Paper presented at the National seminar on Dynamics of Labour Relation in India, 10-12 March 2016 Rural Wage Labour in Western Tamil Nadu
Judith Heyer1
Increasing numbers of rural wage labourers in India now work outside agriculture. They have a variety of options, many of them locally specific. One can distinguish broadly between areas in which there is little non-agricultural employment available in the vicinity and large numbers migrate for work, and areas in which there is a considerable amount of employment locally and many commute.
It is common to find large numbers of commuters in rural areas not far from sizeable towns, or industries.
This paper looks at rural wage labourers in western Tamil Nadu where there is a large amount of industrial and other non-agricultural employment in the vicinity. This is an area in which there has been significant industrial development, much of it relatively small-scale and decentralised, as transport and communications have developed. The area attracts a lot of migrant labour.
The past few decades were characterised in this region by falling wage labour in agriculture and rising wage labour in engineering, textile and other light industries, and in the service sector. Low skill wage workers in rural areas in this region have had access to a range of employment options outside agriculture as well as within. For the majority the wage labour options outside agriculture have not been that much better than those in agriculture however. The terms and conditions of employment in agriculture have improved over the past few decades to keep up with the non- agricultural options that have become available.
There was an increase in commuting and migration to work outside the villages on which this paper is based as transport and communication networks developed. There was an increase in distances travelled for agricultural employment too. Migrant labour from outside the region also competed increasingly with local labour. Industrial employers balanced the advantages of using local as opposed to long-distance migrant labour. Migrant labour was easier to exploit and control. Local labour could be employed on a more irregular basis. There were also some useful skills built up in the local labour force over time.
The paper looks at the range of options for low skill wage workers living in villages in the hinterland of Coimbatore and Tiruppur, villages in which just over 60% of the workforce consisted of low skill wage workers in 2008/9. Relatively few of these low skill workers engaged in petty forms of self- employment. The paper looks at the ways in which low skill workers ranked different types of wage employment and shows that many preferred agricultural labour to other options open to them. This was a positive choice in a context in which the terms and conditions of employment in agriculture had improved over time.
1The research on which this paper is based was funded by the UK Department of International Development (DFID, formerly ODA), the Oxford University Webb Medley Fund, the Leverhulme Trust and the Queen Elizabeth House Oppenheimer Fund, at various stages. The 2008/9 research was funded as part of a project on the effects of the expansion of the knitwear industry in the Tiruppur region funded by a DFID-ESRC Research Award, a project in which Grace Carswell, Geert De Neve, and M. Vijayabaskar were also involved. The research could not have been done without the support of Dr. V. Mohanasundaram, my interpreter and co- researcher for most of the fieldwork since 1981/2, and without the contributions of M.V.Srinivasan, Paul Pandian, Selva Murugan, Arul Maran, Gowri Shankar, S. Saravanan and Jagan Subi who acted as research assistants at different stages in the field. The research has also benefited from discussions particularly with K.
Nagaraj, J. Jeyaranjan, Karin Kapadia, S.Anandhi and Barbara Harriss-White.
The range of non-farm employment options to which low skill wage workers had access in this region in the 2000s and 2010s included ‘semi-skilled’ as well as ‘unskilled’ or ‘manual’ labour. They included loading, carrying, and moving goods and materials in markets and industrial units; casual labour in hotels and shops; and unskilled construction work. They also included semi-skilled work in textiles, metal workshops, engineering and construction. Wage work excluded from the low skill category for the purposes of this paper is work for which technical training or higher education is require, some of the wage work in engineering for example. Nearly all of the employment of low skill wage workers in the 2000s and 2010s was informal, or ‘temporary’ rather than ‘permanent’. They did not have any of the provident fund, final bonus and other protections associated with formal sector employment.
It is important to note that this was a region in which there was a range of social policies that supported wage workers. These included a particularly well implemented PDS (public distribution system) providing access to food and other essential commodities at heavily subsidised prices, a mid-day meal scheme, child nutrition centres, and pensions, maternity benefits, and benefits for the disabled (Heyer 2012). There was also substantial state support for improved housing, particularly for Dalits. All of this provided low skill wage workers with some safety-nets, as well as subsidising their standards of living. It enabled employers to pay lower wages too.
