India

India has a population of over 1.2 billion people. India boasts some of the world's richest men, with four billionaires on the Forbes Top 10 list for 2008. Yet, it also possesses the world's largest concentration of people living below the poverty line. About half of the country's population, or 458 million people, are counted as part of the total workforce. Mapping this workforce is complex, and as we attempt to account for the range of different occupations in India, from agricultural to industrial and postindustrial workplaces, we consider the history of organized labor, the informal sector, enduring dynamics of caste and class, as well as the rise of high-tech industries and care work. In doing so, we spotlight issues of globalization, technology, marginalization, and migration.

India's industrial labor force has only constituted a small proportion of its total working population. At the peak of colonial industrialization, in the 1920s, only 7.5 percent of India's population were employed in urban industries, and toward the end of the 1990s, it was estimated that only 30 million people out of a workforce of 400 million were employed in the formal industrial sector. Yet, as the historian of India's working classes, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, wrote, the social, political, and cultural significance of the industrial sector has been considerably greater than these “stark figures” suggest. At the end of the 19th century, Mumbai became India's major port, a booming commercial center, one of the largest markets in Asia for the cotton trade, and a rapidly growing home to enormous numbers of industrial workers. The history of organized labor in India is tied to this city and the foundation of the first Workers' organization, the Bombay Mill Hands Association, in 1890. During the 1920s and 1930s, Mumbai's cotton mills saw unprecedented political action, as disputes over pay and conditions spread from single mills to the whole industry, and general strikes periodically convulsed the city's leather industries, railways, and docks. The government of India responded by nominating the first representative of labor to its central legislative assembly, and trade union leaders in Bombay gained their first seats on municipal councils, making organized labor a powerful political constituency.

Since the 1920s, all of India's national political parties have fostered a labor union, just as they might a student or youth wing. These federations have regularly served as useful vehicles for aspiring politicians, from India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was once president of the All India National Trade Union Congress; to the trade unionist V. V. Giri, who was to become president of India. Today, there are 12 trade union centers in India, variously affiliated to national political parties. They act as umbrella bodies for nationwide unions in specific sectors of industry or services, and as bargaining agents between groups of workers, employers, and organs of government.

Following independence from Great Britain in 1947, the Indian government oversaw a massive program of industrial modernization. Large-scale industrial infrastructure projects like the country's new steel plants were to be “temples of modernity,” in which old divisions of caste, region, and religion could be transcended for the greater good of the nation. In the 1970s, books like Mark Holmstrom's South Indian Factory Workers (1976) established this urban labor force and their trade unions as specific objects of sociological enquiry. The trade union was recognized as a lens through which to understand the wider social impacts of industrialization, including changes in caste, gender, and community relations. In the 1970s, the sociology of organized labor documented a shift away from community-based unionism, and the rise of what was frequently termed political unionism, led by people who occupied different socioeconomic positions in hierarchies of caste [Page 432]and class vis-à-vis those they claimed to represent and whose chief assets were frequently their party political affiliations. For many sociologists, the role of “outsiders” is pivotal to understanding India's labor movement. As Dipesh Chakrabarty wrote of Bengali socialists in early-20th-century Calcutta, when high-caste or middle-class labor activists set out to identify with the working class by making a public “sacrifice” of material comforts, they reproduced relationships of caste hierarchy, rather than challenging the social order.

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