WHEN human beings are reduced to packets of labour power, squeezed to the last drop of sweat and silenced through intimidation, such packets can explode! Employers across the world have tried the same strategy to reduce the cost of labour and assert their control over the labour process and history has shown that they have failed every time. Noida is not a stray incident, and it is part of a series of flash protests organised by workers in the recent past in Panipat, Palwal, Gurgaon, Faridabad and Manesar. Workers are facing a livelihood crisis with almost stagnant real wages for about a decade added with increased fuel prices and recurrent episodes of food inflation.

Contractualisation and casualisation has been rampant in Indian factories and in the formal sector the proportion of contracted workers turn out to be close to 40 per cent. The new industries which came up as drivers of high growth in the past three decades of the neoliberal regime in different cities of India hardly recognise any worker as permanent. Hire and fire has become the hegemonic model in Indian industrial relations to be emulated by others who still resort to old fashioned permanent employment. The process is to relieve the employer from all responsibilities of continuing with the worker and bearing her cost of living during slump and offering the employers the freedom to use the flow of labour as plugged in and out depending upon the ebbs and flows of the business cycle. The employers seem to say that workers livelihood is only important for them when they are required for production, else no responsibility on the part of the employers or from the state to be expected.

On top of that what would be paid as the value of labour power, what should be the working hours and conditions of work or benefits and paid holidays would simply depend on the relative strength of the worker and the employer, and no collective social conscience and sanction is applicable or desirable. Workers therefore would be forced to show their strength by whatever means and that may appear unusual. If the employer has no responsibility to ensure reasonable wage and society at large -- ideally assumed to be represented by the state -- and various institutions are reluctant in caring about the life of the direct producers, workers show their might through riots on the streets. This has been the history of working-class resistance across the world which forced the employers and the capitalist state to realise that workers are not mere packets of labour power, but they are human beings and deserve a reasonable share of the social product.

Immiserated Working Class

Neoliberalism was nothing but a class project. It was essentially about destroying the existing rights of workers, recalibrating the terms and conditions in a manner that protect the accumulation of profits. It was objectified through reification of market and idealised as a neutral project, as the state being withdrawn from economic activities. We see the state being active in every form that protects the gains of the capitalist class. The UP government, or for that matter any other government in India, bother about the wage and working conditions of workers when the employers face a challenge from workers. In the name of abolishing the ‘inspector raj’, factories have become forbidden space for regulatory authorities and employers are given a free run to exploit their workers. All these went in the name of development and growth, and it is the workers of India who are destined to sacrifice the most for the growth of the economy while the fruits of growth are being appropriated by the employers as private profits.

The government enters the picture to establish the ‘rule of law’ when employers face a challenge from the workers. While the perpetual dispossession of workers silently continues every day, when minimum wage is not being revised for years and working hours were extended according to the whims and fancies of the employers, no government bothers to assert the rule of the game and norms of employment. Mark that in the past decade workers’ real wages grew on an average by 1.7 per cent while inflation grew much faster. The productivity of the workers increased in the factory sector but their share in value added declined drastically from 33 per cent in the eighties to 15 per cent in 2023-24. By average working hours in a week, India ranks 13^th out of 170 countries and by percentage of workers working more than 49 hours a week, India ranks second highest in the world just after Bhutan. Immiseration of the working people is also reflected by declining household savings which has come down from 23.6 per cent of GDP in 2011-12 to 18.4 per cent in 2022-23 and net household debt has increased in the recent years. But this was happening when corporate profits grew very fast reaching its fifteen-year peak in 2024-25. This is the hallmark of neoliberalism when capital gains and labour lose in the process of growth.

Network of Working Poor

The ephemeral relationship between labour and capital that neoliberalism embarks upon and the dismantling of long-term cohesion of responsibilities mediated through democratic institutions for collective bargaining infuses flash points that are apparently violent. It is nothing but the other side of the violence that the workers face every day in their workplace silently. Taking punitive action against a loud unruly mob, vilification of the protest by witch-hunting labels of ‘conspirators’ and ‘terrorists’ are futile attempts to control resistance. In fact, the new growth poles of the world located in South and East Asia and growth poles within India located in UP, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Tamil Nadu would be featuring cheap, docile labour as the selling point to attract investment. The subversion of workers’ rights and underconsumption of workers together with under-reproduction of natural resources become the major mode of neoliberal accumulation. On the one hand, direct producers are dispossessed from their traditional livelihood either forcibly or through a protracted process of making agriculture and petty production nonviable, on the other hand, the workers working in factories and in new service activities are dispossessed every day from their work-related rights as well as from larger human rights.

This situation creates objectivities of convergence within the working poor but at the same time comes with diverse and autonomous spaces of subjectivities. Most of the protests we see in recent times across the world share common features: they are sporadic, unmediated by trade unions, built on transient loose networks collaborating with different segments of working people and often do not continue for long. This is not surprising given the nature of capital-labour relations that evolved over time during the neoliberal regime. Labour is in a state of flux and so is capital. Circulation of workers has increased significantly in the recent period with increasing contractualisation and casualisation also manifested through increased migration. Capital is also driven by search for higher profitability and with increased financialisation productive activities are subject to the imperatives of financial profits. In such a transient and fluid relationship, negotiations and discontents get highly condensed and charged momentarily. The conflict in concrete moments is specific, but the generality of such events suggests a protracted battle between labour and capital as class. The recomposition of class should go beyond factories. These movements need to be backed by organised trade unions, community support systems and social movements. The broadest possible alliance of working people through an evolving network of organisations and communities, while retaining the diversity and autonomy of struggles is the need of the hour.