A facility for the manufacture of woven coir products in Alleppey, a coastal town and the centre for the industry in Travancore,[2] was established by an American, James Darragh, in 1859.
Those circumstances became poor when financial promises made by those who had recruited them were abandoned from 1931 onwards, with the onset of the Great Depression causing a plummet in the price of coir flooring products and the wages paid to produce them.
[4][a] Changes in census definitions may affect the enumeration but it seems clear that there had been a disproportionate increase in the number employed in the coir factories of Travancore around this time, with the figure rising from around 7,000 in 1931 to 32,000 a decade later, whilst the cottage worker element grew from 120,000 to 133,000.
[5]The coir workers became dis-satisfied with the ability of their communal associations – most notably, the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana – to address their changed circumstances a decade or more before the Depression.
The Travancore Labour Association (TLA) was established and Before long, it had expanded its influence to represent coir workers elsewhere in the town.
[7] It was at first primarily more a caste association than a trade union: its efforts were less focussed on employment matters than on the well-being of its membership in a wider social sense.
It promoted welfare by encouraging various educational facilities and an ayurvedic hospital; its members were active in caste-related affairs such as those that gave rise to the Temple Entry Proclamation and campaigns aimed at ending the practice of Untouchability.
First, in contradiction to one strand of conventional wisdom about labour, the coir workers' union grew in strength and militancy during Depression.