Discuss the changes taking place in the industrial class structure in India. (2024)
The classical Indian industrial class structure — a permanent factory proletariat facing an identifiable employer, organised by party-linked federations — is dissolving. What is replacing it is not a smaller working class but a differently composed one: contractual, dispersed, service-based and harder to organise.
The decline of the organised factory proletariat
- The turning point is the Bombay textile strike of 1982-83 under Datta Samant: a militant, non-federation strike that collapsed, hastened mill closures and pushed production to powerlooms. It marks the end of the classical mill working class as a political actor.
- Contractualisation has hollowed out the core from within. The Annual Survey of Industries 2022-23 records 40.7% of factory workers as contract workers — 5.95 million of 14.61 million, up from 38.4% in 2019-20. The dominant type is now formal enterprise, informal worker.
The new strata
| Stratum | What is changing |
|---|---|
| Industrial bourgeoisie | Family firms professionalised; a class of salaried industrial bureaucrats and managers interposed between owners and labour |
| Managerial-technical | Expanding rapidly with services, software and finance; culturally the new middle class |
| Permanent organised workers | Shrinking in relative terms; no longer the model worker |
| Contract and platform workers | The growth segment; 77 lakh gig workers in 2020-21 (NITI Aayog), projected at 2.35 crore by 2029-30 |
| Circulating migrants | Jan Breman‘s footloose labour — neither peasant nor proletarian, with no fixed employer |
Informalisation, feminisation and law
- Around 90% of workers are in informal employment (India Employment Report 2024); 31.89 crore unorganised workers are registered on e-Shram (August 2026).
- Women are 18.42% of directly employed factory workers but far more present in export garments and electronics — feminisation is real but concentrated in the least secure terms.
- The four labour codes in force since 21 November 2025 subsume 29 central laws and, for the first time, statutorily define gig and platform workers, with aggregator contributions of 1–2% of turnover and portable Aadhaar-linked benefits. States moved earlier: Rajasthan (2023), Karnataka (2025), Telangana (2026).
Weakening class organisation
Mark Holmstrom argued that the real class line runs between organised and unorganised workers, not between labour and capital as a whole — and contractualisation has widened it. Central federations are losing ground to enterprise-level unions: the Samsung Sriperumbudur strike of September–October 2024 ran 37 days and ended with a productivity incentive while union recognition was left to the courts.
Conclusion
The change is best read as recomposition, not disappearance. Numerically the working class grows; structurally it fragments, so that the shared consciousness Karl Marx expected is displaced by segmented bargaining. Whether the labour codes convert statutory recognition into real security is the open question of the decade.