There were many considerations as far as people making the choice between different kinds of low skill wage work were concerned. It was not just the work itself (physically taxing, dirty, etc) or the physical work environment (outside, in hot sun, etc) that were relevant where employment open to low skill wage workers was concerned. There were also the pay, perks, and hours; the relationships between workers and employers, and between workers and supervisers and other intermediaries;
and whether the work was near or far from home. In particular, agricultural wage labour which is usually thought of as the one of the least attractive options compared well with many forms of non- farm employment as it was on reasonable terms and conditions, and was associated with acceptable social relations, hours that were not too long, some flexibility, et al.
The way in which low skill workers rank employment options differs from the way in which these options are generally ranked in the literature. Activities that are generally ranked near the bottom in the literature include bonded labour in brick kilns and rice mills (Breman, Guerin and Prakash 2009;
Guerin et al. 2014) and bonded labour in agriculture. Migrant labour in construction and agriculture also tends to be ranked near the bottom in the literature. Agricultural labour, whether migrant or not, is usually ranked near the bottom too.
The wage workers on which this paper focuses were from agricultural labourer, marginal farmer, and trade and service backgrounds, and had school education but no formal technical or college education. There had been a considerable expansion in school education in the decades preceding the 2010s when all children under the age of 15 were in school. Many of the wage workers were people for whom the only options would have been marginal farming and agricultural wage labour in the past. In recent decades the possibility of non-farm employment had become widely available as well.
The main employment sources open to low skill wage workers in the study villages in the 2000s and 2010s were agriculture, knitwear units, powerlooms, and construction. There was a wide variety of other types of low skill wage employment in which small numbers were engaged as well. Although non-agricultural employment had been growing steadily (Heyer 2013, 2014a), the majority of low skill wage workers in the villages on which this paper is based still worked as agricultural wage labourers. The largest source of non-farm employment was the knitwear industry. Powerloom
employment was an important alternative (Carswell and De Neve 2013), though relatively small numbers from the villages on which this paper is based were involved. Construction was a growing employment source.
The paper starts with the data and goes on to the total numbers of low skill wage workers in the study villages. Then there are sections going into more detail on agricultural labour; knitwear;
powerloom work; construction; and other forms of non-farm employment for low skill wage workers. The paper concludes with a discussion.
The Data
The data for this paper come from villages 25-30 km north west of Tiruppur and 40-60 km north of Coimbatore (Heyer 2012, 2013, 2014a). These villages are the site of a long-term study which involved systematic surveys of 20% of randomly selected households in 7 hamlets in 2 revenue villages in 1981/2, 1996 and 2008/9, and in-depth interviews with individuals in sample and other households both in the survey years and in most years between 2003 and 2016. The principal sources for the current paper are the 2008/9 survey and in-depth interviews conducted in March 2016 which focused specifically on low skill wage labourers’ reasons for engaging in alternative employment options. The longer-term data provide a background against which these data are considered.
The villages concerned are multi-caste villages, in which Gounders, Naidus and Chettiars are the major landowning castes, and Pannadis (Pallars) and Arunthathiyars (Chakkiliyars) are the two main Dalit agricultural labourer groups. Arunthathiyars had virtually no agricultural land (though they did own their house plots). A minority of Pannadis had very small agricultural landholdings. The power of the larger Gounder, Naidu and Chettiar landholders who dominated the villages in the early 1980s (Heyer 2010) had waned by the 2000s and 2010s. They no longer exerted anything like as strong a grip on the village population, Dalits in particular, who now had much more autonomy and could move about more freely than they had been able to in 1981/2. Dalits also had much more direct access to state officials and state programmes than they had had earlier (Heyer 2012). Moreover, they were much more visible, after the setting up of new settlements and the provision of much better housing than before. This did not mean that they were not still subject to various forms of discrimination though (Heyer 2012). The village economy was based on a relatively robust well- irrigated agriculture together with non-agricultural activities many of which involved commuting to nearby centres (Heyer 2013, 2014a). This was a diversified agriculture based on relatively small landholdings2 in which the crops grown on irrigated land were bananas and turmeric and some sugarcane together with a variety of minor crops, and the crops grown on rainfed land were groundnuts and cholam (sorghum) together with a variety of lentils and grams. There was no canal irrigation in this area. Most of the manufacturing activity in which people from these villages were employed was in centres within a radius of 30 km or so. There were a few manufacturing units in the villages: units producing elastic for the knitwear industry, stitching units, and latterly two steel rolling mills that had set up on the outskirts of the villages most of whose employees were long distance migrants from north India.
