The Backbone We Broke: India's Working Class Is Being Crushed in Plain Sight

Every republic likes to tell itself a founding story. India's is the story of a country built on the backs of its labourers — the farmer who feeds 1.4 billion people, the construction worker who raises a skyline in a season, the factory hand who stitches the shirt on your back, the delivery rider who gets your dinner to your door in eighteen minutes. We call labour the backbone of the nation in every Independence Day speech, every budget preamble, every corporate CSR report.

And yet, if you actually look at how India treats the people whose labour it depends on, the picture that emerges isn't of a backbone being honoured. It's of one being slowly, systematically broken — through wages that haven't moved in real terms for a decade, workdays that stretch well past what any law allows, unions that get treated as national security threats, and a state that has quietly stopped showing up.

This is not a fringe problem affecting a small, unlucky minority. It is the daily condition of the overwhelming majority of working India.

The Wages That Never Moved

Start with the plainest number: what a labourer actually earns, and what that number has done over the last decade.

Data from India's Labour Bureau and National Sample Survey Office shows something close to a virtual stagnation of real wages over the past ten years. Nominal daily wages for general agricultural labourers — one of the most common occupations in the country — rose by roughly 6% a year between 2014 and 2024, but once you adjust for inflation, that growth shrinks to barely 1% a year. Compare that to India's per-capita income, which grew at roughly 4.6% annually in real terms over the same period: workers doing the most common job in rural India saw their real earnings grow at under a quarter of the pace of the economy their labour was helping to build.

The story is no kinder in the cities. India's informal sector — where the overwhelming majority of the country's workforce actually earns its living — shows average annual pay for a hired worker sitting between roughly ₹1.16 lakh and ₹1.35 lakh, which works out to about ₹10,000 a month for full-time work. The ILO's own Global Wage Report found that in the years after the pandemic, formal-sector wages in India fell by 3.6%, but informal workers — the vast majority of the workforce — saw their wages collapse by 22.6%. The same report found that the gap between nominal and real minimum wages for unskilled workers has widened sharply over the past decade: nominal wages grew by roughly 240% between 2008 and 2019, while real wages, adjusted for what that money can actually buy, grew by only about 70%.

Only around 23.6% of India's workers hold regular, salaried jobs; the rest survive on self-employment or casual daily work that offers no fixed income, no protection, and often no legal minimum wage in practice even where one exists on paper. And even the workers who are legally entitled to a minimum wage frequently don't receive it — India's current central floor wage sits at around ₹783 a day for unskilled labour, a number that, spread across a family, barely covers food and rent in most Indian cities today, let alone healthcare, education, or savings.

This is the arithmetic of a trap: wages too low to save, too unstable to plan around, and rising too slowly to ever catch up with the cost of living. For the vast majority of India's labourers, escaping poverty isn't a matter of working harder — they're often already working harder than the law permits. It's a matter of an economic structure that was never built to let them out.

The Workday That Refuses to End

The law in India says eight hours. The reality, for enormous numbers of workers, is very different.

Central trade unions have repeatedly flagged the rise of contractual employment — now covering an estimated 42% of all manufacturing employees — as a mechanism that strips away basic protections, including limits on working hours. Workers on contract are routinely pushed beyond the legally stipulated workday with no overtime compensation to match, and unions have made "strict adherence to the eight-hour working day and double overtime wages" one of their core, repeated demands in recent years — a demand that shouldn't need to be a demand at all, since it has technically been Indian law for decades.

At the extreme end of this spectrum sit cases that go well past overwork into outright forced labour. In one recent case in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, twelve factory workers — including minors — were rescued after a labourer escaped and alerted police. Survivors told investigators they had been forced to work from around 4 a.m. until nearly midnight, seven days a week, with their phones and identity documents confiscated so they couldn't leave or contact their families, and beaten with iron rods and fan belts if they fell ill or resisted. In Karnataka, 28 bonded labourers — including minors — were rescued from sugarcane fields where they were paid ₹240–270 a day, forbidden from leaving even for family emergencies; one worker recounted being denied permission to go home even after his son died by suicide. In Punjab, another 30 bonded labourers, including minors and workers trafficked from Nepal and Bihar, were rescued from a potato farm where they had been held and mistreated by contractors.

