[DOWNLOAD] "Modernizing the Colonial Labor Subject in India (Report)" by Valerian DeSousa * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free

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Title: Modernizing the Colonial Labor Subject in India (Report)
Author : Valerian DeSousa
Release Date : January 01, 2010
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
Pages : * pages
Size : 95 KB

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In 1907, the colonial Government of British India appointed a commission to inquire into the conditions of textile labor following riots by workers in Bombay (today Mumbai) who were protesting harsh working conditions. The commission, consisting almost exclusively of representatives from government and business, found workers "incapable of prolonged and intense effort," with a "natural inclination (to work) in a leisurely manner," and a "strong disinclination ... to submit to discipline" (Report of the Indian Factory Labour Commission 1908 20-21). These conclusions were derived from a construction of the worker as an "agriculturalist," a position drawn from a deeply entrenched ideological field based on knowledge produced by the Orientalists of the late eighteenth century that saw India and Indians as rooted in a timeless and undifferentiated past. In order to transform the agriculturalist into an "efficient" worker, the Commission recommended far reaching changes to the existing regime of production through new technologies of labor management. The Commission's recommendations along with other studies and reports on labor, became the basis of a series of labor laws that were enacted between 1911 and 1936 and saw the arrival of the "modern" labor subject. This was not the first time the government had attempted to structure conditions of labor: in 1881 the government passed the first Factories Act which was amended ten years later. However, both these legislative interventions were limited by the imperatives of a despotic regime of production that sought to maintain harsh conditions of work on the grounds that Indian workers were incapable of entering the world of the "modern": the Indian worker was analogous to the eternal and timeless Hindu, steeped in an inescapable traditional past. However, it was only when workers made their interests known through strikes and other forms of protest in the last decade of the nineteenth century that they became the subject and object of study, leading to these legislative interventions that reconstituted the subjectivity of the Indian worker. I argue that the law was an instrument of governmentality that deployed the power and authority of the colonial state in a way that reshaped the economic and political processes central to colonialism, encoding new meanings of workers' relationship to their work, to employers, and to the colonial state. Law became the means of reforming a pre-modern laborer into a "modern" industrial worker that fit into the vision of empire. Here, I examine five laws that were enacted during this period. The first of these laws, the Factories Act, brought into existence a labor subject which was the initial step toward reforming the worker. Subsequent laws can be grouped into two types, welfare and rights laws, and these continued the process of transforming the worker as subject in law. The Workmen's Compensation Act of 1923 translated the meta-discourse on welfare as efficiency into changes at the level of work practices by naming employers as responsible for new modes of safety and discipline at the workplace thereby compelling them to institute changes that would alter the habits of workers. The Trade Unions Act of 1926 while seemingly enacted to protect the right of workers to combination, sought to bring about a certain predictability in workers' actions. The Trade Disputes Act of 1929 complemented the Trade Unions Act by restricting the right to strike and limiting the form and activities of unions. The last of these laws, the Payment of Wages Act of 1936 sought to optimize worker discipline by restricting the employers' right to penalize workers to acts that corrected "inefficient" behavior affecting production. This law also introduced a new ideology in relations between capital and labor --the cash wage--that put an end to the "traditional" relationship between employers and worker thereby inserting the worker into the discursive space of work as a mone