Towards a Political Economy of Skill and Garment Work: The Case of the Tiruppur Industrial Cluster in South India

Across the Indian subcontinent, industrial employment has long been precarious for the majority of its workers. Deeply rooted as it is in the informal sector and in casual and unprotected labor markets, industrial work has largely thrived on informality and on the abundant supply of cheap, casual, flexibly deployed labor (Harriss-White 2002). From garments to brickmaking to construction, few industrial workers have had access to regular or permanent employment, let alone to any sort of social security within their jobs (Breman 2012;Cross 2010). Many of those lucky enough to have made it into the few citadels of formal industrial employment—widely referred to as the “aristocracy of labor”—have been rapidly sliding back into the seas of informality and precarity as formal and state-owned industries are restructured, privatized, and outsourced in the post-liberalization era (Breman 2004; Mezzadri 2008; Parry 2013; Sanchez 2012a, 2012b; Strümpell 2014, 2014b). As ever more sectors fall prey to liberalization policies, whatever formal industrial employment existed in the post-Independence period has rapidly shrunk,and whatever labor protection and labor rights were won have been gradually eroded, even for those who remain regularly employed. Various types of casual and temporary contracts dominate the majority of industrial labor markets.