Wages, unions, and labour productivity: evidence from Indian cotton mills

Bishnupriya Gupta

Economic History Review, 2011, vol. 64, issue s1, 76-98

Abstract: Clark and Wolcott attribute the low productivity of Indian cotton textile workers to their preference for low work effort, and suggest that unions resisted an increase in work intensity. This article argues that low wages were due to surplus labour in agriculture. Low wages allowed the persistence of managerial inefficiencies and resulted in low productivity and work effort. It uses firm-level data from all the textile producing regions in India to examine the relationship between unions and labour productivity. The findings show that fewer workers were employed per machine in the unionized mills in Bombay and Ahmedabad, compared to the mills in less unionized regions. These findings suggest that unionization increased wages and compelled managers to raise productivity

Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/j.1468-0289.2010.00528.x

Related works:
Journal Article: Wages, unions, and labour productivity: evidence from Indian cotton mills (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ehsrev:v:64:y:2011:i:s1:p:76-98

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0013-0117

Access Statistics for this article

Economic History Review is currently edited by Stephen Broadberry

More articles in Economic History Review from Economic History Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().