Abstract
One of the fastest-growing sectors of the Indian economy is waste. Its labour illustrates Deliege’s paradox of material essentiality combined with social stigma and marginalisation. Between 2015 and 2019 the production and disposal of waste in a small South Indian town was traced through its circuits of industrial production (agro-processing), distribution (of people and of food), consumption, the production of labour (human wastes) and the reproduction of society (health care activity). The material substances of waste, their physical organisation and gendered labour processes are mapped onto each circuit. This enables a discussion of three questions: (a) regulative institutions in the formal and informal waste economy; (b) the gendering of property and work in the capitalist waste economy and (c) the gendered significance of collective action. The privatisation of waste work has caused a deterioration in work conditions throughout the waste economy. Literally and metaphorically, waste work is shit-work in which women experience the worst conditions in both physical and economic terms.
Introduction: From Dung-work to Shit-work
This essay was inspired by insights about gendered labour from research in the 1980s on cow-dung-work in a UP village (Jeffery et al., 1989). Cow dung was seen as waste from the rearing of calves and cattle for two productive activities: milk production by cows and agricultural production where adult cattle provided traction. Processing dung into fuel, fertiliser, insecticide and cleaning and sealing agents was women’s work. When the average use-value of the dung-work-burden was imputed at half a year’s agricultural wages, not only was dung-work revealed as central to rural women’s working days, despite being invisible to men and to rural accounts, it clearly also challenged the theoretical categories of productive and reproductive work which it straddled. The 1989 paper further concluded that dung-work is ‘shit-work’, which it defined as low status, menial work with no control over resources. Shit-work is undervalued both by men and by those people privatising and encroaching on common property resources that have provided fodder to cattle, some used directly by grazing cattle and some also collected by women.
Since then—and despite the poor quality, wide range and incoherent classifications of statistics—waste has arguably become the fastest-growing sector of the Indian economy with no end to this growth in sight for the next century (Hoornweg et al., 2013). In this essay, we fast- forward to south, rather than north, India, to a small town rather than a small village, where the cow has a diminished role in a rapidly growing urban economy. We turn to the complicated waste generated by this town, to a workforce that is organised, not through the household but through the public sector (the local municipal state which supplies resources for the public economy of waste) together with a differentiated private sector comprising capital and wage labour and a large structurally informalised labour force of self-employed and waged collectors. We study waste that is rarely processed directly for use (as it was in the UP village some 30 years earlier) but is partially commodified for private re-processing in a system that is far from circular and is poorly understood by the officials responsible for managing it. As in the 1989 research, we examine the gendering of small-town waste work. We find that literally and figuratively, women’s work remains shit-work.
Our evidence comes from three pieces of exploratory fieldwork in 2015, 2016 and 2019 in a nameless, 100,000 town in South India that acts as a central place for administration, construction, wholesale and retail trade, and its finance. The town is also a hub for communications, public and private health care, school and college education, religion and culture (from temples, churches and mosques to marriage halls and cinemas). Like all such small towns, it has a large informal economy. The conceptual and field methods we developed for this waste research have not been used before (Harriss-White, 2019). We conducted open-ended, semi-structured interviews with 142 waste workers and officials, placing them as living jigsaw pieces into a heuristic analytical method that makes sense of the town’s disordered discards. We assembled case material about the social relations of waste as it was generated and disposed of throughout the circuits of capital within the urban boundary:
industrial production (liquor, clothing accessories and rice mills), circuits of physical distribution of commodities (the vegetable market) and the distribution of people (Indian Railways), waste produced by consumption (the municipal sanitation workforce, private companies using casual labour and contracted to major public and private institutions together with the informal economy of waste), waste in the production of labour—human waste (sometimes mixed with consumption waste but also involving septic tanks and fleets of septic tankers), and waste in the reproduction of society (the liquor sector, without which workers cannot face the working environment of waste; and waste from the public and private institutions of health care without which society would not remain healthy across the generations).
In recording the gendering of this much more complex sector than in the village case study in UP, we use case material from the urban fieldwork in order to follow the questions asked in the 1980s research by Jeffery et al. They focussed on the material substances of waste, their organisation and tasks, the commodification of waste and earnings from waste work, women–men relations at work and their political and social visibility. We then ask three questions:
How is this waste economy regulated? How is property and labour gendered? What is the gendered significance of collective action in the urban capitalist waste economy?
