Labour and the metrics of citizenship

THE HISTORY OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT  is grounded in the struggle for equal and dignified citizenship. Far from being confined to the workplace, the demands of workers have long encompassed broader claims to inclusion, recognition, and democratic participation. From the Chartist movement in 19th-century England to the strikes demanding an eight-hour workday which culminated in the May Day, working-class mobilisations have always invoked a vocabulary that transcended mere economic claims, insisting instead on a moral and political reordering of society that acknowledged the worker as a full citizen.

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.

Exclusionary Public Distribution System

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, according to estimates by economists Jean Drèze, Reetika Khera, and Meghana Mungikar, over 100 million people were excluded from PDS access by 2020 due to the use of outdated census data. 

In August 2023, the Union government admitted before the Supreme Court that nearly 80 million people in India remain without ration cards, effectively excluding them from the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (‘PMGKAY’) and broader food security benefits. Independent researchers place this figure even higher estimating that approximately 130 million Indians in need of food security are currently excluded from the system.