The employer would offer wages well below the market rate and pick some men, but others would push forward, offering to work for even less. But jobs had become so scarce and their hunger so debilitating that this moral code of the destitute had crumbled. They would not undercut each other: they would not compete when employers came looking for casual workers. Earlier, before the pandemic, a certain unwritten moral code prevailed among these dispossessed homeless workers. Whenever a car or van would drive up to recruit workers, in no time fifty or a hundred workers would gather around them. In the labour chowk this year, we saw now among them an even more aggravated desperation for work, any work, on any terms. Harsh Mander Burning Pyres, Mass Graves and a State That Failed its People Speaking Tiger, 2023 Most were single homeless men who had cut all ties with their families. These were workers who could not even escape the cruelly locked down city by joining the epic worker exodus of millions in the blistering summer of 2020. Several thousand homeless men would mill around our food vans, desperate for food. Nearly a year and a half earlier, this is where we, in the Karwan-e-Mohabbat had begun our food solidarity work. They are alone in the world, with zero bargaining power, and zero protection. These workers are the most unprotected, even among daily wagers, because they have the backing of no union, no collective, no government, and not even a family. We wanted to check if work had revived for Delhiās casual daily wage workers. I drove to the labour chowk near Company Bagh, in the Walled City of Old Delhi, the humble street corner where homeless casual wage seekers gather looking for work. It was early one rainy morning in the beginning of August 2021, when the dreaded second wave was just abating.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |