To many observers, Noida’s industrial unrest appears to have come as an “out-of-syllabus” surprise. Workers have come out in protest against conditions that have been difficult and onerous, and the immediate trigger of wage hikes in Haryana but not Uttar Pradesh, appear to have lit the match. But this has been a crisis that has been brewing for years.

In 2018, social scientists Amit and Nayanjyoti published a study of production regimes and collective bargaining in Indian manufacturing. — through six months of fieldwork in the Gurgaon-Manesar belt, they found that integration into global production networks brought industrial growth but systematically dismantled collective bargaining. Capital responded to worker militancy through three concurrent strategies: Automation to make skill and experience redundant; contractualisation to replace permanent workers with a disposable, non-unionisable majority; and production-shifting to newer units with weaker labour regimes. The result is worsening conditions alongside growth.

In 2026, the conditions that drove workers onto the streets are an extension of this logic. Employees at garment factories and light manufacturing units — many of them producing for export markets reported working 12-hour shifts as the routine rather than the exception, despite a legal cap of eight to nine hours. Monthly wages ranged between ₹13,000 and ₹15,000. With sharply rising........

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