Industrial Fragmentation, Migration and Live-in Factories in Ahmedabad

Abstract

This article interrogates live-in factory labour as a distinct feature of informalised industrial structure, an absence of state regulation and an outcome of kinship-based internal migration processes and labour precariousness. It also demonstrates the fallacy of analysing living arrangements of migrant workers as undifferentiated structural artefacts and highlights the underlying social relational dynamics. It argues that suboptimal wages and terms of employment embedded in highly asymmetrical relations between employer and worker mediated through labour contractors and organised on caste, ethnicity and regional lines dictate the persistence of the system of in-factory living of workers. Such a living arrangement represents a distinct configuration of urban employment that allows firms to have greater control over workers’ lives to extract surplus value and determine their relations with the city. Thus, the article posits that migration, informal workplaces and informal labour relations converge together to create certain hyper-precarious occupational niches reserved for workers from particularly marginalised communities. Apart from debt bondage, a phenomenon which has received significant scholarly attention over the years, on-site accommodation is used by employers to keep vulnerable migrant workers in these niches.