British-Pakistani homeworkers and activist campaigns, 1962–2002

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the testimony of twelve British-Pakistani women living in Oldham, drawn from a larger study about British-Pakistani women's relationship with formal and informal labour, between 1962-2002. These interviewees were either homeworkers for the garment industry or were the children of homeworkers. Homeworking is the practice of ‘doing paid employment in the home… for an employer, with little control over the way the work is done’. This work was inherently exploitative, given the long hours and menial pay. Nonetheless, my interviewees revealed that they were not passive victims of economic exploitation, despite being amongst the lowest paid workers in twentieth century Britain. Their testimony highlighted how resistance took many forms, as women managed the demands of waged labour with family responsibilities. Alongside small-scale acts of resistance taking place in homes across Britain, formalised activist campaigns emerged from the mid-1970s, with the purpose of informing homeworkers about their employment rights and changing labour laws. A long-held problem for campaigners-who were often white and middle-class- was reaching migrant women. By the 1990s, sources suggest that campaigns addressed this issue by employing South Asian activists, who were often better positioned to build connections with South Asian homeworkers.

Homeworking, defined as an individual ‘doing paid employment in the home or domestic premise, for an employer, with little control over the way the work is done or the design of the product and no profits invested in the business’ was a popular form of waged work amongst working-class women in Britain across the twentieth century.¹ Almost every working-class British-Pakistani woman from Oldham, who was interviewed as part of my study about Pakistani women’s migration, settlement and work experiences between 1962 and 2002, was either a homeworker for the textile industry or their mother was a homeworker. These women were employed because they were a cheap source of labour. Their lack of English proficiency, combined with the demands of housework and childcare, meant that homeworking was one of the few options British-Pakistani women had to earn a wage and take care of their families. As part of their job, homeworkers were expected to fulfil their employers’ near-impossible production demands for pennies per item sewed. Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Jack Ashley, for example, told the House of Commons that the ‘scandal of sweated labour’ had resulted in homes of Britain’s poorest people becoming sweatshops: ‘These prisoners of poverty are mainly women with young children, disabled people or immigrants. They are the under-privileged of our society who should be generously assisted, whereas they are ruthlessly exploited’.²

I argue, however, that homeworkers were not necessarily passive victims of labour exploitation. Rather, migrant homeworkers found ways to resist, such as taking part in activist campaigns for homeworkers’ rights. Activist campaigns were largely run by middle-class white women, with the purpose of informing homeworkers about their employment rights and fighting for legislative changes in labour laws. Feminists and activists were often drawn to the cause of homeworkers’ rights whilst working in related movements such as poverty alleviation, labour rights, gender equality, community outreach and safe housing. By the 1990s, campaigns often involved South Asian activists, some of whom were former homeworkers who could access difficult-to-reach migrant women. Pakistani women’s resistance against economic exploitation was a necessary part of securing a comfortable, long-term settlement in Britain.

During the 1980s, when homeworking was arguably at its peak, according to the Analytica for the Employment department, 1 in 10 employers employed homeworkers in some capacity.³ Scholarship by activists and sociologists during the 1980s documented the working lives of homeworkers in the context of political apathy and economic exploitation. The purpose of this work was to highlight the oft-ignored plight of Britain’s most underpaid workers and to challenge the prevailing view that homeworkers were not ‘real’ workers like their husbands and sons.⁴ For example, according to Sheila Allen and Carol Wolkowitz, the shifting image of the home-based worker was one often rooted in their ‘atypical’ working lives, given that they worked from home, could fit work around other responsibilities, such as childcare, and that their wage was seen as ‘pin money’.⁵ Given the purpose of this scholarship, namely to galvanise support for the growing network of activist campaigns that fought for homeworkers’ legislative rights, authors often focussed on who homeworkers were, why they were paid inadequately, what their employers demanded from them and, in some cases, included action points about what could be done to protect homeworkers from economic exploitation. The ways in which homeworking affected family dynamics or community relationships have not yet been examined, despite homeworkers from Oldham often discussing their work in relation to their responsibilities as mothers, wives, daughters and community members. In other words, interviewees did not see themselves solely as exploited machinists.

Despite the agency many women had over managing work and family life and, for some, the control they had over how their wages were spent, the nature of their work was nonetheless inherently exploitative, given the long hours and low pay. The unequal relationship between employers and workers takes different forms depending on the historical context.⁶ For migrant British-Pakistani women, their employment as homeworkers was a product of changing recruitment practices by corporations seeking cheap labour from the late 1970s, the decline of traditional mill work in Oldham, and the demand placed on women to manage wage-earning with domestic responsibility. Since British-Pakistani women were primarily seen as caregivers, rather than labourers, their access to work, or lack thereof, has not been a serious point of consideration in existing scholarship about British-South Asian migration and settlement in Lancashire and West Yorkshire. For example, the anthropologist Mohammad Anwar, in his pioneering 1979 study about Rochdale’s British-Pakistani community, focussed solely on men’s experiences working in the mills and taking on the labour white workers had refused. Whilst Anwar does acknowledge that women sewed at home for a wage, the ways they managed work with caring responsibilities, as well as the strategies women employed to navigate exploitative work practices, are overlooked. Instead, Anwar argued that Pakistani women sewed at home because ‘the majority of Muslims do not allow their wives and daughters to work or have contact with the outside world’, without acknowledging how workplace racism and high childcare costs, as well as changes in the local economy, affected women’s work choices.⁷

Instead, feminist activists and researchers of gender and labour have analysed the specific reasons why working-class South Asian women chose homeworking. The economist Naila Kabeer, in a comparative study about the labour choices amongst Bangladeshi women in Dhaka and London, explored why women from Tower Hamlets opted for home-based piecework rather than factory work like men in their community.⁸ The study, which is one of the most comprehensive insights into British-South Asian women’s homeworking experiences, highlighted that (much like their white counterparts) childcare and a lack of qualifications were the primary reasons why they opted for home-based work, as a means to economically contribute to their working-class households. Although some women referenced purdah, or veiling practices, as the reason why they worked from home, more women said they worked from home because of their domestic responsibilities. This was a direct challenge to the growing orthodoxy within the social sciences to analyse Pakistani women’s experiences primarily in relation to purdah.⁹ Similarly, Annie Phizacklea and Carol Wolkowitz’s comparative analysis of Black, South Asian and white homeworkers’ experiences in Warwick in 1990 suggested that although there was an overlap in their low pay and lack of power, there were still contextual differences between homeworkers that must be accounted for. For example, South Asian interviewees were much more likely to work as homeworkers full-time, since they had more children and lived in families with a lower income compared to white families.¹⁰ However, missing from these accounts of South Asian women’s homeworking experiences was how they resisted economic exploitation and political apathy. The way women organised their days, the labour they prioritised, and how they managed being active in their children’s lives despite the demands of their employers are experiences that rarely feature in scholarship about homeworking. In addition, there is no account of how activist campaigners (who were mostly white and middle-class) reached out to British-South Asian homeworkers, given the language barriers, and there is little information about the experience of British-South Asian women who took part in activist campaigns. The idea that migrant women were solely victims of globalisation and economic growth, therefore, remains largely unchallenged.¹¹ The history of homeworking in the twentieth century is not expansive or robust enough to account for South Asian women’s experiences of being homeworkers and activist.

An oral history of British-Pakistani homeworkers

As part of a larger study about British-Pakistani women’s relationship with formal and informal labour, between 1962 and 2002, I interviewed twelve women who had spent most of their lives in Oldham. Some women were part of the first, pioneer generation of British-Pakistanis to arrive during the 1960s and 1970s. These women, who migrated to Oldham as married adults to join their husbands, were the most likely to become homeworkers, given that their settlement coincided with the restructuring of the cotton industry during the 1980s, which affected employment in Oldham. I also interviewed women who migrated as children or were born in the UK during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. This younger generation of women reflected on their mothers’ work through the lens of their childhood memories, offering insights into what everyday life was like for the families of homeworkers.

There were significant advantages to using oral history. Most importantly, given the acute lack of historical research about British-Pakistani migration and settlement, as well as the lack of archival material pertaining to British-Pakistani women’s experiences of work, asking women to share their life histories filled a significant gap in the existing record. The processes of remembering and forgetting, as Tony Kushner argued, has resulted in the purposeful alienation of migrant and ethnic minority people, whose experiences and contributions rarely feature in national storytelling about the past.¹² The traditional archive, ‘an essential knowledge space to be approached, constructed and even confronted in numerous ways and from many perspectives’ is ridden with silences, erasure and exclusion.¹³ Oral history is a process of recovery, a method of preservation that can ‘democratise the historical record’.¹⁴ Using a life story approach of interviewing, and focusing on the subjective, individual voices of my interviewees, I analysed how aspirations and opportunities for work changed over time, starting from childhood. This approach also offered women the flexibility to craft a coherent narrative on their terms and to contextualise their relationship with work by sharing how their changing status corresponded with their shifting responsibilities. According to the oral historian Charlotte Linde, ‘narrative is among the most important social resources for creating and maintaining personal identity’.¹⁵ The interviewing process, then, was not just a way in which to record a history of women’s labour experiences, but also to understand how women connected their present selves to their own personal history. As historian Paul Thompson argued:

oral history certainly can be a means for transforming both the content and the purpose of history. It can be used to change the focus of history itself and open up new areas of inquiry … it can give back to the people who made and experienced history, through their own words, a central place.¹⁶

Since the interviews were conducted in women’s first language (often Punjabi), interviewees could offer a more precise account of their settlement experiences.

Meeting women was made significantly easier by my status as a British-Pakistani, Muslim woman from a working-class background. In Oldham, however, I was not part of the local Pakistani community, which meant I had few personal connections. Community centres became the places where I met interviewees, such as a 65 + group at a women’s association. Developing a relationship with community activists was crucial in building connections with potential interviewees. Whilst snowballing was generally a beneficial way to meet new interviewees, older women often recommended friends who were of a similar age and had settled in the UK around the same time as them. This, however, made it difficult to meet younger women. To overcome this, I decided to interview younger British-Pakistani women, including mothers who met weekly at a local primary school in Glodwick, an area where Pakistanis in Oldham have historically resided.

Given the few connections I had with Pakistanis in Oldham, group interviews were a way in which to build a rapport with women who wanted to understand what the interviewing process would entail. From these group interviews emerged an unexpected dynamic; remembering became a collective process, with women learning from each other, comparing memories, and powerfully demonstrating the close relationships they had with one another.¹⁷ The overlaps and divergences in their experiences of labour highlighted the significance of age, status, generation, and place in determining how women’s settlement processes unfolded.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had significant consequences on this paper and the study, not least because collecting testimony and visiting community groups was no longer possible. The project was initially designed on the basis that women would be interviewed multiple times since, more often than not, the first interview was a learning process for both the interviewee and I. Given that I met all my interviewees from Oldham at community centres, their personal information was not collected and, therefore, remote or virtual interviewing was not possible. Consequently, the Oldham interviewing process was only partly completed. The past two years have had devastating consequences on the women I met, their families and their communities. Some women I interviewed lost their lives and other women have had to deal with the insurmountable grief of losing their parents or spouses. The ethical and emotional responsibility I had to my interviewees meant respecting their inability to commit to interviewing again. It also meant accepting that some questions will remain unanswered.

British-Pakistanis in Oldham and the proliferation of homeworking

British-Pakistani women are part of the world’s largest community of overseas Pakistanis. In 1951, the number of Pakistanis in Britain was negligible, with around 10,000 out of an estimated population of 50,285,900.¹⁸ By 1971, this number had increased to 119,000 out of an estimated 55,928,000. By 1991 there were 477,000 Pakistanis out of 57,438,700 people.¹⁹ By the early twentieth century, Pakistanis were the second largest ethnic group in the UK after Indians (excluding white British). Lancashire has been home to a large Pakistani population since the 1960s. According to the 1981 census, Oldham was home to 5000 Pakistani migrants, which accounted for 2.3% of the town’s whole population. This figure increased to 9000, or 4.1% of Oldham’s population in 1991 and, by 2001, Oldham’s Pakistani population had grown to 13,754, equivalent to 6.3% of the town’s population. Between 1981 and 2001, Pakistanis remained Oldham’s largest migrant group and the second largest ethnic group after white.²⁰

Before 1962, it was men who primarily migrated from Pakistan, and specifically from Mirpur, a district in Azad Kashmir, northern Pakistan which neighbours the border of Punjab. In fact, over 70% of Pakistanis in Britain have connections to Mirpur.²¹ Apart from one woman, every interviewee came from Mirpur or, in some cases, from the neighbouring Punjabi city of Jhelum. Historically, financial stability in Mirpur was elusive since there were few employment opportunities in this agrarian, formerly under-developed region. Consequently, economic migration has historically been an important way in which men could fulfil their breadwinner responsibilities. There is no recorded example of an unmarried, Mirpuri woman migrating alone, without any connection to Britain, such as family members or neighbours who migrated beforehand.

Before 1962 and under the British Nationality Act of 1948, circular migration was possible, meaning men could work, send remittance to their families and travel between Britain and Pakistan if they had the economic means to do so. The 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act, which necessitated work permits for those wanting to migrate, forced men to make a decision about whether to return to Pakistan and risk losing their livelihood or, more popularly, to reunite with their families by inviting them to the UK, given that wives and children were allowed entry.²² Many chose the latter.

In the mid-twentieth century, Oldham attracted Pakistani migrants because of the employment opportunities offered to manual labourers. The town was a hub of light industry, specifically in textile and cotton production. Regarded as the epicentre of cotton spinning, Oldham owed much of its prosperity to rapid technological development in cloth manufacturing and its expansion of the mill system, which transformed this previously insignificant town into a powerhouse of cotton production during the industrial revolution.²³ Mill work offered a form of economic opportunity that could alleviate deep-seated poverty; it underpinned the conviction of many who took the chance to relocate, despite low pay, long hours and the loss of their support network. In 1948 alone, 7000 new workers from the Commonwealth were recruited.²⁴ No interviewee had a choice in where she would migrate, instead settling in the places where men had found work. Women’s economic participation was not considered when places of settlement were chosen.

