patronage and class in urbanpakistan

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PATRONAGE AND CLASS IN URBANPAKISTANAasim Sajjad AkhtarPublished online: 01 Jun 2011.

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Akhtar / Patronage and Class

PATRONAGE AND CLASSIN URBAN PAKISTAN

Modes of Labor Controlin the Contractor Economy

Aasim Sajjad Akhtar

ABSTRACT: Of the rich academic literature that has emerged on the growth and dyna-mism of the “informal economy” in South Asia in recent years very little work hasfocused on the Pakistani context. This article builds upon the growing body of workon “informal employment” by identifying and explaining modes of labor control inthe housing construction industry in metropolitan Pakistan. The crucial role of thesubcontractor and his exploitative relationship with workers is discussed in a Gram-scian framework. Workers are ensconced in a hegemonic relationship withcontractors due to oppressive structural conditions as well as a culture of depend-ency that contractors have nurtured. Against the backdrop of the shift from Fordistto flexible accumulation regimes, the author argues that the present conjuncture ismarked by the prevalence of extra-economic forms of control such that workersconceive of contractors as patrons. The instrumentalization of cultural norms of rec-iprocity by contractors does not mean that the labor–capital relationship isunchanging and rooted in “culture.” In fact, personalized patronage networks coex-ist with impersonal market ethics dynamically so as to produce and sustain thehegemony of capital.

A consensus is growing in scholarly as well as policy circles that the “informalsector” is here to stay.1 Through the 1970s and 1980s the mainstream viewchampioned by the International Labour Organization (ILO) was that the infor-mal sector was marginal and that it would eventually be subsumed into theformal sector. Instead, the informal sector has grown steadily, mostly in south-

Critical Asian Studies43:2 (2011), 159–184

ISSN 1467-2715 print/1472-6033 online / 02 / 000159–26 ©2011 BCAS, Inc. DOI:10.1080/14672715.2011.570565

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ern countries but also in the North.2 The ILO has documented that over half theworkforce in Latin America, over 70 per cent in Sub-Saharan Africa, and over 80percent in India is informalized.3

In this article I build upon the considerable amount of scholarly literature oninformality that adopts a “worker-centered perspective.”4 A large majority ofworkers in the global South, it is now recognized, are subject to “informal” la-bor arrangements, including workers in the “formal” sector. Among the moreprominent exponents of the informal employment concept are the Govern-ment of India’s National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector(Nceus) and the Multilateral Expert (Delhi) Group on Informal Sector Statistics.While the focus of most research on informal employment remains the specificconditions of work, modes of labor control, particularly subcontracted (includ-ing home-based) labor, are receiving increased attention.5

It seems intuitive to argue that the sheer lack of power of the working class isboth cause and consequence of informal employment, including subcon-tracted work. Indeed there is little doubt that owners, managers, andmiddlemen of various kinds impose exploitative conditions upon workers andthat the latter are typically unaware of and unable to secure their basic rights (asenvisaged under Pakistan’s constitutional framework and international laborcovenants). I contend, however, that domination must be examined in Gram-scian terms; in the context that I have researched—construction workers inurban Pakistan—contractors are able to induce the consent of workers byinstrumentalizing cultural norms of reciprocity (which are far from unchang-ing). As I will explain, this is a hegemonic state of affairs insofar as capitalvalorizes and reproduces its domination over labor.

My case study is the housing construction industry in metropolitan Pakistan.6

Details of my fieldwork and research methodology are given below. It is impor-tant to note that very little available literature is available on informalemployment in the Pakistani context. This is in sharp contrast to India, which isthe site of considerable research on informalization, a literature upon whichthis article draws. Barbara Harriss-White’s insights about the informal economy

160 Critical Asian Studies 43:2 (2011)

1. The term “informal economy” is now increasingly replacing “informal sector.” The change re-flects an acknowledgment of the historical realities of actually existing capitalism. Recentscholarship has even expanded the terms of the debate and posited the existence within the in-formal economy of a “non-capitalist production space,” or what can be thought of as a “needeconomy.” See Sanyal and Bhattacharyya 2009.

2. Scholars such as Sassia Sassken (2001) have illustrated how rapid informalization is takingplace in the citadels of global capitalism such as New York City.

3. International Labour Organization 2002. By informal labor I mean workers who do not enjoylegal recognition and entitlements, often work without written contracts, and, with excep-tions, are not collectively organized. Examples include self-employed vendors, landless wagelaborers in rural areas, and subcontracted workers of the kind I document in this article.

