Working-Class: Structure, Growth, Class Mobilization in India

Defining the Working Class

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• The modern working class came into being with the rise of the capitalist mode of production and its accompanying factory system — without a factory industry, Marx’s scheme holds, there can be working people, but not yet a working class in the strict sense.
• In the Marxian scheme, capitalist society is characterised by two principal classes: the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, and the proletariat, who must sell their labour for wages in order to survive — a distinction Engels specified precisely in a footnote to the Communist Manifesto.
• M. Holmstrom defines the working class more loosely, as people commonly referred to as industrial workers, and sometimes other wage-earners and self-employed workers, who share a common economic situation distinguishing them from property owners and managers — implying a shared interest and a shared consciousness of that interest, both increasingly difficult to sustain given the working class’s internal caste, ethnic, and regional divisions.
• Recent scholarship offers two contradictory readings of the working class’s trajectory: one view holds that automation and the displacement of blue-collar work mean the working class is literally disappearing (more precisely, only blue-collar workers are shrinking); the opposing view holds that virtually all of society — students, teachers, blue- and white-collar workers, salaried employees of every kind — is becoming working class, a reading that highlights the blurring of class boundaries but risks overlooking social distinctions that remain very much alive.

Historical Evolution of the Indian Working Class

Pre-Capitalist and Early Capitalist Origins

• In the pre-capitalist era, a small number of wage earners existed in iron and coal mining, but their numbers were too few to constitute a class.
• Early capitalism — the growth of factory production and the mushrooming of cities — created the real need for, and thus the emergence of, a working class, as villagers moved to these new centres of production.
• Class consciousness developed once workers began to realise that the owners of the means of production were appropriating the entire surplus their labour generated, leaving them exploited.

Consolidation and Early Working-Class Struggle

• Worker consciousness of exploitation was already visible by 1888, when workers at the Shyamnagar Jute Mill assaulted the mill manager, Mr Kiddie; a threatened strike at the Champdany Jute Mill in 1879–80, against an unpopular single-shift system, led the authorities to abandon the proposed change altogether.
• The turn of the century saw both organised national political movements and consolidation of the working class as a force — the Partition of Bengal (1905) aroused mass national indignation that created favourable conditions for the working class to intensify its own economic struggles.
• The first organisation built on modern trade-union lines was the Madras Labour Union, founded in 1918.

The World War Era and Trade Union Formation

• Capitalist development accelerated on the eve of the First World War as the government mobilised India’s industrial capacity for war needs — but the resulting price rise sharply reduced working-class living standards, with rural areas hit by rising manufactured-goods prices and towns by rising food prices.
• The October Revolution and the broader post-war crisis of capitalism gave new strength to India’s anti-imperialist struggle, forming the backdrop to the birth of the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) in 1920 — the first central organisation of the Indian working class, founded at the height of national political awakening.
• Recession struck Indian industry from 1922, intensifying with the global economic crisis of 1929, as mill owners attempted wage cuts that workers resisted despite being caught between rival imperialist and native capitalist interests.
• The Second World War (from 1939) brought double- and triple-shift working, curtailed leave, and steadily falling wage rates, provoking a wave of strikes across Bombay, Kanpur, Calcutta, Bangalore, Jamshedpur, Dhanbad, Jharia, Nagpur, Madras, and Digboi — evidence that the working class’s outlook by this stage extended well beyond narrow economic demands into full engagement with national and international political struggle.

Post-Independence Working-Class Politics

• The end of the Second World War saw the Indian working class emerge as a highly organised, class-conscious, and uncompromising force, with a sharp rise in strike action in 1946 and the AITUC demanding an end to retrenchment alongside minimum wages, an eight-hour day, health insurance, old-age pensions, and unemployment allowance.
• Independence transformed the political terrain for the working class: struggle that had been directed against colonial rulers now confronted a state in which power sat with domestic capitalists and landlords, whose economic interests ran directly counter to the working class’s own — a conflict sharpened by the steep post-Independence rise in prices and continuing fall in real wages, generating powerful working-class resistance nationwide.

Structure of the Contemporary Working Class

• India’s economy is genuinely multi-structural — pre-capitalist relations of production co-exist with capitalist ones — producing a correspondingly differentiated working-class structure, further shaped by caste, tribe, ethnicity, and a gendered division of labour underpinned by patriarchy.
• On the basis of wages, the Indian working class divides into four broad tiers.
• First, permanent employees of the large factory sector who receive a family wage (sufficient to maintain not just the individual worker but their family) — concentrated in public-sector enterprises and modern sectors like petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and engineering.
• Second, a large and actually preponderant section that does not receive a family wage — workers in older industries like cotton and jute textiles, sugar, and paper, including permanent tea-plantation workers, whose owners have historically refused to accept the family-wage norm.
• Third, contract and casual labourers at the bottom of the wage scale, spanning construction, brick-making, and other casual industrial work.
• Fourth, a reserve army of labour engaged in petty commodity production and petty trading — hawking, rag-picking — generally within the informal sector and surviving on the barest subsistence wage.
• Because most workers do not receive a family wage, households typically rely on more than one wage earner, supplemented by non-capitalist-sector income; Das Gupta notes that both men and women in plantation or bidi-manufacturing households routinely supplement wages through allied agricultural activity (cultivation, poultry, milk) — activity that, by keeping formal-sector wages artificially low, effectively subsidises the capitalist sector.
• Wage differentials map onto differences in job security and working conditions too: better-paid labour enjoys far greater security, while workers at the lower end face not just insecurity but extra-economic coercion and personal bondage that curtails their civil rights — a pattern that worsens further for women workers, who may, for instance, be barred from steel-plant work “for safety” while remaining permitted to work the very same site as contract labour.

