Informal Workers’ Mobilization in Central India: The Limits of Democratic Dissent?

• In Event: 439 - Section on Labor and Labor Movements Paper Session. Organizing the Unorganizable: Labor Activism among Informal and Low-Wage Workers

Abstract

Recent scholarship has replaced the prototypical concept of working class-consciousness with what are considered to be empirically more grounded categories such as citizenship, neighborhood networks and community. In this article, I argue that good citizenship, class-consciousness and community affiliations exist concurrently: they are relational identities that emerge from workers’ varied interactions within the complex social world of state, capital, rival unions, public, reporters, intellectuals and their own community. The case I examine is Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha (Chhattisgarh Liberation Front or CMM), a contract-workers’ union, in the state-owned iron-ore mines in the Chhattisgarh- a state in central India. The evidence is generated from eighteen- month ethnographic research. The workers, in personal interviews, underlined a class-consciousness, which they projected over peasant, regional and even citizen identities. Yet they demanded social citizenship from the state, recognition of rights and entitlements as citizen-workers, equal treatment with regular workers, improvement in everyday living, and general inclusion in the space of the nation-state, from which they were partially excluded. They used their community affiliations, affections and networks to expand the union to the country side and to the neighboring towns, and gain leverage as a regional political party. It could be argued, citing a single one of those versions that the workers “were acting” as workers, as citizens, or community members. I show, however, that these identities exist simultaneously, each expressed within a particular relation in which the workers were engaged.

Author

• Manjusha S. Nair, National University of Singapore