By the 1980s, homeworking had reached its peak.²⁵ This coincided with the decline of traditional industries such as cotton manufacturing in Britain, recession in the early 1980s and the restructuring of the textiles industry to meet the demands for cheap garments. The consequences of economic turbulence in Oldham are documented in Virinder Kalra’s ethnography about Pakistani men and changes in their employment, work and economic status.²⁶ The historical economic restructuring of Britain saw a shift in focus from manufacturing to service industries. As a result, Oldham changed irrevocably, with former mill workers, particularly from the South Asian community, choosing self-employment in the face of redundancy and their inability to secure limited, formal employment.²⁷ The recession of the early 1980s, in particular, made manual and semi-skilled work acutely susceptible to redundancy; it is no coincidence, then, that homeworking grew exponentially in West Yorkshire and Lancashire during this period.²⁸

Women’s unemployment was not an option for some families. Poverty meant their wage was crucial in ensuring there was enough food for extended families and that bills were paid, particularly if men faced redundancy. Corporations such as Woolworths, who were accused of paying Halifax-based homeworkers 24p per hour to pack Christmas cards in 1989, recognised that working-class women, who needed to work from home in order to take care of their families, would undertake homeworking despite the low wages.²⁹ To stay competitive, larger companies reorganised and subcontracted production to smaller firms. By 1991, Benneton, the world’s largest producer of cotton, had decentralised 80% of its production work, including using small firms employing homeworkers as a source of cheaper labour. In turn, corporations such as Benneton could remain highly competitive and reduce their use of more expensive, large-scale factory manufacturing. Smaller sub-contracted companies would be responsible for employing homeworkers, not the corporation, and the overhead costs would be covered by the workers.³⁰ In addition, sick pay and holiday entitlements were rare and homeworkers were ineligible for pensions.³¹

The ways in which this form of employment fit into the other demands in women’s lives has been underexplored by historians. This has resulted in homeworkers’ resistance against capitalist exploitation being ignored. Homeworkers, who often became involved in local and national campaigns for homeworkers’ rights, were not passive victims. Women’s testimony revealed that they often made choices, as mothers and community members, to ensure that the demands of their work did not deter them from being present in their children’s lives. Whilst taking part in activist campaigns is an obvious and important form of resistance, women’s everyday management decisions also highlight their resistance against exploitative work practices, which attempted to reduce women’s capacity to partake in any form of labour or leisure that detracted them from sewing and garment production.

The experiences of homeworkers in Oldham

From the moment of their arrival, women’s waged labour and caring responsibilities became an indispensable part of sustaining the household. Home became the space in which both waged work and caring responsibilities co-existed, making every day a relentless balancing act. For homeworkers and their kin, it presented a set of challenges that required newly imagined ways of living. Women had to negotiate the often-inharmonious relationship between waged work and care which created incredible demands both in terms of physical labour and mental exertion. The management of this, as mothers, wives, and community members, was expressed in their choices regarding how to organise their time and the practices they employed to fulfil their daily obligations, such as taking their children to school or maintaining a clean home.

The ability to produce garments to strict deadlines required a vast amount of skill, patience, and capability. The majority of women I spoke to learned how to sew from other women in their family or community, usually before their migration. The only instance of formal training came from Razia. She migrated to Birmingham in 1979, aged thirteen or fourteen, with her mother and three brothers. She told me how she learned the basics of sewing in Pakistan. Upon her relocation to England, Razia was given the opportunity to advance her abilities by participating in a training course organised by a local factory in 1983. This coincided with the implementation of the Conservative government’s Youth Training Scheme (YTS) in 1983, which provided training on the job for 16- and 17-year-old school leavers. Whilst Razia could not provide many details about whether the training was government-sponsored, it is certainly a possibility that she had taken part in a YTS, given her age at the time and that 2,896 students were part of a YTS in Birmingham by November 1983.³² Here she learned necessary skills for garment production, such as how to sew in zips and how to attach buttons.³³ Razia cited word-of-mouth as the way she got her job when she moved to Oldham after her marriage. Her neighbour recommended her for the job and she became one of four other women sewing garments on her street.³⁴ Similarly, Jabeela, who migrated in 1969 and settled in Bradford as a child, was encouraged by her parents to do piecework at the age of fifteen. They helped her find this work, since many other women in the community were sewing for a living.³⁵

The reasons for women choosing homeworking have, in previous research, revolved around the need to care for their children. In Naila Kabeer’s study of British-Bangladeshi homeworkers in Tower Hamlets, for example, the most cited reason for choosing homeworking was that factory labour was often incompatible with caring obligations.³⁶ Mothers needed to find ways to manage paid labour with their children’s school times as well as working around the lack of childcare or nursery provisions for their children who were not in school. In Sheila Allen and Carol Wolkowitz’s small-scale interview project of West Yorkshire Pakistani homeworkers, ten women cited childcare as the main reason for choosing homeworking.³⁷ Similarly, South Asian women in a 1974 survey on Asian immigration in Oldham, conducted by the researcher Kanta Walker, cited childcare and housework as the reasons why they sewed from home. In the survey, which was produced by the Home Office- sponsored Community Development Project as part of their remit to research the most deprived areas of the UK, around 60% of South Asian women said they sewed at home to earn money, and many expressed that their work caused them to feel socially isolated.³⁸ Inaccessible and costly childcare was recognised by activists as one of the primary issues to rectify if homeworkers were to have the opportunity to move into mainstream employment.³⁹

During the interviewing process in Oldham, stories of women managing their responsibilities as mothers, community members and employees were commonplace. Jabeela, for example, worked as a homeworker for twenty-five years in Bradford and Oldham. During that time, she gave birth to four children. She described how her ex-husband, the father of her children, joined her from Pakistan in 1987 but, after a few years, decided to move back to Pakistan where he lived for fifteen years until their divorce. Given that she was the sole carer for her children during this time, she continued with the homeworking job that had been part of her life since she was a teenager. In addition, Maneeza found sewing compatible with caring for her family, particularly her husband who worked in a local mill. She said, ‘husbands did this kind of (factory) work’ and that her responsibility after his nightshift was to have breakfast ready when he returned home, often with his friends who had been working the same shift.⁴⁰

Whilst homeworkers alluded to the difficulty of juggling work, familial responsibilities and social obligations, it was their children that candidly reflected upon the demands of their mothers’ lives. Specifically, they offered new ways in which to understand the attempts by women to juggle their multiple responsibilities. Noor gave a glimpse of what this looked like in her testimony:

We lived in poverty, they didn’t earn much so the women had to help out and they were superwomen! They made the food, they had five, six kids each, I mean they had cloth nappies, toilets outside, um, and I think, I, I was only nine, ten you know and we used to pull out the stool and help make roti at a very young age.⁴¹

The other women in the group agreed in unison, remembering their responsibilities of washing clothes in the bath by hand and picking up the pieces of thread that had fallen from cutting and sewing. I asked whether they resented the need to do domestic work whilst their mothers sewed. The resounding answer was ‘no’:

[Iqra]:

It was just normal innit

[Shabna]:

We had no options we … 

[Iqra]:

I think, I think that’s not just an Asian thing, obviously for white people it was the same for them

[Noor]:

No, no I think we had a hard childhood, but we had a happy childhood cause we were outside playing … 

[Iqra]:

If we told our kids these stories they’d be thinking ‘oh my word’ … ⁴²

There is a clear recognition by Iqra that her experience was similar to that of the white working-class children she grew up with. The accessibility of homeworking is a shared experience between white and South Asian women across the region, particularly when job opportunities became limited due to the closure of cotton mills.⁴³ Poverty in Oldham pushed migrant and non-migrant women to take on severely underpaid work, often because other work was simply not available in places like Oldham and childcare was too expensive to make working outside the home a possibility.⁴⁴ This overlap is noteworthy because frequently ‘cultural constraints’ are cited as the reason why many Pakistani women partook in homeworking, without recognising that culture has a tremendous capacity to shift and change, rather than being an imagined set of static customs or ideas that have been supposedly exported from South Asia.