Waste in Urban Production: The Case of Rice Mills—The Commodified Means of Subsistence
Theoretically the waste from the ring of rice mills surrounding the town is both biodegradable and recyclable. Husk is used as fuel on site and its dry-season surplus is sold to ‘factories with boilers’—dyers, distilleries and sugar factories—from which burnt husk ash is abandoned in piles outside the factory compounds, free for farmers in dry seasons but taken to the town’s dump-yard in the monsoon. Bran generates edible oil, soap and paint in a solvent extraction process whose waste is sold as cattle cake. In the wider region some rice-waste cattle-cake is now even exported to Europe. Black and broken rice grains are traded long distances to supply intensive chicken and egg industries.
Waste work in rice mills carries the lowest status and deploys casual, often bonded Dalit and tribal labour, which, if it has migrated, is further disempowered by lack of fluency in the local language, Tamil. Contrary to the predictions of theory, the technical change which is rapidly capitalising and increasing the operational scale of rice mills displaces casual female workers—the cheapest rather than the costliest labour. This expulsion lends support to the conjecture that the social benefits of removing the contamination to male status from managing these women outweighs the economic costs of capital-intensive technology. Over the period 2015–2019, among the rice mills’ waste-workforce, migrant tribal women sweepers took home roughly ₹3,000 each month while Dalit men earned twice this wage. Women mill sweepers explained that they could not live on these earnings. When in 2015, the poverty line was ₹1,400 per person and the minimum wage for a month was ₹5,000, it was impossible to maintain a family with dependents on incomes like those of rice mill waste workers without other jobs and public economic transfers. The day-to-day reproduction of their households depended directly on the state-subsidised rations of the Public Distribution System (PDS). The latter indirectly subsidises employers, enabling them to pay extreme poverty wages.
Waste Produced in Urban Distribution—Indian Railways—Distributing People
‘Even educated people use the station as a dustbin and as for the tracks…’. As in other large and complex organisations, such as colleges, hospitals and the municipality, railway waste is the responsibility of several bureaucratic lines of command which require co-ordination but which rarely achieve it. In the case of Indian Railways, the management of waste is segmented through its food standards, line engineering and public health bureaucracies.
As with these other organisations, Indian Railways provides a dramatic illustration of the catastrophic impact on the workforce of new public management and the ideology of neo-liberalism. From 2008 onwards, diffusing slowly throughout India, Indian Railways’ waste disposal workforce has been privatised in a dual process of ‘contractualisation’. First, private bidders compete for waste contracts from Indian Railways. Second, successful private bidders seek to minimise labour costs. Waste workers who were laid-off from Indian Railways and rehired privately faced a pay crash. While men supervise, the monthly take-home pay of Dalit women cleaning-labour dropped from ₹15,000 to about ₹5,000. The need to supplement these reduced earnings compelled women waste workers to toil on in unrecorded ‘after-shift shifts’ in which they segregated paper, plastic, card, metals and glass in groups of three or four, bagging and dragging them to wholesalers. The unrecorded transactions with these bulkers add ₹2,000–₹3,000 to their monthly earnings. In so doing they displace informal self-employed gatherers. These work arrangements are both politically invisibilised and politically condoned: their railway supervisors know that without this forced and informally formalised informal labour, their stations and track could not be cleaned.
Waste Produced in Distribution: The Vegetable Market: Urban Food and Biodegradable Waste
Although the town’s ‘meals hotels’ (vegetarian eateries), new fast-food joints and the 13 traders in the wholesale vegetable market are all registered with the municipality, the fruit and vegetable retail market (hundreds of stalls under plastic awnings) and the meat and fish markets (obscured in the back-streets) are unregistered. They are major generators of the kind of waste which attracts rats, feral dogs, roaming chicken, goats, pigs and cattle and which rapidly decomposes into a public health risk. Some of this rotting waste is fly-tipped just beyond the town boundary and some decomposes alongside other non-recyclable waste in landfill. The rest is raw material for re-cycling through back-street dairies, small livestock production and thousands of pigs reared in urban backyards and roaming peri-urban forests. 1 This urban-workshop animal economy is hardly touched by cash exchange before the sale of the product. Food and vegetable waste is collected as a free good every day from sites where it is dropped and is mixed domestically with husks and unwanted PDS rice to make animal feed.