Low Skill Wage Workers in the Villages
Low skill wage workers accounted for 61% of the total workforce in the study villages in 2008/9 (Table 1). Sixty four percent of these were male, 36% female. Dalits made up 43% of the total workforce, and 67% of the low skill wage workers; non-Dalits made up 57% of the total workforce,
2The largest holdings were 30 acres in 2008/9. Most were much smaller than this.
and 33% of the low skill wage workers. There were higher proportions of women among Dalit low skill wage workers (40%) than among non-Dalit low skill wage workers (28%).
Very few Dalit low skill wage workers (6%) were members of households with sources of income other than wage labour (Table 2). Substantial numbers of non-Dalit low skill wage workers (44%) were members of households with other sources of income however (Table 2). Most of these were from households that included members who were self-employed in agriculture and/or trade and services. One or two were from households that included members who were employed in skilled blue collar or white collar occupations as well. Whereas all Dalit households had members who were low skill wage workers, 57% of non-Dalit households did not (Table 3).
Multiple occupations were a feature of households more than individuals. Relatively few individuals were engaged in more than one occupation at a time. The exception was agricultural labourers also doing construction work, and wage labourers also self-employed in agriculture.
The majority of households were nuclear or extended nuclear. Low skill wage workers were more or less equally distributed between households in which there were 1, 2 or 3 workers (Table 4). There were smaller numbers with 4 or 5.
Wage workers from these villages worked in non-farm employment that involved short-distance migration at most, much of it quite close to home. Most of the non-farm employment of those still resident in the villages involved commuting. There was relatively little non-farm wage employment in the villages themselves.
Agricultural Wage Labour
We start with wage labour in agriculture. The majority (61%) of low skill wage workers in the study villages worked as agricultural labourers (Table 5). Gounder, Naidu and Chettiar agriculturalists were continuing to employ wage workers albeit on a decreased scale. A small minority of those whose main occupation was agricultural wage labour were also engaged in other forms of employment and self-employment – construction, self-employment in agriculture, et al. Many female agricultural wage labourers also participated in MGNREGA work.
The large majority (85%) of agricultural labourers were Dalits (Table 5). Gounder and Naidu agriculturalists worked alongside hired labourers in their own fields but many considered working for others demeaning. There were small numbers of Gounders, very small numbers of Naidus, and larger numbers of Chettiars and people from other non-Dalit caste groups who were agricultural labourers.
Larger numbers of men than women worked as agricultural wage labourers in 2008/9, unlike in other parts of Tamil Nadu where the majority of hired agricultural labourers are women (add ref). As elsewhere, relatively few women in the study villages engaged in non-farm wage employment. The fact that the majority of agricultural wage labourers were men nevertheless is explained by the non- participation of significant numbers of women in any paid work at all (Heyer 2014b). There was no child labour in agriculture in 2008/9. There were significant numbers earlier though (Heyer 2010).
A lower proportion of younger people worked as agricultural wage labourers than in non-farm occupations. There were still substantial numbers of young people, most of them Dalit, working as agricultural labourers though (Table 6). There did not appear to be any stigma attached to agricultural labour where Dalits and members of other low caste groups were concerned. Many felt that this was the work they knew and did well. It was also true however that when MGNREGA work
became available it was said to be preferred because it involved working for the government, not for individual agriculturalists.
Much of the agricultural wage labour in peak seasons lasting for up to 6 months of the year was
‘contract labour’, i.e. labour working on piece rates in gangs of 5-10 people. Contract labourers were in a stronger bargaining position than daily wage labourers. This was a form of collective action, albeit small scale. There was also a considerable amount of daily agricultural wage labour which was much lower paid.
Female agricultural wage labourers were paid much less than male, the most commonly reported daily wage rate for men being Rs.300/-, and for women Rs.150/-, in 2016. If they worked in contract labour gangs both men and women could get twice as much. However there was less contract work for women than for men.
