The political economy of unfree labour in South Asia

Determining the nature and scale of debt bondage

Tags: India , Civil Society Building
Additional tags: Unfree labour , Bondage

This paper by Jan Breman discusses the political economy of unfree labour in the context of South Asia by focusing on the issue of the debt bondage. He discusses the narrow definition used in India to describe the prevalence of bonded labour and provides a critique of the same. According to him the prevalence of bonded labour due to debt bondage could be not less than 10% of the working population that would work out to nearly 40 million people as of 2005. While his paper focused mainly on the Indian situation he also notes the prevalence of debt bondage in the neighboring country of Pakistan where power and dominance of landlords are quite formidable and they are often in collision with local warlords. In terms of policy intervention Breman advocates both direct and indirect actions.

On direct action, while he advocates a legal ban of the system of the labour bondage he does not have much faith in the capacity of the state to implement it. So he emphasizes the need for indirect action. On this he takes a firm position against the provision of micro credit that is often touted as a panacea for bonded labour. Instead he advocates public employment programme as a part of a package of elementary social care arrangement including food security. He also favours the establishment of a social floor to such rights as minimum wages and minimum standard of work as propounded by the erstwhile National Commission of Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector. Of course Breman also warns of the possible lack of enthusiasm especially at the level of social security on these indirect actions that he favours. This is working paper 1 of the Road to Social Security series.

Background

How many people live and work in a state of unfreedom? The 2009 ILO report states that 12.3 million people worldwide are entrapped in regimes of coercion – varying from slavery, forced or bonded labour to human trafficking – adding that this figure, given the lack of reliable or even basic records, is without doubt a very substantial underestimation of the problem’s true size. This uncertainty about the scale of unfree labour has its roots not only in the unwillingness of official agencies to gather statistical information on the phenomenon, but also on the difficulty of establishing a clear dividing line between free and unfree labour.

The lives of the working masses at the bottom of the labour system in South Asia display a wide range of aspects that testify to far-reaching deprivation and discrimination, making the designation of free and unfree labour a very elastic concept. In other words, practices of free and unfree labour cannot be described as an absolute dichotomy, but have to be seen in terms of a sliding scale, a continuum on which only the extremes are in clear and sharp contrast to each other.

Having said that, some sources claim that, for South Asia alone, the magnitude of unfree labour is almost double that estimated for the world as a whole in the 2009 ILO report, namely around 25 million people. Furthermore, that estimate covers only the category of debt-bonded labourers. I would suggest that the reservations that can be made about the reliability and, more especially, the verifiability of the statistical data does not alter the fact that debt bondage on the South Asian subcontinent is a significant feature of the misery in which the lower echelons of the working population find themselves. The argument in the attached working paper by Jan Breman is based on the precept that excessive poverty must be seen as the main cause of this mode of unfree labour.