In very small household enterprises, men engage with market transactions and the dumping of animal waste that joins general urban consumption waste, while rearing, milking, cleaning animals and premises and responsibility for rolling credit (Guerin, 2014) are female tasks, with the home and its stable sheds as the worksite. From a petty firm of three adult cows and two calves, monthly incomes were reported—and confirmed—at about ₹2,000. Urban family dairies may be viable in terms of their partially commodified accounts but they are insufficient to support a family. Debt penetrates dairying lives. ‘Banks—no way! One month’s default and they would confiscate our cattle…We would rather live slightly bonded to our loyal consumers than be disgraced by the banks’, explained a dairy woman.
The petty commodity production of milk faces stiff price competition from adulterated supplies from larger dairies. Political invisibility is a competitive tactic. To avoid inspection, milk is not branded, cows are uninsured and there is no collective representation. This backstreet waste-dairy economy depends on cross-subsidies from diversified household income streams. One example involved a storeroom packed with milk churns and supplemented with machines for female portfolio livelihoods adding sewing and tailoring to dairying. ‘If you rear a cow you have to work like a cow’, (ibid) and, like a cow, women have to multi-task for their livelihood.
Waste Produced in Consumption
Urban citizens act with entitlement to throw waste into urban spaces, whatever their tenurial status, whether private vacant house plots, public verges, road corners or gullies between rows of apartment blocks. It is the responsibility of local government to clear, using revenue from property and professional taxes. A pervasive culture of fiscal non-compliance starves municipal budgets. In the municipal government overseeing the case-study town, expenditure on ‘solid and liquid waste management’ is capped at 49 percentage of total revenue. Meanwhile, waste production has increased by a factor of at least four since 2000, accompanied by major changes in its composition. Non-biodegradable urban consumption waste now greatly exceeds biodegradable waste and plastic is a major element of non-biodegradable waste. At least this holds the promise of a new, ‘circular’ recycling sector for paper, card, glass, metal as well as plastic.
Municipal Labour: A ‘Failing Citadel’ of Waste Work
Parry (2020) has distinguished two classes of labour: a citadel of labour privilege with security and interests at variance with the work-life conditions of the labour class outside it. In his case, the citadel is the Bhilai steel plant, while here it is the municipal government outside which most waste-gatherers toil. But the municipal citadel itself is under threat. The higher echelons of the citadel, supervisors and engineers, are displacing the physical workforce. ‘We now cannot even pay them… We don’t replace those who retire or die’ explained an engineering contractor working for—and identifying with—the municipality. In 2000, the municipal sanitation workforce (MSW) numbered 290 and the work was inheritable. By 2015, it totalled 115 (60 women and 55 men) and the expansion of waste had not been compensated for by mechanisation.
This structural squeeze established incentives for incremental privatisation and contractual adhocism. Municipal waste work had been organised in teams of three, formally gender-equal but on declining pay for all. Permanent contracts were on the wane and from 2015 to 2019, the average monthly wage dropped from ₹15,000 to ₹10,000 plus work-related benefits (although these are riddled with delays), but with equipment so inadequate that workers provided it themselves (for instance galoshes, masks and brooms). The new, state-of-the-art electric trucks provided by the municipality were inappropriately small, such that waste-related journeys doubled in time. Ad-hoc contracts at lower pay and without work-related social security open up entry to the beneficiaries of patronage so the caste composition was less exclusively Dalit and tribal and was growing ever more male.
As a result of these changes, work conditions in the best-remunerated segment of the waste workforce were being informalised and moving towards convergence with those outside the local ‘citadel’. By 2019, the metaphor no longer held. The work could not be completed without lengthening the working day and informal sales by MSWs of recyclable waste had been officially permitted by the municipality—acknowledging that these were needed to substitute for declining formal wages. These sales then encroached on returns to the informal workforce such that, despite the constant increase in waste, competition started to replace earlier relations of tolerant co-operation between the two kinds of labour.
