Precarious Self-Employment in India: A Case of Home-Based Own Account Enterprises

Abstract

Abstract A new thrust towards self-employment is seen in India where more than half of the labor class is fending for itself outside the ambit of any kind of employment. Global production networks (gpn s) have changed the structure of the labor market and extended precarity to almost every part of work and world. This has created a labor class that is neither proletariat nor bourgeois but a petty producer integrated in gpn s through mediators called ‘contractors.’ These producers are basically laborers who have been pushed out of the factory system and forced into self-employment. The paper has studied the trajectory of non-agricultural home-based Own Account Enterprises (oae s); a classic case of petty producers across gender and caste lines in various sectors of industry using state-organized enterprise surveys conducted in 2010–2011 and 2015–2016. It has found a vast majority of oae s earning less than half the proposed minimum wage (pmv)—a threshold similar to the idea of living wages rates. The most distressed oae s are in manufacturing, especially, textile, garment, leather, and chemical industries. The over emphasis on self-employment is shrinking the space for labor movement particularly in the global South.