Labour and Society

Labour as Social Activity: The Starting Point

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• Marx treats labour as the defining human capacity: man is a creative, self-conscious being who acts on nature and transforms it, and in doing so satisfies not just physical need but his own individuality — this is what Marx calls species-being, the free, purposive creation that separates human production from an animal’s fixed instinctive activity.
  • Because man is never satisfied with existing conditions, labour is also the engine of historical change — a species that keeps reshaping nature to meet expanding needs cannot remain in a static social arrangement for long.
• Labour is never a solitary act. Transforming nature draws people into interaction with other people, and as this interaction grows more complex it becomes social production — a wide category covering not just economic output but the culture, religion, and institutions that grow up around how a society organises its work.
  • This is the seed of what Marx develops fully as the mode of production: an economic base (the forces and relations of production) on which the rest of social life — law, religion, culture, ideology — is built as a superstructure. Without a functioning system of production, Marx held, no culture is even possible.
  • The relations of production that this generates are relations of domination and subordination that individuals are born into or enter involuntarily, not relations they freely design — which is exactly why class, for Marx, is as much a cultural formation as an economic one.
• This is the reason “labour and society” is treated as its own theme rather than a subset of economics: how a society organises production shapes who has power, what identities people hold, how solidarity is generated or withheld, and how conflict is expressed — themes this note now traces through commitment, organisation, gender, globalisation, and the platform economy. The mechanics of alienation that Marx builds on this same foundation belong to a related but separate discussion of the social organisation of work itself.

The Factory and the Discipline of Industrial Time

• Before industrial capitalism, work rhythms followed the period of daylight, the natural break between tasks, and the pull of other social duties — work was task-oriented, not clock-oriented, and its pace varied with the job rather than with a fixed schedule.
• The factory reorganised this completely: production now had to be synchronised — starting punctually, proceeding at a steady pace, running for fixed hours on fixed days — because a machine process and a large workforce cannot function on individually variable rhythms.
  • The historian E.P. Thompson, in his classic analysis of industrial time-discipline, showed how the clock itself injected a new urgency into work: time stopped being something simply lived through and became something spent or wasted, the origin of the modern intuition that “time is money.”
  • The factory has often been described as an archetype of economic regimentation of a kind previously known only in barracks and prisons — a telling comparison, since all three institutions depend on synchronising bodies to an externally imposed schedule.
• India’s legal response to industrial work developed along two separate tracks, and the distinction is worth holding onto rather than treating all labour law as one undifferentiated mass.

• A further layer targets women specifically — the Equal Remuneration Act, the Minimum Wages Act, and the Maternity Benefits Act — reflecting the recognition that gender-neutral labour law does not automatically produce gender-equal outcomes on the shop floor.
• This entire architecture of 29-odd separate laws has recently been consolidated into four Labour Codes — the Code on Wages (2019), the Industrial Relations Code, the Code on Social Security, and the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code (all 2020) — whose major provisions took nationwide effect on 21 November 2025, though the detailed central and state rules needed to operationalise them were still being finalised through a public-objection process at the time of writing. Their significance for the informal and gig workforce is discussed below.

Labour Commitment and the Weak Organisation of Indian Labour

• A recurring puzzle in the sociology of Indian labour is why the industrial working class never consolidated into a class-for-itself — a group conscious of its shared interests and organised to pursue them — despite decades of large-scale factory employment. Two concepts, commitment and organisational weakness, together explain most of the answer.

Labour Commitment

• Labour commitment is the degree to which a worker accepts and internalises the norms of industrial work — regular hours, factory discipline, permanent severance from the land, and a self-identity as an industrial worker rather than a cultivator who happens to have a factory job. The concept originates in the industrialisation literature associated with Moore and Feldman.
• The classic Indian debate turned on whether the industrial worker was genuinely committed or remained, in effect, a peasant with an urban job.
  • The evidence is mixed, and the honest reading is that commitment in India has historically been partial and conditional: circular migration, land held back home as insurance against urban insecurity, and recruitment through the jobber system all kept the village tie alive rather than severing it.
  • Jan Breman’s concept of footloose labour — workers cycling endlessly between rural and urban, formal and informal, employment without ever settling into either — is the strongest evidence that the classical commitment framework mis-specified the problem. The failure to “commit” is not cultural reluctance or backwardness; it is the outcome of a labour regime deliberately built to keep workers mobile and unattached, since an unattached worker is a replaceable one.