4. Such a perspective requires an in-depth analysis of the “composition, causes and conse-quences” of informal employment arrangements. See Chen et al. 2006: 2132–33.

5. For our purposes, “informal employment” refers to wage employment without the security oftenure or protection under formal law, and, additionally, widespread subcontracting prac-tices.

6. The research on surgical instruments and powerlooms was in two cities: Sialkot and Faisala-bad, respectively. Housing construction was in Islamabad/Rawalpindi.

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in India offer a good starting point for the present discussion.7 For Harriss-White, the “intermediate classes,” namely, the self-employed, kulak farmers,traders, merchant money lenders, and other groups associated with the second-ary and tertiary sectors of the agrarian economy are the dynamic new face ofmodern India. My research confirms Harriss-White’s contention that the inter-mediate classes are ruthless, rely on personalized patronage networks, and“rise to dominance not only through a marriage of convenience with the Statebut also through the particular way power is practiced in and through markets.”

I will show how the exploitation of subcontracted workers is reproducedthrough a complex relationship with the housing subcontractor. This relation-ship is a microcosm of the “personalized impersonalism” of capitalism in asouthern society such as Pakistan. Importantly, current modes of labor control,and extra-economic coercion more specifically, differ from (ideal-type) pa-tron–client relations of a pre-capitalist variety, notwithstanding the apparentsimilarities. This point will be reinforced in an examination of recent literaturefrom a variety of social contexts, highlighting the fact that the existence of pa-tronage relations does not preclude the possibility of political action. Thus inspecifying the hegemony of capital over labor in the current conjuncture I rejectexplanations that reduce the dynamic capital–labor relation to a patron–clientstasis that is embedded in an unchanging “culture.”

Nevertheless one of the questions that motivates this study is why hierarchi-cal authority relations of patronage, which are typically associated with

Akhtar / Patronage and Class 1617. Harriss-White 2003 and 2005.

Workers such as this laborer in Rawalpindi “are ensconced in a hegemonic relationshipwith contractors due to oppressive structural conditions as well as a culture of dependencythat contractors have nurtured.” (Credit: ILO Photo/Crozet M., October 2005)

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status-bound rural settings, are so prominent in the relatively more mobile ur-ban working environment. At the level of theory such case studies raise criticalquestions about the teleological strands in orthodox Marxist thinking aboutmodernity insofar as they illustrate that the prototype of an alienated urbanworking class removed from all bonds of the “past” is conspicuous by its ab-sence in postcolonial societies such as Pakistan. Indeed I believe that it isnecessary to think of the relationship between culture, politics, and economicsin dynamic terms. In this regard I will interrogate the relationship between cul-tural norms of reciprocity, the manner in which such norms are politicized bythe state and dominant classes, and objective economic changes brought aboutby the shift from Fordist to flexible accumulation strategies.

My specific aim in this article is to explain how the housing subcontractor ex-ercises power in and through the labor market in the Pakistani housingconstruction industry. Importantly, however, I focus not only on the politicalstrategies of the subcontractor but also on how workers and artisans perceivetheir relationship with the contractor and on how their relationship facilitatesor impedes coherent class action.8 In this regard I refer to Marx’s classic distinc-tion between “class-in-itself ” and “class-for-itself ” at various points throughoutthe article.

In the final analysis, I contend that in southern societies such as Pakistan,“informalization” (in the sense of informal employment practices) cannot bethought of simply as a process that began in the 1970s—or one that will eventu-ally disappear. Nor should it be considered as synonymous with “traditional”patron–client relations that have remained frozen in time. Insteadinformalization is best understood as the articulation of shifts in global capital-ism over the past thirty to thirty-five years with dynamic patronage-based formsof labor control. Informalization is a process of rapid change whereby the ethicsof the marketplace are becoming ever more dominant, yet in which per-sonal—including ascriptive—ties are prominent despite the disappearance ofthe “traditional” setting for patron–client relations. Understanding the maze ofpersonal and impersonal dynamics that workers must collectively navigate isnecessary in order to avoid “culturalist” narratives or purely functional explana-tions of workers’ exploitation that neglect the importance of cultural andpolitical dimensions of the labor–capital relation.

