Workers

Workers on their way to the factory after the rain

Recently I've been reading a local Hindi newspaper called Majdoor Samachar which is about the condition of workers in the areas of Delhi, Gurgaon, and Faridabad. In the past ten years, India has changed so rapidly it's mind-boggling. One of the ways that it has significantly changed is through the increase in the expansion of factories. There are Indian-based companies, but also a significant number of European and American factories now. (Everything from Gap to WalMart to Whirlpool). The most troubling aspect of the increase of factories is the systemic violation of wage workers' rights in the factories. One of the things that I have learned from reading the paper is the astonishingly low rate of minimum wage. If you can believe it, it is roughly around $3 dollars a day! In addition, that amount is often not even paid to workers who are not actually kept in the company's database or records. Most factory or wage workers work 12 hour shifts. Since they do overtime, they are supposed to be paid double the rate which they usually aren't. The condition of most factories is unsanitary and unclean, where there isn't a proper provision of drinking water or toilets.

A sort of obvious question now is how does this all manage to happen...

Here are some reasons:

*Rapid exploitation of the poor. This was the reason given by a Delhi University economics professor the other day in a casual conversation about India. There is a lot of wealth and profit he said being accumulated in India, but it's at the expense of ordinary workers.

*Migration of people from the villages to the city. Peasant and artisan labour supplied the village economies, but that is giving way to new forms of production which means people are giving up their old livelihoods and adopting new ones like wage-work in factories. This saddens me I must say because many Indian villages are very beautiful and unusual places, but increasingly people don't want to live there or they find they cannot survive there even if they prefer to live there. So now millions migrate to place like Delhi every year in search of work, better education for their children etc.

*Weak laws. This is obvious, given the statutory minimum wage is around $3 for 8 hours of work.

*Even weaker enforcement of laws. This too is obvious but perplexing...I don't quite understand how this manages to occur given the thousands and thousands of people it's affecting...