Hired agricultural labour in the 2000s was very different from hired agricultural labour in the earlier period. In 1981/2 a significant amount of the hired labour was bonded, on call at all hours, with social relations that were oppressive and pay that was low (Heyer 2010). Most of the rest of the hired agricultural labour was daily wage labour on very low pay.3People from the villages, Pannadis particularly, also engaged in migrant sugar cane crushing, working all over the district for months at a time. By 2008/9 there was almost no migrant sugar cane crushing left. All the sugarcane was going to the mills.
There were advantages as well as disadvantages to agricultural wage labour in the 2000s and 2010s as far as wage workers in the study villages were concerned. One of the advantages was that it did not involve much travelling, though contract labourers sometimes worked as far as 50 km away.
Another advantage was that the hours were not as long as in other types of employment. The standard day was 9-3 or 9-4 depending on whether time was taken out for a mid-day meal. Hours could be shorter if the people concerned were working on contract. One of the advantages of contract labour was that people could work as short or as long a day as the group chose. Another advantage of agricultural labour was that people could choose to work as many days as they wanted to in a week. There was also the fact that they did not have to wait to be paid. Further, a number of people said that they liked agricultural labour because it involved working together with people they knew.
The disadvantage of agricultural labour was that people were not able to get as much work as they wanted in lean seasons. They said that they were getting 3-4 days of work per week out of season, and 6-7 days in season, in 2015/16. Women often supplemented agricultural labour with MGNREGA work. Men supplemented agricultural labour with work in construction if they could not get enough work in agriculture. Although female agricultural wage labourers were paid so much less than male the fact that much of the work was close to home, and that the hours were relatively short, was an attraction, making agricultural wage labour compatible with domestic and reproductive responsibilities that were substantial where most women were concerned.
There was a big change in the ranking of MGNREGA over the years. In 2010/11 MGNREGA wages were higher than those being paid for female labour in agriculture and female agricultural wages rose to meet the MGNREGA rate.4 For a while after that the two were on a par. By 2015/16 MGNREGA wages had fallen behind. In one of the two revenue villages the rates being paid in
3See Carswell and De Neve (2013) on how much less oppressive labour relations in agriculture in this area had become.
4From Rs.90/- to Rs.100/- in January 2010 e.g.
2015/16 were Rs.145/- per day. In the other revenue village they varied between Rs.100/- and Rs.130/-.5 This was far too low to attract men. It was only women who did MGNREGA work in these villages. In 2010/11 people said that they preferred MGNREGA work to agricultural labour because they felt that MGNREGA work was less arduous than agricultural labour, and because they preferred
‘working for the government’ to working for individual employers. This was when wages and hours were the same. In 2016 people said they only did MGNREGA work when there was no work in agriculture. MGNREGA filled the gap in the off season. The uptake of MGNREGA work was high nevertheless. Many households had either completed or were near to completing their 100 days entitlement as the end of the 2015/16 financial year approached. Older and younger women were competing within households for the 100 days.
Knitwear
The knitwear industry was the largest source of non-farm employment for low skill wage workers in the study villages. By 2008/9 it was employing 28% of all the low skill wage workers in the sample, 52% of non-Dalit and 16% of Dalit low skill wage workers (Table 5). Most of them worked in small knitwear units, few with any of the protections of formal employment. One of the achievements of the trade unions in this area was the Sunday holiday. Sunday was a holiday throughout the knitwear industry in the 2000s and 2010s. Trade unions had not been able to get significant improvements in general terms and conditions though.
There were considerably more non-Dalits working in knitwear than Dalits. Dalits had entered much later than non-Dalits in the study villages. Further, 75% of the wage workers in knitwear were men.
Not many women worked in knitwear for more than a few years before they got married.6Eighty five percent of the low skill workers resident in the villages working in knitwear were under 30 (Table 6). Very few were over 45.
There were a number of different low skill occupations in the knitwear industry (see Chari 2004, and Vijayabaskar 2005, on this). They included stitching, cutting, ironing, checking, folding, and packing.
No one from the study villages was employed in dyeing, knitting or printing. Work was obtained by word of mouth. There were no contractors or intermediaries involved here.
Just under 70% of wage workers in the villages employed in the knitwear industry were tailors, or
‘helpers’ aspiring to be tailors. To become a tailor one had to go through an apprenticeship.
Apprentices, so-called ‘helpers’, assisted tailors by assembling and readying pieces to be stitched.
