Revision summary
Capitalism cheapens labour by expanding uncovered, insecure work. Marx’s reserve army and subcontracting are the mechanisms. Hart and Breman refute the leftover story. Women’s home-based work and gig apps show the present. PLFS: a small regular core, a large informal majority. Increasing: flexibility as competitive strategy, not only persistence of farms.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
Capitalism did not only build the formal factory. It also produces insecure, uncovered work as a flexible shell around the core. Informalisation is increasing where contracts thin, chains lengthen, and platforms rent labour without employing it. The claim can be substantiated.
Body
Why capitalism informalises
- Karl Marx’s reserve army and the need to cheapen labour explain expulsion from the protected core.
- Profit seeks to shed social security. Subcontracting and piece-rates push risk down the chain, which world-system writers after A. G. Frank also mapped globally.
- Max Weber’s formal organisation exists; capital uses it for some and denies it to others.
Historical substantiation
- Keith Hart named the informal sector; Jan Breman showed Indian circular migrants as the normal capitalist labour process, not a pre-modern leftover.
- Deindustrialisation in the North replaced mill jobs with casual services. Daniel Bell’s post-industrial hope missed this.
- Export garment and electronics chains rest on home-based and workshop labour, much of it women, as feminist labour studies show.
Indian and platform evidence
- PLFS and Census class-of-worker data show a large self-employed and casual majority beside a small regular-wage sliver.
- Gig apps present a fetish of self-employment while controlling time and rating, a Marxist appearance with a Weberian digital cage.
- SEWA’s constituency grew because the form grew.
Increasing, not only persistent
- Formalisation drives can coexist with new informal layers: contractors inside “formal” firms.
- Global competition after liberalisation rewarded flexibility more than the standard employment relation.
Qualification
- Some sectors still formalise. The trend the question names is the expanding insecure shell, not the death of every factory Act.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD CAP[Capitalist accumulation] --> FLEX[Shed security] FLEX --> INF[Informalisation] CHAIN[Global subcontract] --> INF GIG[Platforms] --> INF CORE[Formal core] --> FLEX
Conclusion
Capitalism increases informalisation by using uncovered labour as a cheap, flexible condition of accumulation. Marx, Hart, Breman, and feminist home-work studies substantiate the mechanism. Indian PLFS and gig platforms substantiate the present. The factory was never the whole of capitalist work; it is less of it now.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Discuss the consequences of Across Region marriage on kinship system in modern Indian society.
Next question on this syllabus topic (2020 · Q3(c)). View answer →
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Is informalisation the same as poverty?
Many informal workers are poor. Some traders are not. The mark is insecurity of contract and cover.
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Did the welfare state end this in the West?
It compressed it for a time in some cores. Casual services and migrants reopened the shell.
Same topic · past papers
UPSC has asked this before
These previous-year questions sit on the same topic. Open one to practise the earlier ask.
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2017 · Q5(a) · Sociology GS 1 · 10 marks
What do you understand by informalisation of labour '? Write your answer with special reference to India
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