Liquifying workforce in India: An ethnographic account of labour market intermediaries

Guide(s)

Kamath, Rajalaxmi

Department

Public Policy

Area

Public Policy

University

Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

Place

Bangalore

Publication Date

3-31-2025

Year Awarded

March 2025

Year Completed

March 2025

Year Registered

June 2020

Abstract

Known variously as thekkedaar, maistry, jobber, kangani or sardar, the labour contractor in India has served as a crucial labour market intermediary (LMI) between capital and labour since the nineteenth century. Recently, more sophisticated entities such as human resource companies (HRCs) or staffing companies are undertaking functions of LMIs and are gaining prominence in forging tripartite employment relations. HRCs have evolved discrete, standardised, replicable processes related to searching, hiring, payrolling and managing exits of labour in third-party employment. In doing so, they perform the same function as the erstwhile labour intermediaries of smoothening the volatility of labour force requirements, especially in those industries subject to the vagaries of global demand trends. As against traditional individual thekkedaars operating in their little geographies, the HRCs are formally registered, multinational and sophisticated in their functions. This calls for a critical review of the fundamentally altered dynamics of tripartite employment relations. We examine these shifts through the methodological lens of a work ethnography in an HRC based out of Bangalore, where the ethnographer embedded herself for more than 6 months in 2023. In a context of methodological limitations in employment datasets, such as incongruent methods and definitional discordance, we take the vantage point of one intermediary, understand their everydayness, and set out to answer our questions on what, how and why labour market intermediation thrives in India. The fine-grained and thick descriptive data that highlights a reimagined intermediation process also offers insights into the country's dynamic labour market and labour management practices of corporations. We understand this through the HRC’s deployment of workers across a spectrum of skill levels in three service sector employers: information technology (IT) services, the telecom sector, and the retail and commerce sector. We argue that this novel organizational reincarnation of an erstwhile thekkedaar, into an HRC is furthering how labour has been liquified into a tractable and “on tap" vector amongst other means in the production function. As we become cognizant of the advanced and expansive services that intermediaries perform for their client organizations, we argue that the HRC is not simply a neutral entity but a proactive agent in signalling labour market flexibility. They engage with the state on labour policies as a fungible labour force churns through them. As the HRCs oil the engine of the service sector to adjust to volatile labour market conditions and reduce frictional unemployment, we find large sections of population being deployed into the “grey workforce”, controlled by double layers of capitalist managements. The response of the labour force in the uptake of a tripartite employment relation can only be understood in a larger context of the demographic bulge, their aspirations driving migration to cities, a gigified labour market in urban India, the alternative jobs available in the market, the dwindling bargaining power and the role of the welfare state.

Pagination

xvii, 292p.

Copyright

Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

Document Type

Dissertation

DAC Chairperson

Kamath, Rajalaxmi

DAC Members

Malghan, Deepak; Sabarinathan, G; Picherit, David

Type of Degree

Ph.D.

Relation

DIS-IIMB-FPM-P25-11

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