Labour Process in Informal Sector: A Case Study of Carpet Industry

The Carpet industry is an important informal sector in Kashmir, provides employment opportunities to lakhs of people in the rural and semi-urban areas of Kashmir. The carpet industry has made a significant contribution to production, employment, and export of handicraft products and contributes to economic development. Regardless of generating growth, weavers in carpet industry continue to be locked in the unequal and exploitative labour process. The purpose of the present study is to examine the labour process in the carpet industry with specific focus on organization of production, capital accumulation and wage pattern among carpet weavers in Pulwama district of Kashmir. The present study is both primary and secondary in nature. The primary data collected from four blocks of Pulwama district through interview-schedule, focused group discussion and field observation. The key findings revealed that there is diversity in production relation, weavers are facing with a problem of middlemen/master weaver exploitation, low earning, and long working hours and piece-wage is a mode of surplus extraction for capitalists in the carpet industry.

The Impact of Rent from Unequal Exchange on Shaikh’s Classical-Keynesian Political Economic Analysis: The Example of Facebook

In this paper, Shaikh’s 1949–2011 classical Phillips curve (CPC) is replicated and extended to 2016. This updated CPC does not follow the pattern anticipated by Shaikh for the years 2012 to 2016. This paper hypothesizes that this divergence is a result of an increasingly “rentier” economy based on surplus extraction through unequal exchange (UE). Andrea Ricci’s methodology is then applied to the 2014 US advertising and market research (A&MR) sector as a sample test of this hypothesis. This analysis shows that UE accounts for $64 billion, or almost a half (45.3 percent), of total US A&MR value added ($141.3 billion) in 2014. A modification of Ricci’s methodology for a firm-level UE estimation finds that in 2014 Facebook alone was able to extract a within-industry, within-country, between-firm absolute rent of $3.8 billion. The paper concludes that Shaikh’s analysis needs to be extended with non-classical political economy UE, or “rentier economy,” analysis.

Super-exploitation of Adivasi Migrant Workers: The Political Economy of Migration from Southern Rajasthan to Gujarat

This article offers a political economy account of labour migration of Adivasi workers from southern Rajasthan to growth centres in Gujarat. It unpacks the structural forces that shape this labour mobility, which erupted only as recently as 30 years back. The article focuses on three industries that are key employers of migrant workers—construction, textile as well as small hotels and restaurants in the Gujarati cities of Ahmedabad and Surat. It presents evidence on labour market segmentation and resulting unequal wage distribution between migrants in this corridor by their social group. This is complemented by an extensive mapping of the informal practices that violate applicable legal provisions found in these industry segments. Through these, the article teases out the mechanisms by which the community undergoes what in Marxian terms are referred to as surplus extraction and super-exploitation. The article finds that Gujarat’s economy utilizes the historically low socio-economic position of Adivasis for capitalist accumulation, such that the community’s poverty and disadvantaged position is reproduced inter-generationally, instead of being interrupted by their employment in the growth centres of the state. JEL: O15, J61, N35