This report describes workers’ strategies of organising and collective bargaining in the informal sector in India. It discusses the organising experiences of the most marginalised workers in society – waste workers, sex workers, domestic workers, rural workers and kite making workers. These are people who were always on the margins of Indian polity and society due to their class, caste and gender.
This report is a field assessment study on asbestos and the the extent of its use in the country bringing to attention to the gravity of the situation in countries like Asia and the building time bomb in the region with regards to asbestos use.
Batam is an island close to Singapore but part of Indonesia. Until the late 1970s it had a few thousand inhabitants that lived mostly on the produce of land, forests and sea. Like Shenzhen, it all changed in late 1970s and early 1980s. Batam became an assembly line where cheap labour could assemble parts and products that would feed into the more advanced and capital intensive Singapore industry. Being an island it was an ideal location for a free trade zone and it was developed primarily for the electronics sector.
This report was carried out by the Local Initiative for OSH Network (LION) in collaboration with AMRC. An initial mapping was done of the limestone mining area close to Bandung district in Indonesia and looking at the potential of silicosis in the region on workers and the community due to exposure to the dust in the environment due to extensive mining in the area.