Many
people, especially in India, tend to believe that the
process of economic growth is likely to be mostly liberating
for those oppressed by various forms of social discrimination
and exclusion. The argument is that market forces break
open age-old social norms, especially those of caste
and gender, that have for so long denied opportunities
and restricted options for so many.
Unfortunately,
the current Indian reality is more complex than that.
The strength of Indian large capital, which is leading
the current economic boom, derives at least partly from
the persistence and even expansion of a wide range of
workers engaged in precarious and low-productivity employment.
Most significantly from the point of view of the Indian
corporate sector, different degrees of outsourcing have
blurred the lines between formal and informal activities,
and the proliferation of such low-paying self-employment
has become an important means of reducing costs for
the corporate sector as well passing on the risks of
production to smaller units that are essentially part
of the working class.
The extent to which all successful formal economic activities
in India rely on the implicit subsidies provided by
cheap informal labour is largely unrecognised. Yet corporate
profitability in India hinges substantially on the lowering
of a wide range of fixed costs through outsourcing.
Thus, for example, the success of the much-lauded software
industry in India is only partly because of cheaper
skilled IT professionals compared to their international
counterparts. A significant part of the lower costs
comes from the entire range of support services: cleaning
and maintenance of offices, transport, security, back
office work, catering, and so on. These are usually
outsourced to smaller companies that hire temporary
workers with much lower wages, no job security, very
long hours of work and hardly any form of worker protection
or other benefits. Without the cost advantages indirectly
conferred by these low paid workers, the domestic software
industry would find it much harder to compete internationally.
The same is true of a wide range of corporate activities
across both manufacturing and the newer services.
These processes of direct and indirect underwriting
of the costs of the corporate sector have been greatly
assisted by the ability of employers in India to utilise
social characteristics to ensure lower wages to certain
categories of workers. Caste and other forms of social
discrimination have a long tradition in India, and they
have interacted with capitalist accumulation to generate
peculiar forms of labour market segmentation that are
probably unique to Indian society. Numerous studies
have found that social categories are strongly correlated
with the incidence of poverty and that both occupation
and wages differ dramatically across social categories.
The National Sample Surveys reveal that the probability
of being in a low wage occupation is significantly higher
for STs, SCs, Muslims and OBCs (in that order) compared
to the general ''caste Hindu'' population. This is only
partly because of differences in education and level
of skill, which are also important and which in turn
reflect the differential provision of education across
social categories.
Such caste-based discrimination has operated in both
urban and rural labour markets. For example, even in
a major metropolitan area like Delhi which is one of
the epicentres of economic expansion, there continues
to significant discrimination against Dalit workers
operating dominantly through the mechanism of assignment
to jobs, with Dalits largely entering poorly-paid ''dead-end''
jobs. These are actually essential jobs in both production,
such as sweepers, loaders, unskilled construction workers,
and services, such as shop and sales assistants and
security guards and the like. Methods of recruitment
based on contacts, which are widely prevalent in such
low-skilled occupations, cause past discrimination to
carry over to the present and thereby condemn lower
caste groups to providing poorly remunerated labour
that is nonetheless essential to income generation in
the economy as a whole.
Similarly, empirical studies of caste behaviour in rural
India have found that there are many ways in which caste
practices operate to reduce the access of the lower
castes to local resources as well as to income earning
opportunities, thereby forcing them to provide their
labour at the cheapest possible rates to employers.
One study (Ghanshyam Shah, Harsh Mander, Sukhdeo Thorat,
Satish Deshpande and Amita Baviskar, ''Untouchability
in Rural India'', New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2006)
of various caste-based practices in rural areas of 11
states (Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh
including Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Orissa,
Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu) found,
in addition to the well-known lack of assets, a large
number of social practices that effectively restricted
the economic activity of lower caste and Dalit groups,
and forced them to supply very low wage labour in harsh
and usually precarious conditions.
In 73 per cent of the villages surveyed in this study,
Dalits could not enter non-Dalit homes. In 70 per cent
of villages, Dalits could not eat with non-Dalits. In
64 per cent of villages, Dalits could not enter common
temples. In 36 per cent of survey villages, Dalits could
not enter village shops. In around one-third of the
survey villages, Dalits were not accepted as traders
dealing with commonly used items of consumption or production.
