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Footloose Labour: Working in India's Informal Economy. By Jan Breman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp.x + 278. L50 and L16.95. ISBN 0 521 56083 7 and 56824 2
This is an extremely important book. Set in south Gujarat, as much of Breman's earlier work, its findings alert us to new patterns in labour relations in India today. It also heralds new directions for research on India's labouring poor. First, it finds that the consciousness of the mass of very poor, landless, lowest caste workers is changing significantly. They are steadily less willing to accept overbearing and brutal domination by their employers. Second, it notes that this change is closely connected to changes in employment patterns, which now involve massive migrations of labour and which articulate workers with and position them within much wider social and political worlds than before, Third, it finds that the capital that fuels the enormous informal sector in which most workers are employed is largely merchant capital: this has a very specific bearing on the structures of both rural and urban informal labour markets and labour relations within them.
Breman's unified view, that takes in both urban and rural labour markets in one analytical sweep, is entirely persuasive. He shows that to dichotomise is unhelpful because workers move from one sector to the other all the time and conditions in informal employment are equally bad in both rural and urban areas. To dichotomise rural and urban would occlude the processes of rural-based labour migration.
Great tidal waves of thousands of migrants flow out of the rural areas every year. They are absorbed in both farm and non-agricultural employment. The paradox is that there is considerable agricultural employment available in the areas that they leave and it is migrants from elsewhere who come to fill this demand. For instance, there is an inflow of 150,000 migrant cane-cutters annually. Actually a puzzling two-way traffic continues. Thus, at a brickworks in 1986 Breman finds that 100 Kathiawadi workers have been recruited from Bhavnagar, far away: `the arrival of these newcomers was countered by the departure of almost an equal number of Halpatis and Dhodhiyas from Chikhligam to other destinations, including Bhavnagar, to seek work in the brickworks there!' (p.82).
This paradoxical two-way traffic...