Introduction
Labour market intermediaries have long been a topic for scholarly research. Recently, they have received renewed attention from scholars of corporate social responsibility who are concerned with the rise of labour contractors and other intermediaries within global production networks.Footnote 1 In this literature, the informal labour contractor is often vilified as ‘unscrupulous’ recruiter of poor and vulnerable labourers for global capital, and represented in stereotypically negative terms as a key node in the extraction of surplus value. In particular, concern has been raised about the inability of corporate codes of conduct to ‘reach’ some of the most vulnerable workers in global production networks, including the contract workers recruited through middlemen at the tail end of global chains.Footnote 2 As a result, labour contractors, and the contract and casual workers they recruit, are referred to as the ‘Achilles heel’ of codes of conduct and are considered the weakest point in the ‘chain’ of corporate control over global production networks.Footnote 3
While not denying the role of labour market intermediaries in the reproduction of vulnerability, exploitation, and inequality within local economies, this paper seeks to debunk the one-dimensional myth of the unscrupulous, rapacious contractor who is only out to exploit and abuse an already fragile labour force. Instead it presents an ethnography of the social processes of becoming and being a labour contractor in the South Indian garment industry, and makes three analytical arguments. First, it illustrates how the category of contractor is itself a highly ambivalent and unstable position within labour processes that are often marked by high levels of instability and unpredictability. In the Tiruppur garment companies in Tamil Nadu, which form the focus of this paper, contractors not only emerge from the ranks of workers, but, located as they are at the tail end of highly volatile markets, many of them keep ‘falling back’ into the position of wage labourer. The boundary between acting as a contractor and working for a contractor is highly blurred and is often crossed back and forth by many aspiring workers. Recognizing the extraordinarily unstable and precarious position of contractors operating within neoliberal markets has implications for an understanding of their relative power within labour regimes as well as for a discussion of class formation. Or, following both Thompson on eighteenth century England and Chandavarkar on nineteenth and twentieth century India, the contractor embodies a position that reveals the porosity of boundaries between class positions and, most importantly, the challenges to upward mobility between class positions, despite considerable entrepreneurial motivation.Footnote 4 The contractors’ compromised position between management and the workforce as well as their vulnerable and unstable role as labour brokers within a precarious neoliberal environment point to the highly fragmented nature of the working class itself.Footnote 5
The second point of this paper relates to the nature of entrepreneurship itself. The social space covered by the informal activities and networks of labour contractors forms a site of amazing entrepreneurship, skills acquisition, and knowledge generation. In many ways, the contractors described in this paper constitute the prototypical self-motivated individual who embodies all the features of neoliberal subjectivity and enterprise culture that engulfs contemporary India.Footnote 6 Indeed, as Gooptu recently put it, neoliberalization itself ‘depends on the development of self-regulation, self-direction and self-management of enterprising selves’.Footnote 7 In Tiruppur, as we will see, contractors reveal themselves as quintessential neoliberal subjects equipped with the resourcefulness, ingenuity, and resilience that the city's garment industry needs in order to thrive in a neoliberal environment. The role of contractor is not only consolidated by the new commercial pressures of global outsourcing and subcontracting, but contractors’ enterprising spirit, creative self-fashioning, and skilful navigating at the interstices of the informal economy in many ways make them the driving force behind India's neoliberal success.Footnote 8 Informal processes of network building, training, and skills acquisition not only drive the social organization of the economy at the tail end of global production networks, they also constitute a remarkable arena of agency, ability, and resourcefulness, relentlessly mobilized by those whose working lives remain in many ways marred by a systemic lack of opportunity and mobility.
Thirdly, simplified representations of labour contractors as unscrupulous exploiters ignore the complex social and material reality within which they operate. Contractors’ own opportunities are shaped by the continued informality of their work environment.Footnote 9 Their activities remain located well within the informal spheres of the Indian economy, and their participation in global networks of trade and production is marked by what Phillips has called processes of ‘adverse incorporation’Footnote 10 or conditions that reproduce their vulnerability and precariousness. Furthermore, in India, contractors’ room for manoeuvre as labour recruiters is further curtailed by dynamic networks of caste, kinship, and migration that often temper their scope for extraction and exploitation. The ethnography below therefore suggests that contractors’ leverage is crucially determined by the nature of the production process in which they are located, the commercial dynamics of global markets, their own skills base, and the characteristics of the workforce they recruit. In the Tiruppur garment workshops—the tail end of global garment production networks—the workforce is highly skilled, production schedules are tight, workflows are erratic, and the division of labour is complex. In such a context, contractors are faced not only with a volatile workforce but also with a production process in which responsibility, risk, and uncertainty are largely devolved upon them. Their precarious position within the labour market makes them anything but a stereotypical unscrupulous exploiter. While this does not mean that they are necessarily weak figures and that in other contexts, production, skills, and labour characteristics may well combine to produce more empowered and aggressively entrepreneurial middlemen, it is my contention that neoliberal conditions tend to undermine rather than enhance contractors’ entrepreneurial success and to reduce rather than intensify their power vis-à-vis both capital and workers.
Labour intermediaries past and present
Much has been written about labour intermediaries’ multiple roles as recruiters of labour, supervisors at worksites, labour organizers, moneylenders, providers of housing, and headmen of various sorts in India.Footnote 11 Historians have dwelled at length on the role and rationale of the jobber, sardar or maistri in rising urban colonial industries, such as textiles, jute, and mining, and have discussed the reasons for their decline and fall in the late- and post-colonial era.Footnote 12 This historical scholarship carefully described the precariousness of contractors’ position between management and the labourers they mobilize. At times, this intermediary position is advantageous to contractors, allowing them to extract profits and become upwardly mobile, while at other times, their intermediary status puts them in a vulnerable position within the labour process: unable to satisfy both labour and management, they are often liable ‘to be squeezed by the contradictory pressures exerted upon them by both’.Footnote 13 Sometimes this ruins their own ‘careers’ and relegates them back to the ranks of the workers from which they once rose. This paper seeks to understand the conditions under which success and failure are produced in the neoliberal era.
More recently, attention has been turned towards the re-emergence of labour contractors across India's rural informal economy. In a recent volume edited by Breman et al., the central role of labour contractors in the recruitment of workers has been documented with reference to different sectors across India, including brick kilns, rice mills, cane cutting, and construction work.Footnote 14 Such research indicates the continued key role played by contractors in the contemporary rural economy: not only in recruiting and managing labour—especially migrant and seasonal labour—but also in the reproduction and intensification of relations of dependency, indebtedness, and bondage.Footnote 15 Whereas this scholarship leaves no doubt that contractors and middlemen can be complicit in the reproduction of exploitative relationships, it also needs to be noted that most research on middlemen and brokers to date has focused almost exclusively on domestic agriculture and industry, where fairly predictable and often seasonal production patterns, lower skill levels, and an abundant supply of labour work in the favour of contractors.
