Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. xx, 250 pp. (Tables, figures.) C$30.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-107-66308-4.
Rina Agarwala’s book is quite a tour de force. Based on scrupulous research, and gracefully and clearly written, it makes an important and original contribution in two distinct fields. In the first place it adds substantially to understanding of the politics of labour in contemporary India, and through this to the wider field of labour studies in the context of neoliberal globalization; secondly, it is a first-rate contribution to comparative research on the politics of the major Indian states. It is theoretically astute, without being burdened by theoretical exegesis, and it is mercifully free from genuflection to contemporary icons of social science. The case that the book makes for the continuing relevance of class analysis is quietly but effectively done. Another of its great qualities is that the working poor speak through the pages of the book. Agarwala gives the reader a strong “feel” for the lives of the people about whom she writes.
In India the term “unorganized labour” is much more widely used than “informal labour,” the concept that gained wide currency following the seminal work of the anthropologist Keith Hart in the early 1970s, referring to labour that is engaged in operations that are not legally registered and that is not regulated or protected by labour laws. Workers in such forms of employment have always accounted for most of the labour force in India, though in India, as is the case very widely across the world, the competitive pressures brought by increasing integration into the global economy and the influence of neo-liberalism in economic policy, have meant that this share is tending to increase. The “casualization” of labour is taking place very widely, and the labour movement is almost everywhere in retreat. It is generally held that informal workers confront great difficulties in organizing themselves, being divided in so many ways and across very many often small and frequently changing work-sites. But Agarwala’s work shows that the idea that “informal labour” is “unorganized” can actually be misleading. Drawing on 140 interviews with workers and a further 200 with officials, employers and labour leaders, she documents the extent of organization amongst two important groups of informal workers in India, construction workers and those employed in the production of bidis (local Indian cigarettes). These groups of workers, with greater success in some states (notably Tamil Nadu and Kerala) than in others, have mobilized not against employers for workers’ rights—as has been the objective of the labour movement historically—but rather to make demands upon the state as citizens for social benefits, and also for recognition of their status as workers (marked by state-certified identity cards). It is a labour movement that, Agarwala argues, accommodates unprotected, flexible production whilst struggling for greater protection for the working poor. Where the workers’ demands have been met it has been through the establishment of industry-specific welfare boards, jointly funded by government, employers and workers themselves. In return for membership workers may receive scholarships, housing and health benefits, and pensions. This is not a heroic struggle for social transformation, representing as it does an accommodation with neoliberal capitalism, and involving an implicit contract with the state: in return for their benefits workers “provide the promise of their political support and their low cost, flexible labor on an unregulated basis” (192). It is all of a piece with the way in which the Indian state has extended welfare provisioning, so ensuring that capital accumulation can proceed “unencumbered by the burden of protecting workers’ livelihoods” (M. Vijayabaskar, “Global Crises, Welfare Provision and Coping Strategies of Labour in Tiruppur,” Economic and Political Weekly 46, no. 22: 38-46, quoted from 45). But at least these most insecure workers have found ways “to dignify their discontent” (though Agarwala does not elaborate upon the idea of “dignified discontent”).
For this reviewer, however, the most exciting part of the book (and it accounts for two-thirds of it) is concerned with explaining why the informal worker’s movement has been more effective in some states than in others. This leads Agarwala into well-documented, detailed comparative studies of the politics of Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Maharashtra. Her well-designed comparative framework, which takes account of the varying character of electoral politics and of the approaches to liberalization across major states, also includes Kerala, but she explains that she did not do original research in that state because of the richness of the existing literature about it. One criticism of the text is that she might have made much more comparative reference to the Kerala case than in fact she does. Her analysis shows that the informal workers’ movement has been much more successful in Tamil Nadu than elsewhere because of the electoral politics of the state, in which the two major parties must needs enter into fierce competition for the votes of the working poor. Promises regarding the informal workers’ welfare boards have figured significantly in the parties’ electoral programmes. The commitment of Tamil Nadu, under a succession of governments, to liberalization has also given informal workers some additional leverage. In West Bengal, however, the informal workers’ movement has done much less well, in spite of what might have been expected of the long-lived rule of the Communist Party of India (Marxist): “For decades, CPM retained power by enforcing a reformist ideology and focusing on rural interests, which constrained urban workers’ struggles” (153). The studies of the politics of the three states will be of great interest even to scholars who are not centrally concerned with labour politics.
This is, therefore, an important book. One wishes, however, that Agarwala had been able to provide a clearer picture of how far other groups of informal workers are organized—Tamil Nadu does, for example, have an Unorganized Workers’ Federation, which is not mentioned—and in other states as well as those that she has studied in depth. This is really significant, because some readers may come away from the book with the impression that Indian informal workers are generally organized, which is almost certainly far from being the case. Another limitation of the book is that we learn very little about how the unions that are referred to have been set up, and how they are organized. It is odd, too, to read a book about informal labour that attributes the definition of the idea to Alejandro Portes and others in 1989, and makes no reference to the much earlier research and writing, based on extensive field research in India, of Jan Breman. These criticisms, however, do not detract from my view that this is a most valuable book.
John Harriss
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada
pp. 362-364