Labor History

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Labor History Symposium: Rohini Hensman,

Workers, Unions and Global Capitalism: Lessons
from India

Craig Phelan , Aditya Nigam , Sonia McKay , Jan Breman & Rohini Hensman

To cite this article: Craig Phelan , Aditya Nigam , Sonia McKay , Jan Breman & Rohini Hensman
(2011) Labor History Symposium: Rohini Hensman, Workers, Unions and Global Capitalism:
Lessons from India , Labor History, 52:4, 535-562, DOI: 10.1080/0023656X.2011.632516

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Labor History
Vol. 52, No. 4, November 2011, 535–562

Labor History Symposium: Rohini Hensman, Workers, Unions and

Global Capitalism: Lessons from India

Workers, Unions and Global Capitalism: Lessons from India, by Rohini Hensman,
New York, Columbia University Press, 2011, ISBN: 978-0-231-14800-9 (cloth)

India’s workers and the global labour pool

Noted labour economist Richard Freeman has estimated that over the past
generation or so, the global labour force has more than doubled due largely to the
entry of Chinese, Indian and former Soviet bloc workers into the global economy.
Workers had of course always existed in these places, but it was only in the 1980s and
1990s that their economies were thrust into the global system of production and
consumption. While these countries contributed precious little capital to that system,
they added approximately 1.47 billion new workers to the global labour pool, and
this has placed such unprecedented pressure on labour markets throughout the world
that Freeman regards it as a major ‘turning point in economic history’. As a result,
advanced countries will see real wages and employment grow more slowly than in the
past for the foreseeable future. Developing countries will lose manufacturing jobs
and will see a shift in labour to the informal sector, with an accompanying increase in
poverty. And rising inequality in India and China will create ‘dangers of social
unrest’.1
Freeman is certainly not alone in calling attention to the seismic shift in the
global capital-labour ratio brought about by economic developments in China and
India, and he is hardly the sole voice calling for the World Bank and International
Monetary Fund to adopt ‘a new model of globalization and new policies that put
upfront the well-being of workers around the world’. Considering their historical
importance, it is surprising how little we know about these 1.47 billion new entrants
to the global labour pool. What rights do working people have in these countries?
What labour laws and industrial relations systems exist there? What do we know of
their trade union histories? How have these workers and their institutions been
impacted by having been thrust into the global system of production? How have they
resisted the inevitable dislocations of globalization? And what can we learn from
studying their collective histories and current strategies?
We are beginning to learn about Chinese workers and their organizations,
particularly the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). Although often
dismissed as a sham because it is state controlled, the ACFTU has enormous
potential as a source of change because of its sheer size. With nearly 170 million

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536 Symposium

workers in 2006, the ACFTU has more ‘members’ than all the world’s other trade
unions combined.2 We are also learning about the historical sense of entitlement
among Chinese regarding job security and welfare benefits, and about the massive
social unrest involving millions of workers that bubbles to the surface when such
entitlement is threatened by changes in that country’s labour laws.3
Far less has been written about Indian workers and working-class institutions - so
much so that Rohini Hensman, an experienced trade union researcher and activist
based in Bombay, wonders aloud about the ‘curious lack’ of interest in the Indian
working class, given that the country ‘follows closely on the heels of China in terms
of the size its labor force and its growing importance within the global economy’
(p. 5). Fortunately, Hensman herself has done much to begin to fill that void and
stimulate interest in her topic. Her book is a concise and illuminating history of
Indian trade unionism and industrial relations. And it is so much more than that. It
is a treatise on the nature of globalization and its impact on workers in India and
elsewhere in the developing world, an authoritative guide to the harsh realities of
work in the ever-expanding informal sector, and a call for a worker-centred
programme to transform the politics that presently underlies globalization. While
some readers may find her guarded optimism in organized labour’s future a bit on
the sanguine side, all readers will benefit from a book that is erudite, informative and
consistently thought provoking.
One reason why so little is known about Indian labour and trade unionism is its
complexity and diversity. There is no coherent Indian industrial relations system;
both the central and state governments have been prolific in passing labour laws.
Rather than a single national trade union federation, there are no less than twelve,
each of which in turn serves as the labour wing of an established political party.
There are also a growing number of unaffiliated unions which, although usually
lacking in resources, pursue their own agendas free from the domination of political
parties. Indian trade unionism is deeply divided along ideological lines, and it is
further divided by caste and community ties. By law, only seven workers are needed
to form a union, and therefore an unhealthy level of union proliferation is reflected
in the workplace, eroding collective bargaining strength, stifling worker militancy,
and undermining any sense of working-class unity.4
The political and legal climate in India has not been conducive to union vitality.
Historically, labour legislation in India has been geared towards the suppression of
industrial conflict through a highly bureaucratic process of dispute resolution, which
in turn has made mainstream trade unions dependent on lawyers and technocrats
rather than on strike generals or collective bargaining experts. Moreover, trade
unions have traditionally been heavily reliant on political patronage at the state level
to protect them from adverse legislation and safeguard employment, placing a
premium on trade union leaders who are able to forge and maintain relationships
with politicians rather than on union leaders eager to roll up their sleeves and
organise new recruits. This in part explains what some commentators have described
as a passive union culture in which the rank and file has a tendency to be uninvolved,
in which workers in new industries remain unorganised, and in which the union
leadership curries favour with political elites.5
While union density statistics in India are notoriously unreliable, the strength of
the movement has always been in the numerous public sector enterprises created
 Labor History 537

after India secured its independence. The formation of large, employment-intensive

public sector enterprises fuelled economic growth and trade union advancement. By
the 1970s, however, the economy began to stagnate, and by the end of that decade a
marked turn in industrial relations became evident. Employers embarked on
aggressive campaigns to shed excess labour, eliminate unions and restructure these
unprofitable public sector firms. In June 1991 the Indian government adopted the
World Bank-IMF’s structural adjustment programme, signalling that India had at
last liberalised its economy and entered the global system of production.6 But by that
time formal sector workers were already in the midst of a wave of privatization, plant
closures and retrenchment. Especially hard hit were industrial centres like Bombay
where the trade union movement was strongest. Hensman ably describes this process,
illuminating not only the new and more precarious forms of work that have emerged
in India and elsewhere since the 1980s, but also the liberalisation of labour law and
the corresponding decline of India’s traditional unions.
Hensman is no anti-globalization campaigner. Not only does she consider
resistance to globalization today to be as futile as resistance to the industrial
revolution would have been 200 years ago, but she has no nostalgia for the state
capitalism of the 1960s and 1970s, and no desire to join hands with the right-wing
protectionists who spearhead the anti-globalization movement. She is at pains to
move the globalization debate beyond ‘pro’ and ‘con’ and arrive at a definition of
what globalization is and what it means for workers. Her analysis is wide ranging,
and her conclusion may surprise some readers: ‘it is not globalization as such but the
dominant neoliberal model of it alongside traditional authoritarian labor relations
that have exerted downward pressure on labor standards’ (p. 2). She argues quite
forcefully that globalization is not responsible for the loss of hundreds of thousands
of jobs in the formal sector, nor is it responsible for the expansion of the informal
sector in the past two decades, nor for the hollowing out of India’s mainstream trade
union movement. It was not globalization that did these things. The ‘large-scale job
losses began before the liberalization policy was announced in 1991 and were fuelled
by government policies encouraging relocation of production to nonunionized
workers in the informal sector or to industrially backward areas’. India did indeed
experience a ‘race to the bottom’, but ‘the prime motor of this descent has been
government policy, not globalization’ (p. 323).
State policy, then, is responsible for aggravating the key problem facing the
labour movement in India: the informal economy. More than 300 million Indian
workers, or well over 90% of the Indian workforce, toil without the protection of
employment rights. Street vendors, subcontracted workers, casual workers, the self-
employed, unpaid workers in family businesses, home-based workers – the number
of workers in these and other categories of informal labour is growing, whereas the
number of jobs in the formal sector actually declined every year from 1997 to 2002
(p. 171). Perhaps nowhere in the world is the problem of informal labour so deeply
entrenched, but India is far from unique in seeing its informal sector expand in recent
years. Nearly nine of every ten jobs created in the early 1990s in Latin America, for
example, were in the informal sector. Unprotected by labour laws or social welfare
policies, the informal workers who comprise perhaps a majority of the workforce in
the developing world are notoriously difficult to organize. It is often expensive to
even try doing so, since the cost of organizing is greater than whatever meagre dues
538 Symposium

