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MAPPING INDIA’S WORLD OF
UNORGANIZED LABOUR
B A R B A R A H A R R I S S -W H I T E AND
NANDINI GOOPTU
I f class struggle is first a struggle over class and second a struggle between
classes, we can say that the overwhelming majority of the Indian work-force
is still kept engaged in the first struggle while capital, even though stratified and
fractured, is engaged in the second.
India’s capitalist economy has a GDP about the size of Belgium’s, but with
a hundred times the number of people and of course a radically different
history. Out of India’s huge labour force, over 390 million strong, only 7% are
in the organized sector. Even the term ‘organized’ is seriously misleading
because only half of the 7% is unionized and in the vanguard of working-class
politics.1 The union movement, despite the efforts of workers, has been
exposed to the exertions of political parties, machinations of the Indian state and
onslaught of employers, so becoming fragmented and failing to represent
consistently the interests of organized labour. ‘Organized sector labour’ means
workers on regular wages or salaries, in registered firms and with access to the
state social security system and its framework of labour law. The rest—93% of
the labour force—works in what is known as the ‘unorganized’ or ‘informal’
economy.2 Unorganized firms are supposed to be small. In fact they may have
substantial work-forces, occasionally numbering hundreds, but where workers
are put deliberately on casual contracts. There is actually no neat boundary
between the two categories of labour. Some sectors, notably mining and dock
labour, straddle the divide. In practically every ‘organized’ firm, including state-
run corporations, unorganized labour is selectively incorporated into the labour
process.3
90 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2001
Nowhere is this more evident than in manufacturing where the unorganized

state of the work-force is overdetermined by a variety of converging forces. For
most of the last century (and long before the era of flexible specialization or
economic liberalization) a process of decentralized agro-industrial mercantile
accumulation gave rise to a numerically powerful stratum of small-scale capi-
talists with low managerial costs and flexible labour practices, a stratum that was
almost literally a law unto itself.4 There, unorganized labour was and is unpro-
tected by the regulatory regime of the state and deprived of any rights at work.
In India, unlike in the West, state regulation of capital–labour relations was not
imposed on capital after industrialization, but accompanied it. This meant that
from the start, strong incentives were created for capital to evade these laws,
while the state acted in the interests of capital whenever organized labour
sought their enforcement. Employers’ responses to radical trades unionism
ensured informalization through subcontracting, putting out and casualization in
‘organized’ firms.
The massive unorganized sector, which contributes some 60% of GDP
beyond the regulative and protective reach of the state, is one of the four most
distinctive features of Indian capitalism. An audit of Indian labour must focus
on the workers in this sector. A second feature is the unskilled nature of much
work, with employers relying on casual labour and flexible employment prac-
tices, so attaching little importance to training and the development of skills.5
A third distinctive feature is the absolute poverty of workers. While organized
workers receive a third of all wages and incomes, 36% of the population
survives on incomes below the stingy, nutrition-based official poverty line, a
number far in excess of the official estimates of those un- or under-employed.6
In 1995, an agricultural labouring household of 2 adults and 2 children earned
about $130 a year. Two-thirds of all landless agricultural labour live below the
poverty line. Fourth, most work may be unregulated by the state but the
markets for their labour are far from ‘unstructured’.7 Work is organized through
social institutions such as caste and gender. Capitalism is not dissolving this
matrix of social institutions but reconfiguring them slowly, unevenly and in a
great diversity of ways. The matrix still affects the tasks most people do, the
kinds, terms and conditions of the contracts they are offered and either settle
for or refuse. It also generates the volatile political forces—the struggles over
class—which overlay the glacial development of the conflict between classes.
While the economy grew at 5% from 1977 to 1994, employment in the
corporate sector was stagnant at 0.1%. Meanwhile, and despite a discourse of
state compression, public-sector employment grew at 2.2% and that of the unor-
ganized economy expanded at 2.6%.8 Contrary to the beliefs behind the
economic reforms, growth has become less and less labour-absorbing over time.
The fastest-growing industries—engineering and software—are those with the
highest labour productivity. The organized sector has shed and informalized up
to half its labour force. Small-scale production has been adversely affected by
a tight money policy and stagnant domestic demand. Agriculture, the construc-
MAPPING INDIA’S WORLD OF UNORGANIZED LABOUR 91
tion industry, quarrying and petty trade are working as shock absorbers, but
ones with ever weaker elasticities of employment.9 Public infrastructure (irri-
gation, roads, stores, electricity, industrial estates) is known to work
synergistically with private investment but has atrophied. Un- and under-
employment are on the increase and of late the real wages of workers in the
unorganized sector have stagnated and in some areas have declined. All this was
clearly foreseen by the World Bank in 1989 which predicted some 8–10 million
of extra unemployment from the stabilization phase alone.10
Cheek by jowl, even in rural India, a household with assets worth $200,000
these days has near-neighbours worth a mere $6. We agree with Sheila Bhalla
that the new economic policy has been most successful in generating ‘gross
inequality—not the straightforward kind where most people get better off, ...
(although) the benefits of growth accrue more to the rich than to the poor, but
the really mean kind where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, not just
in relative terms but absolutely’.11
Indian capitalism has developed in distinctive eras, strata, sectors and
regional blocks. The tiny minority of labour in the corporate and public
sector—the so called ‘commanding heights of the economy’, increasingly
confronting orogenies of global capital—accounts for 20% of GDP. Its fastest-
growing and most publicized sector, software, amounts to 10% of India’s
exports yet it is a mere 0.1% of the global software trade. The brain drain has
effectively deprived India of the engineers who drive software innovation.
India’s ‘cheap labour’ is not yet playing the role of global educated reserve army
which has been attributed to it.12 It relies in turn on wage goods produced by
the altogether cheaper labour, which is the focus of our essay. Agriculture is still
the largest single sector. While its share in the economy shrank from 41% in
1965 to 29% in 1994, during a period when both its technologies and its rela-
tions of production were transformed,13 its share in total employment has hardly
changed—from 73% to 67%. Its labour productivity remains stagnant, currently
at around one-third of that in manufacturing and services.
The bulk of the Indian work-force consists of the catch-all category of the
‘self-employed’. Although ‘self-employed’ may cover small family businesses,
for the most part people classified this way are semi-independent peasants with
small assets, petty commodity producers and traders. They exploit their own
households and often both hire in and hire out labour according to seasonal
peaks, their independence concealing ‘sundry forms of wage labour’.14 One
recent estimate is that 56% of all Indian workers are ‘self employed’ in this guise,
29% are casual wage labourers and just 15% are in any kind of regular waged
or ‘salaried’ employment whether organized or not.15 ‘Self-employed’ people
are entering labour markets in droves and being chosen for their experience by
employers in preference to the third of the Indian population who have no
assets at all.16 The implication of having miniscule assets is the constant manage-
ment of a trade-off between the calendar of demands of accumulation from
petty production and trade and the compulsions of wage labour. The implica-
tion of being casual labour is that while employers will stop employing wage
labour beyond the point at which marginal returns and costs are equalized,
employees themselves will seek to maximize work days, a practice called ‘self-
exploitation’.
Attempts to model Indian workers as objects in a set of markets in which
their prices vary according to supply and demand have proved to have a limited
purchase on the real relations of labour, even when these relations are essen-
tialized as money wages.17 Indian labour is not competitively priced. It is highly
heterogeneous. Not only its returns but also its politicization are shaped by the
social construction of all the markets that make up Indian capitalism. In the
struggle between classes, capital attempts to enforce its control of labour not
only through the manipulation of various non-class social identities but also
through the segmentation and fragmentation of labour markets. For instance,
the blurred boundary between the organized and unorganized sectors is also a
division across caste and gender.18 The uneasy relationship between the struggle
for, and that between, classes is central to the politics of Indian labour. The
tactics by which the various fractions of Indian capital control labour are
comprehensive and pervasive—not only at work but also outside work, and in
the domestic as well as the public sphere. These tactics also operate through the
state. Long before ‘liberalization’, capital has rained body blows on organized
labour. However, the world of labour is not always what capital wills, for labour
often reshapes and complicates that world. Employers’ practices often undergo
significant changes as a result of the efforts of labour, however limited or frag-
mented, to gain control over labour time and labour processes and increase
pay.19
Both labour and capital are shaped for their routine encounters not only by
class but also by gender, caste and point in the life cycle. The constant working
of these relationships may involve aspects of life outside work which may
distract from or compensate for class-based action. They also make for signif-
icant differences in the terms and conditions of work. In a recent study of two
villages in West Bengal, twelve different types of wage-labour contract were
found. There was no single village wage for casual labour. For any one kind of
contract there was a great diversity of detailed terms and conditions, including
pay. Households did not map onto types of contract such as ‘casual labouring’
or ‘permanent labouring’. Labour contracts were affected by gender (more
open-ended obligations and less power to choose for women), caste (which
affects the tasks available to a household), age, and household composition. All
these factors led to variations in the earnings of landless labourers.20 Such axes
of segmentation make for multiple solidarities which tend to make collective,
class-based action harder to achieve.21
In the rest of this essay we try to map the dialectic between the way capital
has manipulated labour relations embedded in Indian social institutions, and the
politics of labour,22 which will also lead us to examine the ability of the Indian
state to respond to the needs and interests of labour. Moreover, the politics of
labour does not remain confined only to responses to strategies of capital, but
is also crucially shaped by the identities and perceptions of labourers themselves.
Such politics, perhaps more appropriately identified as the politics of the poor
than of labour, is a significant reality for labouring people. The transformation
in labour conditions, be it through the agency of labour itself or capital and the
state, cannot happen without initiatives and struggles by workers. Globalization
and liberalization have intensified the need for these struggles.
THE SPATIAL UNIT FOR LABOUR
The social construction of the spatial unit for labour varies hugely in India.
Rural workers have begun to migrate seasonally on a large scale. ‘People who
migrate this way are not “just” migrants. They may also be own-account
farmers, petty traders, school students, gatherers and priests’.23 Buses designed
for 50 people can be found transporting 190 on peak days. New sources of
demand for labour for harvests hundreds of miles away or in seasonal ‘mud
work’ (construction) enable migrant labour to raise agricultural wages and to
break free from debt relations and other demeaning practices in their villages
of origin.24 Nevertheless, the village still tends to be the key unit for the orga-
nization of labour, particularly for women workers who are stuck with
housework and children. Familiarity counts in employers’ decisions whether or
not to spend time supervising operations. Both employers and employees have
expectations about future work based on compliance and loyalty. The struc-
tures of differentiation in land relations, through which demand for labour is
organized, vary village by village. So in the absence of highly developed rural
transport (which is still rare), even if daily casual wages are known to be higher
in the next village, labourers, especially women, often do not seek them. In
turn this generates a fundamental lack of symmetry in the relations between
agricultural employers and casual labour. While employers may not always
maximize profit, they are able to use non-economic means to exploit workers;
meanwhile workers are unable to maximize wages. Since those who do travel
to get better wages are mostly men, it is hardly surprising either that the gender
differential in wages is widening.25
Outside agriculture, even though the distribution of non-agrarian castes such
as weavers (being based on networks, routes and towns rather than spatial terri-
tory) may still shape recruitment, in urban areas the geopolitical unit for a given
labour market may be small.26 Individual small capitalists set the terms and
conditions of their labour contracts. Even when casual wages are ‘agreed’ across
a sector within a town (in actuality usually imposed by associations of
employers, often without any consultation with labour), the implicit terms for
‘casual’ labour (which may include hours, bonuses and perquisites) can be
altered individually.27 So also can the breakdown between the cash and kind
(food) components of wages. Such practices prevent easy comparisons.
So the small-scale and fragmented nature of labour markets restricts collec-
tive action on the part of work-forces encompassing several villages or a
segment of the non-farm or urban economy. The excess supply of labour also
means that the threat of dismissal hangs over negotiations. Despite these
constraints, small groups of workers do try to negotiate their terms of employ-
ment at the level of the individual village or firm, and at times achieve wage
increases or changes in employers’ practices by ‘formalizing’ terms of employ-
ment.28 Their action is, however, focused on individual employers in the
locality and is rarely of long duration, with the possibility of reversals and with
few implications for the wider labour market. The anthropologist Jan Breman
has argued that the movement of labour between firms or over short distances
to get other jobs ‘must be explained as a deed of protest’, and that ‘as employ-
ment becomes less regular and wages lower, the intrepidity of the underdog
seems to increase’.29 Breman interprets such actions as expressions of proletarian
class consciousness, showing workers’ increasing refusal to accept their condi-
tions passively. The fact remains that these attempts at wage negotiation or
escape have no general impact on the relations between capital and labour, and
fail to be enlarged into collective class-based resistance. The problem is not that
workers lack political consciousness or the willingness to resist their exploita-
tion, but that the structural constraints are too severe. Where resistance occurs,
employers often resort to force and violence, often with the complicity of the
local state and the police.
COERCION IN CONTRACTS:
PATRONAGE AND DEBT-BONDAGE
To reduce costs capital has a powerful interest in labour which is flexible.
Flexibility is commonly achieved by capital through casualization and by labour
through its physical movement. Yet many employers (rural and urban) want
people to work at their literal beck and call: to work with cattle, irrigation,
monitoring consignments of grain in town, shifting between workshop/firm
and farm, between farm and family. Although outright, permanent, inheritable
bondage is illegal and increasingly rare, labour is commonly tied not only by
site but also by debt, by contracts which link in a single agreement terms and
conditions for labour with those on land, money or product markets, and by
the non-contractual obligations of patronage which may also require the work
of the women and children of a male labourer. Such ties have thrived on the
lack of symmetry of power associated with customary rights, particularly with
rights of employers to command family labour and rights to terminate the rela-
tionship. There is no archetype for such arrangements, and much regional
variation in their incidence and intellectual contest on the left about their signif-
icance in the process of capitalist transformation.30 They are widely argued to
be breaking down thanks to (i) migration which offers alternative work; (ii)
new technology which reduces demand for labour; (iii) struggles by labour for
contracts less encumbered by customary notions of dependence, inferiority and
obligation; and (iv) other efforts towards emancipation, sometimes organized
along lines of caste.31 Yet the skein of patronage may uncoil only to recoil in
the form of debt-bondage and labour attachment. Throughout South India for
instance, the refusal by labourers to perform collective, unpaid irrigation ‘duties’
as ‘clients’ of a new stratum of lower-caste landowners—work their fathers
performed for Brahmins who have since then sold their land—has contributed
to ruining the longstanding system of tank-fed agriculture and forced
landowners to invest in (or rent) private wells. The provision of accommoda-
tion and/or debt can then be used to force labour to operate electric pumpsets
at night or whenever rationed electricity is available.32 Farther north in Andhra
Pradesh the refusal by men to accept this sort of contract means that women
have graduated from being the assumed adjunct to permanently employed
(‘attached’ or close to bonded) male labour to having such contracts in their
own right.33 In Jan Breman’s region, Gujarat, ‘neo-bondage is less personalized,
more contractual and monetized, while also the elements of patronage have
gone, which provided some protection and a subsistence guarantee, however
meagrely defined, to bonded clients in the past’.34
The consequence of neo-bondage is that emancipatory politics has had to be
focussed ‘upwards’ towards and against local patrons. Resistance usually
consists in violating debt obligations and escaping, though it can also take
collective forms.35 Where bondage is now largely ‘economic’ (enforced with
physical violence, when necessary) and not based on social (and indeed legal)
legitimacy, or on workers’ acceptance that employers are socially and ritually
superior and have the right to extract labour, workers do resist coercive
arrangements, even though they are still forced to enter into debt relations for
job security or out of sheer penury. Some even choose the more risky option
of wage labour on piece-rates, eschewing the security offered by debt-bondage.
While this may not improve their economic condition, it ‘might benefit the
dignity of labour’ and signal an emancipatory move, according to Breman.36
LABOUR-LAND RELATIONS
In the segmented labour and land relations in agriculture the detail of the
labour process reflects local class configurations and the mode of appropriation
and accumulation of surplus. Capitalist landowners set the terms and conditions
of work, the most important of which is a socially determined wage. Their
dominance is bolstered by caste authority and political clout. The size of their
holdings, their production decisions (crops, technologies) and their investment
decisions (particularly in irrigation and in the non-farm rural economy, in
sectors like trade, finance, construction, mills, looms, processing industry and
transport) determine the demand for labour.37
The technologically precocious region of north-west India is a case in point.
The early stages of the green revolution were highly labour-absorptive. Large
landowners responded by luring some labour into permanent contracts to tie
them, while shifting others to piece-work and gangs (‘contract’ labour) to
reduce labour costs. They also subdivided tenancies to reduce the costs of
supervising labour and to ensure that unwaged family labour contributed to
production. Later, employers started to mechanize to cram an extra season of

