“We Are Not Just Illiterate Dalits; We Are Workers and This Is Our Union” Ascending Formal Labour Geographies Among Informal Waste Pickers in Bangalore, India

This paper engages with a hyper-marginalised cohort of urban informal workers in India, i.e., waste pickers and their recently registered waste-worker union, Tyajya Shramika Sangha (TSS), in Bangalore. I place this research at the crossroads of everyday work informality, struggles around worker identity and dignity, and the materialisation of worker agency. This research intends to contribute to the ongoing theoretical evolution of labour geographies and recounts some of the emergent activist forms in informal workspaces in the global south.

Despite their numbers and the importance of their work, informal waste workers struggle to maintain their right to waste. They suffer existential precarity, private sector participation in municipal solid waste management (which, by design, alienates them), and loss of rights over waste. In this changing waste scene, this paper asks how this workforce, as part of a vast infra-economy, engages, responds, and negotiates with the diverse and changing world of waste management.

The formation of TSS has marked a milestone in the Indian informal urban underclass struggles and movements at manifold intensities. A major component is affirming their agency within a traditional worker association structure and entering negotiating spaces while dealing with municipal and other authoritarian bodies. While the hierarchies of caste, class, and gender both circumscribe and are circumscribed by waste work, equally intriguing is the overt effort to claim their worker identity over and above their Dalit under-caste identity when they state: “...we are not illiterate Dalits alone; we are workers; this is our union.”

This assertion is noteworthy to explore in the Indian context, as we have some of the largest membership-based organisations of informal workers across diverse employment, and are mostly organised not just around worker status but around caste, religion, language, region and gender, precisely because work in India is deeply entrenched within socio-cultural identity.