Beyond the social pale

LIKE many disciplines, labour studies too have suffered from stereotyping. For many decades, the prototype of "labour" was the male worker toiling on assembly lines in factories: the powerful and yet simplified image presented by Charlie Chaplin in his classic "Modern Times". Over time, other elements got added to the stereotype: that of the unionised, organised working class struggling essentially for its own interests. From that grew the picture of the "labour aristocrat," the well-paid economistically-oriented worker who had lost his proletarian character, abdicated his responsibility in mobilising others in society to bring about political change.

The problem with that image was that it was only partly correct. A section of the working class had indeed got immersed in mere economism and had become smug - in some colonial countries it had even been co-opted by the bourgeoisie in joining the "national" project of exploiting the colonies and sharing the spoils. But there was much about the working class that was taken for granted. Since sections of it were organised, it was assumed that all of it was unionised. Since some workers in colonial countries with welfare states had achieved relative prosperity, it was taken for granted that exploitation of labour itself had ceased. This simple-minded, partial and unreal idea of labour led to disillusionment with the working class itself.

There was an intellectual and even political backlash against the organised, unionised, econimistic, working class. By the early 1970's, not only students of labour but even organisations like the World Bank had discovered "unorganised labour" and the informal sector as a counter-phenomenon to the so-called "labour aristocracy." It was suddenly recognised that there is an entire stratum of labour that exists but whose existence is rarely acknowledged. It was as if labour studies had once again gone back to taking note of the "tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief" who had been written about in the early years of the Industrial Revolution and generally taken for granted subsequently. In fact it was re-discovered that there are many in the labouring poor - peddlers and prostitutes, plumbers and painters, street vendors and domestic servants - and many, many others who service the elite in many ways but beyond the social pale. They build and sustain economies but are seen as being the perennial outsiders. In the discourse of development they are pushed down from the text to the footnote and in the actual management of the economy, they are relegated to what has been designated as its innocuous sounding informal sector. This division of workers into sectors - formal and informal - creates an artificial duality. Indeed, even as the concept of the informal sector was advanced, its critique also developed. The critique was on many grounds. The most significant criticism of the concept was that it was confined, by and large, only to the urban economy, as if the informal sector did not have an existence beyond the city limits and did not exist in the rural milieu.

Another criticism was that the concept was often used descriptively, with an analytical laziness that did not seek to clarify about the size, relationship and dynamics of the informal sector. And finally, perhaps to distinguish this sector from the formal or "organised" workforce, there was an over-emphasis on self-employment in the informal sector, again on the false assumption that "employment" went along with unionisation and organisation. Thus, through the creation of this artificial duality, the working class was segmented into the organised and unorganised, the formal and the informal, and was fragmented into urban and rural, male and female, industrial and agricultural and other clear-cut 'black and white' categories.

There is, in fact, a continuum in the workforce, ranging from the miserable rag-picker to the relatively well-off organised sector high-tech factory worker. In fact, by making pertinent but simplistic dichotomies, we tend to lose sight of multiple identities and ambiguities in the vast landscape of labour. There are of course many differences across the spectrum of various forms and types of labour but it is also important to note the commonalities and essentialities of labour, particularly in these "post-industrial" times in a "globalised" world.

Globalisation has created a situation where production has been separated from the markets: commodities can be produced in one place and consumed in quite another place. The result is also that there is no relationship at all between the lives of the consumers of such commodities and their producers: diamonds, for instance, may be forever, as the famous advertisement informs buyers, but diamond-polishers are not; their working lives are nasty, often brutish and invariably short.

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Indeed, modernity and industrialism have ugly underbellies: the so-called informal economy. It is an economy based on scrounging, on under-paying, on over-working, on misery and on absolute poverty. It is based on de-humanising the labouring poor.

And yet, the real point of the informal economy is not poverty. In that respect, the term "labouring poor" is somewhat misleading since its focus too is on poverty rather than on the labour that, even in its degraded condition, is as integral to the economy as modern industry. In fact such labour, and such capital too, are the base on which the edifices of commerce and capital are erected.

This organic and mutually sustaining relationship between the informal and formal sectors is quite different from the assumptions about capitalism and development that were made in the first decades after Independence. The development paradigm that became dominant that suggested a major shift would soon took place in India from a rural-agrarian to an urban-industrial type of existence. In the course of that transformation, the condition of poverty in which people were accustomed to live, then considered to be the essential "Asian drama" caused by low levels of production and productivity, was supposed to end. It was to give way to improved levels of living expressed in better food, health, education and housing, in short, a life of human decency and dignity. Although social and economic progress has indeed been made during the last half century, more people than ever before find themselves in a state of immense poverty.

