Persistent Vulnerabilities in the World of Work and Contemporary Capitalism: Some Reflections on India

Abstract

The onslaught of COVID-19 has been catastrophic for India’s world of work. While it was a bolt out of the blue, its impacts on employment need to be located in the context of a long-term and ongoing structural crisis of (un) employment and systemic vulnerabilities (and subsequent burgeoning of ‘labour reserves’) that have tended to worsen during the neo-liberal regime. Using the various EUS and subsequent PLFS rounds for roughly the last two decades, the paper seeks to highlight selected aspects of the vulnerabilities and inequities that have plagued India’s world of work. These include participation rates, vulnerable employment, composition of workforce and access to certain aspects of decent work such as social security, paid leaves, and written contract. An important issue that the paper investigates is ‘income-vulnerability’ of the employed at the present juncture. Further, inequities across gender and social groups have also been assessed as regards these variables using the most recent data.

Changing World of Work and Rural Diversification

“…Second, the increase in RWS employment has been dominated by work arrangements of a contractual nature, that is, short-term or fixed-term contracts (Rani and Sen, 2018) and lack of prospects for decent work (discussed earlier). Thus, employment in the tertiary sector has been associated with higher vulnerability (Jha & Mishra, 2022). Another point to highlight here is that, with the fall in the share of the primary sector in rural employment before the pandemic (Table 3), there has been a rise in the number of self-employed.…”

“…It is the accentuation of these tendencies with the ascendancy of the neoliberal regime that has remained key to avoiding the crisis of reproduction under contemporary capitalism, while worsening further the process of "diversification." However, it is a complex story that needs to be unpacked carefully and must be situated within the context of a growing reserve army of labor through decline in labor absorption and rise in varying forms of vulnerable or informal employment, which has been assessed in great detail by a large number of scholars working in India (e.g., Patnaik, 2014;Raveendran and Kannan, 2009;Himanshu, 2011;Jha & Mishra, 2022). Furthermore, the fluidity in the concepts of rural-urban and increasingly complicated circuits between the two imply that rural labor has also transformed in a manner that no longer represents only those who predominately derive their income from agriculture, further complicating a discussion on diversification.…”

“…The latter essentially constitute a systemic subsidy to capital through appropriation of unpaid labor (or extracting a higher surplus value from low-paid labor). In fact, in the present stage of spontaneous capitalism, there is a strong tendency for labor repulsion, such that RSP increases in proportion to the active labor army to facilitate accumulation (Jha, 2019; Jha & Mishra, 2022). This petty accumulation assumes various forms across geographies and occupations and is frequently rooted in the existing structures of caste, race, and class hierarchies.…”

“…This changing sectoral composition of GDP; the high growth rates in sectors with low employment elasticity of output, that is, the tertiary sector; and a stagnant manufacturing sector had enormous implications for labor absorption (Jha & Mishra, 2022). It led to a “job-less” growth between 2004/2005 and 2011/2012 and then further to a “job-loss” growth between 2011/2012 and 2017/2018 (Kannan & Raveendran, 2019).…”

“…Nevertheless, it is evident that the share of RWS did increase for both men and women since 2017/2018, which could point toward an occupational diversification. This occupational diversification was, however, accompanied by a rise in the proportion of RWS workers who lack aspects of decent work (Jha & Mishra, 2022), particularly in rural areas—as indicated by a high proportion of RWS workers who were ineligibility for paid leaves and absence of any written contract. Although those among the RWS without any social security reduced between 2011/2012 and 2017/2018, they again began to increase in the pre-pandemic period of 2018/2019.…”