Examining the ‘Labour’ in Labour Migration: Migrant Workers’ Informal Work Arrangements and Access to Labour Rights in Urban Sectors

The mass exodus of India’s internal migrant workers, from urban areas, back to their villages during the Covid-19 lockdown was met with an outpouring of public empathy. However, policy responses remained restricted to relief, for what was conceived of as a temporary problem precipitated by the lockdown. The migrant workers crisis has been treated solely as an interstate mobility issue, while the lack of wage and employment security or hazardous work conditions, which are commonplace in urban labour markets, does not feature as part of the problem description. This is evident in the attack on workers’ rights by state and central governments, through a labour reforms agenda under the garb of economic revival, even at the peak of the migrants’ crisis. The article uses pre- and post-Covid evidence on labour rights violations facing migrant workers in three modern, urban work sectors—construction, hotels and manufacturing—spanning the high in-migration cities of Ahmedabad and Surat in Gujarat. It juxtaposes the exploitation of migrant workers with gaps in the country’s labour governance architecture, to highlight that suspension of migrant workers’ rights is the central feature of urban economic growth, maintained through extra-legal and informal processes in its labour markets. It addresses core tensions and deadlocks in the labour reforms process, to move towards a labour governance architecture that is able to respond to an intersection of challenges presented by informality, mobility and social marginalisation experienced by rural–urban migrants, for enabling inclusive and equitable urban growth.