poor people can pay. Yet the sheer size and growth of the informal sector suggests
that ‘a breakthrough in this sector is probably the litmus test of the continued
relevance of trade unions to the world’s workers of today’.7
Women are disproportionately represented in the informal economy, and
generally they face even worse working conditions than their male counterparts
because of gender inequality in Indian society. Hensman devotes an entire chapter to
the question of women’s inferior status in the labour force, offering example upon
example of how the gender division of labour operates in India and the shocking
extent of sexual harassment and violence against women, persuasively arguing that
any strategy to build working-class solidarity must confront this issue. Hensman
rightly emphasizes another large category of informal labour in India – child labour.
She does a particularly good job of disentangling the various debates on the subject,
spelling out the arguments and the evidence for and against the question of whether
child labour should be immediately abolished. Ultimately she concludes that the
‘persistence of child labour undermines democracy, which requires the participation
of all in decision making’, and that India cannot claim to be a democracy if it
continues to deny the ‘overwhelming demand from the poor’ that their children be
educated (p. 203).
One of the key themes of the book is that neoliberal globalization creates
openings and opportunities for working people as well as imposing economic
dislocation. And it is here, when looking at the creative responses of Indian workers
to their increased casualization and to the apparent impotence of their mainstream
trade unions, that Hensman finds evidence of the potential of Indian workers to
overcome their deep divisions and forge bonds of solidarity not only amongst
themselves but with workers around the globe. This, of course, is the message of the
book, spelling out the ‘lessons’ that India has to share, and it is why Hensman
remains guardedly optimistic about the future. The ‘negative fallout of globalization
for workers is accompanied by developments that create the potential for
counteracting those disadvantages and, indeed, building an even stronger labor
movement’ (p. 3). Among her catalogue of working-class responses, Hensman is
most impressed by: (1) the proliferation of independent and internally democratic
‘employees’ unions’ in India as an alternative to the party-dominated unions and
federations; (2) the creative efforts to organize informal sector workers; and (3) the
attempts made by employees’ unions and associations of informal workers to
champion international solidarity.
Hensman places great emphasis on the potential of employees’ unions, a strong
undercurrent in the Indian labour movement for the past several decades. Not to be
confused with management-driven US- or East Asian-style company unions, India’s
employees’ unions are local workplace-based organizations that sprang from a rank
and file dissatisfied with the bargaining ineffectiveness of the traditional unions. Run
by shop-floor leaders, they have proven to be more militant, more successful in
negotiations, and more democratic than the party-dominated mainstream unions.8
Most importantly for Hensman, these unions ‘are generally characterized by
participatory democracy’ (p. 137), an essential building block for any future, better
labour movement. Far more than mainstream unions, employees’ unions have
understood the need to organize the informal sector. Hensman provides numerous
examples of efforts, successful and otherwise, to organize and assist informal
 Labor History 539

workers, and not just in their work relations – there are also efforts to provide them
with a level of social welfare denied them by the state. Finally, Hensman places great
stock in trade union efforts to forge solidarity across national borders, and she
makes a strong appeal for the inclusion of labour-rights clauses in World Trade
Organization (WTO) agreements as a first step towards the harmonization of labour
law worldwide.
Workers, Unions, and Global Capitalism is a superior introduction to the history
and present condition of the hundreds of millions of Indian workers who have
contributed to the doubling of the world’s labour force in the past generation.
Interdisciplinary and comparative in its approach, this book offers countless insights
into the nature of India’s complex industrial relations system, labour laws, and trade
union structure. The author takes great care to show how Indian workers themselves
are involved in the making of their own fate, and she offers their ‘lessons’ as part of
what she hopes will be a dialogue with scholars and activists elsewhere in the world
where workers face similar problems. Given the enormity of the problems facing
trade unionism in India, and the obstacles to building effective international
solidarity, some readers may not be thoroughly convinced that even her muted
optimism is warranted. Building a stronger labour movement, however, begins with
an accurate understanding of conditions as they are now, as well as with a vision of
what we would like them to be, and in both those respects this book succeeds
remarkably well.

Craig Phelan
Editor, Labor History

Notes on contributor
Craig Phelan is Professor of Modern History at Kingston University London. His
most recent book is the edited collection Trade Unions in West Africa: Historical and
Contemporary Perspectives (Peter Lang, 2011). He is now completing a monograph
on trade unionism in French-speaking West Africa since 1945.

Notes
1. Freeman, ‘China, India’.
2. Taylor and Li, ‘The ACFTU’s Changing Role’, 31. See also Ma, The ACFTU.
3. Lee, Against the Law; Chan, ‘Realities and Possibilities’.
4. Ferus-Comelo, ‘Unions in India’; Bhattacherjee, ‘Trade Unions in India’.
5. Sherlock, ‘Labour and the Remaking of Bombay’.
6. Bhattacherjee, ‘Trade Unions in India’.
7. Munck, Globalization and Labour, 115–16.
8. Bhattacherjee, ‘Trade Unions in India’.

References
Bhattacherjee, D. ‘Trade Unions in India’. In Trade Unionism since 1945: Towards a Global
History, ed. C. Phelan, vol. 2. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009.
540 Symposium

Chan, A. ‘Realities and Possibilities for Chinese Trade Unionism’. In The Future of Organised
Labour: Global Perspectives, ed. C. Phelan. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006.
Ferus-Comelo, A. ‘Unions in India at Critical Crossroads’. In Trade Union Revitalisation:
Trends and Prospects in 34 Countries, ed. C. Phelan. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007.
Freeman, R. ‘China, India and the Doubling of the Global Labor Force: Who Pays the Price
of Globalization?’ The Globalist, 3 June 2005.
Lee, C.K. Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007.
Ma, Z. The ACFTU and Chinese Industrial Relations. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011.
Munck, R. Globalization and Labour: The New ‘Great Transformation’. London: Zed Books,
2002.
Sherlock, S. ‘Labour and the Remaking of Bombay’. In Organising Labour in Globalising Asia,
ed. J. Hutchison and A. Brown. London: Routledge, 2001.
Taylor, B., and Q. Li. ‘The ACFTU’s Changing Role in China’s Tumultuous Socialist
Development’. In Trade Unionism since 1945: Towards a Global History, ed. C. Phelan,
vol. 2. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009.

Globalization, alter-globalization and workers’ rights

Workers, Unions and Global Capitalism is a timely intervention on the important
theme of workers’ rights under ‘globalization’. Rohini Hensman’s has been among
the few voices on the Indian Left that has steadfastly refused to join the nationalist
chorus against ‘globalization’ – which for the Left has become just another name for
‘imperialism’. I have put the word globalization within quotation marks because, as
Rohini persuasively argues, it is used as a vague, catch-all expression that condenses
too many things within it. She therefore spells out her own understanding at length.
Globalization is, to her, primarily about the capitalist world economy covering
the entire globe, in a context of changing relations between capital and state, where
‘the most advanced capitals’ do not need protection but, rather, porous
borders (p. 62).
It has been her contention that globalization actually affords an opportunity for
entering a new terrain of struggle where new alliances are to be made, and new
institutional frameworks found, that can act as a counterpoint to the limitations of
the nation-state. The global arena, in this reading, provides the possibility of a more
universal normative framework of labour and human rights standards that is usually
resisted by nationalist elites in the name of national sovereignty. This became
manifest quite dramatically in the debate on what came to be known as the ‘social
clause’ in the mid-1990s when the World Trade Organization was being put in place.
As is well known, most trade unions and Left parties in India rallied behind ‘their
own’ government in defense of ‘national sovereignty’ against the demand of US and
European governments that universal labour standards be linked to trade. That is,
the idea that matters such as denial of the right to form unions, implementation of
minimum wages, employment of bonded or child labour and so on should be treated
as unfair trade practice was taken by trade unions and Left parties as interference in
the nation’s sovereignty! Rohini, along with some of her other comrades, was among
the few voices then that sought to point to the absurdity of such a position.
 Labor History 541

The present book is an elaboration of that argument and of the larger

assumptions that undergird her position. The central argument, in her own words, is
that ‘globalization cannot be reversed any more than the industrial revolution could
have been, but the politics of globalization is a terrain of contestation’ (p. 4) where
claims must be made. In keeping with her general stance, Rohini makes a powerful
case for a global strategy for labour - though, she admits, this must not mean
abandoning the local or the national as arenas of struggle (pp. 3, 4).
Rohini Hensman sees herself as espousing a feminism-informed anarcho-
communist position that rejects the idea of takeover of state power and that of the
representation of the ‘working class’ by a vanguard that the former entails
(pp. 17, 18). According to her, the project of ‘capture of state power’ is also
deeply problematic for another reason - namely, that it can only be national in
character – something she is deeply suspicious of, as I have already mentioned. More
important, in my view, is the argument that the entire imagination of ‘taking power’
entails the creation of institutions that mirror state apparatus – political parties,
armed forces, bureaucracy and so on (p. 19). Rohini’s claim is that this particular
imagination models itself on ‘the bourgeois revolution’, where seizure of state power
by the bourgeoisie represented by its various parties is understandable. But a
communist transformation, in her view, must base itself on the working class
transforming itself and its circumstances through its own activity (p. 18).
While I agree with the main thrust of Rohini’s argument here, I must also register
a point of unease with this notion of the working class. Already by the end of the
twentieth century (if not much earlier), many of the certainties about ‘the working
class’ being the agent of history had been thrown into serious crisis – for the
empirical, ‘actually existing working class’, never behaved in the way that Marxist
theory expected it to. And to those of us who have actually worked as trade union
organizers, it has long been clear that there was always a wide gulf that separated
what we (the activists or militants) thought of the working class and how those in it
saw themselves. Indeed, Rohini’s own evidence in the book, based on long years of
association with the workers in Bombay in particular, reveals a different working
class, to my mind, than the one that comes forth in the more theoretical formulations
about it. However, let us leave this matter here and return to the key issues.
Rohini’s book is the result of a long-term active association with the workers’
movement, where she has participated in some of the debates that the book refers to.
It is this association that makes it possible for her to espouse ‘action research’ as her
method of investigation. Her subsequent university research only adds to what was
already there in terms of a deep understanding of the myriad issues facing the
workers’ movement. Based on her reading of labour historians’ work and her own
experience (with the Union Research Group and the Trade Union Solidarity
Committee in Mumbai and the Manchester-based Working Women Worldwide), she
argues that ‘the driving force of working class struggle, analogous to capital’s drive
to accumulate, is a desire for dignity, recognition and control over one’s own life and
work rather than mere biological survival’ (pp. 16, 17).
From these basic assumptions, Rohini goes on to examine the myriad issues of a
‘working-class’ – more generally defined – politics in India. These cover both the big
formal sector and informal labour. The discussion covers a broad terrain, ranging
from the experience of employees’ unions in big units and issues of trade union
542 Symposium

