Dr Koyel Lahiri, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Moturi Satyanarayana Centre for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences gave a presentation at the conference ‘Capitalism, Crisis, and Global Reordering’ organised by Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research, in collaboration with the Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. The conference was held between 23-24 June, 2026 at the Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Milan, Italy. Her presentation was titled: ‘Post-Fordist Work, Informal Workers and Politics: Revisiting meaningful struggle’
Abstract of the Presentation
This paper explores the default pro-union framing in labour studies through an ethnographic study of factory workers’ politics in the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR), India. One puzzle of contemporary factory worker politics is the simultaneous existence of a desire for unions and undisguised animosity toward them. A common refrain among activists and union leaders is, “Workers don’t want this; they have no unity…”
This puzzle is rooted in the contemporary crisis of capitalism and the post-Fordist shift toward mass informalization, where the union form often offers limited leverage to informal workers and can even undermine solidarity and collective mobilisation. Moreover, privileging unionisation as the most legitimate form of struggle obscures other modes of resistance-often fragmented, chaotic, or violent-shaping how we perceive workers’ agency and the balance of power between labour and management. The paper puts the puzzle together by asserting that a worker’s politics may best be understood through a three-fold relationship with work- work at the worksite, social aspects, and selfhood aspects; and that the current moment urgently calls for greater attention on the social and selfhood dimensions of this relationship.