These are not isolated horror stories from a bygone era. Government data shows bonded labourers are still being "rescued and rehabilitated" every year — 246 in the roughly twelve months to January 2025, 673 the year before that — against a national target, set in 2016, to free 1.84 crore people from bonded labour by 2030, a target that would require freeing around 13 lakh people a year. The gap between that target and the actual pace of rescues is not a rounding error; it's a signal of how far this problem still is from being taken seriously as the crisis it is. Researchers studying the aftermath of these rescues have found that many "freed" workers spend years — in some documented cases, decades — trapped in bureaucratic limbo, waiting for compensation or legal resolution that never fully arrives, and frequently end up cycling back into exploitative work simply because nothing better was ever offered to replace it.

When "Efficiency" Costs a Uterus

If you want to understand exactly how far labour exploitation in India can go when there is no one watching and no power to say no, look at Beed district in Maharashtra.

Beed is one of the country's major sources of migrant sugarcane-cutting labour — roughly 1.75 lakh workers, including about 78,000 women, leave the district every year around Diwali and return home nearly six months later. Contractors pay these workers by output, per tonne of cane cut, and missing even a single day of work — for illness, pregnancy, or menstruation — can trigger fines of ₹500 to ₹1,000, often exceeding what the worker would have earned that day. Contractors have openly been reluctant to hire women who menstruate regularly, treating a basic biological function as a business inconvenience.

The result, documented over years by government health officials, journalists, and researchers, is one of the more disturbing labour stories anywhere in the world: a district-level government health report found that 843 women sugarcane workers had undergone hysterectomies — surgical removal of the uterus — just before the 2024 migration season, most of them between the ages of 30 and 35, an age at which the procedure is medically unusual outside of cancer or severe illness. Over 13,000 women in the district are estimated to have undergone the same procedure over the past decade, at a rate roughly 14 times the national average. Investigations dating back to 2019 found that private doctors routinely labelled ordinary period pain or irregular cycles as a "diseased uterus" requiring removal, workers financed the ₹10,000–30,000 surgeries with loans against future wages, and many returned to eighteen-hour shifts in the fields within weeks — permanently unable to menstruate, and therefore permanently "efficient" by the field's own brutal logic. Some women have said the procedure was performed without their informed consent altogether, discovering only after the fact that their uterus had been removed during what they'd been told was routine treatment.

This is what "cheap labour" actually costs when nobody is protecting the people supplying it. Not a discount. A body.

The Argument That Needs to Die: "Cheap Labour Is Necessary for Business"

There's a line that gets repeated every time these stories surface, usually from people who will never personally experience the conditions being defended: businesses need cheap labour to stay competitive, and workers should accept hardship because that's how developing economies grow.

This argument deserves to be examined honestly, because it does not hold up.

First, it confuses low wages with competitiveness, when the two are not the same thing. An economy built on suppressing wages produces workers too poor to be meaningful consumers, which in turn shrinks the very domestic market that Indian businesses need to grow into. India's own stagnant-wage data shows this clearly: corporate profits have risen far faster than employment or wages in recent years, meaning the gains from growth are flowing to shareholders and owners, not to the workers producing that growth. That is not a competitiveness strategy — it's a wealth-transfer strategy dressed up as one.

Second, the "necessary hardship" argument has no natural endpoint. It was used to justify sweatshop conditions during India's early liberalisation years in the 1990s. It's being used today to justify twelve-lakh-a-year executives at IT firms sitting atop a workforce of freshers earning ₹3 lakh a year that hasn't moved in over a decade. If cheap, exploited labour is "necessary" at every single stage of a country's economic development, then it isn't a temporary phase at all — it's simply the permanent business model, and workers are the ones being asked to permanently subsidise it with their bodies, their health, and their time with their families.

Third, and most importantly: other countries did not have to choose between growth and worker protection. Post-war Germany, South Korea, and the Nordic economies all industrialised with strong labour protections, powerful unions, and rising real wages running alongside — not against — economic growth. The idea that Indian workers uniquely must accept exploitation as the toll for national development is not an economic law. It's a convenient story told by the people who benefit from workers not asking too many questions.

