COLUMN
Bias as base
JAYATI GHOSH
Capitalism in India, especially its globally integrated variant, has
used modes of social discrimination and exclusion to advance itself.
A. SHAIKMOHIDEEN
CONSERVANCY WORKERS CLEANING a drainage channel in Tirunelveli. A file
picture. A large number of social practices effectively restrict the
economic activity of "lower caste" and Dalit groups and force them to
supply very low wage labour in harsh and usually precarious
conditions.
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, which have denied opportunities and
restricted options for so long and for so many.
Unfortunately, the current Indian reality is more complex than that.
The big capital, which is leading the current economic boom, derives
its strength at least partly from the persistence and even expansion
of precarious and low-productivity employment, in which a wide range
of workers are engaged.
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. 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 the availability of skilled
information technology professionals who are cheaper than 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 and long working hours. There is hardly any form of worker
protection or other benefits and no job security. 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 some 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.
SOCIAL FACTORS
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 (NSS) reveal that the probability of being in a low
wage occupation is significantly higher for the Scheduled Tribes, the
Scheduled Castes, Muslims and Other Backward Classes (in that order)
compared with the general "caste Hindu" population. This is only
partly because of differences in education and the level of skills,
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 such as
Delhi, which is one of the epicentres of economic expansion, there
continues to be 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. Methods of
recruitment based on contacts, which are widely prevalent in such
low-skilled occupations, ensure that past discriminations are carried
over to the present and thereby condemn lower caste groups to 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,
Untouchability in Rural India (by Ghanshyam Shah, Harsh Mander,
Sukhdeo Thorat, Satish Deshpande and Amita Baviskar; Sage
Publications, New Delhi, 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 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.
K. BHAGYA PRAKASH
A PROTEST BY members of the Domestic Workers Union in Bangalore. A
2009 photograph. For urban women, the increase in regular work has
dominantly been in services, including low-paid domestic service.
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 the villages, Dalits could
not enter common temples. In 36 per cent of the villages surveyed,
Dalits could not enter village shops. In around one-third of the
surveyed 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. 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.
GENDER DISCRIMINATION
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, unemployment comes down; or when paid labour
increases, 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 jobs 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 in finding paid
work.
In this period of economic boom, average real wages of women workers
increased relatively little over the 10-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, which 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
Accredited Social Health Activists).
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 a piece-rates
basis 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 patterns of social discriminations; instead it has
relied on them to take forward the growth story.
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