rice or cotton into this wheat-producing region; the capacity of agriculture to
mop up labour while production was growing fell, and labour even began to
be displaced. Large landowners casualized their labour. Real wages fell.
Employers turned to migrant labour, not to compensate for local shortages but
to ensure control. A striking increase in reverse tenancy (in which small owners
rent out land to large operators) was engineered to concentrate holdings and
reap rents from economies of scale. Militant agitations in the name of all
agrarian interests have consolidated gains for the local elites at the expense of
landless labour which has been kept quiescent and controlled by threats to
reduce demand for their work.38
By contrast small peasants and landless agricultural labourers who form the
great mass of the rural work-force39 are obliged to work by having dependent
family members, by consumption needs, by debt (often at usurious interest)
and, wherever there is no alternative, by the coercive power of dominant
landowners to enforce rental contracts yielding low returns to tenants. They are
effectively reduced to being wage-workers in thin disguise. Average land hold-
ings have fallen dramatically. While small-size farms generally have small-size
families, the smaller the holding the greater the proportion of the household
which has to work for wages—including children, sick or disabled and elderly
people.40 Wage dependency is increasing inexorably in agriculture. In 1961
there were three cultivators for each landless labourer, by 1991 already the
proportions were almost equal.41
The compulsions of labour have never gone without challenge, although the
political agenda of the mass of labourers who are low caste may put food secu-
rity (mediated through the state) and dignity (especially rights to use village
space and public wells) ahead of contracts and pay. Labour scholars of northern
India have recorded a flurry of strikes in the 1990s over wages, the length of
the working day and humiliating treatment by employers; and the dalit-based
Bhahujan Samaj Party has been voted into power in the state of Uttar Pradesh.
(‘Dalit’, literally meaning the down-trodden, refers to untouchables and other
low castes.) The counter-tactics of employers, including the formation of
private armies to coerce labour through brutal suppression, reflect their power
over aspects of life outside the wage relation. Employers have also denied recal-
citrant labour access to common property resources and space, to force them
into submission.42
THE GENDERING OF WORK
Domestic labour produces new labour-power for the wage-labour market
and protects and sustains it when it is unemployed, incapacitated or past coping
with the physical toil. This labour is female. It has long been appreciated that
the process is not a straight subsidy between the genders because unpaid
domestic labour cannot be compared to a money equivalent. Reproductive
strategies also vary with class position. In households with few, if any, assets,
people are compelled to work to reduce dependency, so it is not surprising that