They learnt to stitch by watching the tailors they helped, and by being allowed to use the machines in lunch and tea breaks. Apprenticeships were very variable. Some ‘helpers’, mainly non-Dalits, qualified after a few months. Others took years to qualify. Many young women working as ‘helpers’
never expected to graduate. They expected to stop when they were still ‘helpers’ when they got married. ‘Helpers’ were getting Rs.150-300/- for a shift (8 hours) or a shift and a half (12 hours) in
5Some people said that they did not know what the rate was as it was paid into their bank accounts and it was not possible to get an explanation of how the money they received related to the days they had worked.
People didn’t like the fact that they had to wait up to a month to get paid either.
6This should not be confused with ‘sumangali thittam’, an arrangement whereby young women lived and worked in closed environments for 2-3 years, getting most of the pay which was designed to be a contribution to their dowries at the end of the period for which they were contracted to work. This is a very exploitative arrangement which operated in some parts of the textile industry where long-distant migrants were concerned.
2016.7 Tailors, who worked on piece rates, were getting up to Rs.600/-. Tailors who were well established could acquire reputations resulting in pay that was higher still. There were few such in the villages though.8
Although many working as tailors did not earn as much per day as agricultural labourers, the work was more regular. Many also said that it was ‘lighter’ work, in better physical environments, and that they liked the social side of it. This applied particularly to young women for whom work in knitwear units was a particularly attractive alternative to working in agriculture as the wages they got in agriculture were so low. The hours of work for tailors were long however and commuting added to these. It was not uncommon for people working either as ‘helpers’ or as tailors in knitwear companies to leave the village at 7 in the morning and return at 10 at night. The fact that tailors worked on piece rates meant that the pressure could be relentless too. They did at least have Sundays off, unlike many of the powerloom workers, though (see below).
Ironing was another occupation in the knitwear industry that attracted a significant number of people from the villages, all male. Ironers living in the villages were earning Rs.150-350/- per day in 2016. They were paid at piece rates which meant that earnings increased with experience. The advantage of ironing was that there was always plenty of work. Ironing was physically demanding though. We came across people who were relatively young who had discontinued after a number of years because ‘their bodies could no longer stand it’. Ironers tended to work 8-hour shifts, and not 12-hour shift and a halfs. The work was too strenuous for that.
Cutting, another knitwear occupation attracting men, not women, from the villages, was learnt by being employed for one month without a wage. It was usually paid at piece rates. Daily earnings quoted in 2016 varied from Rs. 250/- to Rs. 400/-.
Checkers, folders, and packers were paid at similar or lower rates to ‘helpers’. These were options taken up mainly by older women, and by men who were between occupations.
Low skill wage work in the knitwear industry was variable both in terms of rates of pay and in terms of regularity. There were people, more non-Dalits than Dalits, who had worked regularly, as tailors, ironers, or cutting masters, for years. Others had worked intermittently. Employers’ complaints of absenteeism were corroborated by the fact that we often met people working in knitwear units who were at home in the villages for the day, saying they were sick. Knitwear workers also complained that they could not always get work.
There were men, mostly non-Dalits, who had worked hard in knitwear units on a regular basis for years and had accumulated enough to finance higher education for their children. There were also men, mainly Dalits, who had worked in knitwear units and left, preferring agricultural labour, construction labour, or other work. Some of these were young men trying different occupations out.
Others were older. Women tended to work in knitwear units for a few years before they got married after which they withdrew from wage labour or went back to agricultural wage labour.
Many of the older non-Dalits who had worked for many years in knitwear stopped when their children had become established or had completed higher education, going back to cultivating their
7It was generally employers, not workers, who decided whether their workers worked 8-hour or 12-hour days.
One of our interviewees said that his employer allowing him to work an 8-hour day was a concession because he commuted from so far away.
8An owner who had moved his stitching unit from Tiruppur back to the villages said that he could not produce for export in the villages because he could not get tailors who were skilled enough locally.
own land at that stage. Others turned to less strenuous activities such as checking and packing, or intermittent daily wage labour in agriculture.
Powerloom work
A small proportion of low skill wage workers in the study villages worked in powerloom units. There were villages in the region in which powerloom units were a major source of wage employment (see Carswell and De Neve 2013). In the study area on which this paper is based there were only a few powerloom units scattered through the villages. This was not a powerloom belt. Most of the units were small enterprises, many of them in sheds constructed on farms, others in sheds constructed in the centres of the villages, with 8-20 looms each, not more. Although only a small number of people in the study villages worked in powerloom units, discussions of how wage work in powerloom units compared with other types of wage work raised a number of issues that are relevant here.
