The Everyday Politics of Labour : Working Lives in India's Informal Economy Book

Contents: Acknowledgements. Glossary. 1. Introduction/Studying India’s informal economy 2. The industries/Class, caste, and mobility. 3. The workplace/Hierarchy and authority on the shop floor. 4. ‘Here we can be jolly!’/Sociability on the shop floor. 5. ‘Imagine, we were still paid in kind!’/The politics of union militancy. 6. ‘Our greed has become our problem!’/The politics of baki (debt). 7. ‘We are all sondukaarar (relatives)!’/The politics of kinship. 8. ‘The mother of us all!’/Festivals, patronage, and ‘community’. 9. ‘Let’s unite around kuli (wages) and not jati (caste)!’/State and civil society. 10. Conclusion/Industry, mobility and inequality. Appendices. Bibliography. Index.

"The Everyday Politics of Labour: Working lives in India’s Informal Economy presents an analysis of contemporary labour politics in India’s informal economy. Following increased integration in global economic networks, India’s informal sectors, in some parts of the country, have expanded drastically over recent decades and are employing an increasing number of the country’s working population.

The book presents a powerful critique of simplifying representations that portray workers’ politics in this informal sector as marked by low levels of class consciousness, limited abilities for resistance, and ruled by ‘primordial’ relations of caste, kinship and patronage.

Drawing on detailed ethnographic accounts of three textile industries in Tamil Nadu, collected during two and a half years of fieldwork between 1995 and 2000, the author describes everyday labour activism, explores the character of trade unionism and individualised forms of resistance, and depicts the political culture of the shop floor. A recurrent theme of the book is that a preoccupation with relations of production (or class relations) has for too long marginalised the study of relations in production. The latter focuses on the ways in which relations of hierarchy, authority, class and gender are enacted on a day-to-day basis within the workplace, and how they intertwine with neighbourhood and community relations.

Interesting case studies illustrate how labour politics have been shaped both by the social mobility of some communities and the increased feminisation of some occupations. While castes in the dyeing industries, which were considered to be polluting, have become owners of dying factories, gender patterns in the handloom factories have been reversed as men have moved out to powerloom sectors in search of better paid jobs.    

The book will be of interest to students of economics, politics, sociology and social anthropology. It will be equally valuable to scholars of development studies." (jacket)