While much of the emerging picture is far from rosy, Picherit, in a study of labour middlemen in Andhra Pradesh, does warn against reductionist representations of contractors as ‘wicked persons who exploit and harass’ and who should ideally be eliminated from the chains of recruitment.Footnote 16 Picherit makes the important point that, despite the availability of elaborate descriptions of middlemen's structural positions within the labour process, we know remarkably few personal details about the contractors themselves.Footnote 17 Contractors remain stripped of any social identity or personal history, encapsulated as they are in a ‘black-box’ category that takes their origins, social capital, and authority for granted.Footnote 18 Picherit, by contrast, argues that maistris’ particular strengths and weaknesses are not merely the outcome of their structural location but hinge as much on the prestige and reputation that they are able to command, and the trust and loyalty that they manage to gain from workers—in other words, on the quality of their abilities, social capital, and relations.Footnote 19 What is required therefore is a better understanding of how one becomes a labour contractor, who is able to join the ranks of this amorphous group, and how success or failure may ensue from both structural positions and personal predicaments.
Finally, labour market intermediaries, whether formal recruitment agencies or informal contractors, are also on the rise globally. They thrive within global production networks where ‘there is an increasing trend for producers to deploy labour contractors to facilitate the labour supply required to meet production schedules’.Footnote 20 There is evidence that both recruitment of migrant and temporary labour by contractors is on the rise within global production networks across the globe.Footnote 21 The contradictory commercial dynamics behind this phenomenon have been well described by Barrientos.Footnote 22 Buyers and retailers exert pressure on suppliers to cut costs, reduce lead times, produce flexibly, and meet ever more demanding quality and ethical standards, including rigorous labour standards. At the same time, price competition is cut-throat, with buyers threatening suppliers that they will go elsewhere if standards are not met. As a result, suppliers increasingly rely on contractors and a casual workforce in an attempt to pass the costs and risks of production down the chain and to evade labour legislation. The outcome is an eminently neoliberal environment in which contractors thrive. The conditions for the proliferation of labour contractors, however, are not simply of the suppliers’ own making. They are engendered by the contemporary modes of outsourcing by lead firms in global networks who are increasingly removed from the labour they employ and the sites of production they link into. Global pressures on time, quality, and costs of production not only make contractors a crucial node in global production networks, but also determine their scope within the more localized production processes in which they operate. Volatile market demand, highly skilled workforces, ever tighter production deadlines, and complex divisions of labour add to the precariousness of the contractors’ position and often reverse their prospects of upward mobility—and that despite their often enormous entrepreneurial spirit and resourcefulness.
Following Kelly, labour contractors are considered as a key node in the constellation of actors and institutions that together form the ‘local labour control regime’, which mediates global capital's control over labour.Footnote 23 Capital's grip over labour, especially within neoliberal markets, is rarely exerted in a direct manner or, as Kelly puts it, ‘the relationship embodied in the labour process of newly industrializing spaces cannot be conceived simply as an antagonism between “global” capital and “local” labor’.Footnote 24 Rather, this relationship is mediated through a range of institutions and actors, many of which exist outside the formal, regulatory sphere. In many industrial clusters, labour contractors are central to this mediation and, as unregulated actors, they play a vital role in the production of local labour processes and in generating the flexibility, entrepreneurship, and skills needed to generate success in the global economy. How they insert themselves within such labour processes, how they contribute to local labour control regimes, and how they provide insight into the precariousness and porosity of class positions are the subject of this paper.
Contractors in the Tiruppur garment industry
In what follows I present ethnography from the Tiruppur garment manufacturing cluster in South India, where contractors have become almost ubiquitous figures across export companies of various sizes. Tiruppur, located in the western part of Tamil Nadu, South India, is one of the largest knitwear garment clusters in South Asia and has known almost uninterrupted growth since the early 1970s when manufacturers began to trade with European buyers. Today, the cluster is a leading centre of garment exports for the world market and is well integrated into global production networks that stretch from Europe to the United States and Asia. The cluster constitutes one of India's most important foreign exchange earners, with a total export value of $2.5 billion in 2009–10, up from $2 billion in 2007. Estimates suggest that there are about 10,000 production units in Tiruppur, employing more than 400,000 workers, but real numbers may well be higher than this.Footnote 25 Field research in Tiruppur included a worker survey; a firm survey; and interviews with workers, labour contractors, and company management as well as with wider stakeholders such as trade unions and industrial organizations. The material presented here draws primarily on interviews and participant-observation carried out during a year of fieldwork in 2008–09 among workers and labour contractors in the factories and residential areas of Tiruppur.
In Tiruppur, labour contractors are widely deployed in cutting-manufacturing-trimming units, where garments are tailored, checked, and packed. Their contracts with the company owners typically consist of an agreement to produce a stipulated number of garments to a specified deadline, for an agreed payment, and to a certain standard. Different contractors each take responsibility for a core operation in the production of a garment. In any garment unit, up to four or five contractors can be employed simultaneously to cover the core operations of cutting, tailoring, ironing, quality checking, and packing. Raw materials and machinery are usually provided by the company itself, although an increasing number of cutting contractors now have a cutting machine of their own, which they take with them as they move between companies.
The contractor's main task consists of recruiting a team of workers and getting them to work at such a speed and with such skill that the contract is completed on time and meets the required quality standards. On putting together a team, the contractor divides the work among the team members, checks the quality of their work during production, keeps track of the speed at which they are working, and pays wages at the end of each week. The company pays the contractor a fixed sum per contract, which is usually negotiated at the beginning of each contract and is always calculated on a piece-rate basis. The contractor then pays his tailors or cutting masters either on a piece-rate or a shift-rate basis. What is left after paying the team members is his commission for his work, including the risks and responsibilities it involves. The main point to make here is that the contractor is a key figure on the shop floor: he monitors the entire production process, is the primary supervisor of his team, allocates jobs to team members, trains less experienced workers, speeds up slackers, and solves all sorts of quality problems.
Under this system, the bulk of the workforce is directly employed by the contractor and not by the company itself. How this serves the needs of local (and global) capital is obvious: suppliers can restrict their dealings with labour to a handful of contractors, thus freeing up time for marketing, sample development, and external relationships with buyers and subcontractors. Employing labour contractors also allows companies to benefit from a flexible workforce to whom they have no long-term commitments, while avoiding the day-to-day management of labour as well as compliance with labour legislation. In case of any labour discontent, workers can be readily referred back to their contractors. While contractors are widely deployed by small and medium-sized company owners, even large export firms rely on them.Footnote 26 For most firms, the contract labour system is not a matter of choice. It is increasingly the only method of recruitment that can provide the flexibility required by the global market for which they produce. The importance of labour contractors transpires from the perennial concerns faced by those companies that try to avoid contract labour and register hundreds of workers on a regular pay roll. Those companies admit struggling with high rates of labour turnover and absenteeism, enhanced labour costs, and the complexity of managing a huge labour force in the light of constantly changing product lines and skills requirements.
Locating the contractor: shifting grounds and ambivalent positions
Let us now turn to the shifting grounds on which contractors operate. I present trajectories that are typical but not exhaustive. They illustrate the diversity of routes by which workers become contractors, the social networks they mobilize, and the vulnerabilities they are exposed to. The precariousness of the contractor's position is revealed, both regarding their employers and the workers they recruit. The ethnography presented below was collected on the shop floor of Modern Fashions, a small production unit in the centre of Tiruppur, and in its surrounding neighbourhoods.
