Anyone who has visited India—and perhaps any overcrowded country with a large pool of low-skilled labor—is struck by the sophisticated division of labor found in different spaces, both public and private.
Not only in the most obvious place for a visitor, hotels, where you can see how each employee is assigned a specific task, for example, scrubbing the front steps, but also in shops, where there are sometimes more employees what customers.
In the wealthy homes of Delhi -I am not referring to large mansions, but more or less spacious flats- there can be four or five service people who are each in charge of different tasks: from washing the floors to cook,
That doesn't necessarily include chopping vegetables that may be someone else's responsibility.
Like any social system, it is a functional system that responds to the objective situation of the country: with large sectors of the unqualified population, as I have already mentioned, and a great social polarization, those who have a little more can have access to the services from others in exchange for small wages.
Distributing resources among the largest possible number of individuals constitutes a mechanism of micro-employment in middle-class homes that is understood almost as a moral obligation.
In principle, this proportionally small group of privileged people benefits from the situation, so their incentive to push for better education for the bulk of the population that contributes to reducing inequality is low.
Like any social system, it is a functional system that responds to the objective situation of the country: with large sectors of the unqualified population, as I have already mentioned, and a great social polarization, those who have a little more can have access to the services from others in exchange for small wages.
Distributing resources among the largest possible number of individuals constitutes a mechanism of micro-employment in middle-class homes that is understood almost as a moral obligation.
In principle, this proportionally small group of privileged people benefits from the situation, so their incentive to push for better education for the bulk of the population that contributes to reducing inequality is low.
Like any social system, it is a functional system that responds to the objective situation of the country: with large sectors of the unqualified population, as I have already mentioned, and a great social polarization, those who have a little more can have access to the services from others in exchange for small wages.
Distributing resources among the largest possible number of individuals constitutes a mechanism of micro-employment in middle-class homes that is understood almost as a moral obligation.
In principle, this proportionally small group of privileged people benefits from the situation, so their incentive to push for better education for the bulk of the population that contributes to reducing inequality is low.
With large sectors of the unskilled population, as I have already mentioned, and a great social polarization, those who have a little more can have the services of others in exchange for small salaries.
Distributing resources among the largest possible number of individuals constitutes a mechanism of micro-employment in middle-class homes that is understood almost as a moral obligation.
In principle, this proportionally small group of privileged people benefits from the situation, so their incentive to push for better education for the bulk of the population that contributes to reducing inequality is low.
With large sectors of the unskilled population, as I have already mentioned, and a great social polarization, those who have a little more can have the services of others in exchange for small salaries.
Distributing resources among the largest possible number of individuals constitutes a mechanism of micro-employment in middle-class homes that is understood almost as a moral obligation.
In principle, this proportionally small group of privileged people benefits from the situation, so their incentive to push for better education for the bulk of the population that contributes to reducing inequality is low.
Distributing resources among the largest possible number of individuals constitutes a mechanism of micro-employment in middle-class homes that is understood almost as a moral obligation.
In principle, this proportionally small group of privileged people benefits from the situation, so their incentive to push for better education for the bulk of the population that contributes to reducing inequality is low.
Distributing resources among the largest possible number of individuals constitutes a mechanism of micro-employment in middle-class homes that is understood almost as a moral obligation.
In principle, this proportionally small group of privileged people benefits from the situation, so their incentive to push for better education for the bulk of the population that contributes to reducing inequality is low.
It is not difficult to understand that, if the only occupation that one has been assigned is sweeping the landing of a store or cutting vegetables in a house, do it calmly and with dedication.
In the sociology of work, this slowness and zeal in the execution of a task is interpreted, in addition to being a strategy against boredom, as a way of taking over the work from the boss, that is, of empowering oneself (remember the go-to-zealous strikes with which the workers have historically shown their resistance in the assembly lines).
From this perspective, it is worth asking whether the unskilled worker in India is not more the owner of his work today than the precarious worker in developed societies.
As the sociologist Saskia Sassen and other authors have exposed in recent decades, globalized, financial and technological capitalism,
it feeds more and more on a (new) proletariat, fundamentally urban, of precarious workers.
Initially composed of immigrants from the developing world, rural migrants and marginal groups, generally low-skilled;
educated workers begin to form part of it.
Consider the domestic worker in a large western city, typically hired by the hour, who is expected to complete a (usually large) series of tasks within a predetermined time.
Meanwhile, the domestic worker in India, with less defined hours, with even fewer tasks for her, can perform them at a more leisurely pace.
Without the pressure of constantly looking at the clock, without having to move from one house to another throughout the day, she has, potentially,
Of course, it is not about idealizing or claiming the conditions of the unskilled worker in India, but about observing something very concrete.
It could be that his parsimonious work, carried out without the expectation of efficiency, serves to reflect on old and new forms of worker resistance in the first world at the dawn of cybernetic feudalism.
The debate on submission
versus
The autonomy of the worker is an old debate, but it takes on a particular urgency in the face of the new reality that developed societies are experiencing, where the trend is that an ever smaller group of people benefits from the low-skilled, hyper-supervised and insecure work of a large number of workers. growing number of workers, more and more accelerated, dehumanized and indistinguishable from the robots that dictate their tasks.
If the problem in our societies, as the French thinker Jacques Ellul argued, is the
diktat
of efficiency, it will be necessary to begin to dismantle the concept and resist it.
For Ellul, the logic of efficiency is characterized by the search for the most economical means in terms of resources and time to carry out a certain activity and standardize it.
According to the author, in the evolution of developed societies towards an ever greater degree of efficiency, the means or process to obtain a predetermined result has ended up becoming the end in itself: controlling precisely how and in what how long the worker executes his task matters more than the result of his activity.
Faced with this dynamic, and paraphrasing one of the thinker's most famous quotes, parsimony must be assimilated and put into practice: “I can do more and faster… but I don't want to”.
Olivia Muñoz-Rojas
is a PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics and an independent researcher.
oliviamunozrojasblog.com
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