The over-emphasis on ‘cultural constraints’ to explain Pakistani women’s participation in homeworking has resulted in factors such as poor childcare provisions, racism, and poverty being overlooked. The Community Development Project survey of migrant communities in the Glodwick area of Oldham stated that women did not work outside the home because their husbands did not permit it and, when interviewing five adolescent Pakistani girls who had left school, described them as accepting ‘this confinement to the home quite calmly’.⁴⁵ There is little space for the social and economic factors motivating these responses, the suggestion being that a ‘very different culture’ is responsible for the decision-making of this community.⁴⁶ The same paper stated that ‘paki’ was generally used to describe South Asian members of the Glodwick community, yet a link between rife racism and women working within the home is not made.⁴⁷ Nor is a link made to the declining local economy that made the creation of a government-funded Community Development Project in the area necessary.⁴⁸ For working-class people in places like Oldham, the prevalence of poverty and their low socio-economic status resulted in homeworking becoming the occupation of both migrant and non-migrant working-class women. Whilst the motivations to work from home were complicated and, for South Asian women, were often affected by the threat of racial violence, the consequences for children like Iqra and her white friends was a shared experience of watching their mothers work and helping with their domestic responsibilities.

In these conversations with the daughters of homeworkers, the long hours women sewed every day, and the way their mothers managed this with domestic work, was exemplified. I asked how many hours their mothers dedicated to sewing and how they would fit it around school drop offs and looking after infants:

[Shabna]:

We used to come back from school and help them (laughs)

[Interviewer]:

Oh gosh

[Noor]:

We would hear sewing machines ALL the time, like I remember my mum … 

[Iqra]:

I think it was the time wasn’t it?

Noor described falling asleep to the sound of the sewing machine, whilst Iqra suggested that this form of work was a thing of the past. None of the interviewees were currently homeworkers and it seems the majority had finished with this form of work by the early 2000s, at the latest. Iqra, who grew up in the 1980s, remembered a time when homeworking was potentially at its most prevalent, nationally, as a form of employment.⁴⁹ It is inextricably linked with these women’s memories of growing up. Stockpiles of garments, the sound of sewing machines and the littering of materials were the hallmarks of these women’s upbringing. Homeworking and the home became one and the same:

[Iqra]:

They used to get ‘maal’⁵⁰

[Noor]:

Maal (laughs)

[Shabna]:

Yeah! That’s what they used to call it, ‘maal’

[Noor]:

We used to get cushion covers, I remember we used to sit there, mum used to sit there and we used to turn them inside out

[Shabna]:

We used to pull the thread of things and, you know

[Noor]:

The knickers, oh the knickers

(a few women agree and laugh in the background)

[Noor]:

Knickers everywhere (laughs)

Their descriptions of childhood memories, where the work of their mothers was almost inescapable, vividly illustrated how sewing and family life became a tangled web. The lack of space meant literally living with work.

Women’s wages went directly towards supporting the household, although the extent to which they controlled where their money went varied from person to person. Some women put their wage into the pooled income of the household and their husbands or parents would decide how it was spent. Others kept the money and decided where it would go, often using it to buy toys and clothes for their children. Pat Lewis and Rabia Patel, in a pioneering project that recorded the experiences of Black and Asian West Yorkshire homeworkers in their own language, highlighted that ‘need’ often outweighed ‘want’ when homeworkers decided how to spend their wage. Women earning a wage was crucial, as one participant of the project stated, since she could not expect her father ‘to feed us all on his wages’ given that she was the eldest of seven.⁵¹

For some families, women were the breadwinners, although this did not necessarily mean that domestic responsibilities were shared more equally between women and unemployed men. Razia made this clear when she described how her husband, upon his redundancy, began working with her to help fulfil her sewing demands. In a passing statement she said, ‘I got him on the work too because he was at home’.⁵² It echoes the experiences of Sarfraz Manzoor’s mother and sister in his autobiography about life in the Pakistani-dominated area of Bury Park in Luton. Six months after her arrival, his mother was taken by his father to local textile factories in order to find work. She learned how to sew clothes in Pakistan as a means to support her family and her husband was adamant that she replicate this form of work in her new place of settlement.⁵³ Manzoor’s father’s redundancy from the Vauxhall car factory in 1986, the biggest employer in Luton, meant his mother’s piecework became the primary wage of the household.⁵⁴ Men’s redundancy meant women had to juggle being mothers, wives, carers and the primary breadwinner of the family, often with great difficulty.⁵⁵ The inaccessibility of the very work that brought Pakistani men to Britain made women’s employment all the more vital.

A second-generation interviewee I met in Oldham, Iqra, shared testimony about her mother’s work which exemplified the strategies used by mothers to make sure their children were looked after whilst simultaneously trying to make ends meet. During a group interview with women whose mothers sewed as homeworkers when they were growing up, the conversation was often steeped in nostalgia and humour. When I asked Iqra about her mother’s work, she said:

[Iqra]:

You know what my mum did, my mum was sewing little jumpers

[Noor]:

Yeah

[Seema]:

T-Shirts?

[Iqra]:

No, jumpers. My brother was only small and there were two arms left and no top so my mum just sewed the two arms together and made him a pyjama

(women laugh)

[Iqra]:

(laughs) we were so poor back then. I still remember it (laughs)

[Interviewer]:

So was every, was every woman that you knew sewing?

[Noor]:

Most of them

The reaction of the other women in the room suggested that they were familiar with the conditions that framed Iqra’s testimony. The necessity to be resourceful was directly linked by Iqra to her family’s poverty. It was telling that this was what she remembered when thinking about her mother’s work, a specific, singular moment that encapsulated the way in which families resisted the pressures of poverty and which, despite hours of work and effort, could rarely be alleviated without strategic resourcefulness. The testimony of British-Pakistani homeworkers and their daughters revealed that, although they worked long hours for a small wage, women’s lives were not solely defined by the hours they spent at their sewing machines. Despite the demands on their time, women cared for their children, families, and community members in ways that challenged the images of victimhood and passivity that had defined homeworkers. Their resistance, however, was not solely confined to the home. Homeworkers across Britain also became involved in activist campaigns that pushed for legislative change.

Activist campaigns

Homeworkers were not passive victims in the fight against their abhorrent working conditions and pay. However, the intervention of activists who campaigned for homeworkers rights, such as founder and director of the West Yorkshire Homeworking Group Jane Tate, former director of the National Group on Homeworking Linda Deveraux MBE and director of the Leicester Outwork Campaign Majeet Tara, were crucial in pushing for legislative change and making the struggles of homeworkers part of the national debate about labour conditions and pay. The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act of 1974 stated that the duty to protect the welfare and safety of workers was contingent upon what was ‘reasonably practicable … it shall be for the accused to prove (as the case may be) that it was not practicable or not reasonably practicable to do more than was in fact done to satisfy the duty or requirement’.⁵⁶ It became clear, during national debates about the status of homeworkers, that some political figures believed employers had done what was necessary to protect these invisible workers. Activists argued otherwise.

