Mapping India's World of Unorganized LabourSocialist Register

Abstract: The massive unorganized sector, which contributes some 60% of GDP beyond the regulative and protective reach of the state, is one of the four most distinctive features of Indian capitalism. An audit of Indian labour must focus on the workers in this sector. A second feature is the unskilled nature of much work, with employers relying on casual labour and flexible employment practices, so attaching little importance to training and the development of skills.5 A third distinctive feature is the absolute poverty of workers. While organized workers receive a third of all wages and incomes, 36% of the population survives on incomes below the stingy, nutrition-based official poverty line, a number far in excess of the official estimates of those un- or under-employed.6 In 1995, an agricultural labouring household of 2 adults and 2 children earned about $130 a year. Two-thirds of all landless agricultural labour live below the poverty line. Fourth, most work may be unregulated by the state but the markets for their labour are far from 'unstructured'. Work is organized through social institutions such as caste and gender. Capitalism is not dissolving this matrix of social institutions but reconfiguring them slowly, unevenly and in a great diversity of ways. The matrix still affects the tasks most people do, the kinds, terms and conditions of the contracts they are offered and either settle for or refuse. It also generates the volatile political forces-the struggles over class-which overlay the glacial development of the conflict between classes.