Flexible Accumulation Regimes and Labor

My use of “informal employment” requires a brief discussion of the macro-levelshifts in the global capitalist regime over the past two or three decades so as tomake the link between my localized research and the broader political economypicture. David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity stands out as the mostprescient exposition on the evolution of capitalist modernity in northern coun-


8. While I have mentioned the “intermediate classes,” my purpose here is not to engage at lengthwith the question of how much power the “intermediate classes” exercise within the social for-mation at large, which was the subject of most of the seminal works on the subject, includingthat of Kalecki (1972). Harriss-White’s book-length study also contains a detailed discussion

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tries.9 Harvey analyzes the relationship between postmodern aesthetics,politics, and emergent flexible regimes of accumulation (in the wake of thegradual decline of Fordist production methods).

Writing more than two decades ago, Harvey was responding to those who ar-gued that a new postindustrial society had emerged and that humanity wasswiftly moving in the direction of an “end of history” utopia. He argued that thedeindustrialization of many northern cities and the fashioning of new culturalforms needed to be understood in relation to changes in the global capitalistsystem and specifically the burgeoning contradictions of this system. Thesechanges were operationalized by the neoconservative regimes that had come topower in the countries of the North, particularly the administrations of RonaldReagan (USA) and Margaret Thatcher (UK). While Harvey’s focus was the North,his observations on the nature of the new accumulation regime bear great rele-vance to southern countries such as Pakistan.10 Harvey identifies the followingcharacteristics of labor control under flexible regimes:

flexibility with respect to labour processes, labour markets, products, andpatterns of consumption…[which signals a] move away from regular em-ployment towards increasing reliance upon part-time, temporary or sub-contracted work arrangements…[which in turn] open up opportunitiesfor small business formation, and in some instances permit older systemsof domestic, artisanal, familial (patriarchal), and paternalistic (‘godfather,’‘guv’nor’ or even mafia-like) labour to revive and flourish as centerpiecesrather than as appendages of the production system…. [C]lass conscious-ness no longer derives from the straight class relation between capital andlabour, and moves onto a much more confused terrain of inter-familialconflicts and fights for power within a kinship or clan-like system of hierar-chically ordered social relations.11

I wish to make several important qualifications in light of Harvey’s character-izations. First, even before the major shift toward flexible accumulation regimesin the early 1970s, sellers of labor power in the manufacturing and service sec-tors of southern economies were not meaningfully protected by the law. Writtencontracts, to the extent they existed, were weakly enforced and the use of coer-cive force to suppress labor radicalism by owners and the state wascommonplace. With the onset of flexible accumulation regimes, workers havebecome even more vulnerable, especially in light of the fragmentation of

Akhtar / Patronage and Class 163

on the “intermediate regime” (IR) formulation. My focus is the specific relations cultivated bycontractors with workers and how this system of patronage inhibits/facilitates a politics ofclass.

9. Harvey 1989.10. In short, the new accumulation regime glossed over the crisis of overproduction through liber-

alized financial markets, thereby freeing capital from the constraints of welfarism and stateregulation. The bargaining power of labor was reduced both in the North and South. The im-positions of the international financial institutions (IFIs) ensured that already dependenteconomies such as Pakistan were made even more vulnerable to the vagaries of internationalmarkets, and workers lost ground in the class struggle against capital.

11. Harvey 1989, 147–52.

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large-scale industry and the attendant explosion of small-scale production unitsin which trade union organization is conspicuous by its absence.12

Second, and crucially for the purposes of the present analysis, we must dis-tinguish between the northern and southern contexts within which the“revival” of “older” forms of labor organization along “artisanal,” “familial,” and“paternalistic” lines was—and still is—taking place. In the North it can broadlybe argued that a process of sociological individuation has taken place over timeand that impersonal exchange norms have been institutionalized accordingly.13

This premise having been stated, it is possible to empirically test Harvey’s hy-pothesis that “older systems of domestic, artisanal, familial (patriarchal), andpaternalistic (‘godfather,’ ‘guv’nor’ or even mafia-like) labour” are being re-vived.14

In contrast, while the colonial state in most non-Western societies demon-strated a formal commitment to impersonal exchange norms in the market andin the struggle for political resources, in practice it reified “primordial” identi-ties such as race and caste.15 Notwithstanding Weber’s insistence on the“patrimonial” essence of non-Western societies, I argue that it was the colonialstate’s need to maintain social control that led to the institutionalization of whatHarvey calls artisanal, familial, and paternalistic identities in the colonies; theseidentities were operative in all social and political exchange, including in the la-bor market.