Senthil, the ‘local’ contractor
It was Senthil's father, Kumarasamy, whom I met first in January 2009, when sitting in the small and sweltering office of Modern Fashions.Footnote 27 I had just told the company owner that I was interested in working in his factory in order to gain a better understanding of the production process and the workers. The owner immediately called Kumarasamy, the powertable contractor, to his office and told him to introduce me to garment work.Footnote 28 ‘He will show you around and tell you everything you want to know; he knows everything about garment work—you can spend as much time with him as you like!’ the owner added. This was how my free and unrestricted access to the shop floor of Modern Fashions began. Over the following six months I worked there—on and off—as a helper assisting powertable tailors, and gradually came to know most people in the company as well as many others who regularly visited, such as quality controllers, suppliers, subcontractors, and, not least, the family and friends of tailors.
Kumarasamy, aged 55, took me straight to the powertable machines where he sat me on a chair next to his son, Senthil, aged 26, who he introduced as ‘the contractor’. I soon realized that Senthil and his father jointly manage the contracts they take from Modern Fashions. Senthil started to chat to me in Tamil but with lots of English sentences thrown in, and in no time recounted the main stories of his life, which he further detailed in subsequent conversations. In telling his life story, he was at least in part trying to justify why, given his high level of education, he had ended up working as a manual, albeit very skilled, labourer in a crammed and dusty garment workshop.
Senthil was born and brought up in Tiruppur and introduced to powertable tailoring at a very young age when he assisted his father after school and during holidays. At the age of 16, having completed class 10, Senthil went to Bangalore where he worked for a year. As he did not particularly like the work, he returned to Tiruppur to complete class 12. At the age of 18, already a fully skilled tailor, he took up a job in a garment company. Soon after, with the support of his parents, he started a degree at Ooty's Government Arts College, where he graduated with a Bachelor's degree in 2004. On his return to Tiruppur all hell broke lose when he revealed that he had married a Muslim woman three years earlier and that he had a three-year-old daughter with her. All this had happened without the knowledge of his parents and, on revealing the news, his father's—and indeed entire family's—reaction was understandably one of disbelief, outrage, and betrayal. For Senthil's father it shattered his already fragile dream to move up in the world. Kumarasamy's own father had been a mill worker and Kumarasamy had started tailoring at the age of 10. For more than 20 years he had worked hard as a contractor, saved some money, educated his sons, and struggled against the odds to do well. Indeed, the classic but powerful male dream in Tiruppur is to one day set up one's own company and to make the transition from worker to employer.Footnote 29 Yet Kumarasamy had not been lucky and did not hide his disappointment at his unfulfilled aspirations and his sense that life is a perennial uphill struggle. Senthil's secret love marriage to a Muslim girl was certainly a major setback to his father's plans to start up a garment unit with his two sons. On hearing of the love marriage, all communication between father and son broke down, and on his return from Ooty in 2004, Senthil started working as a tailor and later as a contractor. At one point he set up a small unit with two friends, in which he invested Rs 40,000, but the partnership was not to last and within the first year the company had closed down.
Senthil broadly agrees that his family has not had much luck. Because of his love marriage he lost the support of his father and ended up living with his wife and daughter in a small one-room flat in a poorly maintained government block. However, as time passed, Senthil's relationship with his parents recovered, and after a while Senthil and his father began to work together as contractors. To do well as a contractor, family support is crucial and the chances of succeeding in the industry are greatly enhanced if several family members pool their skills and expertise. Senthil realized that his father's experience and support were vital to his own development, while his father similarly knew that he would make little progress without the support of his sons. By the time I arrived in January 2009, Senthil and his father were taking regular powertable contracts from Modern Fashions where they had been working steadily as contractors for a couple of years.
Senthil's brother, Rajan, however, was doing even better as a well-established cutting contractor. His arranged marriage in 2007 means, his father explained, that he receives a lot of ‘support’ from his wife's family, and in the course of 2009, Rajan purchased a plot of land for more than Rs 2 lakh, on which he was planning to build a house. The support of one's family—from both sides—is crucial for young couples to manage married life in Tiruppur, especially given the frequent fluctuations in employment and household income. Senthil often mentioned that because of his love marriage, he and his wife get no support from their families and are therefore unable to buy a property or start up a business. While there is no doubt that his love marriage has made his own father much less forthcoming with financial assistance, Senthil does receive important support from his father in at least three ways. One is direct help in managing the contracts that they take on—his father works alongside Senthil as part of the same team. The second relates to the way in which the income from the contracts is divided: Senthil is able to keep Rs 3,000 of the roughly Rs 4,000 per week that they jointly earn. And, finally, Senthil enjoys indirect benefits from his family's social capital and financial security in Tiruppur.
Indeed, one of the main advantages for Senthil's family is that they are locals. Families with long-term roots in Tiruppur (many of whom are higher caste Gounders or Naickers, like Senthil) often own land in town, have properties to rent out, run their own companies, and are involved in money lending. As property prices have soared over the last decades, many locals have made fortunes overnight. This is also the case for Kumarasamy. At some point, Kumarasamy sold the house he owned to buy a larger plot of land. He paid Rs 15,000 when he bought the land about 15 years ago and it is now worth Rs 25 lakh. His plans are to build some houses on the land, rent them out to migrant workers, and earn a regular monthly income. At the moment, however, it is his money-lending business that is his most reliable source of income. For more than 15 years, Kumarasamy has been acting as a money lender: ‘Not on a large scale,’ he explains, ‘but I give Rs 2,000 or Rs 3,000 to people here and there and then collect interest.’ In fact, he has between Rs 2 and 3 lakh in circulation. Such additional income flows allow local families, like that of Kumarasamy, to save, invest, and spend, and, above all, to deal with gaps in employment or delays in payment, both of which occur on a regular basis in the industry. While Senthil may not be able to avail himself of family money to set up a company, he certainly benefits from his family's overall financial security, social networks, and human capital, to which his education is a major contributor. Family support and social capital in Tiruppur are key to any garment workers’ success in establishing themselves as contractors and to their ability to remain afloat in what is a highly volatile and unstable labour market.
Mohan, the settled migrant, the unsettled contractor
But not all contractors are equally well endowed with social and financial capital. Mohan's life history as a settled migrant in Tiruppur presents a different employment trajectory. I first met Mohan when he worked as a singer tailor in Modern Fashions in December 2008.Footnote 30 Although he is known as a veliyur aal or ‘person from outside’—commonly distinguished from the ullur aal or ‘locals born and brought up in Tiruppur’—Mohan doesn't go back to his home city of Madurai (160 km south of Tiruppur) all that often and very much thinks of himself as a local. It was a failing tailoring shop and debt that drove his father, Pandian, to migrate to Tiruppur in 1997, along with his wife, seven sons, and daughter. For Pandian's children the move to Tiruppur meant the end of their schooling, with most of them having completed only class 5 or 6. This is the case for most migrants, especially when they are already in their early teens and employable in the garment sector. While Pandian blames himself for failing to educate his sons, his own tailor shop—first in Madurai and later in Tiruppur—provided an excellent training ground for his sons, five of whom now work in export companies as skilled tailors. Moreover, two of them became labour contractors in their early twenties and all of them earn today what are widely considered to be the most desirable wages in Tiruppur's garment sector.
