The Labouring Practices of Jobless Degree Holders: Rethinking Work, Productivity, and Labour in a Small Hill Town in North India

Abstract

This article critiques productivist and wage‐centric conceptualisations of labour by analysing the labouring practices of jobless degree holders in the Indian Himalayas. I draw on ethnographic material to illuminate how young men developed forms of unpaid labour that centred skills associated with their educational credentials. Educated youth were able to produce positive reputations through their labour and made sense of their activities as making a social contribution to others. Yet their labouring practices also affirmed dominant modes of masculinity and reinscribed patriarchal gender relations. While jobless degree holders were excluded from the kinds of jobs they desired, I argue that they were able to yield status and respect by embodying competencies that white collar jobs demanded. Situating jobless degree holders within productive relations creates scope for illuminating how they attempt to assert their productive capacities in the face of long‐term unemployment.

Rewriting the hills: Youth sociality as a mode of navigating unemployment in a context of outmigration in North India

“…One of the most potent ways in which young men attempted to do this was by subtly critiquing dominant understandings of rural space that define it by what it lacks. Indeed, most young men who gathered at Bhandari Infotech performed masculinities in ways that were strikingly similar to what may be expected of white-collar employees in large urban centres (Deuchar 2019, 2021; Lukose 2009; Nambiar 2013). This was particularly the case for the first and third sets of young men, who often dressed in collared shirts and trousers.…”

“…The term ‘non-migrants’ oriented analytical attention towards what they have not done, rather than what they have done and can do (cf. Chea and Huijsmans 2018; Deuchar 2021). It also downplayed their agency and concealed important differences between these young men.…”