These practices in turn can be used to keep wages of
Dalit workers (who are extremely constrained in their
choice of occupation) low, even in period of otherwise
rising wages. And these practices persist even during
the period of the Indian economy's much-vaunted dynamic
growth.
But the important point to note here is not simply that
such practices continue to exist, but that they have
become the base on which the economic accumulation process
rests. In other words, capitalism in India, especially
in its most recent globally integrated variant, has
used past and current modes of social discrimination
and exclusion to its own benefit, to facilitate the
extraction of surplus and ensure greater flexibility
and bargaining to employers when dealing with workers.
So social categories are not ''independent'' of the accumulation
process – rather, they allow for more surplus extraction,
because they reinforce low employment generating (and
therefore persistently low wage) tendencies of growth.
Similar tendencies are evident in patterns of gender
discrimination as well. With respect to women's work,
there have been four apparently contradictory trends:
simultaneous increases in the incidence of paid labour,
underpaid labour, unpaid labour, and the open unemployment
of women. This is a paradox, since it is generally expected
that when employment increases, then unemployment comes
down; or when paid labour increases, then unpaid labour
decreases.
For urban women, the increase in regular work has dominantly
been in services, including most importantly the relatively
low-paid and less desirable activity of domestic service,
along with some manufacturing. In manufacturing, there
has been some recent growth of petty home-based activities
of women, typically with very low remuneration, performing
outsourced as part of a larger production chain. But
explicitly export-oriented employment, even in special
zones set up for the purpose, still accounts for only
a tiny fraction of women's paid work in urban India.
Meanwhile, in rural India self-employment has come to
dominate women's activities even in non-agricultural
occupations, largely because of the evident difficulty
of finding paid work.
In this period of economic boom, average real wages
of women workers increased relatively little over the
ten year period 1993-94 to 2004-05 despite rapid increases
in national income over this period, and for some categories
of women workers (rural graduates and urban illiterate
females) real wages actually declined. What is more,
there were fairly sharp increases in gender gaps in
wages, are now among the highest in the world.
Even public services rely heavily on the underpaid labour
of women. While a privileged minority of women in government
employment continue to access the benefits of the government
behaving as a ''model employer'', new employment for the
purpose of providing essential public services has been
concentrated in low-remuneration activities with uncertain
contracts and hardly any benefits. This is true of school
education (with the employment of para-teachers) as
well as health and nutrition (with reliance on anganwadi
workers and ASHAs).
The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee
Scheme is the only public intervention to make some
difference in this, with evidence of gender gaps in
rural wage work coming as a result of the implementation
of the scheme.
Conditions of self-employment among women show many
of the disturbing tendencies of wage employment. Women's
self-employment in non-agriculture is largely characterised
by both low expectations regarding incomes and remuneration
and substantial non-fulfilment of even these low expectations.
Despite some increase in high-remuneration self-employment
among professionals and micro-entrepreneurs, in general
the expansion of self-employment seems to be a distress-driven
process, determined by the lack of availability of sufficient
paid work on acceptable terms. Case studies and evidence
from large surveys of the NSS both suggest that payment
for home-based work, which is typically on piece rates
and accounts for increasing proportions of the economic
activity of women, have been declining not only in real
but even in nominal terms in many urban centres, despite
the economic dynamism of the areas in general.
Similarly, unpaid labour of women is likely to have
been increasing because of public policies such as reduced
social expenditure that place a larger burden of care
on women, or privatised or degraded common property
resources or inadequate infrastructure facilities that
increase time spent on provisioning essential goods
for the household, or simply because even well-meaning
policies (such as for afforestation) are often gender-blind.
Once
again, the relevant point here is not simply that such
gender differences exist, but that they – and therefore
the particular forms that patriarchy takes in India
- are closely intertwined with processes of capitalist
accumulation. So the recent growth has not broken existing
pattern of social discrimination, instead it has relied
on them to take forward the growth story.
|
