The Rise of Neo-liberal Globalisation and The ‘New Old’ Social Regulation of labour: the case of Delhi garment sector.

The Indian Journal of Labour Economics

Asia

The rise of neo-liberal globalisation in the 1980s impacted the industrial trajectories of developing countries, signalling the shift from ‘the development project’ to the ‘globalisation project’. Within the legacy of neo-liberal globalisation, many countries became production nodes within global commodity chains, exploiting their comparative advantage in cheap labour. Looking at the case of the Delhi export-oriented garment sector, this paper shows how labour ‘cheapness’ in global production is realised through the use of those ‘traditional’ social structures already fundamental in regulating the Indian informal economy. In this way, such structures acquire new regulatory roles also within neo-liberal ‘global’ production. Specifically, they become transnational modes of exploitation by subjugating labour both locally and globally. The subsumption of the Indian social structure into the contemporary global capitalist architecture determines the shift from labour informality to a broader process of informalisation of labour.

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