A hysterectomy so a woman can keep cutting sugarcane without "wasting" a paid day is not the unavoidable cost of doing business. It is a choice — made by contractors, tolerated by the state, and defended, when defended at all, using exactly this argument.

India Says No to the World's First Gig Worker Protections

In June 2026, the International Labour Organisation adopted Convention No. 193 — the Decent Work in the Platform Economy Convention — the first binding international labour standard specifically written to protect gig and platform workers, covering an estimated 154 million people worldwide. It passed 406 votes in favour to 8 against, with 36 abstentions.

India's government delegate was one of the 36 abstentions.

What makes India's abstention particularly hard to defend is that India's own workers' delegate and employers' delegate — the other two legs of the country's official tripartite ILO delegation — both voted in favour of the convention. The government stood alone, isolated even within its own official delegation, in declining to support it. India's stated objection centred on the convention's requirement that governments create a "classification test" to determine whether platform workers should legally be treated as employees — a requirement that runs directly against India's existing domestic approach, which treats gig and platform work as a separate legal category outside standard employment protections, deliberately excluding platform workers from the benefits — provident fund, healthcare, paid leave, job security — that regular employees are entitled to.

This abstention landed while Indian gig workers were actively organising and protesting: earlier in 2026, the Gig and Platform Service Workers Union led a nationwide strike across Delhi, Bengaluru, Jaipur, Mumbai, and dozens of other districts over pay and working conditions. Even India's own gig workers' union, GIPSWU, has criticised the final convention text as too weak — allowing exclusions for certain worker categories and leaving key protections to individual national governments to implement, which, given India's own record, is not a reassuring detail. But weak as the convention is, it was still a floor. India chose not to stand on it.

Crushed Unions and a Government That Isn't Listening

None of this is happening in a vacuum where workers simply haven't tried to organise and push back. They have — repeatedly, and at real personal cost.

In 2025 and 2026, central trade unions representing hundreds of millions of workers led coordinated national strikes demanding the withdrawal of India's four new labour codes, which merged 24 older labour laws and, according to union leaders, made it significantly easier for employers to hire and fire workers while weakening collective bargaining protections. One general strike in February drew participation from an estimated 300 million workers across the country — one of the largest coordinated labour actions anywhere in the world in recent memory.

The response, in several documented instances, has not been dialogue. In Uttar Pradesh, when contractual industrial workers organised around minimum wage demands, security forces launched what unions described as a "reign of terror" — over a thousand workers arrested, trade union leaders framed as "external" or "anti-national," reports of custodial torture, and several union leaders and activists placed under house arrest or held in prison. When the state government eventually responded, it wasn't with recognition of the workers' demands but with a 21% minimum wage hike unions rejected as inadequate for a dignified life — offered only after the crackdown, not instead of it.

This pattern — treating labour organising as a security threat rather than a legitimate democratic activity — has a long history in India, but it has sharpened considerably. Raising a demand for a living wage, safer working conditions, or the right to unionise is now routinely met with the same language used for genuinely violent extremism: "anti-national," "external," "disruptive to development." The chilling effect this produces is deliberate. When a construction worker demanding unpaid wages or a garment worker demanding a functioning fire exit can be branded in the same breath as an insurgent, most workers will simply stop asking — not because their demand was unreasonable, but because the cost of asking has been made too high.

"Communist" as a Conversation-Ender

There is a specific rhetorical move that has become almost automatic in Indian public discourse whenever labour conditions come up: the moment someone points out that wages are too low, hours are too long, or a union is being crushed, the conversation gets redirected — not toward the facts being raised, but toward the person raising them. Are you a communist? Do you even understand economics? Do you want India to become Venezuela?

This move does real damage, because it takes what should be a straightforward, factual question — are these wages livable, are these hours legal, is this treatment humane — and turns it into an ideological loyalty test. It's a highly effective tactic precisely because most people don't want to be mistaken for extremists, so they simply stop raising the question at all. The India-specific irony is sharp: India's actual armed Maoist insurgency is a real, ongoing, violent conflict in states like Chhattisgarh, one that has killed both security personnel and civilians in operations as recently as 2025. Conflating that insurgency with a factory worker asking to be paid minimum wage, or a sugarcane cutter's union asking that contractors stop pressuring women into hysterectomies, isn't just intellectually dishonest — it borrows the language of a genuine security crisis to shut down conversations about basic labour dignity that have nothing to do with it.

