Microaggressions, Power, and HRM Reform

Microaggressions, power, and Human Resource Management (HRM) reform require rethinking from a gendered labor rights perspective in India. The chapter is an endeavor in this direction as it examines the problems that everyday workplace interactions routinely experience that often maintain gender-based hierarchies, which legal reforms and mainstream HRM reforms find it difficult to resolve. This chapter focuses not on extreme cases of sexual harassment and workplace discrimination, but on microaggressions as potent and often used tools of power over workers and employees, especially women and marginalized groups that seize the everyday suffering and torment across office spaces, factory floors and within supply chains and beyond in sectors such as garments and textiles. This chapter provides a critique of the current HRM reform in India by grounding it in sociology and using microaggressions as a framework to examine daily gendered harms and the legal infrastructure that has been established to protect women in their workplace.