Erosion in wages & conditions of work

UNFREEDOM AND WAGED WORK — Labour in India’s Manufacturing Industry: Sunanda Sen and Byasdeb Dasgupta; Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd., B 1/I-1, Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area, Mathura Road, New Delhi-110044. Rs. 695.

Ever since global finance capital assumed a command over every aspect of economy and livelihood, supported by the ideological virus called neo-liberalism — that sees labour market as indistinguishable from fish market, and refuses to consider it as a social institution — unfreedom (of waged work) has become a corollary; more in the central capitalism than in India. In the liberal tradition of Europe, capital was forced to accommodate the demand for social justice (expressed by the working classes) until the 1970s. The domains of social life — thanks to the simultaneous rise of political democracy and modernity — remained fairly separated from the management of the economy (i.e., the market).

The so-called principle of the rationality of markets in the new era has emptied the contents of democratic practice (or political management). The popular classes still have the notional rights to express freedom through the democratic vote. But, their fate is reserved by the market, which is no longer subject to the expressions of social interests.

Several changes in the Government of India over the last couple of decades have failed to reverse the trend of erosion in wages, employment, rights at work, and conditions of work in the organised manufacturing sector. These come out convincingly in this book, corroborating several earlier published works, by using the Annual Survey of Industries; some of them, the more important ones, are unfortunately not mentioned though in the bibliography. Moreover, for the wage analysis, the Labour Bureau’s Occupational Wage Survey would have been a critical source, which the study has not consulted although it claims to have based itself on “data sets as are available from the published official sources ...”

The book additionally offers an assessment of “labour under stress” based on primary (one-point) information from 615 workers from different pockets of West Bengal, Delhi, Haryana, Gujarat, and Maharashtra (the survey perhaps was conducted sometime between 2003 and 2006). Casual workers are much more hard-pressed than the permanent and regular workers; wage and benefit differentials are age-neutral; education plays a crucial role in skill formation; migrant workers receive less as wages; the ‘general category’ workers are relatively better-placed; unionised workers put fewer hours of work per day; foreign trade makes insignificant contribution to labour in trade-oriented industries; wage is directly proportional to capital intensity of the industry — these conclusions revalidate many other published studies in the field.

The reader would now rather like to know why, say, there is no positive wage-effect of exports. Is it because “political entrepreneurship” characterises Indian capital? How globalisation is the root cause of volatility in Indian labour market? The fourth chapter dealing with a few case studies of labour in selected enterprises including Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in Noida, Santa Cruz, and Falta concludes: “In India the neo-liberal logic of growth-oriented manual unfurls the Marxian law of capital accumulation (M-C-M) which seeks a cost-cutting route to compete under global capitalism.” To a reader of political economy, this would be the starting point.

One wonders how representative are the workers selected from different industrial clusters in India, since the sampling method is not clearly mentioned, except for the statement: “To avoid possible biases in our sample not more than five workers were selected from a single factory.” In the fifth chapter (Labour security in India’s organised manufacturing industries), the enterprises in SEZs (in Falta and Noida) are placed higher (judged by the constructed indices) than those in the non-SEZ areas in respect of the worker’s employment security, job security, family support, and financial security.

In terms of employment security, for instance, Noida SEZ is ranked above non-SEZ enterprises in Howrah and Kalyani (both in West Bengal), and Surat. These results are distinguishable from some other studies on SEZs. Besides, what explains the large gap, for example, in the index-values of ‘voice representation security’ (referring to a worker’s ability to express his or her protest in a collective voice through trade unions) between Hooghly and Howrah (the adjacent districts of West Bengal)? Is it the “passive attitude of workers” , or rather the submissive trade unions which the workers belong to? On the whole, the book will be “of use to sensitise and change the mindset of corporate capital as well as the policy makers in India.”

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