The Commission on Industrial Relations was the first to reveal its minimal findings on the status of homeworkers in 1973. Their report focussed on the efficacy of five wage councils and found that some homeworkers were earning £8.20 after working a 40-hour week.⁵⁷ The Pin, Hook and Eye and Snap Fastener Wage Council was responsible for determining the minimum wages of textile homeworkers, as part of the ‘metal group’ wage councils that were the focus of the report. Whilst the report recommended the abolishment of three of the five ‘metal group’ wage councils, due to their marginal relevance, Maurice Macmillan, Secretary of State for Employment, recommended that the Pin, Hook and Eye and Snap Fastener Wage Council should be restructured to solely include homeworkers and the determination of their pay rates.⁵⁸ This report catalysed the further collection of data pertaining to some of the poorest paid workers in Britain.⁵⁹ A year later, the Low Pay Unit was the first activist group to account for the severity of the crisis over homeworkers’ pay and work conditions through the collection of empirical data and testimony. The pamphlet ‘Sweated Labour’, published in 1974, amplified the debate created by the Commission on Industrial Relations’ report and by the Liberal Party in Nottingham who had improved the pay of lace outworkers two years prior.⁶⁰ The report found that the vast majority of women, who were paid pennies for every item they sewed to a satisfactory standard, had no choice but to be homeworkers, given their caring responsibilities and economic disadvantage.⁶¹ For the first time in over fifty years, the plight of homeworkers was no longer invisible.

Activist work galvanised support for legislative changes to legally protect homeworkers against low pay and dangerous working conditions, although they were fighting against the perception that earning a minimal wage from home whilst undertaking domestic responsibilities was a privilege rather than exploitative. The earliest step towards legislative protections for homeworkers was the Homeworkers Protection Bill of 1979, introduced by Labour MP Frank White. The bill provided a legal definition for homeworking in order to differentiate these workers from those who worked from home ‘under different sets of relationships’.⁶² Members of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, however, did not believe homeworkers needed special attention.⁶³ Labour MP for Halifax, Alice Mahon, argued for the registration of homeworkers and the machines and materials they used by the firms employing them, so that this data could be accessed by the health and safety inspectorate. This was in accordance with the recommendations made in the 1981 Select Committee Report on Homeworking which had been largely ignored because, at the time of Mahon’s speech in 1989, homeworkers were still not actively protected by health and safety regulation, irrespective of the fact that an estimated 10% of all clothing production took place within the home.⁶⁴ Mahon stated that exposure to harmful chemicals in confined spaces, as well as health difficulties that accompanied long hours of intricate sewing work, were some of the difficulties faced by workers, who covered their own overhead costs and worked for ‘appalling’ wages:

One west Yorkshire company uses 1,200 hand knitters, and a Huddersfield firm says that its home workers contribute £3·5 million to the company’s annual turnover. That is big business. The managing director of that Huddersfield company says that his firm chooses to put work out because of the advantages of flexibility, cheapness and a reduced need for space. All that firm's outworkers are women and 95%. of them are from ethnic minorities who may not be well equipped to organise or to find their way around health and safety legislation in order to improve conditions.⁶⁵

In response to Mahon’s statement that women did this work out of necessity, to economically provide whilst also looking after children or vulnerable family members, Conservative MP for Elmet Spencer Batiste said:

Freedom and flexibility were their hallmarks and home workers expressed great satisfaction at that. Dissatisfaction at home working was low and there was a low level of union membership. Given the typical profile of the home worker, I see no case for giving statutory rights to factory inspectors to walk into people’s homes.⁶⁶

Batiste’s conclusions were solely drawn from Catherine Hakim’s 1981 survey, in which migrant women were not referenced.⁶⁷ The assumption that homeworking was satisfactory because it gave women the flexibility to earn whilst also fulfilling caring obligations undermined the profound difficulty and exploitative practices associated with this work. In addition, citing low union membership as evidence of satisfaction amongst homeworkers is a tenuous argument, at best. The historical exclusion of women from trade unionism, particularly the exclusion of those working in domestic or service industries, is well-documented. Sarah Boston argued that women first had to resist the exclusionary practices of white, male trade union officials so that they could be seen as equal members, before then fighting against employer exploitation.⁶⁸ Between 1964 and 1970, 70% of new union members were women, given the exponential rise of women’s employment in public sector work.⁶⁹ By 1979, for example, four million women were public sector workers.⁷⁰ However, for those working in service industries or as domestic workers, trade union membership was lower, since traditional methods of recruitment, such as visiting places of work with large numbers of potential members, were difficult to apply in home-based work settings.

Working from home and taking care of their families meant homeworkers were not considered ‘real’ workers and, despite their abhorrent pay and long working hours, did not receive trade union support. There are notable examples of British-South Asian women’s workplace activism and the failure of trade unions to support their demands for better pay and improved working conditions. For example, between 1972 and 1974, 400 South Asian (predominantly women) workers went on strike in the East Midlands, demanding a pay rise of £5 and better paying knitting jobs, which were often given to white workers. Those on strike described how they were not allowed to wear saris to work and were bullied in the workplace. However, the National Union of Hosiery and Knitwear Workers deemed the strike unofficial, despite the legal ruling that their employer had breached the Race Relations Act.⁷¹ There are several examples of strikes led by South Asian women that were undermined by trade unions in the 1970s and 1980s. Each case highlighted the historical failure of trade unions in meeting the needs of low paid, exploited migrant women workers and the powerful ways in which women chose to organise.⁷² The activist Jane Tate argued that, by 1985, the Trade Union Congress (TUC) had become more involved in supporting the campaigns to improve conditions and pay for homeworkers.⁷³ The TUC offered policy proposals on homeworking in 1985, targeted towards improving union action and government legislation. The most striking proposal was ‘Union[s] should seek to achieve employee status for homeworkers’.⁷⁴ This statement highlighted that the root cause of homeworker exploitation was that they were not regarded as employees and, therefore, were excluded from legislation that ensured a safe work environment and adequate wages.

The political apathy towards protecting homeworkers rights through legislative changes continued into the 1990s. On 20th June 1996, the International Labour Organisation adopted proposals to improve the working conditions of homeworkers internationally and promoted the implementation of national policies that guaranteed the same treatment between homeworkers and other wage earners. The Homework Convention of 1996 (C177) ensured homeworkers had the right to organise, fair renumeration, occupational safety, access to training and maternity protection. The ILO also urged its members to include homeworkers in labour statistics and inspections so that employers could no longer allow homeworkers to use unsafe substances or work with dangerous machinery.⁷⁵ Despite the Homework Convention of 1996 creating a new international standard for the protection of homeworkers, the majority of whom are women, the UK did not ratify the convention, despite pledges to do so in 1997 and 2000.⁷⁶ Activist work was necessary given the gap in legislative protections for homeworkers.

