Learning from Marginalized Workers: Strategies for organizing and negotiating among workers in the Informal Sector in India

This report describes workers’ strategies of organising and collective bargaining in the informal sector in India. It discusses the organising experiences of the most marginalised workers in society – waste workers, sex workers, domestic workers, rural workers and kite making workers. These are people who were always on the margins of Indian polity and society due to their class, caste and gender. Their marginality has increased in the last few years, as the State has abandoned even the modicum of ‘concern’ that it had for its citizens and has become an unabashed agent of Capital. It is indeed the return of the immiserated toiling masses.