitation 🔗

The wage gap and the care gap 🔗

Economic growth vs. gender equality 🔗

Why prosperity has not closed the gender gap 🔗

Quality of work, not just quantity 🔗

Collective action and the rise of women-led movements 🔗

SEWA and the breakthrough of 1972 🔗

What collective action has won 🔗

Why women’s leadership matters 🔗

The unfinished agenda 🔗