In addition, even by 2019, the municipality had provided no lavatories or bathing facilities for its waste workers. Apart from the irony of workers having to relieve themselves on the very verges that they clean, the absence of ‘facilities’ requires a tight control over bodily metabolism. While women MSWs may have taken an early morning swig of liquor to steel themselves for the sights and reek of their work, they take food and water only after the first long shift of the day is over and after they have bathed, prior to the second. Over decades of such self- discipline, occupation-related diseases such as kidney failure and liver disorders are reported—over and above those diseases directly attributable to work environments, such as skin infections, allergies, joint pain and upper respiratory tract disease. The MSWs were aware of the Human Rights Watch (2014) finding that 90 percentage of India’s sanitation workers die before retirement age. ‘In future, urban shit-workers will be Dalit drop-outs from far-off villages’, said one.
Relative to other niches in the public and private waste economy, the MSWs have conditions most closely approaching (though still far from) decent work but, as with the Indian Railways workforce, these conditions have been deteriorating and their contractual security has been threatened. Treated with bureaucratic contempt, women have been given training by the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU). Yet while their leaders are knowledgeable and articulate, waste had low priority and visibility on the agenda of labour politics which exercises the union. Patriarchal union politics invisibilise women MSWs.
Sub-contracted Private Capital
Such is the crisis of public expenditure and workforce cost-squeeze that by 2019 the municipality had auctioned a third of its streets to private bidders. These are only able to undercut the public budget by slashing labour costs in a double kind of informality. First, bonded long-distance migrant labour were recruited on verbal contracts lacking in benefits. Men and women formed pairs, each earning about ₹8,000 a month. Second, these workers supplemented their pay with after shift informal work, supplying markets for recycling. Like so much of the waste workforce, this labour is not politically visible: with no union, compromised capacity to communicate in the local language and no access to the PDS and other elements of social security, let alone education if children are brought along. Yet their unregistered work is essential to the urban economy.
Informal Markets and Supply Chains for Re-processing Consumption Waste
Roughly half of the small-town consumption waste can now be recycled (a proportion not dissimilar to that of Oxford, where I work). 2 Controlling the local urban process of identification, segregation and bulking of inputs for re-processing is a caste-fortified network of male bulkers and scrapyard controllers. They are supplied by large but unknown number of unregistered collectors/gatherers who, by gathering, segregating, cleaning and bagging, transform waste into raw materials. This workforce is further increased by cleaning labour in schools, colleges, office complexes, hospitals and the bus and railway stations, which ‘super exploits’ itself by prolonging its working day.
The apex scrapyard employs 75 local women from Backward and Scheduled Castes together with 50 long-distance migrant men. They clean (again), segregate (again)—up to 200 classifications—and pack raw material for recycling and reprocessing. Conditions of work involve high-velocity activity on long shifts (9+ hours a day for 6+ days a week, with no paid holidays and selective compensation for work-related accidents on the basis of patronage). But for the female workforce, it is experienced as ‘liberation’ from the only available alternative: agricultural labour. The ‘regular casual wages’ from waste work—₹4,800 a month for women and ₹7,200 for men—are regarded as superior to the seasonal peaks and troughs of labour demand in agriculture. However ‘you don’t age gracefully in this job’ and ₹I’ve sat in this position on this cement floor for 10 years’, said women segregators.
Not Being Fully Human and Dump-yard Work
‘Working like animals isn’t the same as being treated as animals’, reflected a tribal woman. While in 2015, MSWs ‘kindly’ allowed unregistered Scheduled Tribe gatherers to do a sweep of the town at dawn before their first shift, by 2019 the deterioration in MSW pay resulting from stressed public finances put paid to this. MSWs collected recyclables themselves and displaced self-employed tribal labour. The municipality then conceded one urban ward as free for tribal workers to clean.
These workers are ‘permanent transients’, being evicted for generation upon generation from work routes and living spaces by public officials and caste competitors. Without a patta (title to a house plot), without certificates giving access to education, with an oral culture, few children are schooled and adults feel ‘easily fooled’. Bonded to wholesalers by equipment as well as loans, they face price discrimination of up to 50 percentage lower than Dalits for their segregated and bagged supplies. Women face sexual harassment, despite being referred to as beasts by their harassers. In need of physical protection, they work collectively in small male-female groups foraging on the dump-yard, gathering waste from wedding halls (and also working in brick yards and kilns). For this, they may get ₹3,000–₹4,000 a month.
