CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF LAW AND GOVERNANCE
Jawaharlal Nehru University
SEMINAR SERIES
Maya John
Assistant Professor, Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi
On
Law’s Labour Lost: A Long History of Indian Labour Law
Abstract : The postcolonial political economy has bred a labour movement which has fallen prey to low union density, bureaucratised trade unionism and economism. The state's labour law has proved to be a vital tool in this entire historical process. It has nurtured a hierarchy of legal status among workers, triggered the split between the leadership and the rank-and-file of unions, as well as (mis)directed collective action into narrow, institutionalised forms so as to hinder the collective march of labour. Despite heroic workers' struggles against employers, moments in which workers successfully unite across individual factories and overcome divisions or differing statuses created among them by capitalist accumulation and the law are fleeting and sporadic. The neo-liberal onslaught of capital further seeks to de-collectivise and de-institutionalise the public presence of labour. The possibility of its success lies in the precise form in which the labour law regime has shaped the contours of labour movements. More and more workers are being pushed back into the more brutal, early colonial precarious labour conditions.
To better comprehend this crisis and the (in)ability of labour to resist the new onslaught of capital it is essential to engage with the foundational logic of labour law. It is thus important to engage with the twentieth-century colonial period that witnessed the evolution of several key labour legislations. This corpus of legislation introduced highly interventionist approaches to industrial relations that actually stemmed from the jurisprudential shift which facilitated state intervention in private matters of the employment contract. Thus, the earlier contractual framework embodied in the Master and Servant Laws and laws against combination/association steadily became an object of debate, and were eventually repealed.
Critical examination of the jurisprudential shifts actually reveals how labour law is a colonial legacy, which the post-colonial state has perpetuated, as well as significantly modified in order to free capital from the ‘fetters’ of concessions that the working class in the past wrested from it.
3.00 PM, Thursday, 04 October 2018
Conference Room, CSLG, JNU
About the Speaker: Dr Maya John is a History scholar based in University of Delhi, where she is currently teaching. She has published on the evolution of labour law in colonial India, the relationship between caste and the labour market, the question of education in the colonial and post-colonial period. Some of her other research interests include social movements, caste and the history of affirmative action, dynamics of women’s participation in the colonial and post-colonial labour market, and state formation in India. John is also actively working with unions of domestic workers, nurses, teachers and other sections of the urban workforce.
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