the highest proportions of female and child employment (called ‘participation’!)
are found here. By contrast, educated women in the propertied classes are
frequently withdrawn and effectively secluded—thereby wasting the economic
potential of their education—even to the extent of having adverse implications
for the life chances of their girl children.43 Where individual conditions are
known, women own and control so remarkably less assets than men, are so
much poorer and so significantly less educated that it has been suggested that
their class positions are uniformly lower than men’s.44
Though the gender division of paid work is more flexible than used to be
thought, the division of domestic labour has proved extraordinarily rigid. The
very rare case where an elderly man cares for children to liberate adult women
for fieldwork is the exception that proves the rule that even disabled women
must cope with the ‘domestic’ priorities: collecting fuel and water, washing
clothes, cleaning the interiors of houses, child care, care of the elderly and sick,
post-harvest processing and the preparation of food.
Women work longer and harder than men and their wage-work is what is
available when these tasks are done. They face discrimination in every
conceivable respect. Over two-thirds of women have no money returns from
their work, though the proportion of wage workers among those working is
higher than for men. Female labour is heavily concentrated in rural sites, in
agricultural work, on casual contracts and at wages bordering on starvation.45
Women’s wages are practically everywhere lower than those of men irrespec-
tive of the tightening effect of male migration or of the development of male
jobs in the non-farm economy. In agriculture in the 1990s women’s wages
were on average 71% those of men.46 In non-farm work, women are likely to
be concentrated in the lowest grades and stages, on piece-rates rather than time-
rates and with earnings much lower than men’s.47
Women’s wage-work is not necessarily empowering for them either at work
or at home. In Andhra Pradesh—as we saw—while the feminization of the
gender division of tasks has enabled men to refuse work, their employers have
been able to impose attached contracts on wives. Increases in women’s absolute
or relative income do not necessarily increase the power they have over
domestic resources, budgets, decision-making and spending, despite—or
because of—the fact that women’s expenditure decisions are more likely to
benefit the entire household.48
Whereas the work-force as a whole is becoming more masculine, the agri-
cultural labour force becomes more feminine as women take on (or are forced
by men to take on) most tasks except for ploughing and work with machinery.
Despite serious under-reporting, many millions of women have entered the
work-force over the last three decades. ‘Participation’—largely distress-
induced—went up from 16% in 1971 to 32% in 1988. With this
proletarianization of women, however, comes female unemployment. As with
domestic work, female unemployment is hidden. One careful study puts it at
six to seven times that of men. One million jobs may have been lost in the
1990s. Female underemployment (women looking for more work) is also
increasing at a faster rate than for men.49
The literature gives an overriding impression that women are as docile polit-
ically as they are reputed to be economically. But the support of women (taking
the form of unpaid work, or even willingness to bond their own labour) has
sometimes been important to struggles by men. In Bihar, women who are not
bonded and who have employment options outside agriculture have taken the
lead in strikes.50
AGE AND WORK CAPACITY
Child labour has always been part of the family labour force. Nearly two-
thirds of child labour is of this sort. It is the continuity between this and paid
work on the one hand, and the state’s egregious neglect both of education and
of any means of implementing the existing limited law banning child labour in
hazardous industries on the other, which penalize the children of agricultural
labourers.51 The latest estimate is that while 40 million children work, 13
million or 6% of the 215 million children aged between 5 and 14 work for
wages, the casual component (one-third) of which is slowly rising and being
feminized. ‘It is not that the economy cannot do without child labour, it is
rather that many children cannot do without employment’ comments Ajit
Ghose. This begs questions about why. If they are orphans or escaping abusive
families, or if their parents are sick or disabled, then they lack access to social
security. If their parents are underemployed and looking for work then
employers’ cost-cutting may account for it. If their parents are employed then
their low wages—and sometimes their ‘selfish’ consumption patterns (especially
that of alcohol by men) explains why children labour. When adults are unem-
ployed or mired in debt-bondage, children have to join the labour force.52
Apart from domestic reproductive work, agriculture and animal husbandry,
there are certain industries where children are extensively used in preference
to adult labour, the Sivakasi match-making ‘cluster’ being a notorious case.
Controlled by influential business families, it is organized at home or in
sweat/work-shops. The state turns a blind eye in various ways—from exemp-
tion from the Factories Acts to not enforcing the Minimum Wages Act.53 Child
labour is only slowly on the decline as (non-mandatory) primary education
diffuses at a snail’s pace. Illiteracy and poor levels of education lead to casual
labour, with predictable consequences generation upon generation.54
There is, of course, no age of retirement for ‘unorganized’ labour. Instead,
people are incapacitated from the labour market by the physical insults of old
age, by deteriorating eyesight and eye defects (in agriculture after decades of
staring at the reflected sun in wet fields, in weaving by years of close work in
dim light), and by occupation-related accidents and diseases. There is increasing
evidence that employers will screen labour for physique and pay differential
piece-rates according to workers’ physical condition.
CASTE AND CLASS

Marxists have tended to avoid caste as an analytical category. On the one
hand, to view caste as an allocator of occupations is to exaggerate since for the
most part and for most of history most of the population has been confined to
agriculture. On the other hand castes have become dynamic interest groups.
There is also evidence of caste-occupational stratification, often enforced by
workers themselves to maintain their hold over enclaves of the labour market
or sectors of petty trade. Caste still shapes ideologies of work and status. It
makes for compartmentalized labour markets, ‘with non-competing groups
whose options are severely constrained’.55 It stratifies pay. Caste ideology also
affects whether women work at all, what work they can do, how far from
home they may move. In particular to be ‘scheduled caste’ (the lowest castes,
mainly untouchables and 29% of the population) makes a person twice as likely
to be a casual labourer, in agriculture and poor.56 Scheduled caste women are
also more likely to be in low-paid menial labour, thus reinforcing the gender
division. In town, all the work connected with sanitation and public health
infrastructure without which the economy cannot function is entrusted to
scheduled castes. Even when employed by the state, these workers face routine
harassment and contemptuous treatment. Elsewhere as labourers, they are often
still found doing physically dirty jobs, or handling food still to be stripped of
its protective husks and shells. As petty traders they have entered markets for
commodities with certain physical properties, for example fruit with skins or
vegetables—or recycled materials—that need further physical transformation
before being consumed. In these cases, entry to even petty trade is a struggle:
carving out and defending physical territory previously occupied by others or
encroaching on congested public space.
Scheduled caste and tribal people are constitutionally entitled to positive
discrimination (‘reservations’) in the public sector to redress their social and
economic ‘backwardness’ and deprivation, but the consequences have been
uneven and paradoxical.57 Reservations have helped to entrench the impor-
tance of caste as a social institution for access to jobs, have reinforced the
caste-based segmentation of the labour market and made the reserved castes
into an interest group when the original intention had been to dissolve caste
differences. Reserved jobs are limited (sometimes limited by retaliation from
those implementing them) and commonly absorb only a fraction of those who
qualify. The market for jobs for low-caste people is thus segmented between
those who do and do not benefit from reservation. In the context of liberal-
ization, the limited possibilities of expansion of public-sector employment raise
new questions about the need for job reservation in the private sector if lower
castes are to preserve their limited gains in employment.
Caste is also the basis from which urban, occupation-based trade associations
have evolved. These are developing powerful corporatist regulative roles,
substituting for the state and unambiguously supporting local capital in a way
that limits class conflict. Their collective political agendas, focusing on claims
and privileges from the state and on the control of derived markets (for instance,
through negotiating and fixing the rates for lorry transport, by-products, credit,
porters, cartmen and casual labour), push labour issues low down. Through
collective action based on ‘occupation’, decisions are taken to lengthen
working days, flout other aspects of the labour laws and ignore safety provisions.
Even when employers and employees belong to the same caste, terms and
conditions can be imposed on labour and attempts by labour to unionize can
be collectively resisted by upholding caste solidarity. Ways of organizing labour
can be encouraged which disempower workers: associations of ‘textiles
workers’ are actually (caste-based) master weavers. We have also found orga-
nizations representing yarn twisters, market-place porters and handcart pushers
entirely managed by bosses.58
Yet while caste is used by employers to exploit labour and keep it frag-
mented, labourers too deploy caste identities to organize and, often, to enhance
their status and express dignity in the face of exploitation. Workers may empha-
size caste linkages to maintain their hold over a particular enclave of the labour
market (for a ubiquitous example, scheduled caste municipal workers). When
employers and labourers belong to the same caste—e.g., in the diamond-
cutting industry in Surat (Gujarat), or in the industrial district making cotton
knitwear in Tiruppur (Tamil Nadu)59—labourers often emphasize their caste
solidarity with employers, thereby ensuring the exclusion of other caste groups.
This has ambivalent effects. While such a monopoly benefits labourers, their
reliance on vertical caste ties undermines their ability to challenge exploitation
by employers. (There has never been a strike in the Surat diamond industry,
despite extreme exploitation and physical abuse.)60
No less importantly but far less instrumentally, however, caste plays another
role in labour politics. It has provided an idiom for many sections of the
labouring poor, especially lower castes, to organize politically, although not
always within the context of work or labour relations. Social movements and
the political mobilization of untouchables (or dalits) in India in recent years have
gained momentum in their search for dignity and social status. They have
turned to the state for protection of their rights and for preferential access to
public employment and education. Caste-based social movements have devel-
oped synergies with the work-place based politics of lower castes. For instance,
scheduled caste municipal sanitary workers have organized to improve working
conditions and wages, and at the same time have established caste associations
for the internal reform of their caste, demanded recognition and dignity and
challenged the legitimacy of ritual subordination. Lower-caste groups have also
attempted to forge horizontal linkages with cognate castes of labourers and thus
expanded the scope of mobilization. That lower-caste labourers in both rural
and urban contexts now more actively contest the power of their employers
cannot but be understood within the context of a wider process of political
mobilization. In rural Bihar, the struggles of scheduled caste/untouchable land-
less labour, at times in alliance with radical left-wing political organizations,

