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ABSTRACT
In the contemporary global economy, new technologies are growing the ‘reserve army’ of labour, while the wage-system is becoming increasingly unable to meet workers’ ‘basic needs’. Bernstein’s concept of ‘classes of labour’ refers to the growing proportion of the world’s population that is now compelled to reproduce itself through various forms of petty production and wage-labour that is increasingly scarce, informal and precarious. Rather than more ‘visible’ locations in global production networks, this paper focuses on the under-researched majority of labourers who have little structural or associational power. Drawing on fieldwork in India, the paper seeks out the social, spatial and temporal forms of labour’s collective action by analysing spatial patterns of reproduction and forms of control. Inflected with the agency of both capital and labour, these ‘local labour control regimes’ are shown to vary across two contrasting ‘reproduction zones’: a commuting zone that links villages to nearby cities, and a circulation zone that links remote villages to a distant city. The paper analyses how collective action varies across the two ‘zones’, and considers the possibilities for scaling up, consolidating and extending class struggle.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments, the editors of this collection and of the Journal of Peasant Studies, those who gave up their free time to talk, Savitri for research assistance, and Radha and Shalmalee for translation. Thanks also to Gavin Capps, Demet Dinler and Yannis Feresiadis for comments on an earlier draft, and the members of the HMWDRS who provide a valuable forum for discussion.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Jonathan Pattenden is a senior lecturer in politics and development studies at the University of East Anglia, UK. His research interests centre on the political economy and political sociology of class relations and agrarian change. He is the author of Labour, state and society in rural India: a class-relational approach (2016), and co-editor of Class dynamics of development (2017). He has published in the Journal of Agrarian Change, Journal of Peasant Studies, Development and Change, Global Labour Journal, Economic and Political Weekly, and Third World Quarterly. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Agrarian Change. Email: [email protected]
Notes
1 For example, large ready-mix cement trucks are reducing demand for concrete pourers.
2 And in some cases includes those who have settled in the city but retain some social and economic links to their home villages – returning for marriages, and in some cases retaining small landholdings and bringing grains to the city.
3 See also Lerche (Citation2010) and Pattenden (Citation2016a) for discussion of classes of labour in relation to India.
4 As net sellers of labour-power they primarily reproduce themselves either through wage-labour or through petty forms of self-employment supplemented by wage-labour (where self-employment does not allow for simple reproduction, let alone expanded reproduction). See below for the application of this definition to this paper’s fieldwork areas. The term ‘net sellers of labour power’ (drawing on Patnaik Citation1976) does not capture the messiness of boundaries at the level of ‘the concrete’ as shown by discussions of petty commodity production and households’ changing socio-economic position over time (Pattenden Citation2016a), but nevertheless helps to pin down those households that primarily make a living through wage-labour.
5 The broader dynamics of the capital–labour relation allow lead companies in buyer-driven commodity chains to put downwards pressure on labour’s terms and conditions as capitalists in the ‘global south’ struggle to access and hold on to a place in the global marketplace (e.g. Barrientos and Kritzinger Citation2004), while capital’s widespread ability to relocate can undo regulatory gains (Riisgaard and Hammer Citation2011), or spikes in associational power (Silver Citation2003) – spatial fixes offered across a broader terrain than was once the case.
6 For a critical discussion of global labour studies literature, see Burawoy (Citation2010).
7 There are moments when labour’s structural power increases – at harvest time, for example (Wilson Citation1999), although this can often be countered by drawing in labour from elsewhere.
8 This is higher than the overall level of informality, which government data indicate stood at 91.9 percent in 2011/2012, down marginally from 92.7 percent in 2004/2005 but up in terms of absolute numbers by 14.62 million (Srija and Shirke Citation2014, 41).
9 See Pattenden (Citation2016a, 43, 76); Srivastava and Jha (Citation2016, 86).
10 The reference to international markets draws on recent discussions with Elena Baglioni. See also Jonas (Citation1996) for an earlier discussion of the term.
11 See, for example, Agarwala (Citation2013) for discussion of more formal and overt forms, and Swider (Citation2015) for more informal and less visible forms.
12 The names of villages and urban settlements have all been changed.
13 Depending on scale of operations and ownership of means of production, some subcontractors were petty capitalists, and some were labour organisers who sometimes worked alongside workers.
14 More precisely, of the around two-thirds of households that belonged to classes of labour in 2014, only 14 percent made a living through petty agriculture and livestock-rearing, while 82 percent did so through informal wage-labour (Pattenden Citation2016b, 1819). Of these, 70.2 percent mostly worked in the nearby city and 29.8 percent in the village.
15 In 2014, of the approximately 70 percent of households that belonged to classes of labour in Jagalwara village, 84.9 percent primarily reproduced themselves through informal wage-labour while 13.4 percent primarily did so through agriculture and livestock-rearing (Pattenden Citation2016b, 1819). Seventy-three percent of the predominantly wage-labouring households primarily made a living as agricultural wage-labourers in their own and nearby villages, while 27 percent primarily did so as construction labourers in distant Bangalore.
16 The paper focuses primarily on urban worksites and their links to home villages. For more detailed discussion of rural worksites, see Pattenden (Citation2016a).
17 Subcontractors may be higher paid labourers or petty capitalists, depending on scale of operation, ownership of machinery, etc.
18 These workers, like the Tamil migrants referred to below, had settled in the city and did not intend to return home. Although not part of the circulation zone, they were part of what shaped it. Before moving into different parts of the construction sector, this earlier wave of migrants had previously occupied the small-scale core construction work that those in the circulation zone had now moved into.
19 The Jagruthi Mahela Sanghathan.
20 The small-scale village brick production sites visited during fieldwork were operated by petty village-based capitalists, while those in the city were subcontracted to intermediaries by larger capitalists.
21 Such strategies resonate with calls in the literature for more emphasis on local trade unions, self-organised workers’ groups, cross-organisational networks (Zajak, Egels-Zanden, and Piper Citation2017, 899), ‘worker centre’-based ‘local advocacy networks’ (Milkman Citation2010, 4), and a ‘social movement unionism’ that spans workplaces and living spaces, and links different antagonisms and spatial scales (Waterman Citation1993).
22 The settled workers living in formal housing (Yadgir colony) were mostly likely to act collectively in relation to the state (Municipal Corporation), as were the Tamil workers living in informal city settlements, but the latter were the least likely of all to act collectively.