Getting home during lockdown: migration disruption, labour control and linked lives in India at the time of Covid-19

ABSTRACT

This paper uses the Covid-19 induced migration disruption in India as a lens to interrogate what this acute moment reveals about the precarity of India’s migrant workers and their experiences of work in ordinary times. Interviews with interstate migrants from north India employed in the Tiruppur region in the southern state of Tamil Nadu present their narratives of being stuck at work when lockdown began, their subsequent struggles to get home, and finally their plans to return to Tamil Nadu later in 2020. Migrant accounts of migration disruption shed light on (1) the local labour control regime at destination that routinely keeps interstate migrants locked into highly exploitative work environments, and that was intensified during lockdown, and (2) the ways in which this labour regime thrives on the spatio-temporal separation of productive and reproductive spheres in migrants’ linked lives. The Covid-19 disruption also reveals how this labour regime flexibly adapted to produce the simultaneous disposability and unfreedom of circular migrant workers. Drawing on critical literature on labour control regimes, and on the separation of productive and reproductive labour under contemporary capitalism, we show how the Covid-19 pandemic disruption was anything but a transformative moment for India’s vast circular migrant workforce.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration disruption
• labour control regime
• linked lives
• Covid-19
• India

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to their research assistant, S. Yuvaraj, who assisted them with interviews in Tamil Nadu. The research obtained ethical approval from the Social Sciences and Arts C-REC at the University of Sussex (ER/SAFD7/3). Verbal consent was given by all research participants, as approved by C-REC. All shortcomings remain our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 All names of our study villages and informants are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

The research was conducted as part of a GCRF EqUIP funded project, entitled Challenging Inequalities: a Indo-European Perspective (grant number ES/R010811/1).