The growth of activism towards the advancement of homeworkers’ rights became necessary in light of the national standstill in implementing legislation which protected homeworkers. The sheer number of organisations and local networks in places such as Rochdale, Calderdale and Bradford underscored the prevalence of homeworkers’ maltreatment and the importance of activists to deliver the support missing in national legislation. This swell of localised activity can be traced back to the establishment of the Leicester Outwork group in the early 1980s. The organisation was funded by Leicester City and County Council, which collaborated with the outwork group to give homeworkers legal advice, fund support groups and improve employment rights.⁷⁷ This was the longest running and best funded activist group, which worked to address the grievances of employees in the hosiery industry.⁷⁸ Some of their more successful initiatives were replicated in other parts of the country, such as distributing fact packs amongst workers. These fact packs were produced in multiple languages, including Urdu, covering topics such as the legality of their work and national insurance. The Rochdale homeworkers campaign, alongside Calderdale Metropolitan Borough Council and the West Yorkshire Homeworking Group, used this model as a template to immediately rectify the lack of knowledge amongst homeworkers about their entitlements.⁷⁹ Spreading knowledge, whether through fact packs, support meetings or pamphlets was a crucial way to unite several activist groups.⁸⁰

A co-ordinated strategy was necessary given the widespread and varied forms of homeworking that were prevalent across the country, as well as the difficulty in reaching workers who were unregistered. Conferences became the site where activists shared their approaches and exchanged research. This co-operation had both a national and international dimension, given that representatives from European homeworking activist groups and SEWA, India’s Self-Employed Women’s Association, were often invited.⁸¹ In 1994, the National Group on Homeworking brought together multiple local projects under one umbrella, including the Leicester campaign, West Yorkshire, Manchester and Rochdale.⁸² This allowed for smaller, underfunded projects to get the support necessary in order to stay afloat, which was often not possible when smaller groups were working in isolation. National cooperation strengthened local-level activities. One of the most well-known campaigns which worked to build bridges between activists and homeworkers was the West Yorkshire Homeworking Group. Jane Tate, its founder, spearheaded a form of socialist activism that employed homeworkers as part of the campaign, recognising that their experience equipped them with the knowledge to effectively identify what kind of resources were necessary.⁸³ For example, direct contact with homeworkers underpinned the success of their project to record the jobs homeworkers were employed to do over a five-year period. They found 100 different forms of work, with employers ranging from one-person businesses to firms subcontracted by multi-national corporations.⁸⁴ The most difficult group to contact was migrant women.

The involvement of South Asian women as activists became more prevalent in archival documents from the late 1980s and 1990s. These documents suggest an emerging, common practice of employing South Asian women to rectify the long-held issue of reaching this community. Annie Phizacklea and Carol Wolkowitz, as part of their survey on homeworking in Coventry, contacted homeworking officer Vera Hyare to obtain the testimony of South Asian women who did not speak English and, therefore, may not have had access to the postage-paid questionnaire that they sent as an insert in the women’s magazine Prima.⁸⁵ Local South Asian community workers could use their access to South Asians to communicate and meet the needs of women who were the most difficult for middle-class, white campaigners to reach.⁸⁶

The widely held belief that Asian community workers were best equipped to identify the needs of those from their community was exemplified in the records about the West Yorkshire Homeworking group’s fact-finding mission to a homeworkers’ support centre in Tilburg, the Netherlands in 1992. This was part of a strategy to foster stronger international ties amongst home-based workers’ activist groups, and to exchange knowledge in hopes of galvanising change in the immediate and long-term circumstances of workers. Amongst the group of eight activists visiting from the UK was Jaswant, a former homeworker originally from India. Whilst the accounts of these activists only briefly detailed the experiences of Black and South Asian homeworkers, nonetheless it exemplified the crucial importance of South Asian women taking positions of authority as activists to recognise and remedy exploitations that required incisive and specific action. When asked why so few South Asian women adopted a higher profile within activism, Jaswant replied that she thought she worked illegally for nine years and feared the consequences of speaking out. Her only source of information was her employer, who told her nothing. It was a leaflet through her letterbox that informed her of a local meeting for outworkers organised by the West Yorkshire Homeworking Group. This marked the starting point of her relationship with local activists. Had she not known about the support group, she probably would not have been in a position to express the needs of South Asian women.

Jaswant’s perspective illuminated the growing influence of South Asian women who participated in forms of activism that tended to be dominated by middle-class, white women. Although it was difficult to locate the voices of British-South Asian activists in archival material at times, upon filtering through minutes from conferences and meetings, South Asian women were present and they used their experiences and insight to refine outreach initiatives. One of the more successful outcomes of this came in 1988, when the West Yorkshire Homeworking Group hosted its first two-day conference at the local Pakistani Community Centre. Roughly 100 homeworking women were in attendance. The activist group maintained its presence and support through fact packs and support meetings that, according to a Bradford council representative who supported the initiative, empowered women to be more assertive and negotiate their rate of pay.⁸⁷

With the expanded inclusion of South Asian community workers came more nuanced and targeted methods to overcome complex problems specific to the South Asian community, such as language, which often made many South Asian women’s experiences invisible.⁸⁸ The strategies employed during the infancy of homeworkers’ rights campaigns was to produce expensive, multi-language fact packs. Although an effective strategy, a representative for Asian women from Bretton Street Enterprise Centre in Kirklees, at a conference organised by the West Yorkshire Homeworking group in 1992, argued that a multi-pronged approach was a necessary way to support as many South Asian homeworkers as possible. Funding English lessons was recommended as a strategy, with some women needing a foundational English education and others faring better with a college education.⁸⁹ There had been a long-standing and active commitment from the early days of campaigning for homeworkers’ rights to differentiate experiences in the pursuit of effective and wide-ranging change. The involvement of South Asian community workers and former homeworkers put this belief into action.

Activism can work to improve conditions, but it is also crucial in its capacity to illuminate alternatives and options, creating the conditions in which individuals feel they can choose how their lives unfold. The activism that took place in Rochdale, which neighbours Oldham, is the most prominent example of an authority working to meet the needs of migrant homeworkers. It was one of the few local authorities with a homeworking officer. Like other authorities with a homeworking officer employed by the council, such as Halifax, it was a reflection of how extensive this type of work was in the area and the pressing need for the council to fund provisions that supported homeworkers. Whilst improving conditions was part of the remit of this role, archival documents highlight that improving the lives of homeworkers included funding projects that instilled confidence in migrant, working-class women that they could aspire towards professional careers. In 1994, for example, Tanzeem Mahmood, the homeworking officer for Rochdale council, helped organise a 13-week, bilingual business course for thirty Asian homeworkers to attend. The bilingual tutor taught basic office skills, word processing, typing and handling petty cash. In addition, Tanzeem took women to a local community centre to show women what a professional office environment looked like. Although childcare was provided, thirteen women were able to complete the course in full.⁹⁰ Other outreach work did take place, such as a programme to help women knit shawls with an experienced designer, organised by Oldham’s Pakistani Community Centre and Saddleworth Museum in 1994.⁹¹ However, this type of outreach, albeit important, built upon an existing set of technical skills, rather than broadening the breadth of possibilities for those who wanted to partake in formalised waged work.

Activism became necessary when the exploitative practices of businesses could not be remedied by the law. Time and again, governments rarely took the plight of homeworkers seriously and, as a result, campaigners stepped in to support homeworkers, by spreading knowledge about their rights and facilitating the creation of community networks.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have argued that it is crucial to acknowledge the deeply exploitative practices adopted by employers to increase their profits whilst also recognising that women’s everyday experiences amounted to more than the hours they sewed. Women’s testimony revealed that their experiences of homeworking could not be dissociated from their domestic responsibilities. Local economic change and industrial restructuring framed the rise of homeworking in Oldham and, given the tumultuous experiences of men recruited to work in mills that were on the path to closure, women’s homeworking became crucial to the household income. In turn, home became the site of both caring and working for women. At times, women’s memories of this period revolved around the exacting and time-consuming demands of their employers, highlighting the ways in which work dominated their daily routines. Relationships within the household were inevitably affected by this, particularly given that children would help their mothers to ensure deadlines were met. Whilst these memories were steeped in nostalgia, a closer reading of the testimony revealed that women had to contend with poverty, low pay and difficult working conditions whilst also being responsible for housework and childcare.

