Articles by Deepita Chakravarty

In my paper “Trade Unions and Business Firms: Unorganised Manufacturing in West Bengal” (EPW, 6 February 2010) I intended to do an analysis of net value added (NVA), employment, labour productivity and wage share in NVA in the four states of West Bengal, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu for th

Work participation rates among women are low in West Bengal, below the national average; but the state has the highest incidence of working girl children in the urban areas. Based mainly on secondary data, the analysis here suggests that the relatively high prevalence of domestic service and the tradition of inducting girl children into it have led to this trend. A complex interaction of historical, cultural and social practices, together with economic factors, determine women's work in general and that of girl children in particular. A significant factor in this context is the increasing urban affluence in the state led by the growth of the service sector in the recent years.

This study is an explorative, inter-sectoral analysis of state domestic product data to understand the determinants of services sector growth in India during recent years. It is a demand side analysis where the services sector output of a specific state is not only a function of the outputs of a state's own agriculture and industry but also the output of the commodity-producing sector of the rest of the Indian economy. The findings suggest that while a state's own industry turns out to be the most important determinant of services sector growth, the commodity-producing sector of the country outside the state does play a significant role as well in determining services sector performance under certain conditions that basically relate to the supply side.

The literature on the gender implications of expansion of markets for employment often looks at women workers as the victims of the trade liberalisation process, resulting from discrimination in the labour market. However, discrimination is a complex process taking different forms in different contexts leading to different outcomes. This study, based on the garment manufacturing industry, suggests that in the context of a dynamic industrial activity of a poor labour-surplus economy, discrimination against women can take place outside the labour market. For example, employment depends on education and skills, to which women have unequal access.

In this paper we have examined the impact of technological modernisation on the contractual relationships between the workers and their union and the management within a firm. This calls for an examination of the internal organisation of the firm as a nexus of several treaties among its active agents. These treaties are likely to change with the changes in the production technology. Our study relates to some selected organised textile firms in India.