Abstract
Jonathan Parry’s Classes of Labour offers an empathetic and rigorous ethnography of the evolution of industrial workers’ lives from the 1950s, when India launched its postcolonial development agenda of industrial modernization, to 2014, when India’s neoliberal privatization agenda was in full swing. Focusing on the central Indian steel town of Bhilai, the book’s 600-plus pages cover an expansive array of topics including private- and public-sector plants; informal and formal labor; labor recruitment, reservations, promotions, and unions; debt, childhood, marriage, and suicide; and the much-debated relationship between caste and class.
Although less highlighted, this rich ethnography of Bhilai also beautifully underscores the central role labor migration plays in constituting and reproducing capitalism. Acknowledging this role is essential to any effort to articulate a more transformative development future for labor.
At the most basic level, labor migration not only created the new modern city of Bhilai but also altered rural sending regions. The Bhilai Steel Plant would not have been constructed or operated without migrant laborers (who came from other Indian states and from Chhattisgarh’s nearby countryside). To encourage workers to move to the emerging urban center, migration (and by extension, Bhilai) was valorized as a symbol of modernity and national integration. Meanwhile, the sending regions lost their laborers and became dependent on a new financial flow from migrants’ remittances. In some cases, remittances from Bhilai were temporary since they stopped once migrants’ family members also migrated to Bhilai to reunite loved ones (p. 112). In other cases, remittances (especially from the Gulf) raised land prices so high that Bhilai migrants could not afford to return to their own home villages (p. 113). Unsurprisingly perhaps, out-migration increased crime in many sending regions (p. 105). Bhilai’s migration patterns echo the migrant-based genesis of global cities (such as New York, London, and Dubai) and the vulnerability from remittance-dependence that continue to define global migration corridors today (see Agarwala, Rina, The Migration-Development Regime: How Class Shapes Indian Emigration, 2022, and Banerjee, Pallavi, The Opportunity Trap: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families, and the Failures of the Dependent Visa Program, 2022, both reviewed within this Forum).
At a more substantive level, labor migration undergirds the book’s two key arguments. Parry’s first argument is that Bhilai’s manual labor force comprised two classes of labor: the labor elite who enjoyed job security through their naukri or “service” and the precarious, laboring poor who conducted kam or “work.” Rather than defining labor classes by ownership over means of production or skill, Parry underscores the employment contract—job security, therefore, is conceived as a key property right. Implicit (perhaps too implicit) in the book is the role that capital (as a party to the contract) and the state (as the enforcer of the contract) play in forming and cementing these subclass boundaries within labor. Both classes are rooted in the economic structure of production, and both are embedded in relations of exploitation with capital. But because they also engage in exploitative relations with each other, they have conflicting interests. Over time, Parry argues, they have transformed into distinct and socially meaningful groups that have lifestyles, life chances, and identities that differ from each other. This bifurcated subclass structure within labor is especially pronounced today, because mobility between labor classes is now impossible (although in the past, some workers were able to move upward from kam to naukri).
But Bhilai also underscores how the terms of migration help form and cement class divisions among workers. In other words, migration must be added to the list of markers that “structure” the material and cultural basis of class boundaries under capitalism, and future research should more explicitly expose how capital and the state define such terms in varying contexts. Bhilai’s management recruited two classes of labor migrants—one that would offer a core workforce of stable and skilled operatives to run the plant and the other that would offer a temporary workforce to build the plant. To attract the former, Bhilai management offered long-term job contracts to labor migrants, the right to migration for their families, and access to excellent schools and hospitals in Bhilai to cover migrants’ reproductive costs. These opportunities created a stream of long-term migrants who generally came from afar and tended to settle permanently in Bhilai. For the latter group, however, Bhilai management offered none of the above. This lack of support for migrants’ lives in receiving contexts created a circulatory migrant stream whose jobs were insecure and whose social reproduction costs were borne by the rural sending community. Many of these migrants came from the nearby countryside. These divergent migration terms (defined by capital and the state) cemented workers’ divergent social and economic chances. Such use of migration to exacerbate class differences has long been an important feature of global migration from India (see Agarwala, The Migration-Development Regime, 2022).