against their ‘clean’ upper- or middle-caste landowners-employers, have led to
violent confrontations, caste battles reflecting class conflict.61
It would be wrong to interpret such political mobilizations of labour and
expressions of collective identity in the language of caste as a form of false-
consciousness, not least because caste and class exploitation interpenetrate in the
strategies deployed by employers, and because exclusion from or inclusion in
particular sectors of the labour market rests very significantly on caste status. If
caste, as a social institution, continues to configure the labour market and deter-
mine relations between labour and capital, then it would be too restrictive an
interpretation to exclude ‘caste’ politics, outside the work-place, as being irrel-
evant to the politics of labour. In fact, the former is central to the latter. Caste
consciousness and class consciousness are not mutually exclusive, but can rein-
force each other. Notions of class inflect other languages of politics (such as
caste) and are expressed in terms not based exclusively on perceptions of
economic antagonism. The growing power of lower-caste politics, including
its growing institutionalization in political parties and successful electoral partic-
ipation, may have little direct impact on labour relations. It does, however,
form a very significant aspect of the politics of the labouring poor, even if not
of the politics of labour qua labour, and it also enhances the capacity and will-
ingness of labour to contest the power of upper-caste employers and their
exclusion from various segments of the economy and the labour market.
WORKFORCE INSECURITY
Workers in India are insecure. Open unemployment (rigid at 12%) is not
such a feature of work as intermittent, insecure, poorly productive underem-
ployment. The coexistence of open unemployment with positive wages has
proved hard to explain unless the continual resistance by employees to any
reduction of the real food-equivalence of the wage is factored in. Over a
quarter of the casual labour force at any given moment is looking for more
work and the proportion is growing. Seasonal unemployment and employment
overlap and coexist. Even industrial and commercial capital operates seasonally,
and periods of idleness dot the weeks of peak labour demand. Employers are
wily in making labour insecure. Payments are withheld. Contracts and debt are
manipulated so as to ensure the availability of labour at peak periods of demand
(at below the going rate) while at other times labour is dumped or made to
work at below market rates.62
These tactics are not confined to agriculture. In small towns dominated by
agro-processing there are not one but several fault lines in the security of labour
which materially affect its power struggles. The typical ‘unorganized’ firm
(tightly controlled by hierarchized male family members in order to concen-
trate accumulation) has a labour force divided by its extent and kind of security.
Being part of the permanent labour force is here a condition to be aspired to,
in contrast to being permanent labour in agriculture. Labourers are selected by
origin (local), caste (usually not scheduled), and gender (male). Permanent work
offers a diversity of livelihoods ranging from the night watch to accountancy,
but all requiring individual trust. Contracts are individualized and verbal. They
vary in their periods of payment and of notice of dismissal, the one delayed
(sometimes pay is yearly) and the other instant. Some permanent jobs can be
part-time, some seasonal. Many bosses agree to time off for employees to work
their own land or to do periodic trade, or they make working on the owner’s
land integral to the factory or workshop ‘contract’. A primitive form of occu-
pational welfare is usually extended to this part of the labour force. Employers
will give loans and also ‘gifts’ of petty cash for purposes such as medical expen-
diture, education and marriages. At one and the same time these acts parody
state social protection and reveal how capital acts opportunistically to tie up
labour it does not wish to lose. In stark contrast, the casual labour force is char-
acterized by low and fluctuating pay, higher turnover and no security. While
labour recruiters may be given annual bonuses and lent small sums of money,
attempts are made to turn labour over so as to reduce its customary entitlement
to annual gifts and to avoid protective obligations.
Male casual labour is occasionally unionized.63 Yet the multiplicity of unions
invites the political mediation of disputes, which are rarely resolved in favour
of labour. The labour laws tend not to be enforced by unions but by the state.
Factories Acts inspectors with huge territories to cover and few resources with
which to enforce the law are more often than not found to be implicated with
bosses in a nexus of corruption around the evasion of labour protection laws
and the erosion of labour rights. Female casual labour is subjected to extremes
of casualization, negligence and harassment and to unsafe and unsanitary
working conditions, their wages often being reported by bosses as ‘pocket
money’. In such firms, work has for decades been subcontracted, often
exported to rural sites to avoid inspection and to profit from cheap or unwaged
family labour, from low rents and from the ease of evasion of any ‘welfare’
obligations and taxes. So capital uses informal practices and the idiom of social
protection highly selectively so as to render the majority of the work-force inse-
cure and a small minority less insecure. But the latter works in ambivalent ways
which not only protect but also bind the beneficiaries. As a result the microp-
olitics of labour within a firm may be complex.
THE STATE AND LABOUR
India has two forms of state-mediated social protection. In the first, the state
favours its own employees. ‘Public employees are served best, or rather have
ensured that they are best served’, with respect to pensions, provident funds,
sickness, maternity and unemployment benefit.64 Twelve percent of the
work-force is covered, overwhelmingly male. The state also gives persistent
subsidies to the highly regulated ‘market’ for social insurance—covering at best
8% of (male) lives—and experiments endlessly (but with few successes) with
ways and means of increasing the coverage of insurance. Granted this jungle,
the idea that a welfare state or ‘protective social security’ is a luxury India
cannot afford is contested by few. It then becomes possible to argue that the
ramshackle and leaky raft of anti-poverty policies, targeted development
schemes, employment guarantees and food security measures managed through
the public distribution of grain (all of which have their own histories and poli-
tics) are the appropriate, ‘promotive’ forms of social security.65 Certainly they
are the unsystematic ways in which the state ‘protects’ labour. They are all that
capital allows the state to achieve in this direction. Critics have retorted that
rather than promote labour they subsidize it for capital.66
The second system of social security, set up in Tamil Nadu in 1989 and
copied in New Delhi in 1995 (so that the legal framework exists for other states
to implement67), is a major departure from this orthodoxy. Consisting of
pensions for the aged, widows, agricultural labourers and physically handi-
capped people, survivor benefit, maternity assistance, marriage grants and
accident relief (to those under a poverty line set by local states and in this case
twice the national level), it amounts to 1.5% of state expenditure.68 It is not a
luxury. In the state where it was first implemented, old age and widows’
pensions were most consistently claimed, with one evaluation showing that a
third of those eligible were included after five years of operation. The pension
is $2.50 per month plus one free meal a day and two sets of clothing a year.
Many old people are found unsupported by their relatives, contrary to wide-
spread assumptions. Local discretion proves kinder than the official eligibility
guidelines which have proved harsh and restrictive. Even so the majority of
those eligible are not covered, particularly women. Long delays and bribes also
diminish this benefit. While the impact of this rough but unready safety net on
the lives of claimants may be very significant, its all-India impact on the secu-
rity of workers’ lives is negligible.
The work of the Labour Ministry may also have a limited, or even back-
handed, impact on workers. Take the labour laws.69 Their loopholes are big
enough for the proverbial bus to be driven through them. The Trades Union
Act allows registration but does not require recognition of trade unions as agents
of collective bargaining. While the Industrial Disputes Act curbs the rights of
employers, their powerful tool—the lock-out—is hardly penalized and the state
is empowered to conciliate through a judicial maze which makes workers
dependent on highly qualified, legally knowledgeable representatives. Any
union, however small, can intervene in labour disputes, thereby creating a field
day for manipulation by employers.70 The Minimum Wages, Contract Labour
and Child Labour Acts declare entitlements which actually have to be struggled
for by labour organizations. Further, without reforms to give access to the
courts and make their decisions binding, these laws are toothless. Labour orga-
nizations asserting claims to entitlement are, moreover, often dealt with under
criminal procedure. At best, all these laws have a normative role: to raise expec-
tations and act as a rallying point for mobilization.71 At worst the very laws
supposedly protecting labour encourage capital to informalize it.
The state-in-action also reveals itself as profoundly ambivalent towards

