The glassworkers and their “netas”
This paper looks at trade union practices and strategies of struggle for rights in the informal labour sector in Uttar Pradesh through the example of glass workers in Firozabad. The paper considers the struggle for the rights of these informal workers as a form of struggle for tangible citizenship, which involves social and economic rights and not just legal status without any benefits. By analysing the recent history of labour movements in Firozabad and the dynamics of the most recent movement, a strike of bangle finishers, the paper argues that, unlike the case with rural migrant workers, in a context of large-scale informal manufacturing work such as Firozabad, the logics of struggles for rights are not so different from those in the formal sector. But workers there are in a specifically weak bargaining position. The ethnography also confirms that the demand for rights and better working and living conditions in Uttar Pradesh almost inevitably involves the use of force and violence. This implies that the components of social and economic citizenship beyond legal citizenship are inevitably linked to this propensity to influence a power relationship marked by industrial, political and criminal links, which contributes to the blurring of the boundaries between legal and illegal.