Articles by Supriya RoyChowdhury

Reiterations of the state’s responsibilities have emerged at a time when the market had gained legitimacy of hegemonic proportions. This new thinking can be seen as an effort to redefine the state’s welfarist profile. Closely tied to the idea of democracy and civil society’s initiatives as means of securing the state’s obligations, these discourses and policies remain exclusively focused on welfare-related social policies, while work and work-related rights have been pushed to the margins of the framework of state responsibility. This widely shared position fails to engage with broader political economy issues, particularly with the specificity of the ever expanding domain of irregular workers, and the contradictions of talking about welfare, but not about work or wages.

Social science institutes need outstanding academics as organisational heads. But unlike in the past, such academics are unwilling to occupy positions as head of institutions. A number of reasons are responsible for this reluctance. Ultimately, this is both a reflection and the result of the current state of social science institutions.

The tragic death of the historian Papiya Ghosh marks the demise of a truly extraordinary scholar, a popular teacher and a dearly loved friend. The manner of her death also exposes the rot that lies beneath our boasts of progress and in our systems of governance.

Wages and working conditions in Bangalore?s rapidly expanding garments export sector, employing a large number of women, remain completely unregulated. Governments and mainstream trade unions have been largely indifferent to this sector. A number of NGOs and new trade unions have now stepped into this vacuum. Their framework of activism focusses on developmentalism of a certain kind ? credit associations, slum or neighbourhood development, internationalising the issue of workers? rights ? rather than on confrontational struggles over wages and working conditions. This genre of activism is based on a broad understanding of the informal sector, where a large number are self-employed, as one in which the employer-employee or capital-labour relationship is opaque, if not absent. However, this understanding and activism may indeed be limited in a context where capital is internationalised and labour is recast, into contractual, casualised, and in this case, feminised, workforce.

The discourse on labour in the era of globalisation has gone in several directions. A central question has been ignored by this literature: in a period of marketisation, labour is disempowered on several dimensions: the numerical decline of the organised workforce; weakening trade unions; and, frequently, the politically right-ward turn of social democratic parties which shift to neo-liberal, market oriented policies. This essay provides, in brief outline, a discussion of some important shifts in labour's position in the current era when the economic policy framework has been pulled gradually, but definitively, towards greater measure of integration with markets, both domestic and global. In particular, the focus here is on the shrinking of the organised sector, the world of informal labour, inadequacy of social security nets, and the changing dynamics of trade union functioning.