THE HISTORY OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT is grounded in the struggle for equal and dignified citizenship. Far from being confined to the workplace, the demands of workers have long encompassed broader claims to inclusion, recognition, and democratic participation. From the Chartist movement in 19th-century England to the strikes demanding an eight-hour workday which culminated in the May Day, working-class mobilisations have always invoked a vocabulary that transcended mere economic claims, insisting instead on a moral and political reordering of society that acknowledged the worker as a full citizen.
At the heart of the labour movement lies the fundamental struggle over citizenship, not merely as a legal status, but as a lived reality encompassing rights to dignified work, food, education, housing, and identity. In the context of post-colonial India, one observes a persistent gap between constitutional rights and material realities. Across fields as varied as wage structuring, the exclusionary failures of the Public Distribution System (‘PDS’), the neoliberal assault on education, the judicialized displacement of urban poor, and the growing regime of surveillance, culminate in the erosion of substantive citizenship rights.
Work is the primary terrain where citizenship is situated. The Constitution, under Article 43 (a Directive Principle of State Policy), envisions the right to a living wage, a standard that allows not just for bare subsistence, but for conditions of work consistent with human dignity. However, in practice, employers, across all sectors, and more so when the employment is informal, rarely adhere to this vision. Instead, the dominant policy design is to structure wages around the statutory minimum wage, which itself is often set below the threshold of a living wage and is poorly enforced by the State.
Such fragmented structuring leads to a distortion of the “wage” itself, where the fixed component of a worker’s salary barely meets survival costs, and the variable portion becomes a tool for disciplining and extracting surplus labour. This makes the worker dependent on the State for food and basic welfare. A State that does not pay well and accord dignity to the workers hardly bothers to provide for the worker’s basic needs, making her vulnerable to chronic precarity and their political repression.
Exclusionary Public Distribution System
The National Food Security Act (‘NFSA’), 2013, mandates that up to 75 percent of India’s rural population and 50 percent of the urban population should be covered under a targeted public distribution system (PDS). This means that roughly 67 percent of the national population is entitled to subsidised food grains, which reveals the severe malnutrition among the working classes. On top of that, according to estimates by economists Jean Drèze, Reetika Khera, and Meghana Mungikar, over 100 million people were excluded from PDS access by 2020 due to the use of outdated census data.
In August 2023, the Union government admitted before the Supreme Court that nearly 80 million people in India remain without ration cards, effectively excluding them from the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (‘PMGKAY’) and broader food security benefits. Independent researchers place this figure even higher estimating that approximately 130 million Indians in need of food security are currently excluded from the system.
In the context of Indian urbanisation, the right to adequate housing forms a contested terrain of law, citizenship, and exclusion.
Despite repeated Supreme Court directives in 2023 and 2024, the Centre has failed to act. In its August 2024 affidavit, it reiterated that rations cannot be distributed to more people until a new census is conducted. In response, the Court extended a final deadline to November 19, 2024, warning that non-compliance would compel Secretaries of Food and Civil Supplies to appear in person and face contempt proceedings.
The “One Nation One Ration Card” (‘ONORC’) scheme, launched in February 2021, was designed to enable seamless access to PDS benefits across India, irrespective of a person’s state of residence. However, on-ground implementation remains patchy. Migrant workers who travel for work and live away from their state of registration often face obstacles such as biometric mismatches, poor connectivity, and irregular ration supply, leading to chronic food insecurity.
Hunger is a violent denial of citizenship to India’s working classes. Every exclusion from the PDS and every death due to malnutrition and starvation exposes how the State systematically refuses workers their constitutional right to live with dignity. As Jean Drèze notes, Aadhaar failures, ration card exclusions, and bureaucratic cruelty are not technical glitches; they are political acts of erasure.
Un-dignified living
In the context of Indian urbanisation, the right to adequate housing forms a contested terrain of law, citizenship, and exclusion. The judicial and administrative treatment of slums and informal settlements illustrate how citizenship is often rendered conditional upon legality of occupation and tenure, ignoring the deeper structures of dispossession and precarity.
In the landmark Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation (1985) judgment, while the Court acknowledged that eviction from pavements implicated the right to livelihood under Article 21, it ultimately justified the eviction, underscoring that public property cannot be occupied without authorisation.
Later judgments such as Municipal Corporation of Delhi v. Gurnam Kaur (1989) and Sodan Singh v. NDMC (1989) similarly emphasised legality over livelihood. Such judicial pronouncements reflect a structural reluctance to engage with the socio-economic compulsions that compel informal urban housing. They reinforce a bifurcated citizenship, where legal recognition is extended only to those whose presence is regularized, effectively disenfranchising a majority of working-class urban dwellers who materially sustain the life of the city.
At the heart of the labour movement lies the fundamental struggle over citizenship, not merely as a legal status, but as a lived reality encompassing rights to dignified work, food, education, housing, and identity.