Mohan is Pandian's third son, and he was 16 when they arrived in Tiruppur. Having left school in class 5, Mohan is unable to read or write English and struggles with Tamil. He learned singer work in the tailoring shop of his uncle in Madurai and became a skilled tailor who was able to quickly find employment in the garment industry on arriving in Tiruppur. Aged 28 in 2009, Mohan has worked for different contractors and follows them to wherever a team of singer tailors is needed. At times he also works as a contractor himself, as discussed below. Permanently settled in Tiruppur and with his mind firmly focused on the possibilities for future developments in the garment industry, Mohan rarely dwells on where his family come from or what caused their poverty. As far as Madurai is concerned, he only visits once or twice a year to attend a temple or a family celebration. Mohan's frequent references to ‘Madurai’ are almost always in the context of emphasizing the importance of links with ‘people from Madurai’ to his current life in Tiruppur. These links are, first, those of caste—he often tells me that he has many sondukaarar (relatives, but here in the broader sense of caste members) living in Tiruppur—and, second, those with a common area of origin, which includes a wide range of people who hail from a range of villages in Madurai district from which his parents and in-laws come. Mohan continues to foster close relationships with these people, based on shared experiences of migration and of work in the garment sector. Both types of links are vital in terms of the support they currently generate for Mohan in Tiruppur. In almost every conversation Mohan mentions that he has ‘lots of support in Tiruppur’, and he often compares himself with others in terms of the amounts of support they enjoy. While initially I struggled to understand this concept of ‘support’, for which Mohan systematically used the English term, it gradually transpired that it has at least two meanings: support for his own nuclear household and his attempt to establish himself in Tiruppur, and support in his role as a tailor and contractor in the industry.
In 2005, Mohan married Shanti, a young woman from Madurai whose parents settled in Tiruppur more than 20 years ago. Before marriage Shanti worked as a tailor too, but since the birth of their daughter and later a son, she has stayed at home. They live in a one-room rented house in the street next door to Mohan's parents for which they pay Rs 1,350 per month. Mohan sees his father-in-law as a crucial source of support—to some extent, with good reason. At the time of their wedding, his in-laws gave 12 sovereigns of gold to Shanti and two sovereigns of gold to him as well as Rs 10,000 in cash. ‘I would not have had this support,’ he often pointed out to me, ‘if I had gone for a love marriage!’ These and other wedding gifts enabled Mohan to buy a motorbike and start work as a labour contractor around the time of his wedding. In 2009, Mohan kept mentioning a big real estate deal that his father-in-law was about to conclude, and he was hopeful that some of profit might flow to him and provide start-up capital for a business. Mohan therefore maintains excellent relationships with his in-laws, manifested by regular visits to them to pay due respect, and, of course, to enquire about ‘the deal’. ‘My wife's sister,’ Mohan is keen to contrast, ‘had a love marriage, so they don't get any support at all from my father-in-law!’ This is one type of support that is crucial to Mohan in Tiruppur. While this might not be as robust as that which Senthil enjoys as a ‘local’, it certainly sets him apart from recent migrants, many of whom have no family in town at all.
Mohan is always keen to mention how well he can earn both as a tailor and as a contractor, even though it requires hard work and long hours. Having established himself as a contractor around the time of his wedding, Mohan did very well for a couple of years. He worked with about 20 tailors, took regular contracts in one firm, and earned on average Rs 10,000 per week, which allowed him to settle Rs 70,000 of loans. But then the company where he took contracts went out of business and Mohan stopped working as a contractor: ‘I made good money at that time but there was a lot of tension . . . as a contractor one can never rest. I didn't want that tension anymore, and then time was not good for me either, so I began to work as a tailor again.’ By the time I met Mohan in late 2008 he was working as a tailor in Modern Fashions where he had joined the singer tailors’ team.
As a singer tailor, Mohan always works for piece-rates; in one of our very first conversations he mentioned, ‘I can earn well in this job; we earn a minimum of Rs 350–400 per day as singer tailors, but we can make even Rs 1,000 per day. I earned Rs 3,000 last week, and I can easily make Rs 12,000 per month, and sometimes even Rs 20,000!’ Despite the good money that can be earned, piece-rates are not without their drawbacks. In fact, in January 2009 Mohan left his contractor in Modern Fashions following an argument over rates. Disagreements about piece-rates, he explained, typically arise between tailors and contractors: ‘We got low rates from the contractor. If I ask Rs 3.50 per piece and the contractor is only willing to give me Rs 3, then I will simply walk out and tell him to get someone else. And I’ll go and find work with another contractor. If things work out, we can stay with the same contractor and in the same company for years on end and do well.’
But in January 2009 things did not work out between Mohan and his contractor. Mohan left Modern Fashions to start as a contractor himself in a nearby unit. Just two months later, however, he was back at Modern Fashions, but now as singer contractor with his own team, rather than as a tailor. The previous singer contractor had left following a dispute over piece-rates—this time the dispute was between contractor and company owner. During his time as a contractor in Modern Fashions, Mohan led a small team of six to seven tailors and earned a fairly regular income, even though it rarely exceeded Rs 3,000 per week. Five months later, in August 2009, however, he had become seriously dissatisfied with the low rates he received from the owner, the limited quantity of work, and the delays in payments, which made it hard for him to pay his own team. He left the company and moved his team to another firm where he took new contracts. Shortly afterwards, he gave up working as contractor altogether, explaining: ‘It wasn't worth the trouble; I joined again as a tailor in another company.’ When I met up with him again, in October 2009, Mohan was beaming again, telling me that the rates he now received were excellent: ‘I now get Rs 8.50 per piece and I can do 150 pieces per day!’ I made a quick calculation and realized he now could make Rs 1,275 per day. The following Saturday evening Mohan called to tell me proudly that he had made Rs 5,600 that week: ‘You see, there as a contractor I got Rs 3,000 for six days of work, and here I have earned Rs 5,600 as a tailor for only four -and-a-half-days of work!’ Once again Mohan was proud of the money he was making as a tailor, without having the ‘headaches’ of being a contractor. As is typical of tailors in the export industry, Mohan not only keeps moving between companies and contractors—a few days in one unit may be followed by a few months in another—but he also keeps moving between being employed as a tailor and working as a contractor. Much of this shifting ground is caused by fluctuating rates, delayed payments, and irregular work flows, all generated by neoliberal market dynamics.
However, even though it clearly remains Mohan's dream to become a more settled contractor—much like Senthil—he has not yet managed to achieve this. While he does enjoy a great deal of support in town and carefully fosters his social networks of tailors, so far Mohan has failed to transform this social capital into lasting entrepreneurial success. But he doesn't give up easily. By May 2010, Mohan was working as a contractor again and seemed to be doing well. Despite the ups and downs, his aspiration to start a company remains strong and Mohan is confident that achieving this ambition remains within reach. Following the example of better-off Tiruppurians, he also hopes to invest in land one day—not in Tiruppur, however, where property prices are well beyond his reach, but back in Madurai. In the meanwhile, he saves in life insurance policies and sends his daughter to a local private school. ‘The government school is for low people only,’ he says, ‘we can afford it, so we send them to a matriculation school!’
Mohan's employment history illustrates a common pathway for ambitious and skilled garment workers keen to establish themselves as contractors as a stepping stone towards setting up a production unit of their own. While many, like Mohan, have the skills, knowledge, and resourcefulness required to operate as contractors, irregular work flows, fluctuating payments, and a volatile workforce produce regular setbacks that undermine their ambitions and repeatedly relegate them back to the ranks of the workforce.
Murugan, recent migrant, and failed contractor
Let me introduce a third contractor. It was just after Diwali, in October 2009, when I met 33-year-old Murugan in his home village of Keelapatti, 15 km from Madurai city in southern Tamil Nadu. Murugan is a return migrant who, having lived and worked in Tiruppur for five years, had returned to the village just a year earlier. At the age of 10, Murugan began learning tailoring in a workshop in Madurai; by 1993, the year in which he married, he was working as a fully skilled singer tailor. As business declined and ever more people from his area left for Tiruppur, by 2003 Murugan too had decided to give it a try, even though he had no direct contacts in the city. On arrival, he took on a printing job, for which he earned just Rs 45 per shift. After three months, he found more suitable work in a tailoring shop and at that point his wife and two sons joined him in Tiruppur. A few months later, on the recommendation of some people he had come to know, Murugan started to work as a singer tailor in an export garment company. ‘Then,’ he says, ‘I earned Rs 300 per day, and between Rs 1,500–2,000 per week!’ His wife too began to work from home and earned Rs 20 per day sorting waste cloth.
For several years they fared well in Tiruppur. Murugan claims that at one time he was earning Rs 6,000 per week as a tailor: ‘That's how I managed to save Rs 45,000 in just two years’ time . . . I also had a motorbike and bought things for the house, like a food mixer.’ As a very hard-working tailor, Murugan had all the experience and skills needed to start working as a contractor. Again following the suggestion of a ‘known person’, he finally took an order as a contractor and recruited tailors to work for him. It was at this point, however, that things took a bad turn. Murugan had agreed with the company owner to produce 50,000 pieces for a set rate, but when he completed the contract and went to collect the money, the owner only paid him Rs 8.25 per piece instead of the promised Rs 12.50. ‘I made a big loss,’ Murugan explained, ‘I had agreed good rates with the owner but not signed any contract. But I still had to pay my tailors. They fought with me for the money and pulled my shirt, so I had to use all my own savings to pay them. That's how I lost the Rs 45,000 I saved!’ With the benefit of hindsight, Murugan acknowledges that his position in Tiruppur was not strong enough to start as a contractor and that his networks were too frail. He only blames himself when reflecting back on what happened: ‘I went there as a worker . . . I didn't know the business . . . a guy pushed me to take a contract but I didn't know enough about it, so I made a big loss . . .’
Today Murugan is back home, struggling with an overwhelming sense of shame:
Here, everyone thinks I made a lot of money in Tiruppur, but I had to come back without any money . . . I don't tell anyone, only our family knows. My wife told her family and they say ‘he has come back without earning anything’, but they don't know about the bad luck I had and how I struggled . . . When I did well, my wife's family came to stay with us in Tiruppur and they ate meat in our house. And I used to buy them clothes and give them money when they left. But today they are not appreciating this, all they say is ‘he is not earning anything now’. . .
On returning to Keelapatti, Murugan sat for months at home replaying in his mind what had gone wrong and worrying about the shame he had brought upon himself and his family by coming back empty-handed from a place where money is supposed to flow freely. His sense of failure and worthlessness is heightened by his family's assumptions that he squandered money and his wife's continued anger about the whole experience. She herself is now working as an agricultural wage labourer, which further humiliates Murugan. In the meanwhile, Murugan has gone back to work as a tailor in Madurai but a friend is already tempting him back to Tiruppur where he can easily earn double the wages he currently does. However, Murugan is not sure he is ready for this yet and says that it will depend on what his wife allows him to do.
Murugan's experience is not unique and many more stories of loss and failure could be recounted here. His story illustrates the precarious position of the contractor in Tiruppur, caught between company owners and workers, and exposed to exploitation and deception from both sides. Contractors’ resilience and their ability to cope with losses and misfortunes are ultimately conditioned by several factors. First among them is their position within Tiruppur, with ‘locals’ and long-term ‘settled migrants’ usually able to avail themselves of a much stronger social network and fall-back position than recent migrants. This often includes the ownership of land or access to some financial capital, such as Senthil's father's money-lending business which provides the family with an additional income stream they can draw on whenever a contract goes wrong. Secondly, kin support and caste networks continue to play a role too, even though in town these networks are flexible, with any member of one's caste or anyone with a similar migration background being called a sondukaarar (relative). Mohan's persistent references to the support of family, friends, and fellow caste members points to the material significance of social networks which can be mobilized to sustain or improve one's own position. Finally, as illustrated by Murugan's aborted trajectory, practical tailoring skills and technical knowledge, while key to success as an independent contractor, are not sufficient on their own. Knowledge of companies, employers, and the tricks of the trade are equally significant resources that a contractor needs to get a handle on. Much of this is needed to withstand the uncertainties generated by neoliberal market fluctuations, and much of this knowledge too increases with time spent in town and in the industry.
Recruiting a team: the production of flexibility and entrepreneurship
One of the contractors’ core tasks is to recruit an appropriately skilled, reliable, and adequate team of tailors or cutting masters who will produce garments according to buyers’ specifications. Recruiting a team requires both social skills and a social network that is as wide as possible. Being able to recruit flexibly is one of the contractor's core entrepreneurial skills. In an export industry where styles of garments, size of orders, and skills requirements change on an almost daily basis, a contractor may need five tailors on Monday, seven on Tuesday, and three for the rest of the week. An order of 3,000 T-shirts, which takes a team of six tailors three days to complete, might be followed by an order for 10,000 pairs of pyjamas that take 12 tailors two weeks to produce. As the work flow constantly fluctuates, most teams are made up of a small number of core tailors—whom the contractor employs on a more or less continuous basis—and a group of additional tailors who are recruited ad hoc.
Who, then, are the core members of such teams? Usually they are kin, people who migrated from the same region, or long-term friends whom the contractor has known and usually worked with at some point. Senthil's regular team, for example, consists of himself (contractors always work alongside their team members), his father, three tailors (Raja, Suresh, and Rajkumar), and three helpers (Anand, Jeejee, and Kamatchi Amma). Raja and Suresh are from Tirunelveli district in southern Tamil Nadu and became close friends of Senthil when they worked alongside him in a previous company. They have now been working for him since he started as a contractor about four years ago. The company is the primary site where tailors get to know each other, where future contractors can assess the skills and work attitudes of their co-workers, and where they cultivate friendships with workmates whom they might later recruit into their own teams. Senthil often publicly praises Suresh and Raja for being very good friends, excellent tailors, and reliable team members. ‘They won't leave me just like that!,’ Senthil reassures me. It was not until late into the fieldwork, when I had come to know Senthil much better, that I asked him about Raja and Suresh's caste. Senthil told me they are both Scheduled Caste,Footnote 31 from the Paraiyar community, but immediately emphasized that caste does not matter in the industry and that he would never ask someone's caste when recruiting them. Indeed, all a recruiter needs to know is whether the tailors are skilled, reliable, and able to produce at the required speed and to specified quality standards. And this skill, Senthil explained, is something he can spot within hours of seeing a tailor at work. It is true that caste is never talked about among workers, and I felt very uncomfortable raising the subject at all. On another occasion, Suresh and Raja themselves told me that caste does not matter and that contractors never ask about it when they recruit them. While constant joking and teasing shapes the everyday interactions on the shop floor, caste is never the point of reference nor the goal of such exchanges.