outright proletarianization. On the one hand it lends support to capital at
labour’s expense, all the way from the ring-fencing of unorganized labour to the
love affair between the promoter families dominating big business and the
nationalized banking institutions. Elsewhere there are mighty subsidies for prop-
erty, however ‘small scale’, in the shape of cheap electricity, fertilizer, credit and
food, all ineluctably resistant to blandishments from Washington. The first three
can intensify the pace of differentiation, while cheap food slows it. The public
distribution system of subsidized foodgrains (and up to 59 other essential
commodities) is broad-based, broadly redistributivist and very hard to fine-
tune.72 In Kerala and West Bengal leftist parties have achieved land reforms and
laws securing tenancies, thereby consolidating a decentralized base for petty
accumulation. Throughout India, the gains won by capital in a ‘shadow state’,
through a racketeering nexus of tax evasion and bribery, are larger and broader
than the gains won in this same nexus by labour, in the form of a large army of
petty livelihoods.73 Yet on the other hand, the beneficiaries from land or tenancy
reforms, from the distribution of house sites and from periodic amnesties on
encroachment, are but drops in the ocean. State-directed commercial credit to
enable landless people to join the propertied classes is deliberately denied them.
The negligent enforcement of the social wage also weakens labour. The river
of revenue from tax on liquor is at the expense of widespread domestic violence,
pauperization and food scarcity in the households of drinkers. And the many
nutrition and employment schemes, fuelled by the massive buffer stock of food-
grains which the Government of India is obliged to replenish (as much for
technical as political reasons), often do little more than subsidize (female) labour
for capital. Only in those rather rare places where the wages on employment
schemes exceed the ruling swathe of rates for agricultural labour may such
schemes have an empowering knock-on effect on claims for wage increases.
Further, if the public works created by them prove to be really useful public
goods then the spatial and social mobility of workers—out of bondage and into
towns and the non-farm economy—may be given a boost.74
LABOUR ORGANIZATION
By now it is evident why unorganized labour remains so weak vis-à-vis
capital in India, and why the politics of class among Indian labour—especially
unorganized labour—is so fettered. The possibility of resistance or protest at the
work-place, let alone collective, class-based mobilization on a mass scale, is
fraught with difficulties for informal-sector labour faced with fluidity and inse-
curity of work, migration and circulation of labour, localized and segmented
labour markets with heterogeneity of employment practices, the extensive use
of coercive contracts and debt-bondage, and the preponderance of social insti-
tutions (especially caste and gender) in structuring the labour market and
determining the relations of capital and labour.
So, how does unorganized labour contest the power of capital? The ways in
which labour seeks to reshape and contest the world envisaged by capital
constitute a key element of work-place politics. At one end of the spec-
trum,‘everyday forms of resistance’ prevail, encompassing non-cooperation
with employers in periods of peak demand for labour, reneging on debt repay-
ment, or simply escaping and leaving a job; at the other end, wage bargaining,
protests and strikes.75 Yet while instances of labour agitation are not hard to
find, they are often exceptions to the general trend. Labour protests tend to
remain localized, small-scale, and focused on immediate employers—reflecting
the structural characteristics of the labour market and employment relations.
The possibility of an enlargement of scope remains severely restricted.
Moreover, with frequent changes in employment and employers, politics at the
work-place often becomes irrelevant.
It is hardly surprising, then, that the political expression of much of Indian
labour is to be found outside the context of work, in non-class modes and in
the arena of democratic politics and social movements. The political mobiliza-
tion of lower castes—those usually located at the lowest end of the labour
market and landless workers—has already been mentioned. The labouring poor
also forge solidarities in the locality and neighbourhood, albeit sporadically.
Their experience of control or exploitation does not remain confined to the
work-place. Labour discipline is also achieved through the branches of the state,
notably the police, especially in urban areas, where the labouring poor are the
most direct targets of police action and brutality. Increasing urban violence and
the mobilization against the police of poor people in urban neighbourhoods
reflect state control over labour’s public spaces. The exploitation of labour also
happens indirectly through the lack of urban housing, essential services, utili-
ties and infrastructure. In this, the local and national states and the local
propertied elites are all complicit. Not only is there no provision of public
housing to speak of, but local councils also fail to raise taxes from the proper-
tied to extend the provision of services. Capital has a conflict of interest. On
the one hand, it is in the interest of employers to ensure housing for workers
so as to reproduce the labour force. On the other, when labour is in excess
supply, and indeed in order to reinforce its mobile and flexible character, local
capital helps to prevent the creation of permanent habitats for labour by
avoiding investment in housing directly and by evading taxation. The direct
exploitation of labour at the work-place is thus not entirely separate from the
indirect exploitation of labour through the lack of provision of essential infra-
structure. Problems of housing and lack of urban services for workers have
crucially shaped their politics, with violent clashes in urban neighbourhoods
over space, territory and services, both among the poor themselves and between
the poor and local propertied classes or agents of the local state.76 While the
shortage of housing and infrastructure is a predicament shared by all workers,
the competition for these undermines class solidarity.
The ‘struggle between classes’ through formal unionization, while by no
means a negligible element of Indian labour politics, still only involves a section
of organized sector workers and a small fraction—4%—of the total labour force.
It is fragmented. The All-India TUC was founded in 1920 and has been
controlled since 1929 by the Communist Party of India; the INTUC was
created by the ruling Congress Party in 1947 deliberately to challenge
Communists and establish the role of government in the control of labour. The
Hind Mazdoor Sabha was formed by socialists in 1948, splitting in 1964. The
Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) was created in 1955 by the right-wing Hindu
nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to suppress class conflict; and
the Centre of Indian Trades Unions (CITU) by the Marxist Communist Party
in 1970 after the Communist parties split. Other union movements have been
created by regional political parties, pioneered by the Tamil Dravida Munnetra
Kazhagam, when it came to power in 1967 in the (then) Madras State. As
parties have split, so have their unions. Parties influence unions rather than vice
versa. Others have been formed in the corporate and public sectors and by indi-
vidual charismatic leaders. There is an increasing tendency for unions to be
based on regional, communal or caste lines. Labour unions, with some notable
exceptions, have historically concentrated on advancing the interests of those
whom they represent in organized industry, on whom the law confers the right
to engage in industrial action, and have ignored unorganized workers without
this right.77 Attempts to include unorganized workers in their constituency have
been perceived by unions to pose a danger to the meagre benefits that they have
succeeded in wresting for their own members. The existing form of the labour
movement thus remains irrelevant to the large majority of Indian workers.
Trade unions have even failed to protect the more vulnerable sections of union-
ized labour, such as women or lower castes, when they have come under threat
of retrenchment or have been unable to secure the benefits to which they are
legally entitled.
The union movement has also suffered from many external pressures. The
Indian state, even while it instituted a panoply of laws to regulate the relations
between capital and labour, has in practice upheld the interests of capital.
Indeed, it can be argued that the elaboration of a regulatory regime for labour
by the nascent independent state, committed to industrialization and the
nurture of private capital, was motivated by the need to relieve capital from the
pressure of organized labour and to contain labour militancy within the strait-
jacket of legal and bureaucratic negotiations. Indian labour unions emerged
under the umbrella of various competing political parties, which has fragmented
the trade union movement and fostered rivalry among trade unions.78 Labour
unions affiliated to political parties are often torn between the need to further
party political agendas and the responsibility to advance the interests of labour.
When unions linked with political parties have failed to uphold these interests,
workers have bypassed such unions and rallied around charismatic leaders or
organizations on caste, regional or sectarian lines. Alternatively, they have
formed semi-independent unions based in individual industrial units. The latter
have been more consistent in representing labour and have been in the
vanguard of militant agitations.79 They have also borne the brunt of the
onslaught by management, often with the connivance of the state. The most
radical employees’ unions, including those affiliated to Communist parties, have
been marginalized by the state and debarred by bureaucratic fiat from repre-
senting workers in industrial disputes. Political parties given to moderation have
also sponsored rival unions to undermine the influence of militant labour orga-
nizations and not infrequently acted in concert with employers.80
A trade union movement beset with internal difficulties, external constraints
and fragmentation has more recently, since the 1980s, come under a major
onslaught from capital and faced a new ruthlessness on the part of managers.81
Trade unions in the 1970s and early-80s were able to launch major strike
actions, notably in Bombay, in the context of changing patterns of labour
recruitment. The consequence was a major managerial offensive, both a frontal
assault and a war of attrition, against employees’ unions in particular.
Companies were determined to secure flexibility and impose control over pay
and over work schedules and work loads, which set the terms of collective
bargaining. In a drive to beat the unions into submission, lock-outs of facto-
ries were declared by employers following strikes, thus severely trying the
staying-power of labour. Rival unions, acting in concert with employers, were
deployed to fracture workers’ solidarity. Where unions did succeed in forcing
settlements in favour of workers, companies showed no compunction in
violating them, backed with lock-outs to prevent further agitation. Employers
also had recourse to Voluntary Retirement Schemes, refused to fill vacant jobs,
and unilaterally changed the nature of employment contracts, including the
conversion of bargainable grades into non-bargainable grades, not only to deny
workers the rights of organized sector employees, but also to redefine them as
not being ‘workers’ under the Industrial Disputes Act. In addition, production
units were relocated to geographically dispersed sites, and out-sourcing or
subcontracting became increasingly commonplace for large industries or facto-
ries. In this way, the organized sector itself came under threat with an expansion
in the ranks of unprotected labour which severely undercut the social
constituency of the trade-union movement.
In Mumbai, for instance, the impact of voluntary retirement schemes has to
be set in the context of a co-ordinated attack which involved interlocking
strategies, all centred on the progressive and systematic erosion of the
bargaining unit. The ability of companies to sub-contract was the single most
powerful weapon in this arsenal of strategies. It is clear that management had
finally decided to de-unionize labour and to press for de-unionization even at
the cost of large-scale destruction of jobs and closure of factories. Liberalization
has added considerable impetus to the employers’ offensive, but is clearly not
the cause of it. In this current climate, the creation of a vast pool of unprotected
labour is viewed to be integral to the (largely imaginary) pursuit of competi-
tive advantage, even though this is in complete violation of the social and legal
foundations of modern democracy.
EMANCIPATING FUTURES?
We envisage at least three vectors as being crucial to the development of a
politics of emancipation. First, the union movement urgently needs renewal so
as to encourage the rise of a pro-active, co-ordinated and self-governing trade
unionism, which invests substantially more resources in training and strives to
recover collective bargaining initiatives through inroads into company decision-
making. The remarkable examples of some Bombay-based employees’ unions
such as the Hindustan Lever Employees’ Union, the Philips Employees’ Union
and the Kamani Employees’ Union need noting in this respect.82 Renovation
means the formulation of wider political and social perspectives, from issues
relating to control over employee pensions, or work-place exposure to toxic
substances and the threat of hazardous production to local communities,83 to
active opposition to the repeated and ubiquitous violations of human rights and
labour law that pervade India. Yet, these initiatives are more likely to emerge
from the local independent employees unions. The central trade union lead-
erships have even sometimes endorsed positions that are diametrically opposed
to them, e.g., their willingness to buy into ‘national sovereignty’ arguments,
reinforcing sovereign nation-state control over domestic jurisdictions such as
child labour, political repression and labour standards.84 The seeds of such a
renovated unionism lie both in the past lessons and experiences of movements
like the employees’ unions, and in the growth of new work-forces in produc-
tive sectors that have sprung up since the nineties.
The second vector of change must be a set of clear public policy choices
which expand and give teeth to the legal rights available to workers regardless
of gender. A charter of rights would need the broadest possible remit, to cover
every sector of a complex and segmented labour market where, through delib-
erate lack of regulation, the bulk of the labour force is reduced, de facto, to a
condition of near-servitude; while, at the opposite end, elite or strategic groups
of salaried personnel are deprived of bargaining rights by arbitrary legal devices
which construe ‘bargainable labour’ in ways at complete variance with inter-
national best practice or ILO Conventions.85 Such a charter would mean a
political attempt to alter the background legal rules which affect the distribu-
tion of power and advantage in labour markets and society as a whole.86
Much of the thrust of economic liberalization in India in the nineties has
been an application precisely of such normative choices, but one based on the
assumption that freeing markets from regulation necessarily means greater
freedom for business from organized labour. In fact, throughout the nineties, de-
regulation has gone hand in hand with re-regulation, since no market exists in
a regulatory vacuum and rules are essential to the construction of efficient and
orderly markets. Labour is the remarkable exception to this process. But this
politics of liberalization is simply a construction of capital and the state’s
economic agenda, not an inevitable, much less absolute, expression of some
‘essence’ of liberal economic reforms. The second needed vector is thus a
progressive revamping of corporate and labour laws to give substantial

