Inside a textile mill of Orient Craft Ltd. in Gurugram, Haryana.
| Photo Credit: ANINDITO MUKHERJEE/REUTERS

In her poignant and meticulously researched book, Labouring Lives: Industry and Informality in New India, Archana Aggarwal, an economics professor at Hindu College, University of Delhi, sheds light on the often-overlooked existence of modern-day industrial workers. Drawing from her extensive field visits to factories and workers’ homes in Gurugram, Noida, and Manesar, Aggarwal masterfully weaves together empirical data and personal stories to create a compelling narrative accessible to readers from diverse backgrounds.

Divided into six thought-provoking chapters, the book progressively delves into the subject matter, commencing with a historical overview of industrialisation in India. From there, Aggarwal leads readers on a journey through the industrial clusters of the National Capital Region, exploring the lives of wage labourers and shedding light on the challenging working conditions prevalent in factories. Ultimately, the book reveals the grim reality that labour legislation, once meant to safeguard workers’ rights, has become an inadequate protector in today’s economic landscape.

Textile industry

One sector highlighted by the author is the textile and garment industry. Archana Aggarwal underscores the industry’s capacity for job creation, citing a government report from 2020 that states the garment and textile sector can generate 70 jobs for every Rs. 1 crore invested, in stark contrast to the average of 12 jobs created in other industries. However, this industry’s reliance on low wages, which prompts the constant relocation of production bases to countries with cheaper labour, underscores the dichotomy faced by workers like Ramesh, a 35-year-old garment worker from Kapashera near Delhi whose story, among others, Archana Aggarwal has documented in the book. Ramesh produces expensive garments but must travel to distant cities to purchase affordable second-hand clothing for their own families.

The section titled “Journey of a Shirt” carefully traces the highly globalised production process and highlights how Indian firms occupy the lower end of the value chain. This positioning further exacerbates the plight of workers like Ramesh, who are condemned to lead undignified lives due to their limited access to economic opportunities.

Archana Aggarwal also emphasises the crucial role manufacturing plays in a country’s structural transformation compared to other sectors. Unlike developed countries that transitioned from agriculture to manufacturing before reaching the services sector, India experienced a unique leapfrogging phenomenon. The author ponders the implications of this transformative journey, leaving readers with an anticipation of what lies ahead for the country.

Through chapters like “Indignity of Labour”, Archana Aggarwal exposes the hollow claims of industry-led growth by revealing that many industrial workers still depend on agriculture to supplement their meagre wages. This “reverse remittance” underscores the disheartening reality that industrial sectors fail to provide workers with decent living conditions, relying instead on subsidies from village economies. The author questions the fairness of the jobs generated by these industries if they neither uplift the workers nor their families back home.

Archana Aggarwal fearlessly calls out problematic management theories like Taylorism, which advocate exploitative managerial control and reduce workers to mere cogs in a machine. By dissecting this theory and revealing how assembly-line work relies on monotonous labour at breakneck speed, the author effectively captures the dehumanising aspects of modern industrial practices.

No love for labour laws

As the country grapples with a critical unemployment rate, the youth are forced to seek employment in the gig economy, which fails to recognise them as “workers”. Even traditional manufacturing companies increasingly adopt workforce segmentation, labelling workers as temporary, casual, apprentices, or contract workers, while extracting the same amount of labour from them as from permanent employees.

This evolving labour flexibility, as Archana Aggarwal aptly labels it, has been implemented without formal legislative measures and has only intensified as companies disregard labour laws to maximise profits. Governments, eager to enhance their “ease of doing business” rankings, prioritise reducing labour costs, often at the expense of workers’ welfare.

Archana Aggarwal highlights recent worrisome developments, such as the proposed increase in working hours from 8 to 12 per shift in Tamil Nadu, which faced significant backlash and was subsequently withdrawn. These attempts to dilute labour laws, coupled with the intensification of work, further exacerbate the already dire conditions faced by blue-collar workers.

With precision and clarity, Archana Aggarwal dissects the subject of labour, bringing attention to the struggles of workers whose voices are drowned out by the clamour of machinery on shop floors.

Labouring Lives stands as an unwavering testament to the plight of industrial workers, presenting a compelling examination that spares no detail while remaining accessible to a wide audience. In an era dominated by news of record profits and production, Archana Aggarwal’s work serves as a crucial reminder of the precarious lives hidden beneath the surface of India’s industrial landscape.