““Globalization has pushed the labour into informal organization of work.” Substantiate your answer with suitable examples.” (2016)
Globalisation, the integration of production, finance and markets across borders, has reorganised work around global value chains. Lead firms design and market, while production is dispersed to low-cost sites through layers of subcontractors. The statement claims this has moved labour out of protected, formally organised employment into unregulated arrangements. The evidence largely bears it out, with important qualifications.
How globalisation informalises labour
- Mobile capital, immobile labour: firms can relocate and workers cannot. This asymmetry weakens bargaining and sets off a “race to the bottom” as states compete for investment.
- Flexible accumulation: David Harvey (The Condition of Postmodernity, 1989) links the post-1970s global economy to flexible labour markets and outsourcing.
- Network enterprise: Manuel Castells (The Rise of the Network Society, 1996) describes the individualisation of labour as networks replace the integrated firm.
- Liberalisation: India’s 1991 reforms exposed firms to global price competition, pushing them to cut labour costs.
- Global feminisation through flexible labour: Guy Standing (1989) showed export-led growth drawing women in on the insecure terms once attached to “women’s work”.
Examples
- Tiruppur knitwear cluster: Geert De Neve‘s ethnography shows export orders cascading through small workshops and home-based units, with flexible hiring that unions struggle to reach. Under the Sumangali scheme, young women were hired on multi-year contracts with a lump sum promised only at the end.
- Bengaluru garment workers, 2016: a February notification barred withdrawal of employers’ provident fund contributions until age 58. Largely non-unionised women workers protested spontaneously in April and forced its withdrawal, showing how thin their protection was.
- Automobiles: the 2011–12 dispute at Maruti Suzuki’s Manesar plant turned on union recognition and the use of contract workers alongside permanent ones. After the violence of 2012, over 500 workers were dismissed.
- Organised manufacturing as a whole: contract workers rose from about 20 per cent in 1999-2000 to 42 per cent in 2023-24 (Annual Survey of Industries).
- Global platforms: ride and delivery apps backed by global capital classify workers as “partners”. NITI Aayog (2022) projects 2.35 crore gig workers in India by 2029-30.
- The North too: zero-hours contracts in Britain and app-based work in the United States show informality spreading into advanced economies.
Qualifications
- Informality predates globalisation: India’s workforce was overwhelmingly unorganised before 1991. Globalisation reshaped informality rather than creating it.
- Some work was formalised: IT and export services created salaried jobs, provident fund coverage and, for many women, a first independent income.
- Domestic institutions mediate: labour-law design, weak enforcement and caste and gender norms (Barbara Harriss-White, India Working, 2003) matter as much as global forces.
- Counter-movements: state gig-worker laws (Rajasthan 2023, Karnataka 2025), India’s Code on Social Security, 2020, in force since November 2025, and the EU Platform Work Directive (2024) echo Karl Polanyi‘s “double movement” of society protecting itself against the market.
Conclusion
Globalisation did not invent informal labour, but it turned informality into a deliberate strategy of global capital rather than a leftover of backwardness, pushing the costs of flexibility down the chain to the least protected workers. The remedy must be equally transnational: labour standards enforced along value chains, portable social security, and organisation of workers who lack a single employer.