Hosted by the Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP).

Speakers: Rahul Maganti, PhD researcher, Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Gottingen and visiting PhD researcher, CLaSP

Discussant: Prof. Alejandro Colás, Birkbeck, University of London

Event blurb: This research project aims to investigate the changing employment relations of the industrial workforce in post-colonial India, during the second half of the 20th century by foregrounding labour law through which the state regulates the employment relation between capital and labour. In doing so, it bookends two widely known historical processes, the second world war in the 1940s and the opening up of the Indian economy for global capital in the 1990s, and attempts to understand how employment relations of the workforce in the Bombay port was changing during this period. The Bombay port is taken as a case study to understand the dynamic employment relations of India’s labour force because of the capital-intensive nature of logistics and circulation, which requires meticulous organizing of both labour and capital to feed the accumulation process, often administered by the state. 

I suggest that there are five key moments of dynamism within the employment relations of the workforce in the Bombay port. The first moment was that of decasualization during the 1940s, on the heels of organizing the port and its workforce for the needs of the war. A very tiny section of the casual workforce in the Bombay port – the stevedoring workers who were integral to the cargo handling process and quicker turnaround of ships – were given security of employment. The second moment followed in the 1950s when decasualization did not yield the results anticipated by capital. Decasualization had to be coupled with piece-rate wages to ensure capital accumulation, especially for the Indian shipping capital which found it hard to compete with the deep pockets of the established British and foreign shipping capital. The third moment was a wave of militant struggles by different sections of the casual workforce in the Bombay port through the 1950s and the 1960s demanding decasualization and an expansion of the same to multiple occupational groups. The fourth moment was the concurrence of the shipping crisis of the 1970s and containerization which demanded a change in the labour process and the infrastructure of shipping. This allowed for a further expansion of decasualization, especially to the skilled casual workforce in the Bombay port. However, along with the decasualization and piece-rate wages, another element was added to the employment relation by linking bonus to productivity. The fifth and the final moment was the dismantling of decasualization in the 1990s by the Indian state at the instance of global shipping capital and paving a way for casualization of the workforce in the ports as a precursor for globalization of the Indian economy in the 21st centu

Please note that this event is preceded by a workshop from 2-4 pm on ‘Intersections between culture and environment: A guide to environmental management in cultural organisations’. Please register separately for this event through this link.