bargaining rights to the unorganized sector, treating all employees on a par,
without the conscious legal discrimination which currently holds the bulk of
the labour force in a sort of thraldom; and to give to organized labour corpo-
rate governance rights, so that employees and unions can recover some control
over the management decisions which are currently decimating their ranks.
Enabling legislation and mechanisms to translate law into claim and claim into
enforcement (for these and related laws including social and food security, child
labour, equal opportunities, health and safety, etc.) is crucial to a democratic
renewal of society in India.
However, while the first two vectors lack significant social and political
forces to drive them, the third, that of democratic politics, has potential to give
the poor some clout. If poor people emerge as significant political constituen-
cies of the large number of political parties that now compete for power in
India, their needs and interests, including legal protection for labour and social
security measures, which are already insinuated into the policy agendas of the
constituent states, might heave themselves upwards. After all, despite the
retrenchment of public expenditure (in relative if not absolute terms), no state
government has had the courage to ignore the imperatives of electoral politics
and to mess very much with the food subsidies for the poor. Quite the reverse.
When the central government aspires to reduce foodgrains subsidies, state
governments have lately been allowed to get themselves severely indebted to
protect this longstanding, leaky but redistributivist measure to guarantee food
and contain open market prices for this most basic of wage goods.
While there is no evidence yet for any rebalancing of public policy in favour
of the poor or of labour, there is overwhelming evidence of increasing demo-
cratic electoral participation by lower castes and the poor. This has been hailed
as the ‘participatory upsurge of the oppressed’87 and characterized as the
‘plebianization of public culture’.88 Electoral turnouts in India have steadily
increased since independence, but far more significantly, the composition of
those who vote has registered a sea change. While in the years after indepen-
dence the more affluent, the educated, the upper castes and urban residents
formed the majority of voters, in the 1990s, comparatively, the lower castes, the
illiterate, rural people and those with low incomes have started to vote in far
larger numbers.89 The reasons for the increasing democratic engagement of the
poor are yet to be explained and it is far from clear that concerns about labour
relations have a bearing on electoral participation. Yet the acceleration of
democratic participation suggests that poor people have an increasing urgency
to shape the contours of wider democratic politics and to engage with state
power and public policy. Whether this might also have any impact on the
working and living conditions of Indian labour is an imponderable.
The question of labour, however, is not at all incidental to current democ-
ratic struggles in India. For the ‘democratic upsurge’ has elicited from the
propertied, upper- or middle-classes, and upper castes a ‘conservative revolu-
tion’,90 the most dominant institutional expression of which is the Hindu

nationalist political party—the Bharatiya Janata Party. Psephological analysis has
conclusively confirmed that the poor and lower-castes rarely support the BJP,
whose core constituency consists of upper- and middle-classes and castes.
Sociological studies have indicated the strong participation of commercial
communities and rural and urban capitalist classes in the activities of the BJP and
its affiliate organizations. They are drawn to the party because it pledges its
commitment to the increasingly expansionist ambitions of Indian capital and
because it espouses ideologies of caste and patriarchal subordination as well as
a strong, militarized state, one capable of enforcing political stability, public
order and discipline. In quest of a world safe for capital where the democratic
political mobilization of the poor can be tamed, the propertied now look to the
BJP. Arguably, capital’s fear of labour and its need to further subordinate labour,
and make it more flexible and even less politically organized, consolidates its
support for the BJP. Not only did the assault on unions coincide with the rise
of the BJP and its affiliate political organizations, there is also ample direct
evidence that militant, Hindu-chauvinistic, right-wing organizations, like the
Shiv Sena in Bombay, were instrumental in undermining labour militancy and
strikes in the 1980s, with their own trade unions acting in cahoots with
employers to emasculate militant employers’ unions. The politics of the Hindu
Right can justly be interpreted in terms of a wider struggle between capital and
labour in India, being played out in the arena of democratic politics.
Both employers and government authorities are currently working on the
short-sighted assumption that India’s comparative advantage lies in the undis-
putedly low cost of labour. But large reserves of cheap labour cannot constitute
the foundations of a modern, globally competitive economy. Not only does
such a strategy entail the suppression of political and trade union rights for the
majority of wage-earners, and the deliberate fragmentation of the labour force,
but also it presumes a poorly educated, semi-literate and badly nourished mass
of labourers who are constantly vulnerable to exploitation—hardly one that can
sustain mass demand for the goods and services produced by a modern
economy integrated into the global system. At a time when Indian employers
are pressing for wholesale deregulation of the labour market, in the pursuit of
short-term profitability, it is clearly in the long-term interest of the economy
to have a labour force with the requisite levels of training and job security. This
presupposes an expansion of the laws protecting and regulating labour together
with large-scale public investment in what is known in development circles as
‘human capital’ (health, education, social and food security) and infrastructure
(housing, sanitation, electricity and water), as well as a concerted political drive
to create the social and legal conditions under which workers feel free to orga-
nize without fear of reprisal or caste atrocities.
The point, of course, is not that the state is likely to undertake any such
programme of its own accord, but that the ‘making’ of a modern working class
has to be the core of any vision that struggles to modernize social and political
conditions in the country, and the central interest of progressive political forces.
Moreover, a genuinely democratic vision of the Indian polity would have to
be a politics of totalization, given the embeddedness of labour in the whole
matrix of institutions which sustains the numerous trajectories of accumulation
in the country, from caste, communal and gender oppression to the various
forms of authoritarianism which exclude workers from citizenship and citizens
from democracy. It would no longer be possible for a democratic politics in
India to replicate the atomized and fragmented forms of reasoning and imagi-
nation which counterpose politics to economics, trade unionism to political
parties, or democracy to socialism.
NOTES
We are very grateful to Jairus Banaji and Rohini Hensman without whose
helpful advice, critical response and active contributions, particularly to the final
section, this essay would never have been written; to Gerry and Janine Rodgers
who supplied useful literature and to Danny Sriskandarajah who gathered statis-
tical information.
1. Sharit Bhowmik, ‘The Labour Movement in India: Present Problems and Future
Perspectives’, The Indian Journal of Social Work, vol. 59, no. 1, 1998, pp. 147–66.
2. Agriculture is included, even though land is registered, because of the small and
fluctuating size of labour forces on the vast bulk of individual holdings.
3. One recent study of corporate capital put the proportion of unorganized labour
in different corporations at between 40% and 85%. S. Davala (ed.), Employment and
Unionization in Indian Industry, Delhi, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 1992, quoted in
Bhowmik, ‘The Labour Movement’.
4. Nandini Gooptu, The Urban Poor and the Politics of Class, Community and Nation:
Uttar Pradesh between the Two World Wars, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, forthcoming; Christopher Baker, An Indian Rural Economy, 1880–1955: The
Tamilnad Countryside, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1984; Barbara
Harriss-White, A Political Economy of Agricultural Markets in South India; Masters of
the Countryside, New Delhi, Sage, 1996.
5. Kiran Desai, ‘Secondary Labour Market in India—a Case Study of Workers in
Small Scale Industrial Units in Gujarat’ in Maya Shah (ed.), Labour Market
Segmentation in India, Mumbai, Himalaya, 1999, pp. 13–28.
6. Poverty varies according to harvests and foodgrains prices. Two-thirds of those
said to be living on under $1 a day in the world today are in South Asia. Ninety
percent of India’s poor live in the poverty belt covering east and central India,
inland Maharashtra and eastern Madhya Pradesh, a diverse and scarcely urbanized
region. The official Indian poverty line is set and revised at a rural income allowing
for the consumption of 2,200 calories per day together with 20% for shelter,
clothing and medicine. By this account poverty was at its minimum (34%) in
1989. The intransigent persistence of poverty masks a massive increase in
inequality. Sheila Bhalla, ‘Liberalization, Rural Labour Markets and the
Mobilization of Farm Workers: the Haryana Story in an All-India Context’,
Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 26, nos. 2/3, 1999, p. 30.
7. Pace Bhowmik, ‘The Labour Movement’, p. 149.

