Labour

I find it helpful to find a theme around which to take photos, rather than just looking for the random good shots. One of the themes I'm working on as we travel is labour.

Human labour is India's antique coal-burning engine: its been around forever, its not glamorous, no-one wants to talk about it much, it has many negative consequences, but man is it stolid and reliable. For every Bangalorean tech-worker there must be a pyramid of thousands of labourers who make his day possible.

Lets start with the roads. In Canada, our roads are laid on crushed gravel. Ever wonder where that comes from? It comes from gravel pits where huge front-loaders feed bucketfulls of raw gravel into massive crushing machines that spit out smaller crushed gravel, that is then loaded into other crushing machines, etc. Then the finished product is loaded into dumptrucks and taken to site. Simple.

In India, there is a man with a pick. Or, better, thousands of men with picks. They will all be incredibly skinny, wiry, clothed in a threadbare lungi and a soiled tanktop. They will all be barefoot, or at most wearing simple sandals. The only thing that will really vary is their age: from teen right up to grey-haired grandpa. There are no Safety Regulations, no WCB...and if there is, the beaurocrats are well paid to look away when the pick-head from one man's tool flies off and imbeds itself in the skull of the fourteen year old boy working next to him.

They will chip away at the raw rocks until they are small enough to be loaded, by hand, into a truck. The truck will drive the rock to site. There, along the highway and forever one step from death, more men will smash and chip the rock even smaller, to lets say two inches across. Then women, dressed in full-length saris in the angry heat and fume, will scoop a load of crushed gravel into a wicker basket, place it on their heads, walk whatever distance necessary, and spread out the gravel. This will continue for every fresh meter of sealed road, every long kilometer.

There is absolutely no concern for speed or efficiency. In an economy where labour is so cheap, and the unemployed so many, it is far less expensive to pay thousands of hands a pittance to do the work of one modern machine. Further, the workers themselves have zero reason to desire efficiency: this is their only work, and they may consider themselves damn lucky to have it. A big, fast, sexy Western machine could mean the end of their entire extended family's only income.

I don't have any photos of roadbuilders yet. I'm working on it. The following photos are of labourers constructing a granite retaining wall beneath a temple in Hampi. Notice their 'protective' workwear. Notice also that each stone is far too heavy to lift, so it must be wrestled, inch by inch, into position...after first being winched (again by hand) up to the top of the wall on that tottering pulley apparatus next to them. In Canada stones this large would be placed by machine. I was there around an hour, but I nearly saw a man lose his leg when the stone slipped out of its chains. While they are not permitted to actually dig (using tools is 'man's work'), the women form a kind of earth-moving chain gang. It was around 11:00Am and 35C.





In Canada, we use a lawnmower to cut grass. In India, you hire a group of five or six poor men and women, and tell them to bring their own scythe. You will then have a hand-cut lawn. Jobs like this are referred to as 'people-helping' jobs because they employ so many. The last stat I could find claimed that India's National Daily Average Income was around fifty rupees per day, or a touch over a dollar.



Another common 'people-helping' job is street-sweeping. This profession has been around long enough to have its own caste varna. In my experience, if you ask any university educated middle-class Indian whether caste still exists in India he or she will flatly deny it, or at least understate its contemporary import. What won't be mentioned is that the multitude of ancient castes have essentailly been collapsed and solidified into two far more familiar ones: the Haves and the Ain't Gots. And (surprise!) the old-skool caste impoverished fall neatly into the 21st Century Ain't Gots, except now they lack even the small cultural and social security once gained from belonging to a caste community. We're over that now; move on. You're traditions are backward. Bring your family to the city and make money: drive a rickshaw. (I'm not arguing for caste segregation...just comparing its likeness to class.)


A peculiar aspect of labour in India is its infinite divisability. What a Westerner may consider 'one job' an Indian can easlily subdivide into four or five. Take the chai-wallah (vendor), for example. It's maybe a two-person job: one to make the chai and one to deal with customers. But at some chai shops there's one employee to take your order. He then tells another man, who takes your money and tells the tea-maker himself. Another guy will give you change, and yet another will finally hand over your hot chai. There! Five people employed.

Physical labour dominates Indian industry, from the large tea manufacturers who still use old women to sort their leaves by hand, to the simple street conconut vendor, to the production of jaggery (hard suger/molasses candy) from ground sugarcane:









Ten points for you if you guessed the logging truck in the above photo wasn't loaded by a machine. And as an aside, the locals we were standing with guessed it was loaded to over three times its capacity. Now that's efficiency!