These people are not simply socially excluded—through lack of access to the state—they are actively socially expelled—though oppressive and cruel treatment by society. Shunned and dehumanised (by people they meet) they are abjectly dependent on employment guaran- tee schemes, the PDS—to which they have flawed access through intermediaries—and on begging.
The Production of Waste in the Production of Labour: Human Shit
‘The removal of shit is the last thing people in this town think about’ declared one of the MSWs familiar with this work. When the manual scavenging of human faeces was abolished in 1993, both the demand and the supply sides of this aspect of urban waste changed in ways that generated new problems for workers. Female sanitation work was de-reserved and disinherited, a recruitment process was set in motion that destroyed the security of new jobs. Opportunities became ever more dependent on patronage and masculinisation was set in train.
On the supply side, by 2016, half the town’s buildings had septic tanks. These are often sunk to incorrect specifications, frequently too small, rarely voided with appropriate frequency (‘once a generation or when there is a wedding’, we were told by a sludge-cleaning tanker owner). The municipality has stopped providing faecal sludge removal as a public service and yet the two private fleets are underutilised. The town has no faecal sludge treatment so that faecal sludge is dumped in local lakes and riverbeds, which it toxifies. For this practice, septic tanker owners are fined (in private complicity) by the police.
While the other half of the town deposits human waste into pits and open drains, many of the town’s septic tanks are also designed (with encouragement from posters in the municipality) to drain into open drains crammed with general waste. In the span of 5 years over which we studied this town, a woman MSW explained ‘more and more waste is complicated, horrible and jumbled up in drains. It’s new—the sanitary wipes, diapers, sanitary napkins, tampons and incontinence pads muddled in the drains with used plastic, glass, metals, paper and cardboard and food waste’. Waste collection on verges is dry waste and women’s work. Waste in drains is wet waste and men’s work. So, over the last quarter century, human waste has moved from being the worst work for women to being a disgusting and complicated addition to male MSW and subcontracted male-labour time. All wet waste now has to be cleaned before sorting and segregating. In addition, the impossibility of completely sorting faeces from other consumption waste adds to dump-yard non-recyclables and subtracts from raw material for reprocessing.
Physically obvious, at the time of writing, the disposal of human waste is politically and socially invisible in this town.
The Production of Waste in the Reproduction of Society: Medical Housekeeping
If a society is unhealthy, its capacity to reproduce across the generations is compromised. The healthcare sector is vitally important to social reproduction. India spends on health one of the lowest proportions of GDP in the world. 3 Its several health systems are some of the most privatised and informalised too (Brhilkova et al., 2009). The town we studied hosts an allopathic healthcare cluster with one large government hospital, six large private ones and about 50 private clinics—all formally registered. The waste generated by health institutions is mainly handled as general ‘consumption’ waste (e.g., food and human waste). The productive-therapeutic aspects of healthcare vary greatly in their generation of waste—operating theatres, maternity and labour wards and diagnostic labs generate most, while paediatrics generates little.
A small proportion of this waste is infectious or otherwise dangerous to health (needles and sharps; plastic syringes; blood transfusion, blood products and bloody waste; soiled cotton and cloth; drug bottles; saline and glucose bottles; body parts). It is termed medical waste and strictly regulated in a separate system of segregation, collection, incineration and burial (Hodges, 2017). The medical waste of the public and larger private hospitals is recorded, segregated and sent for burial because the region’s incinerator has been closed after a public outcry about its polluting effects on local villages. Medical waste from the smaller private hospitals and clinics is segregated inside their campuses. However, once outside, its classifications unravel as it enters the system of general consumption waste and heads for unregistered segregation or for the dump yard.
The mostly Dalit cleaners of general and infectious waste in hospitals and clinics are called housekeepers but their work demands versatility. For women, heavy waste work may be combined with theatre attendance or the labour ward, for which illiterate housekeepers may have to ‘learn by doing’—and to do this in English. Increasingly long shifts are incompatible with domestic work, which has to be performed by other family members. Housekeeping contracts combine being both oral and permanent: about ₹7,500 a month with discretionary perks on sliding scales according to loyalty. Housekeepers operate politically well under the radar, expressing a disinclination to be organised. They have incentives to keep complicit in the flexibility of their tasks and contracts and in their dependence on relations of patronage to their employers for their livelihoods.