Why Indian Labour Remains Weakly Organised

• Trade unions in India cover only the organised sector, itself a small minority of the total workforce — the great majority of workers are simply outside the reach of union bargaining or protective law altogether.
• Union fragmentation along party-political lines, rather than unification by industry or occupation, means rival unions in the same industry often compete with each other more than they bargain collectively with employers.
• Recruitment historically ran through jobbers, contractors, and kin and caste networks, which split the workforce at the very point of entry rather than uniting it — a worker’s foothold in a factory job typically owed something to a patron, not to an impersonal labour market.
• Caste and regional identity cut across class identity on the shop floor, so that formal wage equality between workers has often coexisted with informal social distance between them.
  • A mill worker’s account of Bombay’s textile mills captures this precisely: caste hierarchy persisted informally even where formal treatment was equal.
  “They would sit and chew paan with him but they would not drink water from his hands. They never treated him badly, they were friends with him, but they would never go to his house, or eat out of a lunchbox bought by any of the Mahars. The funny thing is the Marathi workers were unable to judge the caste of the North Indian workers, so they could not practice untouchability with them.” — Datta Iswalkar, Bombay mill worker
• Underlying all of this is a reserve of surplus labour so large that any single group of organised workers is instantly replaceable — this is the structural condition that makes the other four factors effective rather than merely incidental (the mechanism itself is developed below as the reserve army of labour).
• A further, less obvious answer comes from Michael Burawoy, who worked for months as a machinist inside a Chicago factory to study work from the shop floor rather than from outside it. His finding was that workers often consent to the very production relations that exploit them, because the informal “games” organised around meeting output quotas absorb workers’ energy and give them a sense of relative autonomy and small victories, even while the underlying wage relation and rate of exploitation remain untouched. Burawoy’s account of manufactured consent helps explain why an objectively exploited class-in-itself does not automatically translate into an organised class-for-itself — consent, not just coercion, has to be actively produced on the shop floor.

The Reserve Army of Labour and Its Feminist Extension

• Marx’s reserve army of labour is the relative surplus population that capital accumulation itself continuously produces, in three forms: floating (recently displaced from a job, temporarily out of work), latent (in agriculture or elsewhere, held in reserve until industry expands enough to absorb them), and stagnant (irregularly employed, on the margins of the labour market).
  • Its function is to discipline the employed and depress wages: a worker who knows there is a queue of substitutes right outside the factory gate has far less leverage to demand better pay or resist speed-ups, since the employer can simply replace him.
• Feminist scholars extended the concept to argue that women constitute an “ideal” reserve army: drawn into paid employment during economic booms and pushed back out during downturns, with the ideology of domesticity supplying the legitimation for the expulsion — a woman sent home from paid work is not recorded as unemployed, she is simply redescribed as a housewife.
• This extension has also been sharply critiqued: women’s employment has not, in practice, proved as reversible as the reserve-army model predicts.
  • Occupational segregation — women concentrated in specific sectors and job categories (garments, domestic work, care, certain services) that men rarely occupy — means women are not actually substitutable for, or by, male workers in the way the reserve-army logic assumes.
  • This makes segmentation of the labour market, rather than a simple reserve-army dynamic, the better explanation for the actual pattern of women’s employment over time.

Feminisation of Work

Two Distinct Senses

• Feminisation of work carries two separate meanings that need to be kept apart rather than treated as one phenomenon.
  • Quantitative feminisation is the rising share of women in the paid workforce, driven especially by export-oriented manufacturing, services, and care work.
  • Qualitative feminisation is the spread of conditions historically associated with women’s work — low pay, casualisation, part-time and insecure terms — to the workforce as a whole, men included.
  • Guy Standing’s argument was that global competition drives both trends together: employers seeking flexibility and cost reduction hire more women into precisely the kind of low-cost, easily-adjustable jobs that then become the template for restructuring everyone else’s terms of work too.
• The implications of this shift are genuinely double-edged.
  • Rising incomes and some new personal autonomy do follow from paid work, but the double burden persists because the domestic division of labour inside the household has not correspondingly changed.
  • The new work is concentrated at the informal and unprotected end of the economy, so formal legal protections often do not reach it in practice.
  • Occupational segregation confines women to a narrow band of “feminised” jobs, and the gender wage gap survives even after women enter paid work in large numbers.

