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Who is the working class?

The Indian working class are the citizens of India who are being virtually disenfranchised.

There are close to one billion people above the age of 15 in India who can legally work. This working age population can be divided into three broad categories from the lens of the labour market:

Employed: those who are working

Unemployed: those who are not currently working, but seek work or are available for work, and

Not in the labour force: those who are neither working nor seeking work

The first two categories form the labour force. Roughly 625 million Indians, or six in ten working-age people, are in the labour force, while nearly 400 million working age Indians are out of the labour force. Not in the labour force: those who are neither working nor seeking work. They have given up looking for work.

There has been so much talk of India’s economic growth but the media does not report on how the workers are being laid off from all sectors.  Parliamentary data from the Ministry of Corporate Affairs indicates that over 2,04,000 private companies closed between 2020–21 and 2024–25; a trend linked to restructuring, insolvency and market stress rather than labour unrest. Yet the working class is demonised and blamed for the failure of a system to deliver even the constitutional promise of permanent jobs and living wages.

There has been a wave of strikes by mostly non-permanent workers right across the country just in the past two months, February-March 2026. These strikes are taking place in the background of the push to make the labour market more and more flexible “at a moment when the institutional terrain governing labour relations had undergone a decisive shift, with legal, economic and ideological pressures converging to narrow the space available for collective working-class action”.

There has been a gradual reorientation of state policies in the name of promoting competitiveness and investor confidence. Judges, from labour courts to the Supreme Court, have made observations against the “indiscipline” of trade unions and the working class being an impediment to India’s growth.

International experts have observed that the consolidation of labour flexibility has increasingly coincided with a narrowing of democratic space which demonstrates “that economic restructuring and authoritarian governance are not parallel developments but mutually reinforcing processes”.

Contract workers fully halted refineries in Assam (Digboi, Bongaigaon, Numaligarh) and disrupted LPG/POL depots in Kerala, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Gujarat. At Panipat refinery, thousands of contractual employees struck against 12-hour shifts without overtime pay. Near-total shutdowns (95-100%) took place in Kerala, Himachal and Maharashtra, with strong contract involvement; mining (iron ore, bauxite) strikes paralysed Odisha and Madhya Pradesh sites; ports like Paradip and Tuticorin fully stopped. Steel, engineering and unorganised sectors (beedi, ICDS) had widespread but less quantified contract turnout.

The majority of these workers are contract workers and have not been paid their wages for months, denied water and toilet facilities and despite this have worked on till the circumstances compelled them to protest.

A list of the major strikes in the core industrial areas from February to March 2026 speaks for both the deteriorating working conditions and the growing workers’ resistance:

February 2: Begusarai, Bihar

Contract workers at the Barauni Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL) refinery in Begusarai, Bihar, held protests and strikes regarding safety violations and wage disputes. The contract workers demanded payment of outstanding wages, protested against the alleged snatching of gate passes by company management and raised issues regarding the........

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