The postcolonial state in Pakistan has regularly employed strategies similarto its colonial predecessor in order to undermine insurrectionary forms of poli-tics, along class and other lines. In short, in southern societies such as Pakistanthere can be no meaningful distinction between “newer” and “older” forms oflabor organization because the impersonal exchange norms that became preva-lent in the North never took root in the South.16 Indeed the state and dominant


12. A comprehensive shift in the manufacturing industry in Pakistan took place during theeleven-year-long Zia dictatorship (1977–88). The decade and a half or so before Zia took overwas a period of unabashed labor militancy in Pakistan in metropolitan centers such as Karachi(Ali 2005). Workers were able to organize within large industrial units, particularly in the tex-tiles industry. By the middle of the 1970s big industry started to suffer the effects of structuralcontradictions as well as the nationalizations of private factories effected by the populist Paki-stan People’s Party (PPP) government. The results included overemployment and capital flight(Noman 1988). While workers had been subject to a significant amount of repression duringthe period of militancy, the existence of large industrial towns facilitated comparable resis-tance. With the decline in the industry and the beginning of a process of fragmentation, thesituation changed qualitatively.

13. In the broadest terms, impersonal exchange norms predominate between sellers and buyersin the marketplace and between individual citizens and state institutions.

14. Having said this, there is now a detailed enough literature on working-class history that assertsthe centrality of norms and networks in shaping the formally impersonal exchange patternsthat prevail in the North. I would suggest that a strict binary between northern and southernsocieties is problematic and it is more apt to distinguish them in relative terms. See also foot-note 16 below.

15. For a comprehensive discussion on the politicization of such identities in British India, seeDirks 2001.

16. To the same extent, of course. I have noted above that in Western societies the capital–labor re-lation has never been completely impersonal in the sense of the ideal-type. There is,nevertheless, a clear difference between the relatively more impersonal exchange norms that

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classes continue to be committed to personalized exchange norms in the shapeof what appear to be “traditional” identities so as to undermine class-based po-litical action.

Of course, the material basis of patron–client relations has been transformedconsiderably over time, alongside the discursive meanings of “patron” and “cli-ent.” An exhaustive literature review on this particular subject is beyond thescope of this article, but the point to be made is that one of the most basic strug-gles of workers has been to become a “class-for-itself ” in a patronage-basedpolitical order.17 Harriss-White puts it most pertinently:

If class struggle is first a struggle over class and only second a struggle be-tween classes, we might say that the overwhelming majority of the Indianworkforce is still engaged in the first struggle while capital, even thoughstratified and fractured, is engaged in the second. If one thing is clear fromthe complexities of India’s workforce it is that its social structure makes la-bor easy to control and hard to organize.18

Recent studies that have mapped newer forms of labor organizing under con-ditions of informality suggest that the prevalence of patronage norms does notnecessarily preclude political action, if by political action one means not onlyclassical class-based mobilization. Rina Agarwala, for instance, has argued thatworkers subject to informal employment arrangements in India have eschewedtraditional forms of class-based organizing and instead started employing thelanguage of citizenship to demand welfare benefits from the government.19 Sim-ilarly, Jennifer Chun has documented the “symbolic politics of labor” ofworking women in South Korea and immigrant communities in the UnitedStates, asserting that informally employed workers are constantly involved in abasic struggle for recognition and that, to a significant extent, they stake theirclaim on economic resources by invoking ethical claims that are premised ontheir membership within a wider “community.”20

These studies are important for what they suggest both about the possibili-ties of labor organizing under flexible accumulation regimes and about thelimitations of these (new) forms. They show that the formal trade union move-ment is being forced to recognize the existence and claims of informallyemployed workers outside traditional occupations. In short informal work-ers—or at least those that Agarwala, Chun, and others have documented—areable to transcend objective constraints and give new impetus to workers’ move-ments.

In so doing informal workers have helped articulate a new language of laborpolitics in which “class” is less central a discursive component than “citizen” or“community.” It is worth comparing this “new” politics to that documented in


prevail in Western societies and the much more personalized forms of exchange in southernsocieties such as Pakistan (even while there is considerable variation within the South itself).

17. For a good overview of the academic debate on patron–client relations, see Roniger andGunes-Ayata 1994.

18. Harriss-White 2003, 41.19. Agarwala 2006; 2008.20. Chun 2009.

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the studies of “everyday forms of resistance” made popular by James Scott.21

Scott emphasizes the notion of a “moral economy,” or the fact that shared ethi-cal norms exist across class divides. While workers (or in Scott’s case, peasants)harbor no illusions about the class inequities that exist in their real lives, theynevertheless maintain relationships with class opponents that are not singularlyconfrontational and can in fact contain elements of mutuality.