democracy (chapter 5), to the place of gender and caste relations in the specific class
formation and within union work (chapters 6, 7, 8). Chapters 6, 7 and 8 also take the
discussion into the very heart of the domain of informal labour, which covers a very
huge area in India. These chapters are also important from the point of
view of documenting the activities and debates in the trade union scene in
Bombay – especially those that lie beyond the pale of party-affiliated trade unionism.
Apart from giving the reader a sense of the specifics of the Bombay situation, these
chapters also track larger issues and the formation of more innovative organizations,
such as that of the New Trade Union Initiative (NTUI) as an all-India platform
of workers.
However, an area of discomfort that remains for the reader of an otherwise
meticulously argued text has to do with the understanding of ‘global capitalism’ as a
kind of emancipatory phenomenon – especially in relation to the supposed
‘backwardness’ of non-western societies - so much so, that often Rohini lets
‘globalization’ off the hook for its own trampling of workers’ rights. Thus, for
instance, she argues that ‘globalization strengthened the capacity of government to
raise the abysmal standards of corporate governance in India, since businesses could
not expect foreign institutional investment in Indian equity without improving
standards of management, integrity, transparency and accountability’ (p. 113). This
claim is made despite her own evidence of how ‘international collective bargaining’
failed largely because of employer resistance (p. 282). The recent experience of
workers’ struggles in the greater Delhi area also suggests that global corporations do
not necessarily display higher standards of respect for workers’ rights; they are as
brutal as any national government, and often the two form an alliance against
workers, as the two most recent instances of the Honda and Graziano Transmissioni
workers’ struggles show.
It is a bit troubling, therefore, to read her claim that attacks on labour rights
during the right-wing National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government were
inspired not by neo-liberalism but by right-wing Hindu nationalism’ (p. 112). The
fact that the strident nature of the attacks ‘came to a halt after the Congress-led and
left-supported United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government came to power in the
2004’ is seen by her to imply that the Congress and neo-liberalism can therefore be
absolved in this regard. To be fair, she does not deny that there were attacks on
labour in earlier decades, but she does not link them with the attacks in the last two
decades. However, I want to underline here that the wholesale neo-liberal ideological
and political assault began in the early 1990s, during the Congress-initiated Structural
Adjustment Programme.
Similarly, Rohini claims that ‘there is no clear link between globalization and the
preponderance of informal labour, which predated globalization by decades. Nor is
there a clear link between globalization and declining formal employment . . .’
(pp. 172–3). This claim is based on a statistical examination of employment figures in
the formal and informal sectors (which cover trends only up until the late 1990s).
This is a bit surprising since one of the major developments of the last decades of the
twentieth century has been precisely the passing of the old Fordist system and the
advent of post-Fordist subcontracting – where informality reigns supreme. In fact,
this phenomenon does not come in for a sustained discussion anywhere, nor even in
passing, Rohini does note a few lines later that much of the growth in informal
 Labor History 543

employment is due to not ‘the creation of new jobs but simply the downgrading of
existing ones’ (p. 173). It would in fact be interesting to see how post-Fordism and
subcontracting (which also takes the form of overseas outsourcing, including in
sweatshops) differentially affect employment in the West and the Third World, since
many of these jobs (both informal and in call centres) are relocated in the Third
World. That may in fact strengthen Rohini’s claim that globalization may not always
or necessarily lead to job losses.
Rohini’s celebratory stance arises from the faith she reposes in global capitalism
as a higher and more advanced form. This faith is based on a hesitation to
re-examine some of the most dearly held teleologies of Marxism – and she cites Marx
himself quite extensively in order to elaborate her position: ‘Marx did not reject
everything that capitalism achieved: he saw the vast increases in productivity due to
large-scale production and technological advances as laying the basis for a future
when associated producers would control the means of production for the common
good’ (p. 14).
It may not be out of place to recall here that this productivist imagination
today encounters many serious and new adversaries, in the context of the ecological
crisis and climate change. These did not exist in Marx’s time, and they call
for rethinking the entire paradigm afresh, though that is not my immediate
concern here.
What I want to underline, however, is that the idea that capitalism is a
global system – one that is, in some way, a necessary outcome of historical
development – itself ran into serious problems very early in its career, even in the
context of Europe – especially Eastern Europe and Russia. Marx’s encounter with
the controversy over the peasant communes in Russia is revealing.1 More
importantly, if we look at the entire debate on ‘development’ and ‘underdevelop-
ment’ or at the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ in the 1960s and 1970s, it is clear that it
is marked by a deep anxiety about the prognosis about capitalism’s global victory
not bearing itself out. At that time, however, Marxists attempted to explain why this
prognosis had failed; they were still not ready to ask whether their theoretical
paraphernalia itself needed re-examination. But already, by the time Robert Brenner
wrote his critique of what he called ‘neo-Smithian Marxism’, he had to begin with the
acknowledgement that ‘the appearance of systematic barriers to economic advance in
the course of advanced capitalism . . . has posed difficult problems for Marxist
theory’.2 One would have thought, therefore, that for someone like Rohini, this
should have been at least a position to engage with, and one is somewhat taken
aback when she claims that ‘empirically, the proposition that capitalist industrializa-
tion cannot take place in Third World countries is not sustainable; in the absence of
political and military intervention from outside, it is entirely possible’ (p. 38). She
also finds this idea ‘theoretically inconsistent’ with capital’s constant drive to expand
the production of surplus value’ (p. 38). However, the empirical evidence of the
relative failure of capitalist development is quite overwhelming, reflected even in the
work of an unabashed votary of capitalism such as Hernando de Soto.3 It seems to
me that the theoretically posited position adopted by Rohini comes in the way of
acknowledging this failure.
Given this position, it is entirely logical for Rohini to argue for the elimination of
‘informal labour’ and bring the whole gamut of labour relations within what can
544 Symposium

only be highly regulated systems. For her suggestion is to accomplish this through
the registration of all employers and employees and the regulation of employment
(p. 204).
To be sure, this desire to bring all employment under some kind of legal
regulation is in itself unexceptionable, and no one can seriously argue that this
domain should be exempt from labour laws – especially sweatshops and other units
that often work as illegal fronts for bigger concerns. But we need to look at the way
capitalism actually functions in post-colonial contexts, where, as Kalyan Sanyal has
recently pointed out, there is a ‘reversal of the effects of primitive accumulation’.4
That is to say, populations that are dispossessed from land and are thrown into
urban labour markets cannot be absorbed within them – simply because there is a
dead end here (Brenner’s ‘barriers to economic advance’). And, of course, these
societies today do not have the luxury of transporting entire populations to new
continents. It is these dispossessed populations who then form the bulk of ‘petty
producers’ in the informal economy. This, in fact, is an index of the failure of
capitalism to absorb everything, and this very failure creates new possibilities.5
To argue for the elimination of informal labour and ‘petty production’ and their
replacement by large-scale capital appears very problematic in this context. To dub
those who advocate anything that seeks to reverse ‘globalization’ as a ‘reactionary
utopia’ of ‘petty bourgeois socialists’, as Rohini does, is to misunderstand the radical
potential of the sphere of non-capital.
Another discomfort I have is about Rohini’s treatment of unions and unionism.
Much of twentieth-century experience of the defeats of the working-class movement
remains unexamined in this book, and so one is not quite sure how exactly she
understands them. Do these defeats have anything at all to do with the forms of
working-class organization and struggle and their inflexibility? One of the difficulties
that most labour activists and scholars hesitate to confront is that these workplace-
based forms tend to freeze both the identity of the workers and the technological/
organizational space of the workplace. Since unions are and should always be first
and foremost concerned with saving employment and with economic improvement
of the workers, they almost inevitably end up fighting for the status quo. In the long
run, this becomes unsustainable precisely because of the dynamism of capital that
Rohini and Marxists in general celebrate. This is a question that calls for a much
longer discussion that is not possible here, but it needs to be flagged as a key question
for the workers’ movement.