Caste, Recruitment, and Labour Market Segmentation

• Contrary to the expectation that large wage differentials would drive mobility from casual toward permanent employment, Deshpande’s study of Bombay labour found the reverse: around 87% of regular employees who had changed jobs had started as regular employees, with only 13% having begun as casual labour.
• Harris’s Coimbatore study similarly found that individuals do not move easily between labour-market segments — of 826 households surveyed, fewer than 20 cases showed movement from the unorganised into the organised sector, even though many unorganised-sector workers possessed the skills, experience, and education a factory job required; what they lacked was the right social network.
• Subramanian and Papola’s Ahmedabad study found 91% of jobs secured through introduction by another worker — a blood relation in 35% of cases, a fellow caste member in 44%, someone from the same native place in 12%, and a friend in 7% — showing how thoroughly recruitment channels run along caste and kinship lines.
• K.L. Sharma’s five-city study (Pune, Kota, Bombay, Ahmedabad, Bangalore) found 61% of workers were upper-caste Hindus, and a separate Kerala study found upper castes dominating higher-income jobs while Dalits and Adivasis clustered in low-wage work, with middle castes occupying the middle-to-bottom range — a pattern that persists even in the public sector, where SC/ST/OBC representation still falls short of population share, and where caste-linked job assignment (Dalits and Adivasis disproportionately doing the most hazardous and physically punishing work in coal mines and steel plants) remains visible.
• Deshpande attributes part of this to “pre-labour-market characteristics” like education and landholding — but notes that even where upper- and lower-caste workers hold comparable education and land, upper-caste workers still secure better-paid segments, evidence that caste ties in recruitment continue to operate independently of measurable qualification.
• Nathan frames caste’s function more structurally still: caste helps ensure a steady labour supply for different kinds of work while keeping wages no higher than strictly necessary — the depressed condition of Adivasis and Dalits guarantees a pool of labour willing to work near subsistence, so caste simultaneously locks lower groups into the lower strata of the working class and gives upper-caste workers a durable labour-market privilege.

Class Mobilization and Trade Unionism

• Indian trade unionism formally began organising from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, culminating in the AITUC (1920); but trade unions as a whole have not, historically, been fully responsive to the problems of India’s working class, and the 1991 New Economic Policy affected the working class severely, with today’s increasingly fragmented workforce making unionisation harder still.
• Sharad Bhowmick distinguishes government-sector employees from industrial employees in terms of their differing job security and organisational strength, while Arjun Sengupta argues that the loosening of state control after liberalisation has left labour fearful for its job security in ways that actively obstruct collective consolidation.
• Studies by Richard Lambert, Milton Singer, and N.R. Seth find that caste, joint family, and other traditional values have not, in fact, obstructed the development of healthy social relations within factories and industrial organisations.
• Bardhan and Rudra argue that globalisation and urbanisation have together increased the capitalist class’s assets specifically at the expense of the working class, while Prof. Krishna Kumar points to the politicisation of work culture within public sector undertakings — where guaranteed job security removed any incentive for either innovation or genuine trade union activity — as a distinct driver of industrial underperformance.

DP Mukherjee and A.R. Desai: Modernization or Capitalism?

• D.P. Mukherjee reads the rise of the Indian industrial working class as a product of modernisation — a broad civilisational shift in values and social organisation.
• A.R. Desai, by contrast, reads the same phenomenon through the lens of capitalism — the working class as the direct structural product of capitalist relations of production imposed on India under colonial rule and extended after Independence.
• This disagreement mirrors the wider debate, discussed above, about whether the working class should be understood as a distinctly modern social category or as an inevitable consequence of a specific mode of production — a distinction with real stakes for how one reads the working class’s likely future trajectory.

Contemporary Developments: Labour Codes and the Gig Economy

• India’s four consolidated labour codes — replacing 29 separate central labour laws — came into force on 21 November 2025, formally extending statutory recognition and social-security coverage to gig and platform workers for the first time, a significant structural change to the wage-tier system described above.
• The gig and platform economy itself is projected to grow sharply, from an estimated 7.7 million workers in 2020 to roughly 23.5 million by 2029–30 (NITI Aayog) — a genuinely new addition to the “reserve army” tier of the working-class structure, expanding as an extension of informal work with historically minimal social-security provision, and now the central test case for whether India’s newest labour law framework can extend meaningful protection to workers who fall entirely outside the traditional factory-based model this article’s historical account describes.