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.
