India: When Most Workers Have No Employer

by bam

Every tool in the anchor course, the election, the contract, the grievance procedure, the duty to bargain, assumes one thing so basic it is never said out loud: that a worker is an employee, and an employee has an employer. India is where that assumption breaks. About 90% of Indian workers are in informal employment (India Employment Report 2024, ILO and the Institute for Human Development, built on the government's own Periodic Labour Force Survey): no written contract, no social security, often no identifiable employer at all. This course teaches what that number means and where it comes from; the full legal machine India built on paper (a union with seven members, a constitution that guarantees association, and a Supreme Court that found no fundamental right to strike); union federations that each belong to a political party, a third politics-and-labor entanglement to set against Poland and China; SEWA, the Self-Employed Women's Association, which since 1972 has organized millions of women who have no employer to bargain with, the one institutional invention in this track built for exactly that; the 2019-2020 Labour Codes that folded 29 laws into four and then waited five years to come into force (taught dated, because the states are still writing their rules); the first legal recognition of gig and platform workers anywhere in this track; and the honest part, caste and labor, the sewer deaths a ministry reported to Parliament in the same breath as 'no manual scavenging,' and child labor's real progress and real limits. Cited to the ILO, the Periodic Labour Force Survey, the Codes' own text, parliamentary answers, and SEWA's own record. A country course in the Workers' Rights track, take "The History of Unions: America and the World" first.