Biography

I study labour legislation as a strategic apparatus of capitalist hegemony, stabilising the dominance of capital by offering limited protections while simultaneously reproducing elements of earlier control regimes. It reflects a form of instrumentalism exercised by an alliance between the colonial state, and later the postcolonial nation-state, and capital. At the same time, it deflects demands for structural change and institutionalises the subordination of labour to capital. For my PhD, I examine the history of the Workmen's Compensation Act and related laws on disablement benefits and employers’ liability, assessing their developments with shifts in the dominant modes of production in modern India. For my research, I present a micro-history of the iron and steel industry during the colonial period to examine the colonial mode of production and the introduction of international labour legislation. The social relations of production are explored through archival research on industries such as British Iron & Steel Corporation (BISCO) and TATA in India, both established in the early twentieth century. The dominant mode of production and history of compensation are traced in this colonial context. Through accounts of unionisation, movement formation and resistance, the hypothesis of hegemony maintained through labour legislation is critically assessed. My study then proceeds to the history of automobile manufacturing in the postcolonial and contemporary periods. Beginning with early industrial developments involving Bajaj and Hind Motors, the research will extend to corporations such as Maruti, Hero and Honda in the neoliberal era. Questions of industrial safety and compensation will be examined through the archival sources. The study will also draw on primary data collected through extensive field engagement, oral histories, and archival accounts of labour in New Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai. Historical accounts of labour and labour movements will be sourced from trade union archives, labour newsletters (e.g. Gurugram Workers News and Faridabad Mazdoor Samachar), and official Indian government records. Labour legislation, since its inception in both metropoles and colonies, has functioned as a tool of imperial dominance. By standardising the social relations of production, I argue that it reorganises consent without fundamentally altering the relations of exploitation. Through disciplining the workforce and regulating labour turnover in the global North after WWI, labour legislation characterised the “Fordist compromise.” During the war years, as industrial spaces began to change, resistance from the working class was met with a series of employer and state-sanctioned negotiations for reintegrating labour into the circuits of global capital. This process ideologically maintained colonial dominance by gradually facilitating a shift of production in the global South, while simultaneously containing working-class resistance through the remodelling of the social relations of production.

Previous Education

Jawaharlal Nehru University Development and Labour Studies 2022
Christ University, Bangalore Economics (Honours) 2020

Links

http://www.ankitkumarsingh.com