The Bombay mill owners had little trouble recruiting a labour-force, but labour

relations in the city were often difficult. Whereas in Ahmedabad and the other up-
country centres most of the labour in the mills was drawn from established local
spinning and weaving communities, in Bombay the industrial workforce was hired
from a number of fairly distant rural areas in the southern Konkan districts of
Bombay Presidency and the eastern United Provinces to the north. In 1911 only II
per cent of the mill-hands had been born in Bombay; by 1931 this figure had risen
to 26 per cent, but still over one-third had been born in the Konkan region and
another 12 per cent in the United Provinces. The Bombay mills recruited labour and
organised casual employment through the broker-age activities of intermediaries
(known as 'jobbers). This system tended to limit management contact with, and
control over, the mill-hands significantly, without making the workers fully
subservient to the jobbers either. Aided by their rural connections as well as by the
development of neighbourhood links within the industrial areas of the city, the mill
workforce was able to assert itself quite effectively against the formal and informal
management systems in the inter-war years. Eight general strikes of over one
month were called in the Bombay mills between 1919 and 194o, one of which lasted
for almost eight-een months in 1928-9; over 48 million working days were lost in the
Bombay mills between April 1921 and June 1929, almost half of them in 1928.

Indian cotton mills employed a larger percentage of male labour than was common
elsewhere in Asia, drawing heavily on displaced handloom weavers. Such workers
were highly unionised and better able to defend their working practices than was
the young, largely female, workforce living in corporate accommodation that was
common in Japan. For whatever reasons, labour prod-uctivity was somewhat lower
in Bombay than in other centres of textile manu-facture. In Indian mills it was rare
for a weaver to control more than two looms, whereas the average was four in
Britain and six in Japan; an average of 16.5 hands per shift were used to mind 1,000
looms in Japanese spinning mills in 1925-6, as opposed to 23 in Ahmedabad, 24 in
Madura and 24.2 in Bombay. Such figures tell us more about working practices than
about relative efficien-cies, since the cheapness of labour in India made a different
usage of machinery appropriate, but there were some discrepancies in real wages
and productivity between India and Japan. A comparison of direct labour costs in the
late 192os found that spinners' wages per pound of yarn produced were 8 per cent
lower in Japan than in India, while weavers' wages were 4o per cent lower. In
Bombay