Response to Jan Breman's Review Essay on Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town

Abstract

I am grateful to Jan Breman for his generous comments on, and critical engagement with, Classes of Labour, and to the editors of this journal for the opportunity to reply. Breman’s focus is on just one of the book’s central arguments. My response will for the most part follow suit, though to explain why I do not find his strictures on it convincing I need to briefly refer to some other strands in my analysis that his commentary has largely passed over and that are indispensable background to the key proposition with which he takes issue. In the opening sentence of his Abstract Breman declares that from the beginning of his career he rejected the idea that the landscape of labour can be seen in dichotomous terms, divided between a formal and an informal sector workforce. Perhaps he forgets? Originally published in 1976, the first chapter of his 1994 essay collection is a repudiation of his own earlier attempts “to divide the local labour market into two divisions” and a plea for a more nuanced picture of the labour hierarchy as composed of multiple gradations (Breman, 1994: 18). Two aspects of Breman’s recantation particularly struck me when I attempted to review his position in the book (Chapter 2, Section 3). First, in the light of the empirical evidence alluded to in that 1976 essay itself and in the one that is reprinted next in the 1994 collection, the need to recant at all did not seem pressing. What much of that evidence in fact pointed to was a deep division between the labour elite (mainly regular workers in sizeable enterprises in the organised sector) and the rest of the workforce (primarily the three other major fractions of labour that Breman identified: the petit-bourgeoisie, the sub-proletariat and the paupers – a list that was seemingly provisional and expandable). Among other things, the labour elite was more like a salariat than a proletariat, was clearly distinguished from others in its material conditions, consumption patterns, aspirations and values, and by its consciousness of having different interests. Mobility into this stratum was very limited and joint households that included workers from across this divide seldom remained joint for long. The second aspect that struck me was that two other doyens of Indian labour studies had followed much the same trajectory at much the same time. Consider the shift between Holmström (1976) and Holmström (1984), and between Harriss (1982) and Harriss (1986). What was initially portrayed was a clear break in the hierarchy of labour between, on the one hand, those who occupy a “citadel” of relative privilege with secure and well-