Reproduction Preferences and Wages: The Mineworker in Jharia Coalfields, 1895–1970

Abstract

Why did workers bargain for a specific amount of wage? This was an expression of reproduction preferences of workers rather than merely any demand and supply calculation. This article brings out how the mineworkers evinced their post-traditional economic propensity, as it was in contradistinction to the ‘subsistence ethic’, in wage negotiations and work efforts. Mineworkers articulated the economic propensity upon the message derived from the self-respect campaign and respectable tastes of consumption. Their economic propensity was an excess for capital’s ‘iron law of wage’. Mineworkers interrogated the latter, and graduated to play the game of wage-work with the rules of struggles for a minimum living wage for a human, ‘civilized’ life. This concept of the minimum living wage represented mineworkers’ new reproduction preferences, the compensation for the loss of supplementary earnings and their awareness of a mismatch between their work-efforts and their earnings. This article takes the historiography of wage disputes beyond the detail of cost-of-living index and trade union militancy. It further questions the argument that the returns to labour depended on the supply of and demand for labour; and that the local customs and labour surplus inhibited workers’ attempt to secure wages adequate for comfortable living.