Aditya Nigam
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi
aditya@csds.in

Notes on contributor
Aditya Nigam is Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies,
Delhi. He has worked on issues related to modernity and nationalism, secularism,
and radical politics in general. He was earlier a full-time activist with the Communist
Party of India (Marxist) and with the labour movement for close to two decades.
He is author of The Insurrection of Little Selves: Crisis of Secular-nationalism in India
 Labor History 545

(Oxford University Press, 2006); Power and Contestation: India since 1989, with
Nivedita Menon (Zed Books, 2007); After Utopia: Modernity and Socialism in the
Postcolony (Viva Books, 2010); and A Desire Named Development (Penguin, 2011).

Notes
1. For a detailed discussion of this episode, see Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road.
2. Brenner, ‘The Origins of Capitalist Development’, 25
3. de Soto, The Mystery of Capital.
4. Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development.
5. For a discussion of some aspects of this idea, see Menon and Nigam, Power and
Contestation, and Nigam, Desire Named Development.

References
Brenner, Robert. ‘The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian
Marxism’. New Left Review 1, no. 104 (July–August 1977).
de Soto, Hernando. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails
Everywhere Else. New York: Basic Books, 2003.
Menon, Nivedita, and Aditya Nigam. Power and Contestation: India since 1989. London: Zed
Books, 2007.
Nigam, Aditya. Desire Named Development. Delhi: Penguin India, 2011.
Sanyal, Kalyan. Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality
and Postcolonial Capitalism. London: Routledge, 2007.
Shanin, Teodor, ed. Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the ‘Peripheries of
Capitalism’. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983.

Marginalised and precarious workers in an era of global capitalism

In a book that is both well researched and well written, Rohini Hensman presents a
coherent argument against the dominant discourse that treats globalisation as
something different from capitalism, and which has led many consequently to argue
for a defence of their national capital against global capital. For Hensman, ‘it is not
globalisation as such but the dominant neo-liberal model of it alongside traditional
authoritarian labour relations that have exerted downward pressure on labour
standards’ (p. 2). In a chapter on ‘Defining Globalisation’ she makes it clear that in
her view it is not capitalism ‘by another name’ (p. 26). As she points out, if we
substitute globalisation for capitalism the risk is that the enemy is seen as
international capitalism, and consequently the ‘friend’ is national capitalism. This
provides a cover for those who argue that the nation is capable of binding workers
and capitalists together to stand against the common enemy of globalisation or
international capitalism:
Globalization may be a phase of capitalism, but anti-globalisation can never be anti-
capitalist, because genuine opposition to capitalist oppression and exploitation does not
distinguish between national and international capital nor support the former against
the latter. (p. 27)
The suggestion that there is a clear division between producers who benefit from the
patronage of their own nation-state and those who operate best in a globalised world
546 Symposium

(p. 55) might imply that while the former remain dependent on the nation-state, the
latter have ‘broken free’ and no longer have the need for nation-state protection. But
support of the nation-state depends not on capital itself being located within the
state, but on other structural factors – the links and relationships between the owners
of capital and those persons or institutions that formally govern nation-states. These
are built through shared cultures and social networks that are dependent not on
where capital is located, but rather on where the surplus that it generates is
accumulated and disposed of. Hensman’s position is that the key issue is ‘not to try
to reverse globalisation, which is as unlikely as the notion that the industrial
revolution could have been reversed’; instead, the issue is for workers to learn to use
the terrain that globalisation constructs. Thus, the position that workers should take
is not one of opposing globalisation, treating it as somehow a different and less
humane capitalism; instead, it is one of fighting for a politics based on global
solidarity and democracy.
In the chapter entitled ‘Four Sources of the Global Crisis of 2008’, she lists these
four sources as: rising inequality and poverty; financial market deregulation; the
Global Reserve System; and militarism. It is in the discussion on militarism where
the book is at its most innovative, arguing that while militarism may seem to be ‘a
hangover from the 20th century, an anomaly in a globalised world’ (p. 80), it also
serves the interests of those who trade in armaments, which is why, for Hensman,
opposition to war and military spending ‘has to be a crucially important element of
working class struggle’ (p. 80).
A unique strength of the book is in the detail which Hensman brings to the issue
of workers and their struggle for survival, particularly, although not exclusively, in
India. Her description of the new forms of employment which have emerged there,
with the majority of Indian workers no longer covered by legal regulations nor
accorded the status of workers, is a grim reminder of the consequences of a weakened
world labour movement at a time when capital and its ability to relocate and
restructure has never seemed more powerful. At the same time, her chapter on
‘Capital, the State and Trade Union Rights’ shows how the Indian state, right from
independence, has been biased towards capital, rather than this being a recent
development. But from the mid-1970s onwards there has been an additional
onslaught on workers’ rights, not just in India, but worldwide.
In a subsequent chapter on ‘Employees’ unions’, Hensman provides a powerful
defence of what she terms ‘worker unions’, independent workplace-based organisa-
tions that have emerged in India over the last 20 years or so, and which may be better
placed both to challenge employer power and also to advance worker democracy,
through the construction of participative measures which are better able to reflect the
democratic aspirations of their worker members. While the actual shape of these
types of institutions may differ from country to country, the phenomenon which
Hensman describes is also evidenced in Europe - for example, in the Cobas (Comitati
di base) in Italy, and in the Sud movement in France, which represent similar models
of workplace-based organisations that have a more organic and immediate
relationship with workers, and that are freed from the bureaucratic constraints
of more traditional forms of trade union organisation. She also takes the argument
for independent trade unions one step further by asserting strongly that
union democracy is fundamental to a healthy system of worker representation.
 Labor History 547

Worker unions are seen as potentially more powerful institutions, given that they are
generally comprised of 100% or near 100% membership; they assert an
independence from outsiders; there is the absence of a direct relationship with a
political party; and they are organisations that generally cover all workers in a given
enterprise, both white- and blue-collar workers, thereby reducing the risk of
employer-created divisions within a workforce. These, then, are suggested as key
components of the strength of worker unions in the workplace. In contrast, she notes
the inability of the ‘official’ trade unions to take up issues, in particular the issue of
inequality, a criticism that can be levelled not just at union bureaucracies in the
Indian sub-continent, but equally has been advanced frequently in critical debates
within Europe.
Hensman brings to the book her long experience as a trade union researcher,
doing research for trade unions and workers, principally in India, and this deep
knowledge of how and why workers act assists her in her exploration of workers’
struggles in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Her principle
methodology draws from emancipatory action research, and it is through this that
she is able to make the links between practice and reflection, citing Richard Winter,
who describes ‘the process of attempting to have new thoughts about familiar
experiences, and about the relationship between particular experiences and general
ideas’.1 As a model for the study of trade unions, it seems to this contributor that it
is exemplary as it provides her with a critical stance not just from outside, but from
inside the trade union movement. This is particularly helpful in exploring why certain
actions do not take place, as well as in analysing what does occur. She principally
focuses on the protectionist positions of many trade unions, in the industrially
developed world, as well as in the developing countries. For these trade unions, the
fight has become centred on trying to stop the movement of capital and jobs, rather
than on building solidarity across the globe while fighting for the rights of those
informal workers to whom much of the work is being transferred. In the UK, too, we
have seen examples of protectionism, such as in the ‘British Jobs for British Workers’
campaigns, or in the ‘Buy British’ demands of many of the UK’s trade unions. The
industrial disputes of early 2009 against the employment of Italian and Portuguese
workers in UK oil refineries, while ostensibly related to concerns over the non-
implementation of the relevant collective agreements in relation to the migrant
posted workers brought in to undertake work under a contract awarded to a non-
UK firm, also showed how nationalist interests could be expressed as trade union
interests by putting workers in competition with one another for available jobs,
rather than as potentially showing solidarity in the fight for more jobs.
The book benefits from a consistent focus on those workers often omitted from
the study of work, particularly women, and other categories of workers whose
economic or social position marginalizes them, or whose employment relationships
mean that it is of necessity more challenging for them to grab the centre stage of
workers’ struggles. This is one of the reasons why the issues that Hensman raises are
relevant beyond the context of labour relations in India. The description of
marginalised workers, in particular, reflects my own research conclusions in relation
to migrant workers in Europe and undocumented workers in particular, where the
same themes of marginalisation are present. Important too is the dominance of
explanations which often focus on the notion of the ‘unorganisable’ and which
548 Symposium

conceptualise categories of workers as somehow incapable either of being organised

