The rapid economic growth of the past few decades has radically transformed India’s labour market, bringing millions of former agricultural workers into manufacturing industries, and, more recently, the expanding service industries, such as call centres and IT companies.
Alongside this employment shift has come a change in health and health problems, as communicable diseases have become less common, while non-communicable diseases, like cardiovascular problems, and mental health issues such as stress, have increased.
This interdisciplinary work connects those two trends to offer an analysis of the impact of working conditions on the health of Indian workers that is unprecedented in scope and depth.
increasing diversity of migrants from India to the GCC nations (from unskilled and semi-skilled to increasingly high-skilled migrants), the feminization of this migration (around 0.7 million Indian female migrants in 1990 compared to 1.6 million in 2013, especially evident in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia), and the rise in white collar professional Indian workers in GCCcountries (now accounting for 30 per cent of total migrant flows). Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE are key destinations for these flows ( Zachariah and Rajan 2016 ). Data from Table 2.1 shows that
desperate for survival, placing them at greater risk of accepting false opportunities offered by human traffickers. As economies across the world also faced closures, the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in movement of people both domestically and internationally, forcing many to return to their home communities. Migrant workers in particular have been severely impacted by the pandemic with thousands of Nepali and Indian workers returning home, from countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar ( IOM, 2020 ; Foley and Piper, 2021 ), to limited employment opportunities in
political manipulation of the migrating families of the former 'sweatshops' known as the Colonies or Commonwealth. The reaction of black organisations to this reality has been a muted one for many years. The Indian Workers' Association (IWA) blames this upon the effectiveness of government race relations policy, which is seen as being based upon containment. placing responsibility for civil order upon the black 'victim' rather than the host attacker: 'Central to the maintenance of good 'race relations' has been the Government's theory on numbers of black people. In this
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objection to African and West Indian workers was forthcoming, the Partnership was ‘prepared to experiment in suitable circumstances with the employment of these particular coloured workers, either men or women, in selling departments where candidates of sufficient intelligence and education and suitable appearance offer themselves’. 4 Should such experimentation elicit unfavourable reactions from customers or ‘from our normal sources of recruitment’ (clarified elsewhere as ‘the English white collar worker’) 5 then prompt action should be taken to transfer those Partners
or Chinese silk had once exchanged among segments of the Indian Ocean. European textiles and guns put an end to some of these local exchanges in cloths or warhorses. This is true, up to a point. Colonialism enabled new intra-regional networks of market exchange as well. It drew the territories within the tropics into a closer relationship with each other by political means, leading to easier migration of capital and labour between these territories. Indian workers went to British colonies in the Pacific, the Caribbean, in Africa and Malaya, to work for wages or do
contrasting consequences for the rising powers and Gulf oil producers, the impact in the labour market was most adversely felt by India. Globally, the World Bank estimates that worldwide remittances will fall by 20 per cent this year ( Karasapan, 2020 ). This is especially problematic for India, owing to the large diaspora in the Gulf. On average, Indian workers worldwide send home around $80 billion a year. ( Economic Times, 2019 ). This year, remittances from the UAE – where most expatriate Indians are based – is expected to fall by a third. In India itself, the
lifting (Yasobant and Rajkumar, 2014). As was noted in Chapter 3, to date there is relatively little work that has explicitly looked at the role that the psychosocial work environment might have on health in India. Yet, the existing studies find similar relationships between poor psychosocial working conditions and a range of health and health behaviour outcomes among Indian workers (Mohan et al., 2008; Peters et al., 2010; Basnet et al., 2010; Rameshbabu et al., 2013; Roy and Chowdhury, 2013). Indeed, when we look at the findings from the relevant chapters
rule out that ‘white’ organised labour can overcome racism and engage in ‘inter-racial’ class action, he remained sceptical about its immediate prospects ( Virdee, 2000 ). Sivanandan’s reflections were shaped by the labour struggles of low paid migrant workers in the UK and the responses from the trade unions in the mid twentieth century, particularly the establishment of the Indian Worker’s Association (IWA) in 1958 that helped to organise strikes by Indian workers, the 1974 wild cat strike by Asian workers at Imperial Typewriters and the Grunwick strike of 1976
