BehanVox: Trump’s Tariffs Are Unravelling The Lives of Women Textile Workers
This week in BehanVox: stories of women bringing water back to a Himalayan villages, an Urban Company workers' strike in Bengaluru, and more
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Hello and welcome to BehanVox! This week we report from Tamil Nadu’s textile belt on what the massive Trump tariffs are doing to an industry where 70% of employees are women, many of them struggling with debts. We continue our Women in Local Climate Action series this week with a story from an Uttarakhand village, where women have picked up shovels and sickles to clear the path for the spring that brings them water.
Story So Far
The US trade tariffs, which we had hoped was a bad dream we would wake up from soon, have finally taken effect, hitting sectors that bring livelihood, job security and a path out of poverty and precarity to millions of workers. Textiles and apparels, leather, gems and jewellery, auto-parts, agricultural products and marine exports units, many of them small scale, are flailing to alternate markets.
Of these export-centric industries that bank on the US market, many rely heavily on women’s labour, especially leather, garments and marine products industries. One of the biggest employers of women is the textile industry – almost 70% of the 45 million workers in it are women.
To understand closely what the tariffs are doing – and will be doing increasingly over the coming months – to vulnerable women workers, researchers Nandita Shivakumar, Mitali Moharir, Shreya Murali reported from the garment manufacturing belt of Tamil Nadu. The state is the country’s largest exporter of textiles to the US and the manufacturers association expects a 50% drop in its businesses with tariffs sweeping in.
With a few hours of overtime, most women textile workers earn between Rs 11,200 and Rs 14,000 a month — barely enough to cover household expenses and loan repayments. They are already reporting an impending income crunch that will push them further into debt.
Seema, 43, a garment worker in Dindigul, and her husband together earned between Rs 16,000 and Rs 18,000 a month. It was just enough to cover the loan for their small one-room home and their son’s engineering college fees. That fragile balance collapsed when her factory, which supplies to US buyers, scaled down production after the new tariff regime made exports unviable. Workers at her factory are being told to either told to stay home without pay or work on non-US production lines with fewer hours. The first to be let go are usually contract workers like Seema.
“They told us there’s no work now for contract workers like me and they don’t know when they will call us back. I am already in debt for the house, and my son’s college fees are due. Now I’m scared he will have to stop studying,” said Seema, who owes Rs 4.5 lakh of debt to microfinance agencies and moneylenders.
For Erode-based Anitha, 26, the tariff shock comes on the heels of another disaster. Last year, heavy rains brought down the roof of her house. With limited access to formal credit, she and her mother were forced to borrow Rs 2.5 lakh from a moneylender at a monthly interest rate of 10%. The two work earn less than Rs 25,000 together a month and now her factory has cut production and moved workers onto rotation lines. Her mother’s work has been slashed to three days a week, halving her income. Currently, Anitha gets to keep her own job only because her line produces for a European brand.
An underreported fact is how these jobs are allowing the women in the state’s textile belt – with widespread incidents of domestic violence and dowry-related abuse – some semblance of autonomy, for instance, allowing them to walk out on abusive partners and raise children independently. This new vulnerability will end up rolling up many of these hard-won freedoms.
Even more vulnerable are the migrant women workers who cannot find employment in their home states. They are in no position to negotiate for fair wages or decent living conditions. “Layoffs mean we don’t just lose our wages —we also lose our rooms in the hostel. It can force us to suddenly go back to our villages, even if we want to stay and find other work here. There is nothing in our villages for us, and we don’t want to be pushed back,” says Aishwarya, a worker from Jharkhand.
But what can be done to ease the distress of these workers? The government needs to step in proactively before a financial crisis cripples their lives, say union activists. Short term, practical and innovative solutions are needed, they add.
Read our story here.
For years, Shobha Devi woke up at 4 am, in the quiet of dawn, to fetch a pail of water from her local spring in Salga village of Dehradun district. She had to hurry before the queues got longer as women and girls from her village and adjacent villages made a beeline for the slow trickling water. Tempers could flare easily in the biting cold as they jostled for one bucket of water. Sometimes the wait would take her three hours, sending her day into chaos.
This was once the daily reality for the women of the village in Kalsi block of Dehradun district in Uttarakhand. Natural Himalayan springs, which flow underground through the mighty hills and quietly emerge from cracks in the earth, once the life source of water in the mountainous pockets of the state, had begun to dry up, forcing women to walk farther and fight harder for water. Erratic rainfall, seismic activity, and ecological degradation from land use change are impacting mountain aquifers.
Salga village, home to 33 families and around 600 people, received household tap connections under the Har Ghar Jal scheme of the Jal Jeevan Mission in 2021 but the taps mostly remained dry due to the low supply from the nearby spring.
Frustrated, Shobha Devi and other members of the Mahila Mangal Dal took matters into their own hands. She and the women decided to clean the spring’s recharge zones on their own. “We picked up the fawda (spade), kudal (hoe), and daranti (sickle) and headed uphill to dig trenches in the recharge zone. Day after day, under the harsh sun, we cut into the hard mountain soil, paying no attention to the heat, exhaustion, and even our own health. There was just one thought in our minds — the water problem must end,” Shobha says. In the village meeting, the men refused to join in this effort — fetching water, after all was not their headache. Later, once the women started work, the men began to chip in.
Salga’s women now do not need to wake before the crack of dawn. But the rights over the lands that they are helping to re-green with their hard labour still remain with the men.
Read our story here.
Talking Point
Gigworkers’ Strike: This week, hundreds of women gig workers from Urban Company held a gate meeting at the company’s main office in Bengaluru. They are demanding the immediate implementation of the Karnataka Platform-based Gig Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Act, 2025, that was recently passed. They are asking for the quick redressal of the practices that they allege are exploitative – arbitrary ID blocking, unfair rating systems, forced product purchases, and distant assignments without compensation, and the lack of a redressal system against customer harassment.
Question of Freedom: There are many reasons the police ascribe the spate of murderous violence against women reported from across the country last week – Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, Maharashtra, dowry demand being the most common. But each of these stories comes with a common thread – the victims were all caught in toxic marriages and were trying, with very little help from any quarter, to assert themselves or break out. Clearly the line on what freedoms are ‘acceptable’ – and those that are not – is still being set by men.
Music Mentor: Tems, the Emmy award winning Nigerian singer-songwriter and producer, is working with African women who want to succeed in the music industry. This is generally considered a “tough endeavour”, according to Guardian, because the industry allows few women to make it to the top. The lack of funding and infrastructure, and general misogyny usually come in the way. Early this month, Tems got together 20 of her countrywomen in the industry to help with their career progress.
BehanVox Recommends
Breaking silence: In this long read, Nidhi Suresh speaks to the nun that accused Bishop Franco Mulakkal of rape, rattling the Indian Catholic Church, in 2018. It traces the cost of defying patriarchal power, the condemnation, and struggles of reporting rape within the system.
Memories of mothers: After the release of her book ‘Mother Mary Comes to Me’, Arundhati Roy talks about her complex relationship with her mother, grief, her constant search for liberty and freedom.
Tech and colonialism: Elias Gbadamosi analyses the parallels between colonialism and bias in modern technology. As technology seeps in deeper into our lives, Gbadamosi notes how it adheres to a white, able-bodied perspective, and how contemporary digital infrastructures are colonial.
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