At the heart of the labour movement lies the fundamental struggle over citizenship, not merely as a legal status, but as a lived reality encompassing rights to dignified work, food, education, housing, and identity. In the context of post-colonial India, one observes a persistent gap between constitutional rights and material realities. Across fields as varied as wage structuring, the exclusionary failures of the Public Distribution System (‘PDS’), the neoliberal assault on education, the judicialized displacement of urban poor, and the growing regime of surveillance, culminate in the erosion of substantive citizenship rights.
Work is the primary terrain where citizenship is situated. The Constitution, under Article 43 (a Directive Principle of State Policy), envisions the right to a living wage, a standard that allows not just for bare subsistence, but for conditions of work consistent with human dignity. However, in practice, employers, across all sectors, and more so when the employment is informal, rarely adhere to this vision. Instead, the dominant policy design is to structure wages around the statutory minimum wage, which itself is often set below the threshold of a living wage and is poorly enforced by the State.
Such fragmented structuring leads to a distortion of the “wage” itself, where the fixed component of a worker’s salary barely meets survival costs, and the variable portion becomes a tool for disciplining and extracting surplus labour. This makes the worker dependent on the State for food and basic welfare. A State that does not pay well and accord dignity to the workers hardly bothers to provide for the worker’s basic needs, making her vulnerable to chronic precarity and their political repression.
Labour movements therefore recognize the need to organize along multiple metrics of citizenship. As neoliberal authoritarian regimes weaponize formal citizenship to exclude and eliminate communities, the labour movements today are looking to generate a mass demand for the substantive fulfilment of state’s obligations to its citizens, and connect this to the fight against denial of formal citizenship. Below are some of the metrics of citizenship along which labour movements in India have started to organize, drawing upon a range of long-standing Left-democratic traditions.
Housing, Food and Education
In the context of Indian rural and urban development policies, the right to adequate housing forms a contested terrain of law, citizenship, and exclusion. The judicial and administrative treatment of slums and informal settlements illustrate how citizenship is often rendered conditional upon legality of occupation and tenure, ignoring the deeper structures of dispossession and precarity.
Policies for housing Economically Weaker Sections (‘EWS’) and Low-Income Groups (‘LIG’) remain woefully inadequate in rural and urban India, often relegated to the margins of budgetary priorities. The legal machinery continues to function ambivalently, swinging between constitutional compassion and procedural displacement.
The National Food Security Act (‘NFSA’), 2013, mandates that up to 75 percent of India’s rural population and 50 percent of the urban population should be covered under a targeted public distribution system (PDS). This means that roughly 67 percent of the national population is entitled to subsidised food grains, which reveals the severe malnutrition among the working classes. On top of that, millions remain excluded due to use of outdated census data.
The Hindutva state de-prioritizes the vital constitutional mandate of bringing about substantive equality through education. The privatisation of public education, facilitated by the National Education Policy (‘NEP’) 2020 and long-standing structural adjustment policies, not only erodes constitutional guarantees like the Right to Education but also fosters a deeply unequal citizenry. Education, far from being a public good, is increasingly treated as a commodity, its accessibility determined by market logic rather than social justice.
Climate Change and Public Health
The impact of climate change reproduces the structural inequalities of caste, class, race and gender. Those that contribute the least to climate change – the socially and economically marginalized working-class communities, especially of the Global South – are the worst affected. Inequity and exclusion from basic services like healthcare not only heighten sensitivity to hazards, but also constrain these communities’ ability to adapt to climatic changes.
Oxfam India’s “Survival of the Richest: The India Supplement” (2023) revealed that the top 30% own more than 90% of the total wealth. In contrast, the bottom 50% of the population (700 million) has around 3% of total wealth. Poor quality of employment is a key factor behind keeping the bottom 50% to 70% where they are at present. As per the International Labour Organization almost 82% of the workforce is engaged in the informal sector, and nearly 90% is informally employed: victims of non-implementation of labour laws and violation of government advisories on disasters such as heatwaves by the employers.
Trade unions in India are beginning to see climate change and its impact as universal concerns that can forge democratic solidarities between the labour movements and other social movements. Climate justice movements are acknowledging the potentiality of the organized power of the working classes in fighting climate change. This bodes well for the earth and for the workers whose labour makes it habitable.
Majoritarian Exclusions and Surveillance
The Citizenship Amendment Act (‘CAA’) and the National Register of Citizens (‘NRC’) tore open the question of citizenship into the public domain, exposing how belonging in India could be stripped and redrawn along religious and documentary lines. For millions of workers who are migrants, Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims whose lives are already marked by precarity, these moves transformed citizenship from a presumed right into a conditional, fragile status. Workers long marginalised by the State now faced a new threat: the burden of proving identity through an arbitrary and hostile state apparatus.
This assault on citizenship was not confined to Assam or limited to formal paperwork. It revealed a deeper neoliberal project: using surveillance, databases, and documentation as tools to regulate, discipline, and exclude labour. Biometric monitoring at worksites, Aadhaar-linked rationing, exclusionary welfare systems, and digital databases all function as mechanisms of control determining who can work, who can eat, who can belong.
Rising religious majoritarianism is reshaping not only political rights but the very conditions of existence for the working class. The experience of the Assam NRC shows how dangerous this path can be where many people were excluded because of technicalities like name changes after marriage, lack of formal education and mistyped details. Without recognized citizenship, workers risk losing access to welfare schemes, legal protections, reservations, union rights, and even the ability to move freely for work. The NRC framework threatens to create a massive class of stateless labourers, disenfranchised and hyper-exploitable.
The Struggles Over Citizenship
With the aggravating effects of neoliberalism and Hindutva fascism, constitutional protections have become increasingly stratified. The working class experiences citizenship not as a guarantee of rights but as a terrain of struggle where even basic legal entitlements (food, shelter, wage, bodily safety) must be fought for as workers operate outside formal citizenship channels, negotiating rights not as a given but as a conditional favour.
As economic liberalisation and precarious employment regimes increasingly destabilise the workplace, the status of the worker is itself under threat. Market dynamics have stripped labour of stability, and in doing so, have begun to erode the very foundation of substantive citizenship for vast sections of the population. Workers are often the first to be displaced, not just from employment but also from social protections, public services, and constitutional guarantees. Hindu majoritarian fascism has added to this erosion of rights by fragmenting the working class along religious lines and adopting policies such as the CAA-NRC-NPR that threaten to render millions of workers stateless.
The overall situation leaves the working classes with little option other than to (re)organize – not just as workers but also as citizens. Unfortunately, suppression and criminalization of dissent are also major problems for workers. The struggles in ITI (Bangalore), Kalawati Saran Hospital (Delhi), Maruti, Samsung and other struggles in the industrial belts, and struggles against eviction and demolitions have all been met with repression. This automatically brings them into a common cause with other democratic movements facing state repression. While this is a crisis, it can also be an opportunity to build shared platforms and broad democratic unity.
(This is an abridged version of the article published in The Leaflet on May 1, 2025 under the same title.)