Discussion
These snapshots of the production and disposal of waste in the circuits of capital in the urban economy provoke three kinds of questions about women and waste.
How is this sector institutionally regulated? To what extent is the informal economy a refuge which operates with a logic different from that of capitalist accumulation?
How are property ownership and the labour process gendered? What are the economic and social consequences?
What is the gendered significance of collective, self-managed activity in the ‘everyday praxis’ of caste and ethnicity in this urban waste economy?
Question 1: Regulation of the Waste Economy
The waste economy is not marginal or separate, but integrally part of India’s capitalist economy, with a similar distribution of assets, class formation and forms of organisation. As with Jeffery et al. (1989) ‘dung-work’ where dung was mostly for use, so here where waste is both a ‘public bad’ and a raw material for private exchange, waste straddles productive and reproductive work. But in so doing it creates negative value (destroying land, toxifying soil, water and air) as well as positive value (in markets for raw materials for reprocessing) and zero value (as inert waste).
The capitalist logic of commodification, of privatisation, contractualisation and casualisation is diffusing through the state and prevailing over the logic of public service. The labour ‘citadel’ of the local municipality is unable to resist the process of aggressive informalisation, with wages, earnings and effective work rights on the decline throughout the system, while profit to private capital is unsteadily consolidating itself. Overdetermined by stretched public funds in the registered formal economy and thus by contractualisation, the informal economy of waste is integrated into the structure of the Indian economy and regulated through informal institutions.
Social identity, expressed through caste and ethnicity, has naturalised waste collection as a Dalit domain though the sector is cosmopolitanising and non-Dalit capital has entered the sector. Such is the stigma of waste-work however that human identity itself is at stake in some tribal groups enacted through super-exploitation and de-humanising treatment. ‘Animals are treated better than we are’ said one worker, oppressed by relations which exemplify Johan Galtung’s structure of violence. For the most part, caste-based discrimination is not expressed among workers at work so much as in work-based relations with urban society outside work. A Dalit MSW put it this way: ‘Outside work we are called kuppaikaran (trashman) and scavengers. This is India! But non-Dalit sanitation workers are called municipal staff and they soon take the jobs in lorry driving and supervising or sub-contract out their jobs’. Abuse stemming from the ascriptive status of a group may be being replaced by discrimination on the basis of an individual’s lack of capabilities: illiteracy, poverty, dirt and alcohol consumption. Deliege’s paradox of marginality developed for ‘untouchables’ covers the low caste informal labour force here—socially marginalised yet materially essential (Deliege, 2001). While they work unregistered and without rights to work, rights at work and rights to social security, without them the urban economy could not function and its population would fall sick.
The waste economy is also regulated by gender for it remains a persistent target of discriminatory patriarchal practices: lower pay, name-calling (sometimes by upper-caste women) and sexual harassment—as we see below.
Question 2. The Gendering of Property and Work
With the exception of a female manager of a private company subcontracted to the municipality, property ownership in the waste economy is male, though private micro-assets are needed and protected to be able to perform public sector work. Although the informal workforce is unknown, it is likely to be 10–15 times bigger than that of the municipality, and likely to be disproportionately feminised. While the municipal sanitation workforce is being masculinised and casualised, labour works in male–female couples for private companies, in families and task-segregated groups under verbal contracts and agreements and in the informal economy. Women tend to be concentrated in arduous, dirty, manual/menial labour.
Women get livelihoods from working in a vast range of waste substances, some disgusting, often toxic. Not always Dalit, the female workforce in waste is highly differentiated by tasks and niche in the urban waste eco-system, by income, precarity, contact with filth and degree of organisation. Women occupy the kinds of ‘fractured niches’ that Kapadia (2017) has evoked for Dalit women’s work in general. Local women are often forced to work alongside migrant men whose language they cannot understand.
In the municipal division of work—wet and dry waste—women report having to substitute for men but not vice versa. In private subcontracted companies, there is no provision for childcare, poor housing (sometimes tents), no access to public distribution rations, fluid contracts depending on loyalty and the employer’s discretion. Whether in the formal or informal waste economy, women’s work is strenuous and involves shifts so long that they are hard to combine with childcare and household reproductive work. Little to no provision is made in the workplace by any employer for the biological and social needs of women.
