The Event (1/6)
February 21, 2023
Seven days into this challenge, things are going okay. After three days of caffeine withdrawal, my body has learned to get along without it. Walking and daily meditation are on track. Fasting five days last week was a bit of a struggle, but I’m optimistic about next week’s 99-hour fast for love. What I really look forward to, though, is the my annual seven-day fast starting March 10 - the fast for labor unions. And that story begins 105 years ago today in Ahmedabad, India.
It was a city of a quarter million people, and nearly half of the families were involved in the textile industry. Men worked in the mills, producing cloth that might end up as uniforms for soldiers in the Great War. During the winter of 1917-18, a virulent plague ravaged the city — something we can relate to, post-Covid — claiming 500 lives a day at its peak. To ensure their essential workers would show up, owners of the mills paid “plague bonuses” of 70% over regular wages. When the contagion subsided, the owners of the mills announced these bonuses would end, replaced with a 20% raise. Since the plague’s disruption had raised the cost of living, this would leave tens of thousands working for starvation wages.
The plague had wounded the relationship between the mill workers and mill owners; Gandhi was called in to treat the injury. He had friends on both sides of the conflict; Anasuya Sarabhai was the unofficial leader of the workers; she had worked for women’s rights inside the factories, getting special access since her younger brother, Ambalal was one of the leading mill owners. Gandhi had known the family for years; Ambalal Sarabhai was a socially progressive Hindu. When Gandhi’s nearby ashram had accepted had a so-called-untouchable family a few years earlier, his financial backers withdrew their funding; only a generous donation from Ambalal saved it from collapse.
The workers discussed their options, but at the first whispers of a strike, the owners declared there would be a “temporary shutdown.” The workers finished their shifts on February 21, 1918, said goodbye to their machines and promised to return. Gandhi offered himself as an impartial arbitrator. “I am not particularly disposed to favor workers as workers,” he wrote. “I am on the side of justice and often this is found to be on their side.” After gathering information about wages in other cities, he persuaded the workers that a 35% increase would be fair. But the mill owners refused to budge from 20%.
The lockout is the first chapter of the story that would lead to Gandhi’s first public fast on March 15th. The Event, as biographer Erik Erikson named it in Gandhi’s Truth – The Origin of Militant Nonviolence, shaped his use of fasting for the next thirty years. Further chapters will follow over the next few weeks.
Have you ever left a job over working conditions?