Rajkumar, the other core tailor on Senthil's team, is a young man of 26 from Trichy who belongs to the Thevar community of agriculturalists. After the death of his father, his mother and grandmother moved to Tiruppur to make a living. On completing class 12 Rajkumar started to work as a helper and later as a skilled powertable tailor. He too befriended Senthil, Raja, and Suresh at work and has been working for Senthil for four years. Jeejee, a core helper, is a woman in her forties from Kerala who lives just next door to the company. As her husband works in a teashop and her adult son has joined the police force in Kerala, she is relatively free and has the flexibility to work long hours, and is always the first person to be called on when checking or helper work is available in the company. Kamatchi Amma commutes daily from 15 km outside Tiruppur to work as a checking lady in the company. She is only in her late thirties but feels she is too old to learn tailoring. Her husband is a handloom weaver in the village, while Kamatchi Amma has been commuting to Tiruppur for the last five years, since her daughter started school—and she is never asked by the contractor to work later than 8.30pm. Finally, Anand is a local 21-year-old Gounder who commutes to Tiruppur from a nearby village, where his parents are agriculturalists. Not keen on working the land, like many Gounders of his generation, he came to work in town as a kaimadi (helper) and has been employed by Senthil for the last couple of years. Whereas in the village, his father, as a Gounder landowner, employs Dalits to work his land, in Tiruppur Anand is employed as a low-paid helper to assist high-earning Dalit tailors!
These core members of Senthil's team are employed on a more or less regular basis, which means that whenever a new order arrives, they are the first to be offered work. However, given constant fluctuations in the size of orders, Senthil often needs to employ extra hands. In such cases, he usually calls on his wife, an experienced powertable tailor who can work as fast as any of the regular male workers, or on Saravanan, a highly skilled local tailor and friend, who tends to work as a part-time tailor and part-time painter. He is usually willing to help out on an ad hoc basis but seems less reliable as a regular recruit. If an extra helper or checker is needed, Senthil brings in his mother too. Family members are crucial to Senthil, whose team often includes his father, wife, and mother. Friendships and former work relationships constitute the other main networks through which Senthil recruits tailors. As a ‘local’ who went to school in Tiruppur and who has worked in the industry since he was young, his networks are extensive. Senthil often tells me that finding tailors is never a problem for him as he knows hundreds of people in the city.
How, then, does Mohan go about recruiting singer tailors? Unlike powertable tailors, singer tailors do not require helpers, so Mohan only needs to find skilled tailors. While at Modern Fashions, Mohan's core team always included himself; his older brother, Palaniveel; his cousin, Inbaraj; and a good friend, Ramakrishnan. Palaniveel is always the first one Mohan calls on and he often assists Mohan in his role as contractor. Inbaraj left Madurai after falling out with his family following his love marriage to a Muslim girl. In Tiruppur he was taken under the wing of Mohan's father who taught him singer tailoring and now, at the age of 24, Inbaraj is a skilled tailor regularly employed by Mohan. As cousins, they have a very good understanding and a close but casual relationship. Ramakrishnan, the last core member of Mohan's team, ran away from his home village in the southern district of Theni at the age of 13, slowly worked his way into garment tailoring, and now, at the age of 26, is an experienced singer tailor. He befriended Mohan in town and even though they come from different districts of the South and belong to different castes (Ramakrishnan is a Naicker), their similar migratory experiences and shared experiences on the garment shop floor have turned them into close friends.
When Mohan needs additional tailors, he calls on his younger sister, Selvi, who is less experienced but can always be flexible in her availability. Similarly, Mohan also employs his younger brother, Murthy, and his sister's husband, whenever he requires more tailors. While the latter are both well-trained singer tailors, they tend to work on a regular basis for other contractors and are therefore not always as readily available. That is why Mohan also maintains good relationships with a wider group of friends, which includes distant relatives, caste fellows, men from the Madurai area, and friends made in Tiruppur itself. On countless occasions, Mohan took me to different companies to introduce me to friends whom he had worked with or for in the past, or who had worked for him as a contractor.
Contractors play a key role in managing the flexibility required by Tiruppur's export industry. Their ability to recruit flexible labour crucially depends on their ability to maintain good relationships with a large pool of workers upon whom they can call as needed. It is obviously easier to retain the loyalty of workers when one can offer them regular employment; it is much harder to maintain their goodwill if work is only intermittently available. Gaining workers’ goodwill not only helps contractors in avoiding a high labour turnover, it also comes in handy when they need their team members to work 16 or 20 hour shifts to meet a tight deadline. Contractors therefore invest a lot in building friendships with their team members. Senthil and Mohan buy tea for their teams each morning and afternoon, sometimes with snacks included. With a normal shift running from 8.30am till 8.30pm, the contractor provides money for supper in case his team works till midnight, and more tea in case they carry on till 5am the next morning. Whenever there is no work, Senthil takes his core team members out for a film night and pays for the tickets, drinks, and cigarettes. To celebrate his daughter's eighth birthday, Senthil invited all members of his team over to his house where his wife had prepared an elaborate chicken briyani meal. ‘I am not inviting family,’ Senthil explained, ‘only friends, I am closest to them!’
Even when work relationships break down, contractors usually try hard to retain good relationships with their ex-team members. When in January 2009 Mohan left the contractor for whom he worked (following a disagreement about piece-rates), his departure did not result in any major ill feeling between them. A few weeks later I found Mohan talking to the contractor again and enquiring about how things were going with the latest order. It would have been entirely possible for Mohan to join the team again at a later stage, perhaps if the piece-rates had improved or if he failed to get work elsewhere. What is clear is that tailors and contractors alike cannot afford to fall out, as they know they may need each other again in future. Both workers and contractors, and especially those among them who have a long-term commitment to garment work, try hard to settle disagreements as amicably as possible and avoid open disputes. They are well aware of what is at stake: their good name as a tailor or contractor within their social networks and, thus, the very basis of their employment within the industry.
Given the constant mobility of workers in and out of companies and teams, holding on to a core team of tailors, ironers or cutting masters is in itself a considerable feat. In fact, it forms the main challenge for contractors and contributes to what Mohan calls the constant ‘tension’ and ‘headache’ of managing a team. Well-qualified and hard-working garment workers have plenty of opportunities within the industry. Within a booming labour market that is perennially short of skilled labour, experienced workers have a lot of leverage over contractors and employers, and they know it. Whenever they are unhappy with their current conditions, they simply move on to the next-door company or contractor. The precariousness of the relationship is well illustrated by what happened to Senthil in 2009. Despite Senthil's relentless efforts at maintaining the best possible relationships with his core team members, Raja, Suresh, and Rajkumar unexpectedly walked out on him at the end of May 2009, leaving him without any of his core tailors. Even though the helpers and checkers stayed with him, Senthil exclaimed:
Our team has left!
I asked: Why did they leave so suddenly?
Senthil said: They said they wanted more freedom, so they left for another company.
