Labor Stand: Face of Precarious Migrant Construction Workers in India

Abstract

The construction sector of India is the best representation of the informal workforce, which employs 36.12 million workers. These laborers flock together in a particular place on early morning every day in order to find a wage provider for them. It is a sale of labor for the day, where workers stand and make themselves available for a day to be hired by contractors or individual house owners. These places are known as labor stands, a stop for finding daily laborers for construction work, which is the distinctive addition of this research to the scant literature. This paper tries to explore the labor process among these unique informal construction workers’ labor assemblies consisting of 15,000 laborers per day and explore their employment conditions and labor relations. The paper also aims to examine the role of various actors of industrial relations such as trade unions and the government in regulating this employment relationship. The paper is based on a field study encompassing the transcribed records of observation, field interaction with 84 migrant construction workers, and 118 still photographs. The data were analyzed by using qualitative analysis software and adopting open thematic coding and later by developing categories and hierarchy and doing comparative analysis. The findings reveal that these laborers experience precariousness and are challenged by nonavailability of regular work, shortages of food, burden of large family size, and social evils of living in a slum, and also face being harassed by goons as well as contractors with minimal support from trade unions and government. Employers are apathetic toward their legal obligations. With labor stands being a primary source of labor supply to the construction sector, the findings of this paper will help in enriching labor relations and policy measures for its regulation.