Ideologies of Labor and the Consequences of Toil in India’s Construction Industry

Abstract

This article examines the semiotics of labor through an analysis of a construction skill training program in Delhi. It focuses on recurring struggles between students and administrators over the nature and consequences of the activities they engaged in at the training center. Drawing on the notion of language ideology, it argues that students and administrators invoked different ideologies of labor in framing the value and meaning of productive activities. Under different ideological framings, productive action had the potential to transform the subject in radically different but equally unstable ways. While students worried that engaging in “labor work” could transform them into abject laborers, administrators tried to shore up the notion that “practical” would make students into successful workers. More generally, the paper suggests that attending to ideologies of labor can nuance accounts of how labor transforms subjects and social worlds.