The Working Poor and the Labour Aristocracy in a South Indian City: A Descriptive and Analytical Account

Abstract

The starting point of this essay is with some findings on employment in the South Indian city of Coimbatore which we reported in an earlier paper (Harriss, 1982). There we described the principal social characteristics of broad groups of workers, defined after categories proposed by Bromley and Gerry (1979)—those of ‘permanent wage work’, ‘short-term wage work’, ‘casual work’ and ‘self-employment’ or ‘dependent work’ in petty production and trade. We established that in Coimbatore there is little movement of individual workers from other forms of employment into permanent wage work and also that it is unusual to find households with members both in permanent wage work and in other forms of employment. These findings prompt the question whether or not there can be said to exist a ‘labour aristocracy’ in the city of Coimbatore. More broadly they suggest questions concerning forms of social organization and class formation amongst urban workers. We will take up these questions here complementing our earlier studies of small-scale production and the relationships between different levels of production in Coimbatore, and so contributing to the rather limited literature on the lives and work of the urban working poor of India. A further part of our purpose is thus to describe the backgrounds, conditions of work, residential communities and organizations of this important group of people.