The political economy of labor informality in India: trends, theories and politics

Successive agrarian crises and stunted employment in industries have combined to create a crisis of work in India. The growth of the services sector has seen a rise primarily in informal employment. Informal work is often seen as the domain of the self-employed, of petty trade and small enterprises. However, in many parts of the global south, there is a rise in salaried wage labor, in construction, global supply chains in apparels and electronics, contract work in large corporations, and in services. In these domains, employment remains largely unregulated. I argue that there is a need to bring back wage labor to the centre of analysis and politics, particularly in the context of global capital, and from that conceptual platform a new politics of trade unionism can perhaps be crafted, drawing on the institutional and cultural reservoir of more than a century of the trade union movement.