The Indian Puzzle: A U-Shaped Curve

• India presents a specific puzzle within this global picture: female labour force participation has historically been low relative to India’s income level, and it fell even during a period of strong economic growth.
  • The accepted explanations for the earlier decline include rising household incomes withdrawing women from low-return “distress” work, longer years spent in schooling, the shrinking of agricultural employment without a corresponding creation of jobs women could actually access, and continuing constraints of social status and physical safety on women’s mobility.
• Recent Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data shows a striking reversal of this trend: the female labour force participation rate fell from roughly 31% in 2011–12 to about 23% in 2017–18, before rising sharply to over 41% by 2023–24.
  • This rise, however, needs a careful reading rather than being taken at face value as a story of structural progress: it has been driven overwhelmingly by rural women, with urban participation rising far more modestly, and a large share of the increase is in unpaid family labour and self-employment rather than in regular wage or salaried work.
  • More strikingly still, the rise has coincided with women moving back into agriculture rather than out of it — the reverse of the direction development theory usually expects — which suggests rural distress, inflationary pressure on household budgets, and the absence of alternative non-farm jobs may be pulling women into work out of necessity as much as any expansion of opportunity is pulling them in. The debate on how to read this reversal is still open and should be treated as an unresolved question rather than a settled success story.

Women Organising

• Women workers, especially in the vast unorganised sector, have built their own institutions to secure bargaining strength that mainstream trade unions rarely extended to them.
  • SEWA (Self-Employed Women’s Association), founded by Ela Bhatt in Ahmedabad, organised tens of thousands of poor self-employed women into what functions as a trade union, winning gains on land rights, minimum wages, access to credit, and the rights of hawkers and vendors.
  • The Working Women’s Forum in Madras and the Annapurna Mahila Mandal in Bombay pursued similar goals of mobilising urban and rural poor women workers to strengthen their access to credit and other resources.
  • This organising activity intensified alongside the broader revitalisation of the women’s movement through the 1970s and 1980s, which raised awareness of women’s rights and drew women workers into both local struggles and wider political mobilisation.

Globalisation and the Reorganisation of Work

From Mechanical to Organic Solidarity

• Durkheim’s functionalist account of work as a basis of social solidarity provides the frame for understanding what globalisation has done to the organisation of labour.
  • In simpler, less differentiated economies, people doing the same kind of work (subsistence farmers, for instance) share a similar outlook on the world — Durkheim calls the unity this produces mechanical solidarity.
  • As a society industrialises and the division of labour deepens, people take up increasingly different, specialised occupations; they feel less solidarity through shared sameness, but become bound together instead through mutual interdependence, the way separate organs depend on each other within a single body — Durkheim calls this organic solidarity.
• Globalisation extends this logic beyond the nation-state: each worker today depends, however invisibly, on workers scattered across the globe, producing a genuine global division of labour even where no felt sense of unity accompanies it.

Corporations, Ownership, and the Global Superclass

• The institutional device that let capitalism become the world’s dominant economic system is the corporation — a business treated in law as a person in its own right, able to make contracts, incur debts, and sue or be sued, with liabilities kept separate from those of its individual owners.
• A defining feature of the modern corporation is the separation of ownership from management: those who own a company’s shares are typically not the people running its day-to-day affairs, which are instead run by professional managers. “The ownership of wealth without appreciable control, and control of wealth without appreciable ownership.” — Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means
• Conflict theorists read this same structure differently from functionalists: global capitalism, on this view, is precisely the mechanism through which capital exploits labour on a planetary scale.
  • Ownership and control among the world’s largest multinational corporations is concentrated in a relatively small inner circle, connected through interlocking directorates — the same individuals sitting on multiple corporate boards, weaving the top companies into a single overlapping network.
  • David Rothkopf’s notion of a global superclass describes the resulting elite: not just extraordinarily wealthy but able to move fluidly through the top circles of political power in multiple countries, largely insulated from the disruptive effects (automation, job loss) that fall on ordinary workers.

The Balance Sheet of Globalised Labour

• Globalisation’s impact on labour combines several distinct, and partly countervailing, tendencies.
  • A global division of labour relocates production toward low-wage sites, following cost advantages across borders.
  • Competitive pressure between states for investment produces a race to the bottom in labour standards, as governments dilute protections to attract capital.
  • Union power has declined because of a basic structural asymmetry: capital is mobile across borders in a way labour is not, so capital can credibly threaten to relocate while labour cannot credibly threaten to follow it.
  • The peripheral, subcontracted, and informal workforce has grown as firms push risk and statutory obligations down long subcontracting chains rather than carrying them directly.
• Against this, globalisation has also created employment and raised wages in a number of receiving economies, and export-oriented manufacturing has given many women their first independent income — a genuine change in bargaining position within the household, even where the job itself remains poorly protected.

