Abstract
The intersections of class and gender among women workers in various modes of employment are critical to understanding the development of a working-class identity in neoliberal India. The country has around 565 million workers, 37 percent of whom are women, mostly living and working in deplorable conditions with increasing numbers of women entering precarious employment. Class and gender-based organisations have been operating among the women workers in India, affecting their economic, cultural, and socio-political positioning within the workers’ movement and the society in general. Specifically, trade unions - the most prominent workers’ organisational form - have been organising amongst women in all major employment avenues in India, including the formal public sector, the formal private sector, the informal sector, contractual work, and ‘scheme’ work i.e., women employed in various developmental programmes run by the state.
This thesis situates women workers within the wider social context of India and, countering the relative absence of the contractual and scheme workers from scholarly discourses, it investigates the relationships between women workers and their organisations. In doing so, this research offers a critical analysis of mainstream vanguardist trade unions. It also critiques the apolitical nature of most independent non-vanguardist organisations and the effects that they have had on the development of a revolutionary subjectivity among women workers. Using the ideas propagated by Autonomist Marxism, Marxist-Humanism and Social Reproduction Feminism, the thesis analyses the importance of socially reproductive labour in countering the dehumanisation of women workers by both neoliberal capitalism and mainstream vanguardist trade unionism.