or of organising themselves. However, what I have learnt from researching migrant
workers in Europe is that there is a different reality, wherein migrants often consist
of groups of highly organised workers and of fundamentally politicised workers from
whom destination-country workers could learn important lessons of solidarity.
Indeed, migration itself is a reflection of an ability to organise resources and
networks, particularly for those without documents, whose complex migration
journeys are a testament to their own organisational abilities. Migrants also
often bring with them a specific political and organisational knowledge that may
indeed be missing, or less well developed, within the host country at the point in
time when they enter the labour market. Thus, marginalised workers may indeed
provide the impetus for worker organisation and, rather than impede it, they may be
the charge needed to light it. Recent industrial disputes involving cleaners working
for sub-contractors (another category that is often said to be impossible to organise)
in hospitals and universities in London have demonstrated the power of
migrant workers to challenge capital directly and to inspire local workers. It is for
this reason that I see the book’s particular strength as lying in the fact that it does
not start with preconceptions as to which groups of workers are capable
of advancing the struggle for their own liberation, and that it argues that struggles
can also emerge from those who are seen as ‘unorganised’ or, indeed,
‘unorganisable’.
The chapter on ‘Informal Labour’ provides a grim but realistic account of the
lives of workers who are outside even the minimal protections that the state provides,
and again, while the circumstances of the workers affected may seem more extremely
exploitative, the picture that she presents resonates with that of the increasingly
larger numbers of workers in precarious work in advanced capitalist countries, where
contracts are awarded on fixed terms, avoiding dismissal rights, and where basic
employment protections are excluded. But here too Hensman returns to her core
theme, again stressing that this has to be understood as a phase, and not a different
form, of capitalism. As she makes clear, with the benefit of a large amount of
statistical data, there is no clear link between globalisation and the preponderance of
informal labour, which in any case predates globalisation by several decades. Again
this echoes so much of my own research into the lives of undocumented migrants.
These are workers determined by the state to have no employment rights, as a
consequence of their undocumented status. But their exclusion from these rights
offers employers opportunities to exploit them in ways which are not possible in
relation to documented workers. This means that migrants without documents are
forced to accept whatever work they can get, under whatever conditions set by the
employer. It also means that while states might declare certain rights as
‘fundamental’, such as the right to minimum pay, they knowingly permit employers
to ignore these rights for those without legal status.
The chapter also tackles the complex issue of child labour. It seems that Hensman
has successfully managed to separate out the arguments against child labour, which
focus on victimhood, as against those that argue that it is a necessity in developing
economies. In doing so, she focuses on the children themselves and on their rights to
family life and education, and argues that this should be the basis of any campaigns
for the abolition of child labour.
 Labor History 549

In the chapter on ‘Working Women and Reproductive Labour’ she stresses that
issues related to women cannot be all neatly packaged into (1) work-relevant issues,
that workplace representatives should pursue; and (2) issues not directly related to
work, which traditionally organised trade union bodies have been less open to
advancing. In relation to women and work, Hensman makes particular reference to
one policy issue which often is pushed high on the agendas of activists concerned
with advancing the rights of women workers, and this is the issue of micro-financing.
Hensman, in this contributor’s view, is right to be critical of this mode of exit from
capitalist exploitation: she argues that indeed ‘micro-finance belongs to the
neoliberal model of globalisation’ (p. 252). This is a welcome reflection on a
theory which is advanced with considerable frequency and which suggests that
workers can become in effect mini-capitalists, creating their own businesses, and thus
escaping the realities of labour exploitation.
It is in looking at alternatives or at ways forward that Hensman presents some
more difficult reflections. She suggests that the interdependence of national
economies, already a feature of capitalism in the nineteenth century, and intensified
by globalisation in the twenty-first century, rules out the possibility of nationally
constructed responses. Thus, as Hensman rejects what she calls the ‘nation-statist
conception of revolution’, for her the struggle either has to be waged internationally
or not at all, and in the chapter entitled ‘International Strategies’ she provides some
suggestions as to how this might be achieved, focusing on whether instruments such
as codes of conduct are capable of defending workers’ rights. Her position is one of
‘constructive criticism’. In other words, while she does not believe that such
instruments are the solution to the defence of workers’ rights, there is room to build
on their limited strengths (p. 301). Even more valuable, in her view, is the
introduction of a labour-rights clause in WTO trade agreements, provided that it
could be drafted in such a way that it could not be abused for protectionist purposes
(p. 334).
It is the case that I probably remain more sceptical about the ability of these
forms of regulation to impact significantly on the march of capitalism without a
specific political will to bring such an impact about, something which is profoundly
absent at present. Nevertheless, it is instructive for Hensman to have raised these
alternatives, providing at least one thesis for discussion on a way forward.

Sonia McKay
London Metropolitan University
s.mckay@londonmet.ac.uk

Notes on contributor
Sonia McKay is a Professor of European Socio-Legal Studies at the Working Lives
Research Institute, London Metropolitan University. She works mainly on issues
related to migration and work, as well as on collective labour law issues, and is
currently heading a European Commission-funded project on ‘Precarious Work and
Social Rights’. Prior to her appointment to the Working Lives Research Institute,
she was the employment law researcher for the Labour Research Department, the
independent trade union research organisation where she worked from 1983 to 2004.
550 Symposium

She also worked for eight years for a UK trade union. She has a wide range of
publications. Her most recent book is Undocumented Workers’ Transitions, with
E. Markova and A. Paraskevopoulou (Routledge, 2011).

Note
1. Winter, ‘Some Principles and Procedures’, 14.

Reference
Winter, R. ‘Some Principles and Procedures for the Conduct of Action Research’.
In New Directions in Action Research, ed. O. Zuber-Skerritt. London: Falmer
Press, 1996.

The underclasses of mankind

Ongoing poverty
The world order is in the process of transition, leading to a rapid disintegration of
peasant civilizations and their transformation into urbanized societies based on non-
agrarian economies. China in particular is far ahead in this global shift, as more than
200 million men and women have trekked eastwards from the hinterland in the
western regions of the country to the agglomerations in the coastal provinces in the
last quarter century. In other parts of Asia a similar expulsion from agriculture is
taking place. This exodus is unprecedented in the history of mankind, although at
first sight it seems to be a repetition of the process which earlier took place in the
Atlantic world. Capitalism was the driving force then, and this mode of production
also dominates the current pattern of globalization. However, in the southern zones
of our planet, capitalism is differently structured and has, moreover, a societal
impact which is markedly unlike the process which gave shape to modernity in
Europe and the United States more than a century ago.1 While in the nineteenth
century the route towards urbanization-cum-industrialization in the West was
marked by great brutality, the first half of the twentieth century saw the economic,
political and social emancipation of the working classes, a progress which culminated
in the welfare state. It meant that the balance between capital and labour became less
skewed, a trend toward which the government as protector and promoter of
the public interest made a decisive contribution. In contemporary Asia, inhabited by
the large majority of mankind, this development has so far not clearly
manifested itself.
Economic growth in China and India has certainly been impressive in recent
years. In the course of my anthropological fieldwork mainly located in the latter
country and stretched out over close to half a century, however, I have found little
evidence that people in the lower echelons of society have benefited from national
economic growth. In the villages of Gujarat, one of the leading states in the booming
economy, I failed to find confirmation of the good news that steadily higher numbers
of people are crossing the poverty line to a more dignified existence.2 My findings
match with those of a national commission charged with mapping the landscape of
the informal economy.3 The great bulk of India’s workforce depends for its
 Labor History 551

livelihood on this huge and ill-defined sector. The official commission reports that
recent economic growth has so far benefited only a quarter of the population, the
segment which was already better off. A few years ago at least three quarters had to
make do with not more than 20 rupees per day, with the government defining
the poverty line as 12 rupees per capita per day. That trifling amount, however,
indicates pauperization, which is the lot of many of the aged and chronically ill, as
well as single women and all others whose labour power is impaired physically
or otherwise.

The informalization of the economy

Wealth distribution is characterized by a wide and still increasing inequality between
the haves and the have-nots. As Rohini Hensman makes clear in her excellent book,
this dynamic is caused by an informal economy which has cheap labour as its
organizing principle. The extremely low wage level is compounded by employment
modalities based on casual work in an endless rotation of hire and fire; a working
day-night schedule which, according to the need of the moment, can be lengthened or
shortened; little or no skilling; piece-rated rather than time-rated payment; as well as
a preponderance of own-account work. Self-employment seems to be the modus
operandi of the ambulant and transient crowd operating on the streets, while home-
based work (mainly by women) is a frequent practice. Still, what at first sight looks
like occupational autonomy often boils down to a disguised form of waged
employment shaped by outsourcing and subcontracting. Self-employment often
tends to retrogress into self-exploitation. It not only leads to working on at the end of
the shift (of twelve hours), but also to cooptation of young children and older adults
in the labour process. A substantial segment of the population caught up in dire
poverty can only survive by selling their labour power in advance, in a relationship of
indebtedness to employers or their agents, which, as a modern form of bondage,
implies working in captivity.
The mainstream opinion on the ‘discovery’ of the informal economy, which dates
back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, was that this sector took on the role of a
waiting room for small peasants and landless labourers pushed out of agriculture,
those who left the countryside in search of work and income in urban growth poles.
The wishful thinking was that once these migrants managed to become more skilled
and street-wise, the price of their labour would go up. On their way up the hierarchy
of employment they would become members of trade unions, signalling their ability
to engage in collective action, and thus increasing their bargaining strength.
According to this line of thought, the trajectory of upward mobility in the urban-
industrial zone would eventually lead to the inclusion of the newcomers in the formal
sector of the economy. That optimistic scenario has not materialized, as Hensman
shows. Instead of a formalization of labour relationships, the employment dynamics
have gone in the opposite direction, with the loss of regular jobs and fixed-wage
payment, a lengthening of working hours, and the withdrawal of all kinds of
secondary labour rights (including social security benefits) which used to be
guaranteed by government regulation. This retrograde process has resulted, the
552 Symposium