I believe that the apparent “mutuality” that is a feature of the labor–capital re-lation (in certain defined contexts) is just as likely to preclude collective actionof workers as it can motivate ethical claims for a “just” allocation of economic re-sources. Importantly Agarwala and Chun foreground their mapping of the“symbolic politics of labor” by illuminating the suffocating structural environ-ment within which informally employed workers have to survive. In otherwords they do not water down the antilabor posture of state or capital and seekonly to assert that workers employ ingenious methods to compel oppressiveclasses and governments to give workers some share of the economic spoils.

Whereas in Agarwala’s and Chun’s case studies the idiom of “citizenship” or“community” improves workers’ bargaining power, in (most) other cases—in-cluding the one that I present here—there is no silver lining, and structuralviolence against workers is not offset by the emergence of innovative labor orga-nizing practices. In fact, the newer forms of labor organizing actually reflect justhow hegemonic capitalism has become insofar as a politics of class—whichforegrounds the irreconcilability of capital and labor—has now been replacedby a politics in which the proverbial “community” or notion of “equal citizen-ship” is valorized.22

In my case study, workers remind contractors of shared ethical commitmentsevery once in a while, but this does not mean that any major and sustained gainsare being made by labor and in most cases political action is purely reactive.Even while workers invoke ideas of “community” and “citizenship,” they lamentthe fact that they possess little collective bargaining power vis-à-vis those abovethem in the patronage chain. One of my informants offered the following anec-dote:

We were powerful once. Those were the days when labor leaders were notconcerned with keeping the bosses and government officials happy andinstead were committed to really doing something for us. We were moreconfident too and we used to keep our leaders in check. But now our lead-


21. Scott 1985.22. Here I think it is important to discuss briefly Partha Chatterjee’s recent work (2004) on what he

calls the “politics of the governed” in which he posits in a manner not dissimilar to Agarwalathat subordinate class politics in southern societies such as India is now based around the id-iom of governmental welfare. Chatterjee argues that this domain of “political society” isdistinct from the classical liberal domain of “civil society,” which eulogizes legality and bour-geois conceptions of rights. Furthermore, he contends, the subordinate classes that reside in“political society” have learned how to secure governmental welfare benefits in their own dis-tinctive way. I feel that Chatterjee understates the retreat of working-class politics of a bygoneera while overstating the political savvy and bargaining power of those who reside in “politicalsociety.”

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ers are like everyone else and we too have become too concerned with ourown persons. No one believes in change anymore.23

As noted above, I am wary of a reading of patronage that is exclusively cul-tural, or conversely, purely functional. While workers do “behave as they dobecause what little they can potentially get through the [patronage relation] isgreater than the expected payoffs from class action,”24 the structural context thatproduces this attitude must be understood holistically. To reiterate: the consti-tutive aspects of this given structural context are, first, the turn away fromFordist to flexible accumulation; second, the politicization of parochial identi-ties by the postcolonial state; and third, dynamic discourses of socialobligations.

There is no question that workers—those in my case study or in Agarwala’sand Chun’s narratives—are suffering from “false consciousness.” To the con-trary, I think that Agarwala and Chun demonstrate that workers in the post-Fordist world are compelled to forge new political strategies that reflect therebalancing of class forces that Harvey and others have meticulously docu-mented.25


23. Ali (2005) notes that even at the height of the Pakistani labor movement in Karachi in the early1970s, exclusive identities, and particularly ethnicity, were often in competition with an ex-pansive class identity. The existence of a class politics, which eventually suffered a precipitousdecline, ensured that patronage politics was not hegemonic in that particular conjuncture.

24. Khan 2000, 589.25. Chun (2009) discusses at length in the preface of her book how the militant and apparently

unified South Korean formal trade union movement, which defied the general trend till as late

Brickyard worker near Islamabad. Thisstudy shows that “informally employedworkers…while not under any illusionabout the injustice of their conditionand simultaneously knowing that theyare ‘free’ to sell their labor power towhomever they wish, nevertheless‘consent’ to the exploitative workarrangement because they believe thatadhering to patronage rules guaranteessome form of employment and hence isa survival strategy to which many other(potential) workers have no recourse.”(Credit: ILO Photo/Crozet M., October 2005)

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Differences in industrial organization explain in large part the ability of work-ers in Agarwala’s and Chun’s cases to organize effectively and, as well, thealmost complete lack of collective action amongst housing construction work-ers in metropolitan Pakistan. My point is that patronage bonds exist within eventhe most militant labor movements, and, certain exceptions notwithstanding,that extra-economic coercion is a foundational feature of the labor–capital rela-tion in the age of subcontracting and flexible accumulation. Moreover thewidespread extent of extra-economic coercion, even where it contains a certainmutuality, reflects the hegemony of capital.