Bhilai also exposes how a “culture of migration” offers migrant workers material resources and a self-identity that legitimizes their class-based superiority over non-migrant workers. On the material side, cultures of migration offer migrants job information, new networks, and other economic and social prospects that are unavailable to non-migrants. As Parry writes, “The seasoned migrant watches the urban job market as anxiously as his peasant brother watches the weather or price of grain” (p. 104). On the identity side, individual migrants and their families frame themselves as ideologically superior to non-migrants of the “rural backlands” (p. 108). Bhilai workers credited their migration experiences for their metamorphosis into autonomous, modern beings who were unwilling to return to rural life. Their children could not speak their home dialects, and they could no longer withstand rural living conditions. The ability to avoid return thus became a new status marker that kamwallahs lacked and naukriwallahs held (p. 112). These trends echo those of global migrants: Most elite migrants in the United States have been able to remain abroad, whereas poor migrants to the Gulf have been forced to eventually return to their hometowns where they have retained their identities of superiority over native non-migrants (see Agarwala, The Migration-Development Regime, 2022).
Parry’s second key argument is that in Bhilai’s everyday interactions, class trumps other axes of inequality such as caste, gender, and regional ethnicity. Rather than denying non-class axes of inequality, Parry exposes the conditions under which Bhilai’s manual workers are divided into social classes, which in turn reshape the contours of non-class identities. For example, Parry eloquently shows how class inequalities are “naturalized” and aided by the “spirit of the hierarchy on which the caste order is founded” (p. 23).
But here again, migration plays an important role. In Bhilai, migration watered down the structuring force of caste. The Nehruvian ideal of a pan-Indian modernity enabled Bhilai management to draw migrants from a range of regions, which in turn obfuscated precise caste positions and ensured that no single regional ethnicity dominated or organized in rebellion (p. 85). Although mentioned only briefly in the book, the Soviet influence, capacity, and technical training of Bhilai engineers and workers may also have buttressed Bhilai’s ideological approach to an integrated, anti-caste modernity (as well as its offer of low work hours to elite naukris). But in other steel towns, such as Rourkela (which was influenced by Germany and is featured in the final chapter), the local government used migration to exacerbate caste and communal violence by stoking tensions between migrants and native populations. Such events point out important avenues for future research on the role of migration in disrupting rather than cementing non-class identities.
Ultimately, Bhilai’s story exposes how labor migration has constituted and reproduced Indian capitalism by fragmenting Indian labor into subclasses. Vivek Chibber’s book (The Class Matrix, 2022) argues that capitalism’s stability can be explained by individual resignation. But Parry usefully specifies an additional mechanism through which some of India’s migrant workers have not only resigned but also consented to capitalism. The fragmentation of migrant labor into a protected (i.e., consenting) versus unprotected (i.e., resigning) subclass, alongside a culture of migration that has fragmented migrant labor from non-migrant labor, have undermined working-class solidarity, organization, and resistance. Capitalist exploitation thus marches on.
But we know that capitalism is also mired with contradictions, which raises an important question: Can migration also challenge capitalism in our near future? The terms of the employment contract that Parry argues structured Bhilai’s labor migrants into two subclasses is now a relic of the past. Since the 1970s, there has been a severe shortage of Bhilai-type stable industrial naukri jobs for India’s workers. In their place, unprotected and harsh construction and service jobs have surged and successfully attracted Indian workers to cities within India and farther afield, such as to the Gulf. Even elite professional jobs (in India and the United States) that during an earlier time offered job security and permanent visas have now turned to unprotected employment contracts and short-term visas (see Banerjee, The Opportunity Trap, 2022). Almost all contemporary Indian labor migrants (within and outside India), therefore, are thrust into temporary and circular migration streams to take unprotected, private-sector jobs, leaving their families to cover all reproduction costs.
So, if nearly all employment contracts for India’s labor migrants are becoming unprotected and insecure today, are we witnessing a restructuring of Indian labor into a single (albeit multifaceted) class? If yes, could the rising insecurity among Indian workers form the basis for solidarity and a new working-class movement? Chibber rightly notes that we know very little about the events that catalyze workers’ collective action. But understanding the role that migration plays in structuring contemporary labor might offer an important step toward understanding how capitalism has successfully fragmented workers and how workers might mobilize under a common identity to (at the very least) tame capitalism.