national commission estimates, in an informal sector economy which comprises 93%

of the total Indian workforce.
Informalization of employment is a trend which predominates where relatively
closed economies have been transformed into open ones; it coincides with the
surrender of public space to private initiative, and with the abandonment by
governments of their role as the protector of the common interest. In a case study,
I have described and analysed the loss of formal-sector labour rights in the city of
Ahmedabad. Around the turn of the 20th/21st century, more than 50 large-scale and
corporate textile mills were closed down in this metropolis reputed to be the
‘Manchester of India’. The massive workforce was dismissed overnight and former
workers had to search for a new livelihood in the informal sector of the urban
economy. This led to the demise of the biggest industrial trade union which the
country had ever known, established by Mahatma Gandhi.
State authority in many cases seems to show full and unconditional faith in the
unfettered operation of the market mechanism. This model of growth is not confined
to countries such as China and India. It is an economic strategy which, directed by
transnational agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank, has become the means
for managing the globalized order. Western economies have adopted major features
of this model, as exemplified by the phenomenon of ‘self-employment’, wage
flexibilization, the lengthening of working hours and life, the withdrawal of
protection against dismissal, and the reduction of expenditure on social care and
security. Although the hegemony of market fundamentalism may have led to the
erosion of the European welfare state, it has far from disappeared. This is due to a
societal framework in which the equilibrium between labour and capital has become
solidified in an institutional setting largely absent in the low-income zones of the
world where the emancipation of the working classes has yet to be asserted. The
congested and fragmented mass of labour at the bottom of the informal sector in
India is not organized in trade unions, and belongs to invisible underclasses without
political representation.

Impact of the global meltdown

The current recession in the world economy that Hensman describes so well has
strengthened the drift towards informalization of employment. Instead of exercising
more control over the freedom of manoeuvre which capital has enjoyed during the
last half century, this factor of production is able to secure even more government
support and protection than before. The budgetary consequences of this course of
action are borne by cutting back on the cost of labour, resulting in a rise in
unemployment and a decline in incomes. Again, this policy meets with more
resistance in countries where the struggle for equality has been manifest for more
than a century. Such an accumulated stock of resilience is absent in the developing
regions of the world where only a tiny fraction of the workforce has been able to
secure major labour rights and associated benefits. The progress achieved by political
struggle in the past is now undone due to the pressure exerted by the providers of
work who are anxious to keep their businesses maximally profitable. In addition to
job loss in the formal economy, this also means that informal-sector labour is forced
to accept a fall in wages. While the cost of living has risen, nearly half of India’s
 Labor History 553

population is stagnating at a monthly income of less than 2000 rupees. Because of the
effect of the sharp increase in the price of food, only a small fraction of monthly
expenditure is available for health care, clothing, housing and schooling.
Consequently, poverty in the broad underbelly of the economy lingers on or even
intensifies.4
Poverty is growing despite the pledge of the ruling Congress Party to improve the
condition of the working classes. Inclusive growth was the often-repeated slogan of
this party to secure the votes of the aam admi, the common people. Policymakers,
however, subscribe to the neo-liberal doctrine and have proved unwilling to
subordinate private enterprise and profit to the public interest. Of course, the poor
are meant to share in the leap forward, but only eventually through the mythical
process of trickle down. The message is clear: social inclusion will eventually take
place, but only when economic growth permits. The national commission has
rejected this script by pointing out that in a decade of market-fundamentalist-driven
policies, employment generation, rather than accelerating, has actually slowed down.
During this period, the share of the cost of production that is paid to labour, already
small, has further decreased. The members of the commission advocate
drastic reform and conclude that inclusion should be an intrinsic part of the
growth process.

Labour migration as the pathway to progress

As mentioned before, the countries engaged in an accelerated process of development
are not adhering to the western model of societal transformation. In both India and
China, the most populous countries in the world, drastic economic restructuring led
to a massive exodus from the countryside. In China, land reform after 1949 led to
reduction in the size of holdings. After abolition of the collectively held agrarian
property in the shape of large-scale communes, farms became too small to absorb the
labour power of all household members and the output became too low to yield a
viable family income. The younger generation seeks an escape from this constrained
existence by moving out. It is not a total lack of property which makes departure the
only option. Chinese labour migrants are also distinguished from their Indian
counterparts by literacy rates; they have at least attained a basic education and often
have completed secondary school. Access to education explains why child labour
does not constitute a prominent feature of the migrant population in China.
Education better prepares migrants for the urban job market and is further reflected
in significantly higher incomes than are earned by migrants in India. Certainly the
wages of outsiders lag behind those earned by workers born and bred in Xiamen, a
coastal harbour town which turned into an industrialized metropolis, but I have
found that the newcomers have benefited from the gradual rise in real income, as
demonstrated by their ability to purchase a wide range of consumer durables.5 While
in India leaving the countryside is often the only option left for the rural underclasses
and leads less frequently to improvement in material well-being, in Xiamen departure
is often not caused by distress back at home, and in many instances suggests the
beginning of an upward trajectory.
554 Symposium

Politics of exclusion
There are also similarities between India and China. The most important one is that,
having left the countryside, working people find adjustment to life in the urban
centres fraught with complications. The Chinese government withholds permission
to newcomers to settle down indefinitely, and it denies them urban citizenship. The
migrants are welcome to work, but only those born and bred in the city have access
to education, health care, housing, social benefits and many other facilities. The cost
of living in the city is too high for the migrants to bring their children along, let alone
for them to provide accommodation for non-working elderly parents. When
dismissed from a job, whether willingly or unwillingly, alternative employment has to
be found urgently because the migrants are not entitled to any form of government
support. ‘Floating population’ is the accepted term for people who have the status of
workers but not of inhabitants. The term is meant to suggest that the newcomers
tend to regard their stay as time-bound and would themselves prefer to go back
‘home’. In the majority of cases this is far from true, since the desire to stay on and
thereby better provide for their children is widespread.
The same applies to India. Due to the lack of reliable data on the volume of
labour in circulation, the sites where the workers on the move tend to go, the kind of
work they perform and the duration of their absence, generalizing about the
workforce wandering around is quite problematic. More information is available on
the changing composition of the various sectors, and this shows that the process of
economic restructuring cannot be summed up simply as a shift from an agrarian to
an industrial way of life. The exodus of land-poor and landless segments from the
village does not transform them into an industrial proletariat. This has to do with the
growth of the tertiary sector as the dominant type of economic activity. A similar
trend is apparent in China. Identifying China as the factory of the world’s economy
does not invalidate the notion that, as in India, employment for a large proportion of
migrants is found in a broad range of service-sector jobs.
The restless mobility of labour between sectors of activity as well as between a
variety of work sites is the consequence of economic informalization. I estimate this
circulatory segment in India to consist of at least 80 million men, women and
children condemned to a nomadic life. They find their shelter in the urban periphery,
living together in clusters of slums, along the roadside or in wastelands in the open
country. Those who are recruited for the duration of the dry season arrange their
improvised habitat at the work site and usually in the open air. This is not migration
but rather a circulation of labour in a rhythm which goes on for months or years, if
not for the duration of the working life. A predatory capitalism which has come to
dominate large zones of the world system throws people out of their domicile but
does not allow them to settle down elsewhere permanently. As hapless drifters they
are nowhere welcome, because even renting is beyond their means. The reserve army
of labour is huge in size and still swelling. In India the authorities have no control
over the movement of this mass of sojourners. Improvidence forces them to depart
again when the work is done, but they also have to move on because the permanent
residents do not tolerate these footloose hordes as co-citizens. Most certainly,
though, the more well-to-do depend on their presence: as street vendors, rickshaw
drivers, security guards, cleaners, porters, handymen, maid servants, minders of
young children or elderly people, scavengers, headloaders, etc. As today’s coolies
 Labor History 555

they are required, but as citizens they are considered an unbearable burden. This is
often the backdrop to slum clearances, and it has become quite natural for civic
movements which, on the pretext of environmental rehabilitation, insist on cleaning
up by dumping what are now portrayed as the lumpenized elements to sites far
beyond the municipal boundaries.

