Struggling with Informality

Abstract

The labor organization experience among India's informal workers since the 1980s challenges the existing labor literature, which asserts that informal workers cannot organize without an established employer, a single workplace, or a legal employment contract. Indeed, Indian informal workers have been organizing into unions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) since the 1970s and 80s. Of the seven organizations examined in this study, six are membership-based trade unions registered under the Trade Union Act (1926) and one is a NGO registered under the Trust and Societies Act. Whereas the construction organizations are independent of political parties, the bidi unions are affiliated with left-wing political parties. Although informal workers’ unions are structured like formal workers’ unions, their strategies differ from those of formal workers. Drawing from both sets of interviews, I address my first set of research questions in this chapter. How does the informal nature of production affect workers’ collective action strategies? From where do they draw their structural power? Do their strategies vary across industry or state? I argue that to accommodate their dispersed and insecure employment circumstances, informal workers have made three key changes to formal workers’ struggles. These changes are consistent across industries and states, and they are significant to our understanding of workers’ democratic participation in the current liberalization era. Moreover, they challenge conceptualizations of informal workers as delinked from the state (see also Agarwala 2006, 2008).