Across the period, successive governments failed to implement legislation that protected homeworkers, who were the most underpaid workers in Britain, largely because of their ‘atypical’ working lives which involved managing production with housework and childcare. However, the narrative of victimhood is an overly simplistic way in which to frame these women’s lives. Women found ways to resist their work conditions, such as taking part in local activist campaigns which grew in scale from 1974, when the Low Pay Unit published their ground-breaking study ‘Sweated Labour’. Activist campaigns were largely organised by middle-class white women who fought for legislative changes whilst also creating initiatives and resources that could inform homeworkers about their rights. By the 1990s, South Asian community workers and activists played a critical role in building connections with South Asian homeworkers who were often difficult to reach. Initiatives and programmes that specifically met the needs of South Asian homeworkers, who were mostly working-class mothers, became more prevalent in towns and cities such as Rochdale and Bradford. Local activist campaigns were crucial in supporting homeworkers when the national government failed to implement legislation that ensured fair pay, safe working conditions and adequate childcare.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aleena Din

Aleena Din is a recent DPhil graduate in History at Balliol College, University of Oxford. Her research focusses on the migration, settlement and work experiences of working-class Pakistani women in Britain from 1962 until the early twenty-first century.

Notes

1 Jane Tate, ‘The National Group on Homeworking- United Kingdom’, in Action Programmes for the Protection of Homeworkers: Ten Case Studies from Around the World, ed. Ursula Hews (Geneva: International Labour Organisation, 1995), 81.

2 Hansard HC Deb. vol. 943, cc1812–22, 9 February 1978. Also see: Helen McCarthy, ‘Flexible Workers: The Politics of Homework in Postindustrial Britain’, Journal of British Studies 61, no. 1 (2022): 1–25, at p. 1–2.

3 Tate, ‘The National Group on Homeworking- United Kingdom’, 81.

4 See: Sheila Allen and Carol Wolkowitz, Homeworking: Myths and Realities (London: Macmillan Education, 1987); Shelley Pennington and Belinda Westover, A Hidden Workforce: Homeworkers in England 1850–1985 (London: Macmillan Education, 1989); Liz Bisset and Ursula Huws, Sweated Labour: Homeworking in Britain Today (London: Low Pay Unit, 1985); Jane Tate, ‘Homework in Europe: A Paper for the Working Group on Economic and Social Cohesion’ (November 1991), Women’s Library, London School of Economics, London, 7SHR/X/01, File 2.

5 Allen and Wolkowitz, Homeworking: Myths and Realities, 59.

6 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin Classics, 2013), 222.

7 Muhammad Anwar, The Myth of Return: Pakistanis in Britain (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1979), 165. Also see: Virinder Kalra, From Textile Mills to Taxi Ranks: Experiences of Migration, Labour and Social Change (London: Routledge, 2000), 28.

8 Naila Kabeer, The Power to Choose: Bangladeshi Women and Labour Market Decisions in London and Dhaka (London, New York: Verso, 2000), 230.

9 See, for example: Verity Saifullah Khan, ‘Pakistani Women in Britain’, New Community 5, no. 1–2 (1976): 99–108, at p. 99; Anwar, The Myth of Return, 164–6; Amrit Wilson, Finding a Voice: South Asian Women in Britain (London: Virago, 1978), 35.

10 Annie Phizacklea and Carol Wolkowitz, ‘Homeworking in the 90s: A Case Study in Coventry (UK)’, University of Warwick and the World Congress of Sociology Madrid (1990): 25–8, Women’s Library, London School of Economics, London, 7SHR/X/16, Box FL 685.

11 Our Own Reporter, ‘Homeworker Paid 1p Per Hour’, The Guardian, December 7, 1976, 8; Marie Brown, ‘Cracker Trap: Sweated Labour, an Alarming Report on the Plight of Homeworkers, is Published Today’, The Guardian, December 19, 1974, 11; Bisset and Huws, Sweated Labour, 4.

12 Tony Kushner, ‘Alienated Memories: Migrants and the Silences of the Archives’, in Memory and History: Understanding Memory as Source and Subject, ed. Joan Tumblety (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 190.

13 Jeannette A. Bastian, ‘Moving the Margins to the Middle: Reconciling ‘The Archive’ with the Archives’, in Engaging with Records and Archives: Histories and Theories, ed. Fiorella Foscarini, Heather MacNeil, Mak Bonnie, and Oliver Gillianm (London: Facet Publishing, 2016), 3–6.

14 Max Krochmal, ‘Connecting to Activists and the Public Through the Civil Rights in Black and Brown Oral History Project’, Labor Studies in Working Class History 13, no. 3–4 (2016): 15–17, at p. 15.

15 Charlotte Linde, Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 98. Also see: Penny Summerfield, ‘Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives of the Gendered Self in Oral History Interviews’, The Journal of the Social History Society 1 (2004): 65–93.

16 Paul Thompson, ‘The Voice of the Past: Oral History’, in The Oral History Reader, ed. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (London: Routledge, 2015), 34.

17 See, for example: Graham Smith, ‘Remembering in Groups: Negotiating Between ‘Individual’ and ‘Collective’ Memories’, in The Oral History Reader, ed. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (London: Routledge, 2015), 193–211; Patricia Lina Leavy, ‘The Practice of Feminist Oral History and Focus Group Interviews’, in The Practice of Qualitative Interviewing, ed. S. Hesse-Biber and P. Leavy (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2011); Anna Green, ‘Can Memory be Collective’, in Oxford Handbook of Oral History, ed. Donald A. Ritchie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

18 Ceri Peach, ‘South Asian Migration and Settlement in Great Britain, 1951–2001’, Contemporary South Asia 15, no. 2 (2006):133–46, at p. 134. For figures about the UK’s population growth since 1951, see: Office of National Statistics, ‘Overview of the UK Population November 2018’, https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/articles/overviewoftheukpopulation/november2018 (accessed April 19, 2022).

19 Peach, ‘South Asian Migration and Settlement in Great Britain, 1951–2001’, 134.

20 Business Intelligence Service, Oldham 2011 Census Ethnicity Report (Oldham: Oldham Council, 2016), 3.

21 The Change Institute, ‘The Pakistani Muslim Community in England: Understanding Muslim Ethnic Communities’, Communities and Local Government Publications (2009), 25, http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20120920001118/http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/communities/pdf/1170952.pdf (accessed January 20, 2021).

22 Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, Immigrants, India and Pakistan (Work Vouchers) 1962.

23 Hartley Baston, A History of Oldham (Otley, West Yorkshire: The Amythest Press, 1985), 83.

24 Baston, A History of Oldham, 184.

25 Tate, ‘The National Group on Homeworking- United Kingdom’, 81.

26 Kalra, From Textile Mills to Taxi Ranks, 2.

27 Ibid., 2–3.

28 Tate, ‘The National Group on Homeworking- United Kingdom’, 81. Also see: Allen and Wolkowitz, Homeworking: Myths and Realities, 3.