It is important, however, to reiterate that the deprivation and degradation of the poor cannot be understood as the inevitable outcome of stagnation and backwardness. Their origin lies in the politics and policies of the development process itself. Contrary to the idea that poverty is a manifestation of economic redundancy, the down and out produce wealth from which they however remain excluded as beneficiaries. Most of them are the working poor who continue to live in a state of misery and oppression because of the low wages paid for long hours of work.

Occupational multiplicity - doing as many jobs as can be available, and often simultaneously - and cyclical mobility - moving from work sites to work sites almost seasonally - are, in any event, prominent features of the life of the working poor. However, the combined process of urbanisation and factory-based industrialisation, which over a time span of about two centuries transformed the character of western societies, seems to take a different shape in Third World countries such as India. Here even migration is a two-way process. When people go away, they do not necessarily stay away: there is a circulation of labour. Most resourceless workers are pushed out of the village only to be pushed back again after several months or a couple of years in a repetitive drift. Besides, the nature of production itself makes the village a point of arrival as well as of departure.

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There is no equality even among the working poor. Nor is there social homogeneity. Even the solidarity created by trade union, and political action often does not exist. The working people are nowhere near becoming a class for itself; they do not even constitute a class in itself. The working masses floating around at the bottom of the urban economy of Surat and its rural hinterland, for instance, have highly diverse social identifies and are also highly segmented in their mode of employment. The differentiation within their ranks is very marked: powerloom operators and diamond cutters and polishers earn five or six times more than brick kiln workers and sugarcane cutters.

* * *

There is a straightforward relationship between the small and shallow tax basis and Surat's reputation of being one of the dirtiest and most epidemic prone cities in India, lacking in the most basic public amenities. It was only after the so-called plague broke out some years ago that sustained efforts were made to clean up the streets and remove garbage heaps. However, there was a downside to even this; under the guise of beautifying the urban space, the working poor were evicted from their open-air shelters and driven to niches out of the public sight. It is another matter that within a matter of weeks, they were back in the streets again because of the need felt by a large variety of employers to have an ample supply of cheap labour instantly. Constantly available at easy hailing distance, this is labour that is present but not necessarily visible. The visibility not only of labour but also of capital is low in the informal sector economy. Labour in this sector is necessarily mobile, coming and going according to the demands of production; it is, therefore, often ignored altogether or, at best, treated as a temporary incursion in the urban habitat. But much of the business in the informal sector is unstable, shifting, even shifty; massive trade in diamonds is, for instance, carried out almost surreptitiously.

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While the working poor are included in the labour process, they are excluded from their rightful place as citizens in mainstream society. Consequently, the working poor are seen as a dangerous instead of a redundant class: dangerous because a wily, evasive, erratic kind of behaviour is ascribed to them.

This view of the labouring poor derives from the Social Darwinism that was fashionable in the 1860's, premised not only on the idea of "the survival of the fittest" but also based on the axiomatic assumption that the poor were physically, intellectually and morally inferior and indeed unfit. In spite of the fact that a specific type of capital needs precisely that kind of labour - a mobile workforce - there is still a lurking idea that such workers resist the work regime to which they are exposed and are apt to avoid discipline imposed on them. It is assumed that casual work, contract labour and self-employment are modalities which they prefer because these strategies allow them to opt out temporarily, to retreat in niches of their own.

And in some respects that is true too: workers in the de- humanised informal sector do manage to carve out little autonomous spaces for themselves, spaces within which they seek to assert their dignity. This they do by turning precisely the informal and casual nature of their employment and the unregulated nature of their non-working time. The constraints imposed by capital are turned into small freedoms by labour.

The specific form that post-industrialisation has taken in India towards the end of the 20th Century has resulted in large numbers of factories being closed down. This is especially so in the once vibrant textile industry; aged, smokeless and now useless chimneys dot the urban skyline as vestigial remains of a once- upon-a-time enterprise; decline in the influence of trade unions and other organisations of workers go hand in hand with mass unemployment and casualisation of labour. All this has, in many respects, reversed the processes of production itself - from being carried out in factories to once again being fragmented into manufactures. Indeed, globalisation has also meant increased "informalisation". The consequences are severe for the labour process as well as for the labouring people. This book seeks to portray the life and labour of precisely such workers.

Down And Out, Labouring Under Global Capitalism, Text: Jan Breman and Arvind N. Das, Photographs: Ravi Agarwal, Design: Brinda Datta, Oxford University Press 2000, p. 156. Rs. 395.

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