Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-m9kch Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-10T17:08:19.439Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Working Poor and the Labour Aristocracy in a South Indian City: A Descriptive and Analytical Account

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

John Harriss
John Harriss
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The starting point of this essay is with some findings on employment in the South Indian city of Coimbatore which we reported in an earlier paper (Harriss, 1982). There we described the principal social characteristics of broad groups of workers, defined after categories proposed by Bromley and Gerry (1979)—those of ‘permanent wage work’, ‘short-term wage work’, ‘casual work’ and ‘self-employment’ or ‘dependent work’ in petty production and trade. We established that in Coimbatore there is little movement of individual workers from other forms of employment into permanent wage work and also that it is unusual to find households with members both in permanent wage work and in other forms of employment. These findings prompt the question whether or not there can be said to exist a ‘labour aristocracy’ in the city of Coimbatore. More broadly they suggest questions concerning forms of social organization and class formation amongst urban workers. We will take up these questions here complementing our earlier studies of small-scale production and the relationships between different levels of production in Coimbatore, and so contributing to the rather limited literature on the lives and work of the urban working poor of India. A further part of our purpose is thus to describe the backgrounds, conditions of work, residential communities and organizations of this important group of people.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , April 1986 , pp. 231 - 283
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Baker, C. J. 1984 An Indian Rural Economy 1880–1955: The Tamilnad Countryside (New Delhi: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Barnett, M. R. 1976 The Politics of Cultural Nationalism (Princeton: University Press).Google Scholar
Bromley, R. and Gerry, C. 1979 ‘Who are the casual poor?’, in Bromley, R. and Gerry, C. (eds), Casual Work and Poverty in Third World Cities (Chichester etc: John Wiley & Sons).Google Scholar
Desai, A. R. and Devadas, Pillai S. 1970 Slums and Urbanization (Bombay: Popular Prakashan).Google Scholar
Harriss, B. 1981 ‘Agricultural mercantile politics and policy: a case study of Tamil Nadu’, Economic and Political Weekly, Annual Number.Google Scholar
Harriss, J. 1980 ‘Urban labour, urban poverty and the so-called informal sector: a study of the city of Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu’, Bulletin, Madras Institute of Development Studies, vol. X, no. 10, October.Google Scholar
Harriss, J. 1981 ‘Two theses on small-scale industry’, paper presented at the Seventh European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies, University of London, July 1981; also published as Discussion Paper No. 80, University of East Anglia, School of Development Studies; and in the Proceedings of the Seventh European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies; Asian Research Service, Hong Kong, 1983.Google Scholar
Harriss, J. 1982 ‘The character of an urban economy: small-scale enterprise and urban labour markets in Coimbatore’, Economic and Political Weekly, June.Google Scholar
Holmström, M. 1976 South Indian Factory Workers (London: Cambridge University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Joy, A. and Beck, B. 1979 ‘Coimbatore City—the historical background to its social composition at present’, in, Beck, , Brenda, E. F. (ed.), Perspectives on a Regional Culture: Essays about the Coimbalore Area of South India (New Delhi: Vikas).Google Scholar
Kurien, C. T. and James, J. 1979 Economic Change in Tamil Nadu: a regionally and functionally disaggregated study. Bombay etc: Allied Publishers.Google Scholar
MacEwen, A. 1974 ‘Differentiation among the urban poor: an Argentine study’, in, de Kadt, E., and Williams, G. (eds), Sociology and Development (London: Tavistock Press).Google Scholar
Mangin, W. 1970 Peasants in Cities (Boston: Houghton Mifflin).Google Scholar
Nelson, J. 1979 Access to Power: Politics and the Urban Poor in Developing Nations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perlman, J. E. 1976 The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro (Berkeley: University of California Press).Google Scholar
Quijano, A. 1980 ‘The marginal pole of the economy and the marginalised labour force’, in, Wolpe, H. (ed.), The Articulation of Modes of Production (London: RKP).Google Scholar
Ramaswamy, E. A. 1976 The Worker and his Union (Bombay etc: Allied Publishers).Google Scholar
Uma, Ramaswamy 1983 Work, Union and Community: Industrial Man in South India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Rao, M. S. A. (ed.) 1974 Urban Sociology in India (Bombay: Asia Publishing House).Google Scholar
Roberts, B. 1978 Cities of Peasants (London: Edward Arnold).Google Scholar
Sandbrook, R. 1982 The Politics of Basic Needs: Urban Aspects of Assaulting Poverty in Africa (London: Heinemann).Google Scholar
Santos, M. 1979 The Shared Space: The Two Circuits of the Urban Economy in Developing Countries (London: Methuen).Google Scholar
Sau, R. 1972 ‘Indian economic growth: constraints and prospects’, Economic and Political Weekly, Annual Number, February 1972, pp. 361–78.Google Scholar
Waterman, P. 1981 ‘Understanding relations amongst labouring people in peripheral capitalist societies’, Labour, Capital and Society, 14, 1, April.Google Scholar
Wiebe, P. 1975 Social life in an Indian Slum (New Delhi: Vikas).Google Scholar
Worsley, P. 1984 The Three Worlds: Culture and World Development (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson).Google Scholar