Is There an Indian Precariat? Evidence from the Auto Manufacturing Industry

ABSTRACT

Guy Standing’s precariat thesis, which suggests that precarious workers have distinctive class interests, has resonance in India where the overwhelming majority of workers lack adequate social protection. Among many criticisms, researchers have responded that this thesis ignores the historical experience of workers in poor countries and erroneously frames precarity as the province of a separate social class. As part of this debate, Erik Olin Wright argued that precarious workers were better understood as a potential fraction of the working class whose interests sometimes complemented and sometimes conflicted with the interests of other workers depending upon the regulatory scale and political terrain of struggle. Using an ethnography-based case study of automotive manufacturing in India’s National Capital Region, this article considers which of these frameworks – Standing’s or Wright’s – is better able to address the dynamic of contemporary struggle in a local labour control regime which has displaced an established core of “regular workers” with a surplus population of precarious “contract workers.”

KEY WORDS:

• Precariat
• precarious work
• social class
• India
• local labour control regime
• auto industry

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Surendra Pratap and Dr Krishna Shekhar Lal Das for their advice and assistance with the field research for this article.

Notes

1. Pseudonyms are used to conceal all workers’ names in this article.

2. The city and district of Gurgaon was officially re-named “Gurugram” in 2016 although the old name is still widely used. To minimise confusion, this article retains the old name as the nomenclature during the time of field research.

3. Gurgaon district falls within the state of Haryana.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded under an Endeavour Australia Cheung Kong Research Fellowship (Award ID No. 3588_2013).