Beyond the Disaster: Communities of Practice and Statuses of Labor among Bhopal’s Metalworkers

Abstract

In analyzing the labor relations and representations of the informal sector’s metalworkers in Old Bhopal, where the scars of the disaster caused by the Union Carbide factory are still visible, this paper goes beyond the disaster to study the everyday laboring lives of the informal sector’s metalworkers. It argues that though the sector as a labor market is extremely loose and precarious, fairly structured norms and values are shaping statutory positions regarding the levels of skills and of experience that are less volatile than the labor market itself. These statuses are holding the worker’s scattered trajectories together in communities of practice; claims of mastery have to be proven during the concrete working process. However, the scarcity of employment and the everlasting competition, make the upward mobilities erratic and collective resistances difficult. The ideal of independence often conceals the fact that ownership of a workshop is mostly reserved for heirs. The statuses of skills mastery have no value outside of work in North Bhopal’s poor settlements where the workers, precarious and generally Muslim dwellers, face an acute marginalization. As frequently failing breadwinners, they are striving to live up to the dominant masculine norms. However, the paper also insists on the bridge between the daily strife against the precariousness and the long-lasting struggle for inclusion in the city.