14 SOCIAL SCIENTIST or under the putting-out system which mainly use female and child labour. There is evidence to believe that such activities are increasing fast and diversifying their products. They are now working on a number of products such as ready-made garments, electrical and electronic fittings, glass works, ceramics, leather, plastic and rubber products. All of such products are substitutes or near substitutes for products which traditionally used to be produced by the factory sector. These stray facts suggest several trends: 1 In industries where women were traditionally a minority, they were allowed to bear the brunt of loss of jobs through rationalisation. At the time of their peak employment in the textile industry in the last twenty years, women were only seven percent of the total workers. However, 67 percent of the textile jobs lost between 1957 to 1969 were those of women. They were thus used by their fellow workers as a cushion against one serious blow from their employers. 2 Women are now coming back in the factory sector as cheap substitutes for the regular workers who had won for themselves some reasonable working conditions from their employers. There is a kind of poetic justice in this: The majority of workers had let these weak min-orities'take some of the blows intended for workers in general without a protest. Now the same minorities are coming bad to cut the ground below their fellow workers who had let them down. 3 Expansion in women's factory employment, however, is itself likely to be a temporary phenomenon. They are, in their turn, likely to be replaced by workers outside in the unorganised sector, who accept even lower wages. Thus in the biri industry, more and more work is being done by out-workers who accept only Rs 2 per 1000 biris. In a rubber shop factory in Calcutta, the women who work at the factory get a time rate of about Rs 6 per day. The same work, however is being done increasingly by other out-worker women who get piece rates and earn about half that amount per day with a daily tmtput similar to that of the regular workers. Since this possibility exists, it is unavoidable that future expansion of such industries will be with more out-workers who are not only cheaper but save overheads and, presumably taxes. Conclusion The situation described above, in all its inhumanity, is, however, a comfortable one for the ruling classes. The politicians can point with pride to the increase in employment; the industrialist congratulates himself on discovering a bottomless pool of cheap labour, while the planners and professional economists are happy in the increasing adoption, according to the book, of labour-intensive techniques. And all the while the intelligentsia continue in their dogmatic slumbers co^setted by the services of cheap domestic labour. We believe that all of us are in for an unpleasant shock; the growth of women's work in the unorganised