Migrant Labour and the 2020 Lockdown

• The mass distress of migrant workers during India’s 2020 COVID-19 lockdown is best understood not as a new emergency but as the sudden visibility of a normally hidden structural condition.
  • Circular migrants are formally entitled to rations, healthcare, and other benefits where they are registered (their home village), but are physically present where they are not registered (the city) — so the portability of entitlements fails at exactly the moment of need.
  • Migrants are typically hired through contractors, which means no single employer can be held accountable for their welfare or safety.
  • They remain largely invisible in official data, counted properly neither at their place of origin nor at their place of work.
  • They carry little political weight in the destination city, since their vote and their political representation both remain tied to their village of origin.
  • What the lockdown exposed, in other words, was a normally invisible vulnerability built permanently into the structure of circular migration — not a one-off crisis created by the lockdown itself.

The Gig and Platform Economy

• The gig and platform economy is best analysed by identifying the three structural moves it makes relative to conventional employment.
  • It converts employment into a commercial contract between two supposedly equal parties, so that standard labour law simply does not apply.
  • It converts supervision into an algorithm: control over pace, routing, and evaluation becomes total and continuous, yet no human supervisor is left accountable for it.
  • It converts fixed capital costs into the worker’s own assets: the delivery rider supplies the bike, the driver supplies the vehicle, shifting the employer’s traditional capital burden onto the individual worker.
• George Ritzer’s concept of McDonaldization — the spread of efficiency, calculability, predictability, and non-human control (traditionally associated with fast-food production) into ever more sectors of social life — describes the same logic applied to platform-mediated service work, where a delivery run is standardised and timed as precisely as a burger’s assembly line.
• Harry Braverman’s deskilling argument finds a contemporary echo here too: the platform retains all the judgment (route optimisation, pricing, task allocation) inside its algorithm, leaving the worker executing tasks with almost no discretion of their own.
• India’s Code on Social Security, 2020 was notable for legally defining “gig worker” and “platform worker” as distinct categories for the first time — a first step toward extending protection to a category of work whose entire design was meant to escape traditional employment protection.
  • Even after the four Labour Codes took nationwide effect in November 2025, the extension of concrete social-security benefits to gig and platform workers depends on rules that were still being finalised.
  • Several states moved ahead independently in the meantime: Rajasthan passed the first dedicated gig-worker welfare law in 2023, followed by Karnataka’s Platform-Based Gig Workers Act and draft legislation in Telangana and Bihar, each establishing a welfare fund financed by a cess on aggregator transactions and a grievance-redressal mechanism.
  • These state laws did not emerge automatically from legislative goodwill — they followed sustained strikes and mobilisation by gig-worker unions, showing that collective organisation remains possible even within a work structure that was deliberately designed to atomise workers and route control through an algorithm rather than a visible employer.

Social Determinants and Consequences of Economic Development

The Social Preconditions and Correlates of Development

• Economic development is not the same as economic growth alone: growth means a rising volume of production and income, while development additionally requires that income be distributed widely enough to actually improve the population’s quality of life. In practice, no society has achieved a sustained rise in per-capita income without a large shift of both capital and labour out of agriculture, which is why development has historically travelled together with industrialisation even though the two are not strictly synonymous.
• Development is conditioned by social factors at least as much as by capital or technology.
  • Nation-building around a common language and culture underpins the kind of integrated national market development requires.
  • The efficient use of the factors of production — land, labour, capital, organisation — depends on the cultural and social conditions surrounding them, not on technical availability alone; a new technology’s payoff depends on whether the surrounding social conditions are ready to make use of it.
  • A population needs the ability, experience, and knowledge to actually use the facilities made available to it — human capital is itself a social, not merely economic, precondition.
• Development is also accompanied by a recognisable set of social changes.
  • A steadily declining share of the workforce in agriculture, alongside growing urbanisation.
  • A new value system emphasising individual initiative and responsibility, gradually replacing the constraining hold of the extended family, clan, kin group, or caste.
  • The breakdown of clan, kin, or caste exclusiveness, replaced by the more impersonal norms suited to the secondary-group relationships characteristic of an industrial society.
  • The spread of education, and a shift in the basis of social stratification from ascription toward achievement, which is what makes real occupational mobility possible for the first time.

Explaining Backwardness and Poverty in Developing Societies

• Two competing sociological perspectives explain why some societies remain poor or “backward” while others developed, and they disagree fundamentally about where the cause lies.