Forced evictions and demolitions, often carried out without due process or rehabilitation, constitute a direct violation of the right to life and dignity as enshrined under Article 21. The Constitutional framework through Articles 14, 15, 19, and 39 creates positive obligations on the state to ensure access to housing, livelihood, and basic services. Yet, in practice, eviction drives, such as the one in Haldwani where over 5,000 families were threatened with removal from railway land, continue to be justified through a language of encroachment and public interest, stripping the urban poor of both their homes and personhood.
The Supreme Court’s stay in the Haldwani case marked a departure from the norm, emphasising the need for rehabilitation and proportionality, in alignment with precedents like Chameli Singh v. State of U.P. (1996) and Shantistar Builders v. Narayan Khimalal Totame (1990), which located the right to shelter within the broader matrix of the right to life. The Delhi High Court in Ajay Maken v. Union of India (2019) went further to articulate housing as a “bundle of rights” inclusive of education, health, and livelihood. Education, too, is not a neutral public good.It determines whose knowledge is valued, whose future is secured, and whose histories are erased. In Sudama Singh v. Government of Delhi (2010), the judiciary imposed a duty on the state to conduct surveys and ensure rehabilitation prior to eviction.
Despite these advancements, policies for housing Economically Weaker Sections (‘EWS’) and Low-Income Groups (‘LIG’) remain woefully inadequate, often relegated to the margins of budgetary priorities. The legal machinery continues to function ambivalently, swinging between constitutional compassion and procedural displacement.
Majoritarian exclusions
The Citizenship Amendment Act (‘CAA’) and the National Register of Citizens (‘NRC’) tore open the question of citizenship into the public domain, exposing how belonging in India could be stripped and redrawn along religious and documentary lines. For millions of workers who are migrants, Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims whose lives are already marked by precarity, these moves transformed citizenship from a presumed right into a conditional, fragile status. Workers long marginalised by the State now faced a new threat: the burden of proving identity through an arbitrary and hostile state apparatus.
This assault on citizenship was not confined to Assam or limited to formal paperwork. It revealed a deeper neoliberal project: using surveillance, databases, and documentation as tools to regulate, discipline, and exclude labour. Biometric monitoring at worksites, Aadhaar-linked rationing, exclusionary welfare systems, and digital databases all function as mechanisms of control determining who can work, who can eat, who can belong.
The assault on workers’ citizenship can be clearly seen in the Assam model, where the NRC process rendered millions disproportionately from marginalized working communities stateless or at risk of statelessness. This was not an isolated incident but a blueprint for a larger project. In 2019, with the introduction of the National Population Register (NPR) alongside the CAA-NRC, the government’s majoritarian attack on working class existence, attained a national dimension.
While the CAA-NRC sparked widespread mobilizations and protests with the labour movement playing a crucial role the specific and devastating implication for workers often remain obscured.
Rising religious majoritarianism is reshaping not only political rights but the very conditions of existence for the working class. The experience of the Assam NRC shows how dangerous this path can be where many people were excluded because of technicalities like name changes after marriage, lack of formal education and mistyped details. Without recognized citizenship, workers risk losing access to welfare schemes, legal protections, reservations, union rights, and even the ability to move freely for work. The NRC framework threatens to create a massive class of stateless labourers, disenfranchised and hyper-exploitable.
While the CAA-NRC sparked widespread mobilizations and protests with the labour movement playing a crucial role the specific and devastating implication for workers often remain obscured. Migrant workers, informal sector labourers, Dalits, Adivasis, OBCs, Muslims, women, and nomadic community groups already precariously placed now face the additional burden of proving citizenship through documents they often do not possess.
Authoritarian gaze
The growing normalisation of surveillance both by the State and employers represents not just a technological shift, but a deepening constitutional crisis that threatens the core of citizenship and workers’ rights in India. The use of GPS devices on sanitation workers by municipal corporations, as well as high-surveillance performance tracking systems like Amazon’s ADAPT, illustrate a troubling convergence where the logic of capital is deployed through coercive logic of the surveillance state.
This systemically dehumanises workers, reduces them to data points, and erases their autonomy and dignity, directly violating the constitutional right under Article 21 to a life of dignity and privacy, as upheld in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017). This is similar to how the CAA-NRC-NPR framework introduced by the state brought about a shift from a welfare-based conception of citizenship to one marked by suspicion, surveillance, and conditional inclusion. The lack of legal protections around NPR data unlike the Census Act of 1948 raises serious concerns about its potential misuse, especially when deployed in combination with opaque biometric and demographic databases.
What ties these seemingly disparate threads to corporate labour regimes and state surveillance of identity is a shared disregard for individual liberty, particularly of the most marginalized. For instance, the imposition of GPS tracking on sanitation workers in Ranchi, Ghaziabad, Nagpur, and Chandigarh displays how state authorities systematically strip already oppressed workers of privacy under the pretext of efficiency. The resulting workplace regime not only violates constitutional rights but also mirrors caste hierarchies where Dalit labour is treated as inherently suspect, needing to be constantly watched.