Advocating that a worker be paid what the law already says they're owed is not a radical position. It is, definitionally, adherence to the law. Somewhere along the way, simply insisting on that has been successfully rebranded as extremism — and it has worked exactly as intended.

The Quiet Apathy of the Middle Class

Perhaps the most uncomfortable part of this story is not what the state or employers have done — it's what the rest of us have stopped doing, which is caring.

India's urban middle and upper-middle classes interact with labourers constantly: the domestic worker, the delivery rider, the security guard, the construction crew building the next tower over, the driver. And yet a steady diet of anti-union, anti-"disruption" messaging — echoed across television debates, WhatsApp forwards, and social media — has cultivated a broad sense that workers asking for more are, at best, naively unrealistic, and at worst, actively holding the country back. Strikes are covered as traffic inconveniences rather than as workers exercising a constitutional right. Wage demands are framed as threats to "ease of doing business" rather than as basic requests to be paid enough to live.

This isn't accidental. It is the predictable result of decades of messaging, dating back to the Cold War and sharpened considerably in recent years, that frames any organised worker demand as a step toward economic chaos — the same red-scare logic used to justify crackdowns, repackaged for a middle class that has been taught to see its own economic interests as opposed to, rather than intertwined with, the labourers who build, deliver, cook, clean, and drive for it every single day. The domestic worker who raised your children and the sugarcane cutter who sweetens your tea are not separate from your economy. They are its foundation. Treating their exploitation as background noise, or their organising as inconvenience, is not neutrality — it's a choice, made easier by a steady diet of propaganda telling you it's the responsible one.

A State That Has Largely Stopped Showing Up

Underneath all of this sits a simpler, more structural problem: for the vast majority of India's workforce, there is close to no functioning safety net.

Over 90% of Indian workers operate in the informal sector, outside the reach of effective wage regulation, workplace safety enforcement, or social security in practice, even where such protections exist on paper. The Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act has existed since 1976, but summary trials — meant to guarantee speedy justice for bonded labour cases — are, according to recent civil society research, virtually non-existent in most districts, and the vigilance committees meant to protect rescued workers frequently side with the employers who exploited them in the first place. Labour codes passed in 2019–2020 promised, on paper, a universal social security net covering gig and informal workers for the first time — but as of late 2025, unions were still describing the reforms as "exploitative," and enforcement, particularly for the 90%-plus of workers in the informal economy, remains largely aspirational.

This is the quiet part of India's labour crisis: it isn't only that wages are low and hours are long. It's that when something goes wrong — when a contractor withholds wages, when a factory owner locks workers in, when a woman is coerced into a surgery she didn't need — there is often no functioning system standing between the worker and the person exploiting them. The law exists. The enforcement, overwhelmingly, does not.

The Backbone Deserves Better Than a Slogan

Call it what it is: India runs on labour it refuses to protect. The farmer, the factory hand, the sugarcane cutter, the delivery rider, the construction worker — these are not marginal figures in the Indian growth story. They are the growth story. Every skyline built on time, every field harvested on schedule, every parcel delivered in minutes rests on millions of people working longer hours, for lower real wages, with less legal protection, than almost any other major economy would consider acceptable.

Calling labour "the backbone of the nation" costs nothing. Actually treating it that way would mean enforcing the eight-hour day that already exists in law. It would mean a living wage that rises with the cost of living instead of stagnating for a decade. It would mean unions that can organise without being branded anti-national, and workers who can raise a grievance without a contractor's threat or a policeman's baton waiting on the other side of it. It would mean a state that shows up before the exploitation makes international headlines, not after. And it would mean a middle class willing to see its own comfort as something built on other people's labour — not something happening at a safe, unrelated distance from it.

None of that requires an ideology. It requires only that a country's actions catch up to the sentence it has been reciting in speeches for seventy-eight years: that labour is the backbone of India. A backbone that is overworked, underpaid, unprotected, and silenced isn't a backbone anymore. It's a country standing on something it has already broken, and calling it strength.

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— The Sensible Arya