Precarious Stateness: How Construction Workers in Beijing and Delhi Navigate Informality in Claim-Making

The construction sector is a key driver of economic growth in both China and India, and the largest employer of internal migrant workers in both countries. Yet practices of subcontracting, endemic within the construction sector, give rise to problems of informality which severely undermine this huge population of workers’ means of claim-making. Within the lower echelons of the subcontracting hierarchy, agreements between construction workers and petty subcontractors are largely verbal. Without any written contracts, however, workers face difficulties in establishing formal labor relations between themselves and their employers, and, in turn, obstacles in accessing labor protections from the state, or social protections predicated on documented labor market participation. Based on a comparative ethnographic study of construction workers in Beijing and Delhi, and more specifically, through tracing citizen-state interactions in instances of rights contestation, this paper argues for the central role played by the state in constructing categories of informality which relegates certain market practices, and with them, citizens on whom these practices are imposed, to outside the purview of the state. Furthermore, the comparison between the experience of construction workers in Beijing and that of workers in Delhi highlights the distinction between exogenous informality, arising out of the construction of boundaries of stateness, and endogenous informality, arising within the realm of stateness out of jurisdictional fragmentation. I argue that, whereas construction workers in Beijing are hindered from making claims upon the state due to exogenous informality, that is, falling outside the purview of the state, construction workers in Delhi are doubly burdened both by exogenous informality and by endogenous informality.