Secure contracts on pay scales, with work rights and social security eligibility are being replaced by ad hoc contracts, with a half to two-thirds drop in pay, minimal work-related rights and increasing sex discrimination in wages. Informal wages/earnings now hover around the poverty line, and access to subsidised public goods and the social safety net which act to increase real earnings is the more flawed the more they are needed.
Question 3: Collective Organisation and Solidary Economy
While there are no NGOs or self-help groups championing alternative modes of economic behaviour and solidary economy among workers in this small-town waste economy, waste workers may belong to collective organisations such as trades unions, caste associations and kinship work groups. They may also behave in ways at variance with short-term, profit-maximising logic. Some waste items such as clothes are exchanged in barter relations determined by custom as well as the market prices of non-waste barter items. Some working groups share their takings. Others share their ration cards. But work groups are often imposed by employers. The waste sector on the whole does not operate with a logic at variance with that of the rest of the informalised capitalist economy.
Institutions of collective action are small scale and multipurpose. With differing legal status, they may address non-economic problems of their membership (such as land titles, dispute resolution and lack of respect) in which productive and socially reproductive activity can be meshed—in the way pointed out by Jeffery et al. (1989). They are not capable of opposition to the capitalist economy. At best collective action attempts to make it work better in the socially fractured collective interests. And the many problems of waste workers as waste workers are only represented through their identities as Dalits and Adivasis.
Women are marginalised in these collective institutions. CITU’s women’s section succeeds in being cross-caste but it is also cross- occupation. Its local leaders of the female MSWs report little (unexpected) success and much failure. The work lives of women waste- workers are consistent with Kapadia’s (2017) analysis of the politics of Dalit working women in Chennai slums: expressed through their similar behaviour in individual struggles in ‘everyday praxis’ bridging work-sites, productive work in public space and domestic labour.
Shit-work
At the outset we saw, in the equation of dung-work with shit-work, that the concept of shit-work could be used literally to denote the handling of dung, and figuratively to denote low status, menial and poorly valued work. In this study of small-town waste, the literal concept of shit-work—readily volunteered and recognised in Tamil—developed depths hitherto unappreciated. First, the material of shit-work involved aggregating human and animal shit, animal carcasses and other kinds of human waste secreted into soiled padding. Second, the mixing of shit with other consumption waste in drains and gullies greatly expands the composition of shit-stuff and the work needed to decontaminate it. Third, shit-work also involves the work of shitting in public spaces, for which municipal workers, forced by the humiliating lack of municipal ‘conveniences’, are mocked and stigmatised. Yet fourth, the clearing of shit in public spaces is most often done not by women but by men these days as part of their gendered, wet-waste work.
As a figurative concept, the entire waste sector is stigmatised as a sector for shit-work but more oppressively so for women. Women work harder for longer hours, lower pay and fewer social entitlements. Yet, both literally and figuratively, while shit-work is low-paid, dirty and low status—as a sector it is not a barrier to accumulation. The state has few difficulties subcontracting this work to private and corporate capital.
One of the women trade union leaders declared in frustration during our third meeting in 2019 that waste needs a workforce organised and equipped like the Indian army. ‘Waste disposal should be organised through the Government of India like the police and army and not through arbitrary schemes like Swachh Bharat, or cash-starved municipalities, let alone self-help groups’ she said. But the state, embodying upper-caste, waste-throwing interests, is part of the problem not the solution. India’s waste economy is a cultural artefact as well as a physical hazard. Only when the practices and economy of waste are disengaged from patriarchy and caste, and waste management is adequately publicly funded and organised, is the waste economy likely to be technologically transformed and work conditions approach decency. Since that is unlikely to happen, in the meanwhile waste will become one of India’s most obtrusive development problems, with low-caste women waste-workers toiling everywhere at their indispensable shit-work.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge the help of Gilbert Rodrigo in fieldwork and of the NGO ‘GUIDE’ in housing the fieldwork over 2015–2019. This article is a shortened re-written version of a chapter entitled ‘Taking Dung-work Seriously: Women’s Shit-work in Waste’, to be published in H. Gorringe, S. Chaudhry and R. Chopra (Eds), Gender in South Asia and Beyond: A Festschrift in Honour of Patricia Jeffery, Zubaan and University of Chicago Press, and with their kind permission to publish this version.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.