Surveillance today is not an exception or an emergency measure: it has become the default mode of governance over the working poor, naturalizing insecurity as the new condition of life. In this new regime, to work, to eat, to live itself demands constant proof of identity and loyalty, a bureaucratic performance that the most precarious are systematically set up to fail.
Suppression and criminalisation of dissent
The circumstances described above make it imperative for the working classes to organise and assert their power. Yet the circumstances have been created to stop precisely that. There can hardly be a greater denial of equal citizenship than the repression of one’s political voice that protests such denial. Unfortunately, that is exactly what we witness at the current juncture.
Since the Honda agitation in 2006, the Gurgaon-Manesar-Dharuhera belt witnessed large-scale workers’ agitations which impacted the entirety of the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (‘DMIC’). The State would not watch silently and came down heavily on the Maruti Suzuki workers as they fought to register their union and demand their workplace rights. The State used the factory violence of 2012 to imprison scores of workers under criminal charges and dismiss them from their jobs. The dismissed workers, finally out on bail, continue to organise to get their jobs back and help other workers along the DMIC in organising themselves.
With Covid, India witnessed the macabre sight of millions of migrant workers being kicked out of urban centres overnight. The workers who kept the essential services running during the dark days of the pandemic were shown the door as soon as they tried to unionise themselves. On 1 December 2021, 80 workers of India’s first Public Sector Undertaking (‘PSU’), M/s Indian Telephone Industries (ITI) Limited, based in Bengaluru, were terminated with little justification. Despite having worked for between 3 to 35 years, workers are guised as “contract workers.” Sanitation workers at the Kalawati Saran Hospital in Delhi were shown the door for unionizing around the same time as the ITI workers.
With the aggravating effects of neoliberalism and Hindutva fascism, constitutional protections have become increasingly stratified. The working class experiences citizenship not as a guarantee of rights but as a terrain of struggle where even basic legal entitlements (food, shelter, wage, bodily safety) must be fought for as workers operate outside formal citizenship channels, negotiating rights not as a given but as a conditional favour.
Any opposition to the demolition of workers’ informal settlements over the last few years have been met with brutal repression as well. On May 1, 2023, bulldozers demolished over 2000 homes in Tughlakabad in Delhi. On May 8, the bulldozers arrived again to clear the area of these debris. The women protested this fresh act of aggression. In response, the police arrested around 20-25 women, thrust them into a police bus, and took them to the police station. As per eyewitness accounts, male policemen used their sticks to push women into the bus. Many women were beaten in the bus and at the police station before they were released in the afternoon.
Suppression of dissent can take the form of procedural violence as well, as the All-India Central Council of Trade Unions (AICCTU) found out during the 2022 elections to the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD). A union leader – a contractual worker – contesting the election was threatened with retrenchment ostensibly because his job contract forbade political participation. It took an intervention from the Election Commission to impress upon his employer that a job contract could not trample over his statutory right to contest an election.
Whither citizenship?
With the aggravating effects of neoliberalism and Hindutva fascism, constitutional protections have become increasingly stratified. The working class experiences citizenship not as a guarantee of rights but as a terrain of struggle where even basic legal entitlements (food, shelter, wage, bodily safety) must be fought for as workers operate outside formal citizenship channels, negotiating rights not as a given but as a conditional favour. Labour rights are being steadily dismantled through the dilution of protective legislation, the criminalisation of protests and strikes, the informalisation of work, and attacks on unionisation - notably through the new labour codes. The historic struggle for the 8-hour workday is being hollowed out by a fascist regime built on the fragmentation of the working-class movement and the aggravation of its exploitation.
As economic liberalisation and precarious employment regimes increasingly destabilise the workplace, the status of the worker is itself under threat. Market dynamics have stripped labour of stability, and in doing so, have begun to erode the very foundation of substantive citizenship for vast sections of the population. Workers are often the first to be displaced, not just from employment but also from social protections, public services, and constitutional guarantees. Hindu majoritarian fascism has added to this erosion of rights by fragmenting the working class along religious lines and adopting policies such as the CAA-NRC-NPR that threaten to render millions of workers stateless.
The Hindutva state also de-prioritizes the vital constitutional mandate of bringing about substantive equality through education. The privatisation of public education, facilitated by the National Education Policy (‘NEP’) 2020 and long-standing structural adjustment policies, not only erodes constitutional guarantees like the Right to Education but also fosters a deeply unequal citizenry. Education, far from being a public good, is increasingly treated as a commodity, its accessibility determined by market logic rather than social justice.
The overall situation leaves the working classes with little option other than to (re)organize – not just as workers but also as citizens. May Day, once a resounding call for the global working class to unite against all forms of exploitation and domination, rings today with renewed urgency in India. In the articulate words of Vladimir Lenin, May Day is a day “when the workers of all lands celebrate their awakening to a class-conscious life.” In the current landscape, the legacy of May Day reminds us that the fight for labour rights cannot be separated from the fight for democratic rights. Every contemporary contest over rights is also a contest over memories of successes of the past, a struggle to reassert the working class as central to the project of democratic constitutionalism, challenging a system that increasingly treats their lives, labour, and citizenship as expendable.