29 ‘Talks on 24p an hour storm’, Yorkshire Evening Post, February 9, 1989, Women’s Library, London School of Economics, London, 7SHR/X/16, Box FL 685, File 2.

30 Tate, ‘Homework in Europe’, 8–9, 7SHR/X/01, File 2.

31 Outworkers News, ‘The Broader Picture’, West Yorkshire Homeworkers Unit (no date), 57, Women’s Library, London School of Economics, London, 7SHR/X/16, Box FL 685, Folder 1.

32 Hansard HC Deb. vol. 80, cc337–47W, at cc377, 10 June 1985.

33 Razia, Author Interview (17/07/19).

34 Ibid.

35 Jabeela, Author Interview (17/07/19).

36 Kabeer, The Power to Choose, 237–8.

37 Allen and Wolkowitz, Homeworking: Myths and Realities, 82.

38 Kanta Walker, ‘Asian Immigrants in Oldham: A Report on a Survey Carries Out in the Glodwick Area of Oldham on Behalf of the Oldham Community Development Project, by Kanta Walker’, Oldham Committee for Community Relations (May 1974), 8, Oldham Archives, Oldham, Relations SFI: FS L386/L387.

39 See, for example: International Conference for Homebased Workers, ‘Homeworking Conference: Friday’ (1992), Women’s Library, London School of Economics, London, Box 7SHR/X/01, file 1, document 6.

40 Maneeza, Author Interview (17/07/19).

41 Noor, Author Interview (28/08/19).

42 Iqra, Shabna and Noor, Author Interview (28/08/19).

43 Allen and Wolkowitz, Homeworking: Myths and Realities, 81.

44 Tate, ‘Homework in Europe’, 13–14, 7SHR/X/01, File 2.

45 Noel Bruen, ‘Ethnic Minority Groups and the Place of Adult Education’, Oldham Community Development Project (no date), 9, Oldham Archives, Oldham, CDP/11/17.

46 Bruen, ‘Ethnic Minority Groups and the Place of Adult Education’, 10, CDP/11/17.

47 Ibid., 7.

48 Imagine North-East, ‘Community Development projects (CDP’s)’, http://www.imaginenortheast.org/national-and-local-policy-the-cdps/ (accessed July 9, 2020).

49 Tate, ‘The National Group on Homeworking- United Kingdom’, 81.

50 ‘Maal’ generally means a substantial volume of items, often associated with messiness.

51 Pat Lewis and Rabia Patel, ‘With One Voice: Black Women in West Yorkshire Talk About Their Working Lives’, West Yorkshire Low Pay Unit (1987): 3–5, Feminist Archives North, University of Leeds, Leeds, HWW 3, Box 12.

52 Razia, Author Interview (17/07/19).

53 Sarfraz Manzoor, Greetings from Bury Park: Race, Religion and Rock ‘n’ Roll (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007), 19.

54 Ibid., 36. Also see: Blinded by the Light (D. Gurinder Chadha, 2019).

55 See: Selina Todd, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class (London: John Murray, 2014), 329–32; Heather Joshi, ‘The Changing Form of Women’s Economic Dependency’, in The Changing Population of Britain, ed. Heather Joshi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 157–76.

56 The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, Provision as to Offences, Section 40.

57 Peter Cole, ‘Macmillan Reacts to Homeworkers’ Survey’, The Guardian, October 17, 1973, 7.

58 Andrew Macleod, ‘Wages Councils’, Industrial Law Journal 3, no. 1 (1974): 60–1, at p. 60.

59 See: Our Own Reporter ‘Homeworker Paid 1p Per Hour’, 8.

60 Brown, ‘Cracker Trap’, 11.

61 Ibid., 11. Also see: Bissett and Hews, Sweated Labour, 10–11.

62 Sheila Allen and Carol Wolkowitz, ‘The Control of Women’s Labour: The Case of Homeworking’, Feminist Review, no. 22 (1986): 25–51, at p. 27.

63 Bisset and Huws, Sweated Labour, 10–11.

64 Hansard HC Deb. vol. 153, cc. 387, 17 May 1989.

65 Ibid., vol. 153, c. 389.

66 Ibid., vol. 153, c. 397.

67 See: Catherine Hakim, Employers’ Use of Outwork: A Study Using the 1980 Workplace Industrial Relations Survey and the 1981 National Survey of Homeworking (London: Department of Employment, 1985).

68 Sarah Boston, Women Workers and the Trade Unions (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1987).

69 Helen McCarthy, ‘Gender Inequality’, in Unequal Britain: Equalities in Britain since 1945, ed. Pat Thane (London, New York: Continuum, 2010), 111.

70 Pat Thane, Divided Kingdom: A History of Britain, 1900-Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 326.

71 Jonathan Moss, Women, Workplace Protest and Identity in England, 1968–85 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 46.

72 Ibid., 45–8.

73 Tate, A Penny for a Bag, 104.

74 Ibid., 114.

75 International Labour Organization, ‘C177- Home Work Convention 1996 (No. 177)’, 20 June 1996.

76 Kitty Jenkins, ‘Homeworkers ‘Paid Below Minimum’’, BBC, November 11, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7087917.stm (accessed September 30, 2022).

77 Jane Tate, A Penny for a Bag: Campaigning on Homework (Batley: Yorkshire and Humberside Low Pay Unit, 1990), 6.

78 Tate, ‘Homework in Europe’, 8–9, 7SHR/X/01, File 2.

79 National Group on Homeworking, ‘National group on homeworking internal documentation 1993–2008 and homeworking fact pack’, Feminist Archives North, University of Leeds, Leeds, FAN/ HWW/19: HWWIV.

80 Tate, A Penny for a Bag, 20. Also see: Greater Manchester Low Pay Unit, ‘Your Rights at Work’ (no date), Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE (Race Archives and Community Engagement) Centre, Manchester Central Library, Manchester, GB3228.8/11.

81 Paula Solloway, ‘Global Strategy for Women’s Labour Organisation’, Northern Star (9–16 July 1992), Women’s Library, London School of Economics, London, 7SHR/X/01, Folder 3.

82 Jane Tate, ‘The National Group on Homeworking- United Kingdom’, 87.

83 Tate, ‘Homework in Europe’, 32, 7SHR/X/01, File 2.

84 Jane Tate, ‘The National Group on Homeworking- United Kingdom’, 82.

85 Phizacklea and Wolkowitz, ‘Homeworking in the 90s’, 5–6, 7SHR/X/16, Box FL 685.

86 Tate, A Penny for a Bag, 49.

87 West Yorkshire Homeworking Group, ‘Homeworking Conference: Meeting Minutes’ (1988), 1, Women’s Library, London School of Economics, London, Box 7SHR/X/01, Folder 1, file 1, document 5.

88 Ibid., 1.

89 West Yorkshire Homeworking Group, ‘Homeworking Conference, Thursday July 2nd 1991’ (July 1991), 3, Women’s Library, London School of Economics, London, Box 7SHR/X/01, File 3, Doc. 1.

90 Greater Manchester Homeworking Group, ‘Minutes Greater Manchester Homeworking Group Meeting’, 6 May 1994 Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE (Race Archives and Community Engagement) Centre, Manchester Central Library, Manchester, GB3228.8/11.

91 Saddleworth Museum, ‘Making Shawls: A New Textile Project for Asian Women at Saddleworth Museum’ (1994), Oldham Archives, Oldham, PXT:SFI L6S270.