Most of the people in the study villages working for wages in powerloom units in 2008/9 were Pannadis. There were also one or two Arunthathiyars and one or two Gounders. This contrasts with the situation in 1996 when the majority were Gounders and no Dalits were doing this work. There were Gounders involved in powerloom units as owners or lessors in 2008/9 many of them working alongside their wage workers. Most powerloom units were owned by Gounders.
All wage workers from these villages working in powerloom units in 2008/9 were men, usually employed in small units in which the owner, or lessor, provided his own, his wife’s and sometimes his son’s and/or his son’s wife’s labour as well.
Powerloom workers were getting Rs.300 to 400/- per day in 2016, with advances of up to Rs.50K.
They worked 12-hour shifts and 6/7-day weeks, the shifts alternating between night and day. The units operated for 24 hours per day. Many people worked in powerloom units because they were the only source of loans or advances of some magnitude. Some did this work out of necessity. The majority did it because it enabled them to make a reasonable living. Others did it because they wanted to finance investments in education. This resonates with the findings of Guerin et al. (2014) who describe people working as bonded labourers in brick kilns in order to finance increasing levels of consumerism as much as education et al. In our case it was higher education as much as consumerism that was the driving force (see below). There were very few consumer durables in the households of low skilled wage workers in the study villages (see below).
Carswell and De Neve (2013) found in the powerloom village that they studied that once powerloom workers got into these contracts it was difficult for them to extricate themselves. In our case people talked about the danger of getting trapped by taking too large an advance. Some had deliberately not taken any advance because of this. Others had taken an advance that was manageable and then had left powerloom work once they had paid it off. One or two had got trapped. There were also cases in which people had left without paying off the advance and were worrying about the consequences of doing so.
Several powerloom workers said that they liked powerloom work because it was less physically taxing than other types of work open to them and it did not involve working outside in the hot sun.
They also liked the fact that there was nearly always work. This despite the fact that there were strikes, and from time to time the powerloom units shut down because there were problems with yarn supplies or prices. Power cuts were another problem too. Others found the long hours (12 hour shifts) and the relentlessness, 6/7 days per week, week in and week out, taxing. They could not easily absent themselves as those working in knitwear units could. Powerloom units relied too
heavily on individual workers being there. Labour relations could be oppressive though this did not feature in our interviews with powerloom workers in the villages in 2016.
Construction work
Another alternative for low skill wage workers was construction work. The numbers of construction workers in the study villages in 2008/9 were quite small (Table 5) but they were significant in 2016.
The majority of construction workers in 2016 were Pannadis. There were also a few Arunthathiyars and a few non-Dalits some of whom were roadworkers. There was one female construction worker in the sample in 2008/9.
Construction workers from these villages were involved in the construction of houses, stores and go- downs in the surrounding area, work which was booming in 2016. They worked for maistries, many as ‘coollies’, or labourers. There were also a sizeable number who did ‘centering’, which was described as something that took a few months to learn on the job.9‘Centerers’ worked as coollies, labourers, for 6 months or so before graduating to ‘centering’. It helped if they had a friend or a relative in the team who could teach them the skill. The most experienced became supervisers, organising labourers and less experienced ‘centerers’.
Construction workers who were coollies earned Rs. 300 - 350/- per day in 2016, a similar rate to that for daily wage work in agriculture. The most skilled ‘centerers’ were getting Rs.600 - 750/- in 2016.
This was on a par with, though a little more than, contract labour in agriculture. Construction workers worked from 9 to 6, for 3 to 4 days per week, depending on the availability of work. Work was not as regular as they would have liked. There were too many people wanting construction work.
Construction work was physically taxing and it involved working in the hot sun. It was significant that it was taken up particularly by Pannadis few of whom worked as contract labourers in agriculture.
Their work as daily agricultural wage labourers was poorly paid.
Other Non-Farm Wage Employment
Low skill non-farm wage employment open to workers in the study villages also included work in spinning mills and all-purpose textile mills, and in workshops, foundries and engineering units. There were also people employed as drivers, and conductors, and there were individuals employed in low level government positions who were essentially low level wage workers. There were loaders and coollies in markets and assistants in shops. Much the most important for low skill wage workers in the villages were the options discussed above though. None of the other options involved more than a few people at most.