The backlash from below

The set of objectives stated in the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) a decade
ago are supposed to be realized in the next five years. It is already clear that this
mission is going to be aborted. In poor countries governments are already cutting
back on MDG spending, including on education and social protection. It would not
be surprising if there was a sense of fear within the ruling class that the misery
prevalent at the bottom of the economy was going to create an atmosphere of unrest
which could find expression in a popular revolt. After all, the incorporation of the
labouring poor in mainstream society in late-nineteenth-century Europe was partly
inspired by the threat that an ongoing exclusion of the declassed segments might
become a potent destabilizing force. For a variety of reasons, however, this risk does
not seem to loom large in Asia today. A major impediment to such a threat is that,
contrary to the pattern of urban-industrial society as it emerged in the West, the
progressive informalization of the economy precludes the closing of ranks among the
fragmented and segmented workforce. In China, labour migrants cannot become
members of the trade unions, which only cater for the interests of permanent citizens,
and they are officially prohibited from engaging in collective action. The only social
ties acknowledged are familial in nature or relate to groups of friends met in the
workplace. It is a highly atomized existence which does not encourage concerted
action to overcome the sharp divide between those who belong and those who do
not. The authorities in India have less control over both the economy and the
workforce than their counterparts in China, but here too the fragmentation created
by informalization, the constant drifting in and out of jobs, prevents the labour
nomads from articulating their solidarity. Hensman is right in arguing that trade
unions have begun to make their appearance in the informal sector landscape, but so
far they have managed to organize only a very small portion of this huge workforce.
In India, the freeing of the market forces has been aided and abetted by the politics
of denigration and discrimination which have inflicted suffering on the poor since
time immemorial.
The impoverished masses in these societies have not caved in totheir exploitation
and oppression. There exists an attitude of resistance, which is revealed when they do
not turn up when there is work on offer, or when they abscond from the site to avoid
misuse of their labour power. Then there are the individualized acts of protest:
sabotage, deception, avoidance, obstruction, feigned ignorance and other subterfuge,
all part of the well-stocked arsenal known as the weapons of the weak. Once in a
while the anger level may rise so high that joint action is taken. Although there is a
paucity of information on countervailing power in the landscape of informality,
refusal to work and strikes do happen and are indeed quite common, albeit in a
spontaneous rather than planned way, and being small scale in nature, highly
localized and apt to fizzle out due to lack of resources. Still, they are sufficient to fuel
556 Symposium

the social consciousness and to nourish the hope for better times to come. As the
redshirts in Bangkok demonstrated in the spring of 2010, smouldering unrest can
suddenly surface and then spread like wildfire. Close monitoring is also required to
put on record the resistance of the footloose workforce in the cities of China to their
exclusion from urban citizenship.
Is perishing in a hell of poverty the price which has to be paid by a substantial
part of mankind for living and working together in an integrated world system? Of
course not. That misfortune is the outcome of an economic dictate laid down by the
powerful ideologues of neo-liberalism. Rohini Hensman argues persuasively
throughout her book that neo-liberalism rather than globalization is the cause of
widespread misery and poverty in India. I agree with her that redemption is only
possible by taming market fundamentalism, containing the free rein given to the
pursuit of self-interest and prioritizing public above private interest. A drastic U-turn
in the prevailing mindset is required, and for that to occur, a national and
transnational changeover of the political economy is the sine qua non.

Jan Breman
Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research
j.c.breman@uva.nl

Notes on contributor
Jan Breman, one of the founders of the Amsterdam School for Social Science
Research, is also a fellow of the International Institute of Asian Studies in Leiden.
His fieldwork-based research in India (South Gujarat) and Indonesia (West Java)
has resulted in more than twenty books, published by the University of California
Press, Clarendon Press, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press,
Routledge and Sage. His latest book is Outcast Labour in Asia: Circulation and
Informalization of the Workforce at the Bottom of the Economy (Oxford University
Press, 2010).

Notes
1. As I have argued elsewhere (Breman, Outcast Labour in Asia).
2. See Breman, The Poverty Regime.
3. National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector, The Challenge of
Employment.
4. Breman, ‘Myths of the Global Safety Net’.
5. Breman, ‘A Fieldwork Account’.

References
Breman, J. ‘A Fieldwork Account of Labour Migration from Rural to Urban China’.
In Outcast Labour in Asia: Informalization and Circulation of the Workforce at the
Bottom of the Economy, 234–84. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Breman, J. The Making and Unmaking of an Industrial Working Class: Sliding Down the
Labour Hierarchy in Ahmedabad. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.
 Labor History 557

Breman, J. ‘Myths of the Global Safety Net’. New Left Review 59 (September–October
2009): 1–8.
Breman, J. Outcast Labour in Asia: Informalization and Circulation of the Workforce at the
Bottom of the Economy. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Breman, J. The Poverty Regime in Village India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007.
National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector. The Challenge of
Employment: An Informal Sector Perspective. New Delhi: Academic Foundation, 2009.

Step by step, the longest march can be won

I would like to start by thanking Craig Phelan for suggesting and organising this
symposium, and all four essayists for their illuminating comments.
Jan Breman has extended my account of the informal economy. His description
of the contrast between labour migrants from the countryside to the city in China
and India, with the former being better educated and much more likely to be
upwardly mobile than the latter, is most revealing. Yet in China as in India, these
migrants are rarely able to secure residential rights in the cities or settle down
permanently in one place. However, in both countries, workers in this sector are
resisting their exclusion from rights enjoyed by others, and in this he sees hope for
change.
Craig points out that while there have been several recent accounts of workers in
China and the ACFTU, there has been much less interest in Indian workers and
unions – partly due to their diversity and complexity – and correspondingly fewer
accounts published. Globalisation does not mean that local and national struggles
are unimportant; on the contrary, it means that they acquire a global significance.
One reason this book was written was that I felt that some struggles in India – for
example, for union democracy, to organise informal workers, and to abolish child
labour – are relevant for other countries, while struggles in other countries are
relevant for India.
Sonia McKay has used her research on foreign migrant workers, especially
undocumented ones, to expand on my brief treatment of this issue. She makes the
perceptive comment that these migrants often bring with them ‘a specific political
and organisational knowledge’ that can enrich the workers’ movements in the host
countries, and that marginalised workers who are often considered unorganisable
may in fact provide a vital impetus to worker organisation. Indeed, the physical
migration of these workers, as well as the exchange of experience made possible by
modern information and communication technologies that are an essential feature of
globalisation, open up new possibilities for learning and solidarity between workers
from different countries.
I agree with Aditya Nigam that global corporations do not necessarily display
respect for workers’ rights and often form alliances with governments to carry out
brutal attacks on workers; I have cited the example of the Honda struggle (p. 108) to
illustrate this. But he is wrong to think that the last decades of the twentieth century
saw ‘the passing of the old Fordist system and the advent of post-Fordist
subcontracting – where informality reigns supreme’. As my book shows, there
never was an ‘old Fordist system’ except in a very small sector of production;
informalisation was already widespread at independence (when neo-liberalism was
558 Symposium

nowhere on the scene), and accelerated from 1977 onwards, when India was still
heavily protected from the world economy. I cover trends till 2000/2001 (p. 172),
after which, as Jan’s essay confirms, informality plateaued at around 93% of the
labour force.
The alliance between state and capital, too, dates back to independence, and has
been a feature of all governments; it did not arise in the context of globalisation. My
observation that ‘globalisation strengthened the capacity of government to raise the
abysmal standards of corporate governance in India’ (p. 113) is made not to let
global capital off the hook for trampling on workers’ rights, but to ensure that
governments are not let off the hook when they make globalisation an excuse for
policies that trample on workers’ rights.
The assault on labour during the right-wing regime of the National Democratic
Alliance (NDA) led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was
qualitatively different because in a democracy, even a flawed one, neo-liberal assaults
on labour can be fought by legal and constitutional means, whereas in a fascist state
they cannot, and that is what the BJP was (and still is) aiming at achieving.1 To
recognise this is not to absolve Congress and neo-liberalism for assaults on labour
rights, but to be aware that under fascism the assault would be considerably worse.
Much of the Indian left has been confused about fascism, often concentrating its fire
on the political centre while failing to fight against the extreme right - a policy that
helped fascism come to power in Germany, and that could have had the same
consequence in India if the BJP had returned to power in a stronger position vis-à-vis
those NDA allies who supported it electorally but stopped short of endorsing its
fascist agenda. Fortunately, the trade union activists with whom I was associated
were aware of the danger and worked hard – and successfully – to avert this
outcome.
Aditya looks at the informal economy through somewhat rose-tinted spectacles.
Far from being a ‘sphere of non-capital’, it is, as Jan argues in his essay and as I try
to show in my book, the sphere where capitalist exploitation is at its most brutal.
Informal workers themselves demand that they should enjoy the same rights as
employees in formal employment, and this cannot occur as long as they are not
recognised as workers; hence their demand for registration of employers and
employees and for regulation of employment. But ‘this does not mean eliminating the
small-scale sector’ (p. 206). I belong to a group that campaigns against the forcible
displacement of peasants and forest-dwellers from their homes and sources of
livelihood by corporations and the state in the name of ‘development’. But it does
not follow that public money should be poured indefinitely into unviable small
farms. The money would be better spent helping the rural poor to form cooperatives
and creating a social security and welfare system that would sustain those who lose
their livelihoods, most of whom are currently left destitute (pp. 261–2).
However, the issue of peasant communes in Russia, which Aditya raises, is a
more interesting one. The question posed here is: if a system of production shares
elements (in this case cooperative principles) with the society we wish to achieve, does
it have to be destroyed by capital before it can become part of a socialist society? I
would say: not necessarily, but whether it does or not depends on strategy. As Aditya
points out, environmental sustainability, not seen as important in Marx’s time, is
crucial today. Tribal communities, whose relationship with nature may embody
 Labor History 559