I inquired: But they had lots of freedom here, didn't they? Is that really why they left?
Senthil admitted: They didn't like my father . . . he is too dominant, too strict, so they left . . .
Whatever the reason may be, there is no doubt that the relationship had broken down and that Senthil's attempts to create a reliable team had failed. While Senthil tried hard to establish close friendships with his team members, his father took on the role of the disciplinarian on the shop floor. He urged the tailors to work a little faster when production slowed down, told them off when they made mistakes, and generally kept track of what happened on the shop floor. Conscious as they are of their own abilities and highly independent as workers, few tailors tolerate being told off or bossed around. If they feel their freedom is being restricted, as was probably the case here, it does not take long before they leave for another company. Senthil struggled with their sudden departure and felt seriously let down, partly of course because he trusted them, but partly because it called into question his own competence as a contractor. What is telling, however, is that all three of them keep in touch by phone. ‘They call me every week,’ Senthil assured me, ‘but they won't come here . . . they are avoiding my father!’ Indeed, neither side can afford to completely fall out, as one day, perhaps even in the near future, they may need each other again.
Payment is another critical point of negotiation between contractors and tailors. Although payment takes place on Saturday evenings, contractors routinely advance money to tailors during the week, which is then deducted from their weekly pay. Such advances help to create goodwill among the tailors and to generate mutual trust. Weekly payments, however, can also be used by the contractor as a tool to force team members to turn up for work. Contractors also routinely withhold payment until the Sunday in case the work remains unfinished on Saturday evening. But payment regimes can also contribute to the precariousness of the contractor's own authority. Contractors who fail to pay their team members on a regular basis or who keep delaying payments are at immediate risk of losing workers’ loyalty. Workers will swiftly move on to another contractor if they are not paid at the end of the week. Contractors’ inability to fulfil this basic duty toward their team members can quickly earn them a bad reputation and jeopardize their future as labour recruiters. It can also have serious immediate repercussions, such as team members leaving a contractor en masse or threatening him with verbal and physical abuse. This is precisely why Murugan ended up using his own Rs 45,000 savings to pay his workers when the company owner let him down, and why Mohan gave up working as a contractor at Modern Fashions in August 2009 when repeated delays in payment from the company owner made it increasingly difficult for him to pay his tailors on time. It is easy for contractors to become trapped between company owners who delay payments and workers who demand their weekly pay. Few contractors have any working capital themselves and most rely on the cash that is paid to them by the company. The challenge for contractors is to identify reliable and trustworthy company owners who are known to pay on time and who do not jeopardize a contractor's relationship with his workers.
Commanding authority on the shop floor
While the contractor's name and reputation is shaped by the nature of his interactions with his team members, much of his authority is gained on the shop floor itself. Here, the contractor is key to the production process: his collaboration can lead to the timely delivery of a product, while any obstruction from his side can delay and even ruin a complete order. It is crucial therefore to understand his interactions with company management, supervisors, quality controllers, and workers. What follows are some scenes from the shop floor that illustrate the sources of contractors’ authority as well as the problems that they experience.
In most companies, owners and managers are more than happy to let the contractor organize production. It is unthinkable for a company owner to intervene in the division of labour between tailors, decide on the number of tailors needed or negotiate modes of payment. These are the exclusive domains of the contractor. At Modern Fashions, the owner rarely enters the shop floor nor does he interact with the workers directly. When he wants to discuss a problem with an ongoing order or talk about a new contract, he always calls the contractor to his office, where they negotiate deadlines, rates, and quality issues. Most company owners treat their contractors with a great amount of respect as they realize that the successful completion of an order is in the contractors’ hands. Many owners even feel that the contractors are too powerful and that they have become overly dependent on them. One employer told me: ‘the contractors are the real bosses (mudalali) here; if we don't talk nicely to them or give them respect, they will just walk out!’ Much of the contractor's authority does indeed evolve from their crucial role within the production process, which is marked by strict quality standards, high skills requirements, fluctuating workflows, and tight deadlines. While the skilful management of these neoliberal dynamics is what gives contractors a great deal of leverage on the shop floor, it is also the predicament of neoliberal production regimes that risk and responsibility are devolved down the global chain to the contractor and it is precisely this devolution that makes the contractor's position so unstable.
When it comes to the negotiation of rates, exchanges between company owners and contractors often become quite tense. If a contractor is unhappy with the rate offered by the company or simply feels that it is inadequate to produce the order with a reasonable margin for himself, there are several possible scenarios. He may keep negotiating for a better rate, he might just accept the rate and compromise in the hope that he will get a better rate for the next order or he might just walk out and start again elsewhere. Contractors rarely take rash decisions in these matters and balance different factors, including the overall nature of their working relationship with the company owner, the rates they received in the past, and the likelihood of getting regular and better payments in the future. Contractors and employers alike admit that this is an area of constant negotiation, dispute, and compromise. While company owners obviously try to keep the rates down as much as they can, they too make a careful trade-off between their own profit margins, their relationship with contractors, and their reputation as an employer. If they squeeze a contractor too hard, employers risk not only losing the contractor and his team, but damaging their good name and thus their ability to recruit work teams in future. Employers know what makes a good contractor, and they try hard to retain them when they have found one. At Modern Fashions, for example, Senthil has been working as a powertable contractor for over two years and his relationship with the company owner has been good throughout that time. But the story of the singer contractors is different. During the year that I observed the company, there were several disputes between the singer contractors and the owner, resulting in contractors repeatedly walking out. This reflects both the singer tailors’ overall privileged position as the most skilled tailors in the industry and the resulting leverage this gives them in negotiations with both contractors and employers.
Tensions also rise on the shop floor when an order goes wrong and a set of garments needs to be restitched or, in the worst case scenario, rejected. Because of their technical knowledge, skills, and experience, contractors are usually well prepared to defend their case to employers or quality controllers, and they tend to be very skilled at passing on responsibility to others. Negotiation skills are crucial to their survival as contractors. The vignette below illustrates how contractors’ intimate knowledge of the production process forms the basis of their authority on the shop floor and enables them to ward off blame and responsibility when problems arise.
18/03/2009: I am working alongside the tailors at Modern Fashions and in the course of the morning we get a visit from a QC (quality controller) sent by the company that has subcontracted the order to us. Quality controllers routinely enter the workshop to carry out in-production quality checks. The QC measures the length and width of a few T-shirts and tells Senthil, the contractor, that they are 2cm longer than the specification. Senthil tells him to check 5 more pieces first. As soon as a mistake is identified tensions rise and tailors and contractors become nervous about what went wrong and who is to blame. But Senthil remains calm and confident. The QC checks more T-shirts and confirms that several of them are too long. Suresh and Rajkumar join Senthil around the QC, and begin to discuss what might account for the error. Senthil too measures several T-shirts and then explains to the QC that because there are several tailors involved, some variation between pieces is normal and that a 1cm margin is acceptable anyway. The QC is told to measure more T-shirts. He does so and says that some are okay but that other pieces are still 1 to 2 cm too long and that a margin of 2cm is unacceptable. A discussion follows about what caused the errors, with the QC trying to blame the tailors for irregular stitching. Senthil is fast on his feet. He immediately defends his tailors. The QC then blames the cutting masters, but again Senthil says that also the cutting had been flawless. ‘Rather,’ he explains to the QC, ‘it is the printing: we stitched the shoulder pieces and then the garments were sent to the printers. It's in the process of printing that some T-shirts have been stretched. They then came back to us and we finished off the stitching work. It has nothing to do with us! Please check with the printers.’ The QC left and never came back on the issue. Later I ask Senthil how well the QC knows this job. Senthil explained: ‘This boy is only 20 or so and knows very little about garment production.’