Discussion
One of the more striking changes from the early 1980s to the 2000s and 2010s was the rise of informal wage employment. In the early 1980s only a few people from the study villages were employed in non-agricultural activities outside the villages and most of those that were had permanent formal sector jobs. The discourse around non-agricultural wage labour centred on attempts to get permanent positions, positions associated with provident funds and bonus payments, positions from which it was not easy to get sacked. Contacts were usually required to get such employment. There was not much of it available. Those who managed to get it started with
9Centering was one of the most basic skills in construction. All it seemed to involve was being able to construct a straight wall.
temporary positions, hoping that after working for some time they would be made permanent.
There was a lot of discussion of strategies to which employers were resorting to avoid making people permanent, including sacking people just before the 5 years which entitled them to permanent employment were up, and then taking them on again afresh.
By the 2000s the situation had changed. The period since the early 1980s had been the period of
‘liberalisation’, the casualization of labour, and the globalisation and economic policy reform that underpinned this. It started with the downsizing of larger-scale manufacturing units which sub- contracted many of their operations to avoid the regulations applying to units above a certain size (Harriss 1982; 1989) and continued with the expansion in numbers of small-scale manufacturing units in new fields as well as old. Whereas most wage employment outside agriculture in the early 1980s had been in the large-scale units, by the early 2000s nearly all of it was in units that were small, employing people on terms that were ‘informal’ i.e. subject to minimal regulation. The larger units that remained employed many workers on informal terms too.
Trade unions that had been powerful earlier in Coimbatore and Tiruppur were no longer able to defend the position of wage workers to the extent that they had been able to in the past. Wages were increasing slowly if at all, and terms and conditions of employment were relatively poor. They were not so poor that they did not represent an improvement on those previously available in agriculture though. Substantial increases in real wages in agriculture had been necessary to compete with what had become available outside agriculture.
There was plenty of non-agricultural employment available in the 2000s. Permanency was no longer no longer an issue though. The most that low skill wage workers could hope for was regular employment, without too many interruptions, and the ability to get somewhat higher earnings by working hard and continuously at what they did.
While there were now plentiful opportunities for employment outside agriculture, this employment did not necessarily compare well with employment in agriculture. This is partly a reflection of the fact that the terms and conditions that people could get elsewhere were so poor, suffering from long hours, irregularity, and relatively low pay. Employers were getting enough labour willing to work on these terms, including large numbers of migrants from elsewhere. Non-farm employers in knitwear, spinning, et al. with their continually increasing demand for labour were bringing in migrant labour rather than offering better terms to attract all the labour they needed locally. Trade unions could not do much about this. Although trade unions were still active in the urban centres they were weak compared to what they had been earlier, a shadow of their former selves.10 Employment in agriculture also compared well because agricultural employers had continued to compete with non-farm employers by improving the terms and conditions of the wage labour they employed. They had also reduced their labour demand. Agricultural wage workers had to travel further for work, and had to take up non-farm work in the seasons in which agricultural labour is scarce or not available. People in the villages on which this paper has focused have been facing declining agricultural employment on continuously improving terms. There have not been enough days of employment in agriculture for those who want them as the days that are available are much better paid.
10Trade unions were relatively powerful in Coimbatore and Tiruppur in the era of formal sector employment when they played a strong role. They had declined significantly since then with the replacement of the formal by the informal and transient workforce in the liberalisation era. See Thozhilakar Koodam (2016) on the struggles of textile workers in Chennai, and the difficulty of getting those in Tiruppur to acknowledge and work against the oppressive labour conditions there.
This is a change from three decades ago when agricultural labour was the least preferred option to which people had to resort in the absence of alternatives. Low skill wage workers now have the options of powerloom work, construction work, and work in the knitwear industry, as well as options like work in spinning mills, textile mills, engineering workshops, ginning, and casual work of other kinds. Most of those continuing to work as wage labourers in agriculture could have entered one of these other occupations. They have chosen to continue to work in agriculture instead. The improvement over earlier periods is reflected in the improved standards of living of low skill wage workers. Many had houses that were much better than those in which low skill wage workers had lived earlier. There were also much better standards of food and clothing. There were cell phones, mixis, grinders, TVs, and fans. Moreover, 28% of the households relying exclusively on low skill wage workers had 2-wheelers in 2008/9. Some of the consumer goods were provided directly by the state.
