Why jobs do not matter in politics

OUR carpenter, Manoj, is a master craftsman. Give him any design and he can replicate it perfectly. But his skills in furniture making are offset by his complete inability to estimate costs. Push him hard and he might be able to tell you how much raw material he would need, but ask him about his labour cost and he will give you a bemused smile, and quote a random number. Manoj simply has no sense of the time cost of his own labour. But when he has to hire someone to help him, he is perfectly capable of estimating wage costs — so many days of work needed, at so much, or dihaadi or daily wages.

Manoj makes a clear distinction between the value of his own time and that of someone he hires, even though they would be doing exactly the same work. He never pays himself what he would pay to another carpenter he has hired to assist him. There are two key elements in this attitude to work – both of which are typical to economies where non-capitalist production relations exist simultaneously with capital-labour relations. The first is the act of ‘self-exploitation’, or the undervaluing of one’s own labour power, even when an external benchmark exists. The second is the distinction a ‘petty producer’ makes between his own labour power and that of someone he employs. British historian EP Thompson wrote about this in his celebrated essay ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,’ detailing how ideas of the time value of work, notions of productivity and economic betterment only developed with the emergence of industrial capitalism in England. Before that, work was ‘task-oriented’ as opposed to the ‘time-oriented’ work that became the norm under capitalism.

But that was 18th-century England; this is 21st-century India. Task orientation and the absence of time discipline all but disappeared in England by the mid-19th century, giving rise to universal and abstract homogeneous labour, which could shift from one industry to the other in a standardised form. As workers began to perceive the value of their labour power in terms of the time spent working for their employer, they began to agitate for standardised wages, ‘overtime’ pay, paid leave and various other things that we now associate with ‘normal’ work conditions.

For capitalism to flourish as a political system, it has to hold out the promise of vertical mobility. Workers must believe that if they are able to save and accumulate some money, they too have the chance to deploy that as capital. One way to do that is to increase the time spent working, or else improve one’s skills, such that each time unit of one’s labour power is treated as equivalent to multiple units of a less-skilled worker’s labour power. Since the (market) value of a worker’s labour power is the time taken to produce the consumption goods needed to bring that worker back to the labour market the next day – in other words, ‘reproduce’ his labour-power – skilled labour enables workers to save and accumulate. It holds out the promise that they too can, one day, become capitalists themselves. Capitalism, therefore, breeds ambition and aspiration. It entices workers to labour harder and improve their productivity.

At the time of Independence, India’s ruling elite recognised the importance of inculcating capitalist time discipline among the ‘masses.’ The so-called ‘Bombay Plan’ drawn up by some of India’s top industrialists underscored the link between higher labour productivity and better standards of living. “Benefits of higher efficiency will be increasingly available to the… workers in the form of a corresponding increase in their incomes,” it said. This was an underlying assumption of the post-colonial project to build a modern industrial economy under the aegis of the state, with significant support from private capital. Abolishing the zamindari system, ending bonded labour to allow workers to leave the farm and work in the factory, training workers to improve productivity and learn machine discipline — these were all part of the process of building a modern, growing economy.

By all accounts, both Nehruvian ‘socialism’ and free-market reforms have failed to achieve this. My carpenter is not alone in not having a sense of time discipline when it comes to self-labour. If anything, time orientation has steadily decreased because of three reasons: First, that even 75 years after Independence more than one-third of employment comes from farms, where the movement of the sun and the agricultural seasons dictate the rhythms of work. The second reason is that less than 40 per cent of working-age Indians have any kind of paid employment. Finally, the nature of jobs available in our economy has stalled the emergence of capitalist time discipline and aspirations among the working people.

The manufacturing sector, where capitalist ‘ethics’ first develop, accounts for less than 10 per cent of all jobs, and a significant number of these are in the unorganised sector. About one in six workers is employed in construction, where work is mostly unskilled, manual labour. Even though construction workers are paid daily wages, contractors have full control over their labour time. Nearly one-fifth of all jobs are in the retail trade — an overwhelming majority of these would be small kiosks and shops run using family labour where time-based wages have no meaning. Five per cent of those who have work earn their living by providing ‘non-professional’ personal services — as plumbers, electricians, barbers, security guards and domestic help — where earnings are task-dependent.

The absence of capitalist time discipline and time-based wages has significant ‘cultural’ repercussions. Not only do the working people not develop work-based aspirations, but they also lose interest in looking for work once they are unemployed for long periods of time. Those who have left agriculture to look for non-farm jobs return to the village and help out on the farm, even when they are not required. People accept their fate that they will not get a full day’s work. They depend on the government to keep their heads above water, and organise politically to get just that much. That is why access to government handouts, and not jobs, has become the fundamental driver of the politics of the governed.

The author is a senior economic analyst