• Modernisation theory treats development as a universal sequence every society can pass through. Rostow’s stages of growth run from traditional society, through preconditions for take-off and take-off itself, to a drive to maturity and finally an age of mass consumption; Parsons’ pattern variables describe the same shift in value orientation, from ascription, particularism, and diffuseness toward achievement, universalism, and functional specificity. On this account, backwardness is simply an earlier stage, curable by importing capital, technology, and modern attitudes from societies that have already developed.
• Dependency theory rejects the premise that backwardness is merely an earlier stage on the same road. Andre Gunder Frank’s thesis of the “development of underdevelopment” argues that the poverty of the periphery is not a condition prior to development but a structural product of the very same historical process — colonial extraction and unequal exchange — that generated wealth in the core. Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory generalises this into a three-tier structure of core, semi-periphery, and periphery, where the periphery’s continuing poverty is actively reproduced, not merely inherited, by its position within the global economic system.

The Historical Evolution of Media of Exchange

• A medium of exchange is simply the means by which a society values and trades goods and services, and its history tracks a society’s broader technological and organisational evolution.
  • In hunting-and-gathering, pastoral, and horticultural societies, surplus production was minimal, so people relied on direct barter — trading one item straight for another.
  • As agricultural societies generated larger surpluses and trade expanded, metallic money (gold and silver coins) emerged, with a coin’s weight and purity fixing the quantity of goods or services it could purchase.
  • Toward the end of the agricultural period, paper currency appeared as a receipt representing a specific quantity of gold or silver held in a warehouse or vault — currency, in this form, represented stored value, and circulated alongside the metal coins themselves.
  • When fiat money (currency backed only by government decree, not by stored precious metal) replaced stored-value currency, the coins made of precious metal disappeared from everyday circulation, because people considered them more valuable than their face value and were unwilling to spend them — the same dynamic long identified in monetary economics as bad money driving out good.
  • Even without a gold standard limiting the money supply, governments face a practical limit on how much currency they can issue: issuing currency faster than the growth of GDP produces inflation, since each unit of currency then buys less.
• Industrial and post-industrial societies compressed the medium of exchange further still, moving from paper money to cheques and credit cards, then to the debit card (an instrument that electronically transfers ownership of a deposit rather than physical currency), and finally to e-cash — value stored on a company’s server and transferable over the internet, in two forms: e-currency (denominated in an official national currency like the dollar or rupee) and e-gold (a transferable claim on physical gold held in a bank vault).
• India’s own recent experience compresses much of this same sequence into a single generation: the shift from cash and cheques to instant, account-to-account digital transfer (via the Unified Payments Interface) is now the dominant mode of everyday retail payment by transaction volume, and represents the same underlying process traced above — a continuing dematerialisation of the medium of exchange, and with it, a continuing shift in exactly what kind of trust (in a coin’s metal, a bank’s ledger, or a platform’s servers) underwrites an economic transaction.

Polanyi’s Double Movement: Labour as a Fictitious Commodity

• Karl Polanyi argued that land, labour, and money are fictitious commodities: none of them was originally produced for sale on a market. Labour power in particular cannot be separated from the living person who supplies it, unlike a genuine commodity manufactured purely for exchange.
• Market society, nonetheless, treats all three exactly as if they were ordinary commodities subject to price alone — and Polanyi’s central claim is that pushing this fiction to its logical extreme, letting a wholly self-regulating market determine wages, working conditions, and employment with no protective limits, would tear apart the social fabric that makes a functioning society possible in the first place.
• Because of this, the expansion of the market into labour always provokes a spontaneous protective countermovement — Polanyi’s “double movement”: factory acts, trade unions, minimum wages, and social security legislation are all instances of society reasserting that a worker is a person embedded in social relations, not simply a unit traded on a labour market.
• This frame ties together several strands already covered in this note: the informalisation of the workforce and the rise of the gig economy read as instances of the disembedding movement, stripping away a century’s accumulated protections and returning labour closer to a bare market relation; while the litigation over platform workers’ employment status, the new state-level gig-worker welfare Acts, and the Code on Social Security’s extension to gig and platform workers read as the corresponding protective countermovement taking shape in real time.
• The theoretical circle closes back to where this note began: for Marx, labour is species-activity and the ultimate source of all value; for Polanyi, labour is a form of human life that a market can never fully absorb without provoking resistance. Both positions, in their different ways, insist that labour is a social fact before it is an economic one — which is precisely what the study of labour and society, as opposed to labour economics, sets out to demonstrate.