The state had distributed free TVs for example. They had also contributed substantially to the improvement of housing and food consumption. Many items were also financed by the higher earnings that low skill wage workers were getting from employment though.
The position of men who were working as low skill wage workers was very different from that of women. Some male low skill wage workers had done much better than others, working in a variety of what look like generally poorly paid and unattractive alternatives. Some had got into better paid and more regular low skill wage employment that delivered reasonable returns over time. Others never had. The type of employment in which men ended up was determined to a large extent by their position in the economic and social structure from which they came. Those in relatively better quality low skill employment were usually from better placed castes, with some property behind them. This enabled them to hold on and wait for better opportunities, to use contacts to obtain better opportunities, and to perform better and more consistently when they got the opportunity to do so. Those in relatively poorer quality employment were usually those from less well placed castes with little property. They had fewer resources and were more vulnerable to the vicissitudes preventing them both from obtaining the better opportunities and from performing well when they got the opportunities they did.
Women had fewer and poorer quality options than men. Their wages in agriculture were much lower than those of men and the possibilities of working outside agriculture were limited by the domestic responsibilities they had. Relatively few women worked outside agriculture once they got married. Many were prevented by their families from working outside agriculture before they were married too. Working outside agriculture, particularly if it involved commuting to work outside the villages, was strongly resisted by parents who controlled what young women did. There were reputational risks including the possibility that they would be less marriageable if they were known to have worked outside the villages with all the freedoms with which that was associated. There was the risk of self-arranged marriages, so-called ‘love marriages’, with which their parents would not be happy. This meant that many of the young women who worked in textile units did so within the villages where pay was lower than the pay they would get if they worked outside the villages. There were a few textile units in the villages, but only a few.
It might seem surprising that credit has not featured in the discussion above. While debt featured in the lives of low skill wage workers it did not often appear to be a major force. Debt was seldom mentioned per se, except in the case of powerloom workers for whom credit was an issue, either because it was to be avoided, or because it was a reason for engaging in such work. There were of course households that had got into debt, households that had outstanding loans that it was difficult to repay. This was not common though. It was not something that arose in discussions about different kinds of work.
Higher education was the route up and out for young people in labouring households as well as for those better placed than this.11The quest for higher education was a reflection of aspirations that were new. This was where credit was more of an issue than elsewhere. Higher education was financed by higher education loans from banks, by long-term savings from employment, and by smaller moneylender loans, loans from relatives, friends, et al. too.
The key question where higher education was concerned was whether and how far young people continued with education that would allow them to aspire to something better than low skill wage labour. By the 2010s all children were in school until they were 15, the large majority completing Standard X. What was at stake was further education than this. There were conflicts between parents and children. There were parents who lamented their failure to keep children in school, drop-outs in Standard VIII or IX and now X, attracted by work in the knitwear industry which gave them money of their own. There were cases in which parents had made considerable sacrifices for children keen to continue not just in school but in higher education too. There were also cases of children not being able to persuade parents to give them the support they needed to continue.
There were a number of young adults in low skill wage labour households who were pursuing or had pursued higher education nevertheless. Most of these came from low skill wage labour households that had some land. It is notable that the only such cases among landless households were Dalits.
It was only relatively recently that Dalits had started enrolling in higher education. In the 2000s and 2010s however a number of Dalits were going to great lengths to do so. The most impressive cases involved significant sacrifices on the part of household members who worked hard in what were often considered less desirable forms of employment to finance the higher education of brothers and sons. Dalits had the advantage of positive discrimination, the waiving of College fees, free bus passes, free hostel accommodation, et al. It was not easy for them to get to the stage at which they qualified for these though and even when they did so these concessions were only part of what was needed for them to pursue the higher education they sought.
Contrary to widely expressed scepticism about the returns to education it was clear here that the possibilities for people from low skill wage labour households were vastly improved when they went in for higher education. Higher education had enabled people to get middle ranking jobs as supervisers, production managers, technicians, machine operators, salesmen, mechanics, nurses, teachers, and pharmacists, as well as jobs in the government administration. None of these was particularly high-level. They were significantly better than low skill wage labour though.
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