principles vital for environmental protection, are in India confronting global

corporations like Tata, Vedanta and POSCO, that are supported by the state. If their
struggle becomes an isolated military one, tribal communities cannot win; only by
forming alliances and appealing to democratic rights and environmental protection
can they win. This process will, inevitably, change them. Again, unwaged domestic
labour involves production directly for human need, and my book does not suggest
that it should be commodified. Yet relationships within it need to be transformed –
for example, by abolishing the gender division of labour, collectivising and obtaining
public assistance for more tasks, recognising the work done within it as socially
necessary, and shortening the hours spent on wage labour to accommodate it. This
can be accomplished only in alliance with other sections of the working class.
The debate over barriers to the development of capitalism in the Third World
that took off in the 1960s is discussed in Chapter 2, but Brenner’s contribution to it is
not particularly useful. On page 32 of the article cited by Aditya, Brenner says
capitalism is a system that exists ‘[o]nly where labour has been separated from
possession of the means of production, and where labourers have been emancipated
from any direct relation of domination (such as slavery or serfdom)’. Yet Marx
thought that the owners of slave plantations in America were capitalists, and that the
high rates of profit in them contributed to raising the general rate of profit.2 It is
surely incoherent to deny that workers whose surplus labour contributes to capital’s
average rate of profit are involved in capitalist production! Even more bizarre is the
idea that today’s garment homeworkers in the supply chains of global companies are
not engaged in capitalist production because they work at home and possess their
means of production. Unlike Marx, who sees slavery, colonial plunder and the
extermination of indigenous peoples in the Third World as inseparable from the
primitive accumulation of capital in the First World, Brenner sees capitalist
accumulation in the West as occurring purely nationally. He therefore fails to see the
devastation it has caused to the Third World.
By contrast, dependency theorists (pp. 33–8) start from the distortion of
Third World economies and depletion of their resources wrought by colonialism and
slavery. One may not agree with everything they say, but at least they identified the
obstacles to capitalist development in the Third World correctly. And some, like
Giovanni Arrighi and Andre Gunder Frank, were able to see that the situation
had changed radically by the 1990s (p. 49). This does not mean that
capitalist industrialisation has taken place in all Third World countries: many are
still left out. But anyone who has taken cuttings (some cited in my book) from
the business and financial press over the last twenty years would hardly deny
that countries like China and India are an essential part of the global
capitalist economy.
As for de Soto, his complaints are reminiscent of the grouses against India’s
‘licence-permit raj’. The impediments to capitalist development he complains about
are gradually being swept away. In the wake of the global crisis (see Chapter 3), when
the growth rate in the First World lags far behind that in Third World countries like
China and India, it is all the more evident that globalisation is a reality, and
attempting to reverse it is as futile as the Luddites’ attempt to reverse the industrial
revolution. Globalisation makes national borders more porous, and I would like to
see this process extended by the weakening of immigration barriers. This would be a
560 Symposium

boon not only to people separated from relations, friends and colleagues by national
borders, but also to foreign migrant workers, who would then have the right to enter,
work, and enjoy workers’ rights. Anti-globalisation, by seeing porous borders as the
problem, casts workers of other countries as the enemy (‘taking away our jobs’, etc.).
At best, it precludes the solidarity across national borders that is needed to fight
against global capital; at worst, it is complicit in right-wing attacks on immigrants
and nationalist backing for wars.
Another eminent dependency theorist who recognised that the world economy
had changed radically since the 1960s and 1970s put it like this: ‘Identifying
globalization as the problem tends to suggest deglobalization – nationalism or
localism – as the logical solution . . . If the problem is identified as capitalism
and not globalization, and if capitalism is global, then that suggests that
anti-capitalism is the solution and that anti-capitalism must also make itself
global, producing counter proposals not to globalization as such but to global
capitalism and capitalist globalization.’3 That is precisely what my book attempts
to do.
Aditya is uneasy with the notion of the working class as the agent of history, and
with my treatment of unions and unionism, since ‘unions are, and should always be
first and foremost concerned with saving employment and with economic
improvement of the workers’, and therefore they ‘almost inevitably end up fighting
for the status quo’. The working class worldwide and throughout its history has been
so enormously diverse that making any generalisations about it would be foolhardy.
But as I explain in Chapter 1, the Union Research Group started with the idea of the
development of the working class being a learning process, and our subsequent
experience (partly described in Chapter 5) did indeed confirm the hypothesis that
workers learn from their successes and failures, and change their strategies
accordingly. This is one reason why union democracy is so important: if union
leaders are separated from members by a kind of class divide, they seldom learn
from their failures because they do not suffer the consequences, whereas
rank-and-file workers cannot change their strategies because they lack the power
to do so.
It is true that many unions ‘end up fighting for the status quo’, but labour history
is replete with examples of unions taking up issues that go well beyond saving
employment and raising wages – from opposing imperialism and political
authoritarianism to fighting for state education, healthcare, social security and
welfare, from expanding the frontier of control in the workplace to proposing
schemes for alternative socially useful production (pp. 87–92). Two recent examples
are the following: (1) In the wake of the demolition of the Babri Mosque in
December 1992, thousands were killed in anti-Muslim pogroms that swept through
Bombay in January 1993. Caught unprepared, even progressive unions put up no
resistance. But in 2010, prior to the High Court judgment in the Babri Mosque title
suit, the NTUI and others held a well-attended meeting in Bombay, appealing to
workers to organise in neighbourhoods and workplaces to protect Muslims in
the event of violence. (2) Workers and unions have been playing a pivotal role in the
ongoing Egyptian uprising, and many unions have broken away from the
conservative, state-linked Egyptian Trade Union Federation to form a federation
of independent unions fighting for democracy. Both of these are examples of workers
 Labor History 561

learning from their past failures, as well as of unions struggling for goals that go way
beyond bread-and-butter issues.
I agree with Sonia that a specific political will is required to bring about social
transformation that replaces hierarchical, oppressive and competitive relationships
with egalitarian, solidaristic and cooperative ones, environmental destruction with
sustainable production, and production for profit with production for the
satisfaction of human needs, including workers’ need for satisfying work. If this is
envisaged as happening in one cataclysmic event, it does indeed seem unlikely. But
this old union song from Marx’s time captures a very different conception of social
transformation:
Step by step, the longest march
Can be won, can be won.
Many stones can form an arch,
Singly none, singly none.
And by union, what we will
Can be accomplished still,
Drops of water turn a mill,
Singly none, singly none.
Only ‘step by step’ can this march be won, because each step depends on the one
before, and the route has to be worked out on the way. Stones of different shapes
and sizes cannot stand alone, but together they can form an arch. Forest workers and
high-tech workers, public- and private-sector workers, industrial and domestic
workers (waged and unwaged) all make their own unique contribution to social
transformation, but only together can they achieve it. And finally, no drop of water,
by itself, can turn the mill wheel of society; only their combined power can make it
revolve.
If we see the process in this way, and keep working on trying to build agreement
on the goals of the struggle and on establishing solidarity between different sections
of workers, I am indeed optimistic, as Craig says, that our goal ‘can be accomplished
still’, even if it is not in our lifetimes. Because workers and unions do learn from their
struggles, correct mistakes, and move forward.

Rohini Hensman
rohinihensman@yahoo.co.uk

Notes on contributor
Rohini Hensman is an independent scholar, writer and activist working for workers’
rights, women’s rights, and the rights of minorities in India and Sri Lanka. She has
written numerous articles and book chapters on these issues, and is a co-author of
Beyond Multinationalism: Management Policy and Bargaining Relationships in
International Companies. Her publications include two novels.
562 Symposium

Notes
1. Swamy, ‘The RSS Game Plan’. Ironically, Swamy now supports the very forces he
opposed in 2000.
2. See Banaji, ‘Reconstructing Historical Materialism Part I’.
3. Sutcliffe, ‘How Many Capitalisms’, 56.

References
Banaji, Jairus. ‘Reconstructing Historical Materialism Part I’. humanitiesunderground 6
(February 2011). http://humanitiesunderground.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/recon-
structing-historical-materialism/
Sutcliffe, Bob. ‘How Many Capitalisms? Historical Materialism in the Debates about
Imperialism and Globalization’. In Historical Materialism and Globalization, ed. Mark
Rupert and Hazel Smith, 40–58. London: Routledge, 2002.
Swamy, Subramanian. ‘The RSS Game Plan’. Frontline 17, no. 2 (22 January–4 February
2000).