8. S. Guhan and K. Nagaraj, ‘Adjustment, employment and equity in India’,
International Labour Office, Employment Programme Paper, no. 4,Geneva, 1995.
Organized employment for women grew at three times that for men, fastest in the
urban tertiary sector. See Nisha Srivastava, ‘Striving for a Toehold: Women in the
Organised Sector’, in T. S. Papola and Alakh Sharma, Gender and Employment in
India, New Delhi, Vikas, 1999, pp. 181–205.
9. Ajit Ghose, ‘Current Issues of Employment Policy in India’, Economic and Political
Weekly, vol. XXXIV, no. 36, 4 Sep, 1999, pp. 2592–2608; Wendy Olsen, The
Limits to Conditionality, Oxford, Worldview, forthcoming; Bhalla, ‘Liberalization’,
pp. 36–9.
10. World Bank, India: Poverty, Employment and Social Services, Washington, World
Bank, 1989.
11. Bhalla, ‘Liberalization’, p. 63.
12. Sunil Mani, ‘A Survey of Deregulation in Indian Industry’, in Mitsuhiro Kagami
and Masatsugu Tsuji (eds.), Privatization, Deregulation and Economic Efficiency,
Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 2000; Raphie Kaplinsky, ‘Is Globalization all it is
cracked up to be?’, Bulletin of the Institute of Development Studies, vol. 30, no. 4,
1999, pp. 106–15.
13. Terence Byres, ‘The new technology, class formation and class action in the
Indian countryside’, Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 8, no. 4, 1981. The distribu-
tion of employment between sectors of the economy has hardly changed in the
last two decades.
14. Jan Breman, Footloose Labour: Working in India’s Informal Economy, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 12.
15. Ajit Ghose, ‘Current Issues’.
16. Sheila Bhalla, ‘Liberalization’.
17. Maya Shah (ed.), Labour Market Segmentation.
18. In 1991 a mere 4% of the female work-force was in the organized sector. Women
were 12% of the organized work-force but 33% of the unorganized work-force,
and that is likely to be a gross underestimate. Scheduled caste workers are heavily
concentrated in the unorganized work-force. Sheila Bhalla, ‘Liberalization’.
19 See Geert de Neve, ‘Asking for and giving baki: neo-bondage, or the interplay of
bondage and resistance in the Tamil Nadu power-loom industry’, in Jonathan
Parry, Jan Breman and Karin Kapadia (eds.), The Worlds of Indian Industrial Labour,
New Delhi, Sage, 1999, pp. 379–406; Dilip Simeon, ‘Work and Resistance in the
Jharia Coalfield’, pp. 43–76 in the same book; Chitra Joshi, ‘The Formation of
Work Culture: Industrial Labour in a North Indian City, 1890s–1940s’,
Purusartha, no. 14, 1992, pp. 155–72; and Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, Imperial
Power and Popular Politics: Class Resistance and the State in India, c.1850 –1950,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 66–68.
20. Ben Rogaly, ‘Agricultural Growth and the Structure of “Casual” Labour-hiring
in Rural West Bengal’, Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 23, no. 4, 1996, pp. 141–166.
21. See Jean Dreze and Naresh Sharma, ‘Palanpur: population, society, economy’, in
Peter Lanjouw and Nicholas Stern (eds.), Economic Development in Palanpur over Five
Decades, Oxford, Clarendon, 1998, pp. 66–76.
22. This cannot be a literal mapping, for the work on India’s regions of accumulation
has not yet been done. It is a daunting task because India’s regions are an amalgam
of agro-ecological, agro-structural and politico-administrative. There are huge

regional variations in the composition of capital which affect options for labour.
While in the so-called Bimaru states (after the Hindi for ‘sick’) less than 20% of
rural jobs are not in agriculture, 54% are not in agriculture in the rural non-farm
sector in Kerala and 30% in West Bengal. Yet the latter relatively advanced
states—and those with active Communist parties—have high levels of unem-
ployment, while the reverse applies to Bimaru states. It is the persistence of petty
production and artisanal work in poor states together with the decline of petty
production as a safety net coupled with the inability of the economy to absorb
labour at the wages offered, which explains this paradox. Other states such as
Maharashtra have developed with relatively low levels of unemployment, rela-
tively tight labour ‘markets’ and an employment guarantee scheme run by the
state. See K. Nagaraj, ‘Labour Market Characteristics and Employment
Generation Programmes in India’, in Barbara Harriss-White and S. Subramanian
(eds.), Illfare in India: Essays on India’s Social Sector in Honour of S. Guhan, New
Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 77–80; and Jairus Banaji’s review of
Daniel Thorner’s Atlas of the Agrarian Regions of India: ‘Metamorphoses of
Agrarian Capitalism’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. XXXIV, 2 Oct., 1999, pp.
2850–58.
23. Ben Rogaly et al., ‘Seasonal Migration, Welfare Regimes and Adverse
Incorporation: A Case Study from East India’, paper for the Global Social Policy
Regional Workshop, DflD, Koitta, Bangladesh, March, 2000, p. 2.
24. Gerry Rodgers and Janine Rodgers, ‘Semi-feudalism meets the market: A report
from Purnia’, Economic and Political Weekly, forthcoming. Most rural migrants,
especially women, remain within the same district.
25. Though within the agricultural sector it is converging, see Jeemol Unni, ‘Women
Workers in Agriculture: Some recent Trends’, in Papola and Sharma, Gender and
Employment, pp. 99–121.
26. For linear and network territoriality, see Mattison Mines, The Warrior Merchants:
Textiles, Trade and Territory in South India, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1984. Even in the organized sector ‘sheer physical concentration or dispersal
affects the capacity of workers to sustain strikes and the aggressiveness of
employers’: Jairus Banaji and Rohini Hensman, ‘Outline of an Industrial Relations
Theory of Industrial Conflict’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. XXV, no. 34,
25 August 1990, p. 135–6.
27. Perquisites include clothing, loans of cash, help towards the school fees of chil-
dren, medicines and medical fees, see Harriss-White, A Political Economy, p. 255.
28. Breman, Footloose Labour, pp. 248–54. The Labour File, vol. 5, no. 12 noted four
large co-ordinated protests against the state and landlords in 1999 (pp. 26–28).
29. Breman, Footloose Labour, pp. 255–56.
30. See the debates summarized in Jan Breman, ‘The study of industrial labour in post-
colonial India—the informal sector: a concluding review’, in Parry et al., The
Worlds, pp. 407–432.
31. Jens Lerche, ‘Politics of the Poor: Agricultural Labourers and Political
Transformations in Uttar Pradesh’, Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 26, no. 2/3,
1999, pp. 182–241; in the important special issue edited by Karin Kapadia and Jens
Lerche, Rural Labour Relations in India.
32. David Mosse, ‘The symbolic making of a common property resource: History,
ecology and locality in a tank-irrigated landscape in south India’, Development and

