The introductory essay to this collection examines the possibilities that work-based collective organisation affords for transformative politics under precarity. We begin from the premise that precarity is experienced in different ways in the Global North and South, among stable workers and in 'informal' work. Recent scholarship has explored the relationship between precariousness in life and labour, but has paid less attention to labour relations. Contrary to some dominant theories of 'the precariat', we suggest that precarious workers are not always anomic and lacking in work-based political identity, but nor are they straightforwardly a 'class in the making'. The papers in this volume show that there are multiple ways that people organise collectively to challenge and improve their conditions of work, from traditional trade unions, cooperatives, and union-like associations. All have different ramifications for politics and understandings of class composition, and of how informal and precarious economies are likely to develop in the future.

This article is based upon ethnographic research in the Indian company town of Jamshedpur, in the Tata Motors and Telcon companies. I relate the local shift towards casual labour since the 1990s to managerial discourses that rationalize this development. I argue that whilst flexible accumulation may represent a global transformation of employment regimes, the local implementation of this process relies upon a discursive continuity with the past. Referencing a historical language of cultural poverty, predominantly Bengali managers in Jamshedpur continue to claim paternal authority over their mainly Bihari employees, despite no longer fulfilling their traditional ‘parental’ roles vis‐à‐vis the provision of permanent employment. In the latter sections of the article, I discuss the managerial spectre of inefficient permanent workers; ‘deadwood’ whom it is perceived that casualization can prune from the workforce. I argue that whilst permanent employees may exhibit less commitment to the work process than their casual counterparts, their presence on the shop‐floor suggests continuity with the company town ideal and forestalls resistance among casual workers. Far from disembedding labour from social relations, neoliberal employment regimes in Jamshedpur exploit company town paternalism and cultural prejudices.

Employees in global workplaces commonly suggest they are being failed by trade union representatives that betray the political ideals of their institutions. The tenacity of this discourse requires interrogation, since the notion persists even in contexts that lack evidence of such practices occurring. Based upon a comparison of Kazakhstan and India, we suggest that there is a fundamental slippage between the emotive aspect of union politics and the banal realties of institutional processes. We explore how conservative and radical trade unions alike rely upon appeals to an affect of struggle, in order to rationalise their work as part of an international and historically continuous political project. The paper explains why it is in the bureaucratic nature of trade unions to betray such an affect.

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Inspired by E. P. Thompson´s modelling of class as the contingent outcome of historical processes, this paper explores how autochthony and descent came to inform the boundaries of industrial workforces in the Indian steel towns of Jamshedpur and Rourkela. We suggest that if class is a historical object, then it relates to other forms of power and identity in ways that question the use of rigid analytic typologies. In the private sector Tata company town of Jamshedpur, an industrial working class was constructed during the late colonial period from labour migrants, whose employment became heritable within families. In the public sector Rourkela Steel Plant, founded in the mid-twentieth century, the politics of ethno regionalism coincided with state development policy to inform employment reservation for autochthons. Through a historical analysis of urbanization, migration and employment policy, we consider how elite workforces that bound themselves according to the principles of autochthony and descent were formed in the social laboratories of India´s steel towns. We suggest that such processes demand a class concept that engages more subtly with the work of E. P. Thompson.

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