148 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Outside the organized sector, thousands of women workers are employed in small-scale cottage industries where they have no statutory safeguards against the attacks of the employers. These are trades like the making of becdis, lac and embroidery, and cleaning of dal, spices and grains. In addition are the women engaged as domestic servants in cities like Calcutta, Bombay, Madras and Delhi, their social origin being the poorer sections of the working class, scheduled castes and agricultural workers who have come to the cities for a livelihood. These are outside the compass of any labour legislation enacted by the government. Out of Work In the late?t publication of the Labour Bureau, it is stated that "the number of women employed in factories had gone down from 10.37 per cent in 1963 to 8.73 per cent in 1972^. The percentage quotient of workers in the female population and its declining trend emerge from the following figures of the 1971 census report: Year Total Rural Urban 1961 27.95 31.40 11.09 1971 13.18 14.55 7.37 Retrenchment of women workers assumed massive proportions in cotton textiles, jute ard mining where ihey constituted a sizeable segment of the labour force. In textile mills in Bombay, Ahmedabad, Coimbatore and other places where women were predominantly employed in the winding and ruling departments, the proportion came down to 5 per cent while in jute, actual numbers fell to 9,334 in 1962 from 32,890 in 1952. Goal mines, where in 1944 one worker out of every four was a woman, now employ only 7.6 per cent women. The total estimated strength in the tobacco-curing factories in 1965 was 98,701 of which women constituted 85 •per cent. It declined to 64,789 in 1970. Cigarrette factories used to employ women to the extent of about two-thirds of the total labour force: a recent survey put it at 12 per cent. Plantation industry is one where women constituted, and still do, a big force in tea, rubber, coffee, cardamom and cinchona. Tea, plantations employ about 48 per cent, rubber 27 and coffee 46 per cent. Eighty per cent of the cardamom workers are women. It is a fact that the planters while increasing the acreage and production of rubber and coffee have drastically reduced the number of workers. Plantation industry which used to employ more than 10 lakhs, at present have jobs for only 8 lakhs. The work-load in tea plantations in India has increased from 278.6 kilos in 1952 to 568 kilos per worker in 1971 as a result of this ^rationalization.' Unemployment among middle-class women is also growing rapidly as evident from the large number of job seekers on the live register on the eve of the International Women's Year. According to statistics published by the Labour Bureau, "over 9.73 lakhs of women were on the live register of the employment exchange at the end of 1974, i.e. it has gone