Change, vol. 28, no. 3, 1997, pp. 467–504; S. Janakarajan,‘Village Resurveys:
Issues and Results’, in Jan Breman, Peter Kloos and Ashwani Saith (eds.), The
Village in Asia Revisited, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 413–425.
33. Lucia Da Corta and Devaluri Venkateshwarlu, ‘Unfree Relations and the
Feminization of Agricultural Labour in Andhra Pradesh, 1970–95’, Journal of
Peasant Studies, vol. 26, no. 2/3, 1999, pp. 71–139.
34. Breman, Footloose Labour, p. 169.
35. Workers have attempted to turn debt relations to their advantage. In the power
loom industry in Kumarapalayam town in Tamil Nadu, for example, employers
debt-bonded labourers when they were in scarce supply but soon found that
workers proceeded to dictate terms of employment, realizing that employers were
not in a position to dismiss them while the latter still owed money to the former
(Geert de Neve, ‘Baki’).
36. Breman, ‘Industrial labour’, pp. 423–5; Breman, Footloose Labour, pp. 237–9.
37. When they enter local agribusiness, their pre-harvest loans can be interlocked with
post-harvest sales, thereby indirectly controlling the markets which shape the
production of their creditors.
38. P. K. Jha, Agricultural Labour in India, New Delhi, Vikas, 1997; Sheila Bhalla, ‘New
Relations of Production in Haryana Agriculture’, Economic and Political Weekly,
vol. 1, no. 13, 27 March, 1976 and 1999, ‘Liberalization’.
39. Some 60–80% in one study of northern Tamil Nadu.
40. See Jha, Table 3. On and off-farm work is not directly substitutable. Either work
on the small plot owned comes first and so wage-work is a residual, irrespective
of the pay, or off-farm activity determines the crop choice and labour inputs on
a small farm and cultivation is the residual; Krishna Bharadwaj, ‘A View on
Commercialization in Indian Agriculture and the Development of Capitalism’,
Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, 1985, pp. 7–25.
41. Ajay Varma, Poonam Chauhan and M. M. Rehman, Indian Labour: A select statis-
tical profile, Noida, Giri National Labour Institute, 1997.
42. Ravi Srivastava, ‘Rural Labour in Uttar Pradesh: Emerging features of subsistence,
contradiction and resistance’, Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 26, no. 2/3 1999, pp.
263–315; Jens Lerche, ‘Politics of the poor’.
43. Alice Clark (ed.), Gender and Political Economy: Explorations of South Asian Systems,
New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1993; Barbara Harriss-White, ‘Gender,
Capital and Co-operative Control’ (Cambridge Commonwealth Lectures, ch. 4),
Working Paper Series, http://www.qeh.ox.ac.uk, 2000.
44. T. S. Papola and Alakh Sharma, ‘Introduction’, in Papola and Sharma (eds.),
Gender and Employment, pp. 1–23; da Corta and Venkateswarlu, ‘Unfree relations’.
45. The average daily wage for rural women is 47% of the official nutritional poverty
line. For urban women it is 44%. For men it is 66% and 79%, respectively; see
Ghose, ‘Current Issues’.
46. Ghose, ‘Current Issues’; the data are the latest for 1994. The logic of wage-work
may differ according to gender, with women having a target income still prepared
to work until their marginal productivity approaches zero (and therefore to accept
very low wages) while men strenuously resist attempts to lower wages below a
‘reservation’. The question is whether women are low-paid because forced into
tasks of low productivity consistent with their prior obligations (which are the
result of patriarchal power relations within households), or, because jobs bear social
meanings, low-status jobs pull low-status people and women are ascribed with low
status as people, or because women’s wage work is also at the mercy of patriarchal
discrimination on the‘market’. The jury is still out. The facts that women can be
paid less than men where tasks are directly comparable, that women are being
forced into attached contracts and that employers regularly refer to women’s wages
as ‘pocket money’ need setting against the successful struggle for gender parity in
minimum wages in parts of the rice bowl of West Bengal and in Kerala.
47. Sudha Deshpande, ‘Gender-based Discrimination in Segmented Labour Markets
in India’, in Shah, Labour Market Segmentation, pp. 118–129; Ramesh Iyer, ‘Labour
Market Segmentation and Women’s Employment and Earning Differentials in
India’, in Shah, Labour Market Segmentation, pp. 130–151.
48. Male consumption has been shown in a number of studies not only to be biased
towards the provision of investment goods but also towards male adult goods:
liquor and narcotics. Jayati Ghosh, ‘Macro-economic Trends and Female
Employment’, in Papola and Sharma, Gender and Employment, pp. 318–350.
49. Ghose, ‘Current Issues’; Varma et al., ‘Indian Labour’; da Corta and
Vankateshwarlu, ‘Unfree Relations’. In urban areas, while men are casualized, the
proportion of women workers on regular wages has actually increased, though
there is little opportunity for upward mobility and regular work is now threatened
again by ‘flexibilization’. See Pravin Visaria, ‘Level and Pattern of Female
Employment, 1911–94’ and Amitabh Kundu, ‘Trends and Patterns of Female
Employment’, both in Papola and Shah, Gender and Employment , pp. 23–51 and
52–71.
50. Kalpana Wilson, ‘Patterns of Accumulation and Struggles of Rural Labour: Some
aspects of agrarian change in central Bihar’, Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 26, no.
2/3, 1999, pp. 316–355; Karin Kapadia and Jens Lerche, ‘Introduction’, Journal of
Peasant Studies, vol. 26, no. 2/3, 1999, pp. 1–9.
51. Education is still not mandatory and in the only state where it was made manda-
tory (Tamil Nadu in 1995) it has not been implemented. The law on Child
Labour is the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act of 1986. See
Vasudha Dhagamwar, ‘The Disadvantaged and the law’, in Barbara Harriss-White,
S. Guhan and Robert Cassen (eds.), Poverty in India: Research and Policy, New
Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 433–448.
52. C. P. Chandrasekhar, ‘The Economic Consequences of the Abolition of Child
Labour: An Indian Case Study’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 24, 3, 1997, pp. 137–179.
53. The carpet industry in Uttar Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir is another example.
It is known that many of the children here are virtual slaves, purchased with lump
sum payments to parents by agents for carpet manufacturers. Most of these chil-
dren come from the scheduled caste and tribes, agricultural labouring families in
Bihar, subject to fierce oppression from private armies of upper-caste landowners.
54. Yet secondary education produces a peculiar paradox for workers because it
behaves as a luxury good, fitting young educated people, especially women, not
to enter the labour market See Ghose, ‘Current Issues’.
55. John Harriss, ‘Vulnerable workers in the Indian urban labour market’, in Gerry
Rodgers (ed.),Urban Poverty and the Labour Market, Geneva, International Labour
Office, 1989.
56. ‘Scheduled’ in the constitution to receive positive discrimination. This is a term
for untouchables, Gandhi’s harijans (‘children of god’) and now self termed ‘dalits’
(the oppressed). For analyses of work-force data and data on the many dimensions
through which scheduled caste and tribal people are still viciously discriminated
against, see K. Nagaraj, ‘Labour Market Characteristics’, p. 84; D. Jayaraj and S.
Subramanian, ‘Poverty and Discrimination: Measurement and Evidence from rural
India’, in Harriss-White and Subramanian, Illfare in India, pp. 196–226; Sarah
Ahmed, ‘Occupational Segregation and Caste-based Discrimination in India’ in
Maya Shah, Labour Market Segmentation, pp. 67–92.
57. Oliver Mendelsohn and Marika Vicziany, The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty
and the State in Modern India, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, ch. 4.
58. Elisabetta Basile and Barbara Harriss-White, ‘The Politics of Accumulation in
Small Town India’, Bulletin of the Institute of Development Studies, vol. 30, no. 4,
1999, pp. 31–9.
59. Saurashtra Patels are owners, commission agents and traders, and they employ
labour from the same caste. In Tiruppur a significant part of the entire cluster,
owners and workers, are Vellalar Gounders.
60. For the Surat case see Miranda Engelshoven, ‘Diamonds and Patels: A report on
the diamond industry of Surat’, in Parry et al. (eds.), The Worlds, pp. 353–378. For
Tiruppur, see Sharad Chari, ‘The Agrarian Question comes to Town’, Ph.D.
Thesis, UC Berkeley, 2000 and see also Philippe Cadene and Mark Holmstrom
(eds.), Decentralized Production in India: Industrial Districts, Flexible Specialization and
Employment, New Delhi, Sage,1998.
61. Gail Omvedt, Reinventing Revolution: New Social Movements and the Socialist
Tradition in India, New York, M. E. Sharpe, 1993, pp. 58–61. Clean castes are
those not ritually polluted.
62. Karin Kapadia, ‘The Profitability of Bonded Labour: the Gem Cutting Industry
in Rural South India’, Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 22, no. 3, 1995, pp. 446–83.
63. Workers in the unorganized sector are under 1% of all members of trade unions.
64. S. Guhan, ‘Social Security in India: Looking one step ahead’, in Harriss et al.
(eds.), Poverty in India pp. 282–300.
65. Etisham Ahmed, Jean Dreze, John Hill and Amartya Sen, Social Security in
Developing Countries, Oxford, Clarendon, 1991.
66. Wendy Olsen, The Limits to Conditionality.
67. This was in a highly opportunistic last-ditch attempt by the then ruling Congress
Party to drum up pre-electoral support.
68. This amounts to 0.4% of state domestic product. See Barbara Harriss-White,
‘State, Market, Collective and Household in India’s Social Sector’ in Harriss-
White and Subramanian (eds.), Illfare in India, p. 316.
69. The 1926 Trades Union Act; the 1947 Industrial Disputes Act; the 1948 Factories
Act and Employers’ State Insurance Act; the 1961 Maternity Benefits Act; the
1965 Payments of Bonus Act; the 1972 Employees’ Provident Fund and
Miscellaneous Provision Act and the Payment of Gratuity Act; not to mention
those affecting the unorganized sector: the 1970 Contract Labour (Regulation and
Abolition Act) and last and least the 1986 Child Labour (Protection and
Regulation) Act; see Bhowmik, ‘The Labour Movement’.
70. Bhowmik, ‘The Labour Movement’.
71. Dhagamwar, ‘The Law and the Disadvantaged’.
72. Jos Mooij, Food Policy and the Indian State: The Public Distribution System in South
India, New Delhi, Oxford University Press.

73. See Mooij, Food Policy for the PDS; Ron Herring, Land to the Tiller: the Political
economy of Agrarian reform in South Asia, New Haven, Yale University Press for land
reforms and Barbara Harriss-White, ‘The Local State and the Informal Economy’
(Cambridge Commonwealth lectures, ch. 6), Working Paper Series http://www.
qeh.ox.ac.uk, 2000 for the state.
74. Srivastava, ‘Rural Labour in UP’; da Corta and Venkateshwarlu, ‘Unfree
Relations’.
75. Breman, Footloose Labour, ch. 8; Gail Omvedt, Reinventing Revolution. A case in
point is the unionization of informal-sector women workers through SEWA
discussed by Rohini Hensman elsewhere in this volume.
76. Cadene and Holmstrom, Decentralized Production.
77. Bhowmik, ‘Labour Movement’, pp. 158–9.
78. Bhowmik, ‘Labour Movement’, p. 153, pp. 160–62 and International Labour
Office, World Labour Report, Geneva, 1992.
79. These paragraphs draw heavily on Jairus Banaji and Rohini Hensman, Beyond
Multinationalism: Management Policy and Bargaining Relations in International
Companies, New Delhi, Sage, 1990.
80. Bhowmik, ‘Labour Movement’. However, when it comes to strikes there is
evidence that it is the history and experience of bargaining at the plant level which
explains industrial conflict. See Banaji and Hensman, ‘Outline’.
81. See Banaji and Hensman, ‘Outline’ and Jairus Banaji and Rohini Hensman, ‘A
short history of the employees unions in Bombay, 1947–1991’, paper presented
to the First Annual Conference of the Association of Indian Labour Historians,
16–18 March, 1998, New Delhi.
82. Banaji and Hensman find that multinational managements integrate finance and
technology but deliberately isolate labour on its various sites. However, as a result,
some Indian labour has more power in collective bargaining than either the work-
forces of national capital or those in the HQs of MNCs. See Banaji and Hensman,
Beyond Multinationalism.
83. Or their collective opposition to the country accepting the WHO Framework
Convention on Tobacco Control. See Tara Jones, Corporate Killing: Bhopals Will
Happen, London 1988.
84. See ‘Tobacco and TUs: wrong end of stick’, Economic and Political Weekly, XXXV,
no. 16, 15 April 2000, p. 1329.
85. E.g., the ability of scientific and technical personnel to join unions (in the UK,
for example), or the various ILO conventions which secure such rights for higher
grades of employees; see also ILO, Decent Work, Geneva, 1999.
86. Cf. Katherine Van Wezel Stone, ‘Labour markets, employment contracts, and
corporate change’, in J. McCahery, S. Picciotto and C. Scott (eds.), Corporate
Control and Accountability: Changing Structures and the Dynamics of Regulation,Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 1993.
87. CSDS Team, in Frontline, 26 Nov., 1999.
88. Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in
Modern India, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1999.
89. On changing voting patterns, see Yogendra Yadav, ‘Understanding the Second
Democratic Upsurge: trends of Bahujan participation in electoral politics in the
1990s’, in Francine Frankel, Z. Hasan, R. Bhargava and B. Arora (eds.),
Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy, New Delhi, Oxford
University Press, 2000; Yogendra Yadav, ‘India’s Third Electoral System,
1989–99’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. XXXIV, nos. 34–35, Aug. 21–27,
Aug. 28–Sep. 3, 1999; J. Alam, ‘What is happening inside India’s democracy’,
Economic and Political Weekly, vol. XXXIV, no. 37, 11–17 September, 1999.
90. Hansen, Saffron Wave.

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MAPPING INDIA’S WORLD OF

Nowhere is this more evident than in manufacturing where the unorganized

production. Later, employers started to mechanize to cram an extra season of

people are compelled to work to reduce dependency, so it is not surprising that

CASTE AND CLASS

less labour, at times in alliance with radical left-wing political organizations,

The state-in-action also reveals itself as profoundly ambivalent towards

progressive revamping of corporate and labour laws to give substantial

tion’,90 the most dominant institutional expression of which is the Hindu

7. Pace Bhowmik, ‘The Labour Movement’, p. 149.

of agro-ecological, agro-structural and politico-administrative. There are huge

ecology and locality in a tank-irrigated landscape in south India’, Development and

India, New Delhi, Oxford University Press.

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