Tailors and contractors dislike quality controllers who check and comment on their output without necessarily knowing anything about tailoring work themselves. Even though quality controllers are easily silenced by the contractor, they nevertheless act as a constant force to be reckoned with. As inspectors who may well spot real mistakes, quality controllers are potential trouble for the tailors. Yet, as young and often inexperienced men, the quality controllers themselves have to face up to the confidence and competence of experienced contractors who always defend their teams.
Finally, contractors’ and tailors’ relationships with company supervisors are not free of conflict either. Most company owners stay away from the shop floor and instead appoint supervisors to oversee production. Supervisors are usually young, often educated men whose task it is to monitor the production process, supply tailors with raw materials, liaise with outside suppliers, and coordinate between teams on the shop floor. However, the supervisors’ authority is considerably curtailed by the dominance of contractors. Both contractors and tailors tend to boss supervisors around and ridicule their lack of technical skill and know-how. Tailors, moreover, only take instructions from their contractor, whom they consider to be their real employers. As a result, the role of supervisor is rarely a desirable one in Tiruppur's smaller garment firms. Many supervisors are new to the town and the industry, and while they may have considerable levels of education—many have completed at least secondary schooling and often even have a degree—they are usually young men with limited technical knowledge and little experience of the production process. Being charged with the responsibility of ensuring a smooth production process on the shop floor, supervisors are faced with a skilled and confident labour force under the leadership of powerful contractors. The tailors and contractors do not hesitate to take them to task, tell them what to do, and even ridicule them in public.
Conclusion
Labour contractors are central to the recruitment of workers within global production networks and operate at the interstices of the informal economy, where they play ‘an active role in the ongoing remaking of labour markets’Footnote 32 and in mediating the material and social impacts of neoliberal industrialization. While a rich body of Indian historiography engages with the role of labour broker in the colonial period, and an equally fascinating literature explores their importance across rural cottage industries, we know next to nothing about their contemporary capacity in the urban industrial clusters that produce for global markets. Despite their rapidly swelling numbers, they also remain invisible within national statistics and labour surveys, and escape corporate interventions that try to contain and regulate them.Footnote 33 Nevertheless, widely circulated stereotypes cast contractors as unscrupulous exploiters of vulnerable labour and as rapacious profit-makers who operate at the cost of the most marginalized workers.Footnote 34 Unfortunately, such stereotypes not only wrongly assume a linear continuum between colonial and contemporary rural practices, on the one hand, and contractors’ current role in global production networks, on the other, but they also underestimate the ways in which neoliberal trade environments have unleashed commercial pressures and market uncertainties that shape intermediaries’ increasingly precarious and unstable position today.
Without seeking to deny that some contractors undoubtedly exploit weaker actors and that in some sectors they retain a primarily extractive role, this paper has sought to discredit wholesale representations of middlemen as powerful, corrupt, and exploitative. The ethnography of contractors in a south Indian garment city reveals the competing pressures imposed on labour contractors, produced by both the global dynamics of outsourcing and the more localized material and social contexts of production. Three conclusions can be drawn from the evidence. First, far from occupying a fixed position at the apex of the Indian labouring classes, the category of contractor is itself a highly unstable and fluid position that many workers attain and then lose. Aspirations for upward mobility from worker to contractor to company owner are repeatedly thwarted by the neoliberal predicament of uncertainty and unpredictability that regularly relegate contractors back to the ranks from which they rose. Contractors’ trajectories are a far cry from any linear conception of class formation and rather point to the persistent instability of class positions and the ongoing struggle for improvement at the bottom of the Indian labour hierarchy. In Tiruppur, class is experienced as an eminently fragile, shifting, and contradictory position in an aspirational struggle for upward mobility. As a struggle it bears the individualizing signs of the neoliberal era too: it has become a highly personalized endeavour that lacks any form of collective action.Footnote 35
Secondly, despite the misfortunes that shape many contractors’ personal work histories, their activities form a site of amazing entrepreneurship, ingenuity, and resourcefulness, which contribute to the functioning of complex production networks and to the enabling of the flexibility and adaptability that industrial clusters need for success in the neoliberal market. Like urban IT workersFootnote 36 or private sector service employees,Footnote 37 industrial labour contractors have to be recognized as prototypical neoliberal subjects. They are not only the driving force behind much of India's enterprise culture but they also carry the burden of producing its required flexibility and inventiveness while absorbing its liabilities and insecurities.Footnote 38 A habitus of entrapped entrepreneurship aptly summarizes their current positionality in the neoliberal market. Indeed, while neoliberalization relies—and thrives—on the development of enterprising selves, such as those of the contractors discussed in this paper, the individuals embodying such entrepreneurial qualities do not necessarily themselves benefit from the neoliberal opportunities on offer. Their enterprising qualities are largely galvanized to serve the interests of local and global capital, while in their own working lives entrepreneurship and ingenuity help them to mitigate against the uncertainties and vulnerabilities generated by neoliberal production regimes. This ultimately leaves many of them trapped between workers and employers, labour and capital, dreams and realities, and aspirations and disappointments.
Finally, the relative power and leverage of contractors is constrained by at least two major factors. The first is the commercial dynamics of global markets which translates on the Tiruppur shop floor into demands for highly skilled labour, tight production schedules, fluctuating labour requirements, and flexible production regimes. Negotiating such demands produces considerable challenges for contactors and simultaneously curtails the exploitative capacity that some of them might be inclined towards. The other factor is the informality of work that frames their actions. Indeed, informality, Cross reminds us,Footnote 39 is anything but exceptional and continues to shape working lives in special export zones and global production networks across South Asia today. It is precisely this informality that allows processes of ‘adverse incorporation’ to carry on,Footnote 40 and which perpetuates the precarious position of workers as well as the entrapped entrepreneurship of the more ambitious contractors among them.
The trajectories of labour contractors presented in this paper reveal that resourcefulness, creativity, and an enterprising spirit are essential—but not necessarily sufficient—ingredients for success in neoliberal India. Many aspiring individuals remain trapped at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder despite embodying the much-celebrated qualities of the enterprising neoliberal subject, such as self-regulation, self-discipline, preparedness to take responsibility, and ability to mitigate the risks and shocks caused by the wider socio-economic environment.Footnote 41 This entrapped position is the outcome of the wider neoliberalizing dynamics that produce structural uncertainties and vulnerabilities, and that ultimately undermine the entrepreneurial efforts of many of those at the bottom of Indian society.Footnote 42 Viewed this way, India's enterprise culture—while much celebrated and widely internalised—also works as a powerful and oppressive ideological tool of the neoliberal era. Even though it encourages the development of enterprising qualities and raises the hopes of many of India's aspiring individuals, it widely fails to guarantee any form of ‘success’ or mobility for those who work hard to embody its modalities.