I understand hegemony to be the dialectic of coercive force and consent. Soeven in an ideal setting, clients understand their relationship with patrons to bedouble-edged; if on the one hand the patron is thought of as a benefactor, onthe other he is a known tyrant. I believe that informally employed workers, atleast in the context that I study, while not under any illusion about the injusticeof their condition and simultaneously knowing that they are “free” to sell theirlabor power to whomever they wish, nevertheless “consent” to the exploitativework arrangement because they believe that adhering to patronage rules guar-antees some form of employment and hence is a survival strategy to which manyother (potential) workers have no recourse.

A system of domination is hegemonic precisely when the subordinate classesrecognize their own subjugation yet cannot challenge it decisively (aside from“everyday acts of resistance”). The “safety net” of a patron is therefore not un-derstood—as the false consciousness argument would have it—as anunequivocally positive institution, but rather as a means of negotiating(through established practices) what is a fundamentally unjust social universe.

Returning to Harvey, it should be clear that a distinction needs to be made be-tween the North and the South with regard to the nature and methods of laborcontrol under flexible accumulation regimes. In societies such as Pakistan manyof the changes that Harvey argues took place after the shift from Fordism toflexibilization can be understood as follows: extant structures and modes of la-bor control were reinforced while the economic basis of these structures wasdramatically transformed.26

The Context

As Harvey and other theorists of flexible accumulation note, service industrieshave erupted over the past two to three decades.27 On the one hand this trendspeaks to the diminishing livelihood options in the agrarian sector, and on the


as the early part of the last decade, eventually succumbed to the material and discursive logic offlexible accumulation.

26. See Harriss-White (2005, 114) again here: “Capital is far from dissolving or destroying caste.While it might appear that caste is neither occupationally determining nor an entry barrier, inactual fact, control over the biggest local capitals is restricted to a narrow band of castes.… Atbest caste is being reworked as an economic force (sometimes as capital, sometimes cross classbut rather rarely as labour) while at worst caste is a more powerful social stratifier than class.”

27. The World Bank estimated in 1995 that services accounted for two-thirds of the world’s grossdomestic product, up from half a decade earlier. See International Bank for Reconstructionand Development 2000.

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other to the limited scale of the large-scale manufacturing sector. Inform-alization in the urban Pakistani context—the particular focus of this article—can be traced back to the substantive social changes engendered by Green Revo-lution technologies in the 1960s, which resulted in large-scale displacement ofthe subsistence peasantry from rural areas, particularly the irrigated plains ofPunjab. While a section of those who migrated to urban areas became employedin big factories, particularly in the textiles industry, many others slippedthrough the cracks and became self-employed or informal wage laborers.

Despite the lack of employment opportunities in formal industry, the expo-nential increases in population have meant that rural–urban migrationcontinues at rates as high as 4 to 5 percent per annum.28 When this in-migrationis coupled with the considerable internal population growth of urban settle-ments, it becomes clear that a massive reserve army of labor has come intobeing. It is from this surplus pool that the majority of workers in the housingconstruction industry hail.29 The little data that exists on informalization in Paki-stan confirms that employment in the construction industry (alongsidewholesale and retail trade and the hotel and restaurants sector) is almost com-pletely informalized—87.2 percent of those employed in construction aresubject to informal work arrangements.30

A significant impetus to service industries has been provided by remittanceincomes. The golden age of remittances in the early 1980s greatly impacted awide cross section of society. This was because Pakistani workers in the Gulf,hailing from rural and peri-urban areas of the Punjab and North West FrontierProvince (NWFP),31 accounted for the majority of remittances. These remit-tances became a major reason for social mobility and substantial increases inthe consumption of nonsubsistence goods. In terms of investment, migrants fo-cused on housing and construction as well as on small family businesses thatcould provide a regular income.32

The housing construction industry in the so-called twin cities of Islamabad/Rawalpindi has grown tremendously since the end of the 1970s. If this is a corol-lary of the wider social and economic changes associated with rural–urbanmigration, population growth within urban settlements, and diversifiedsources of wealth, there has also been marked expansion in the recent decadeand a half.33 This boom reflects the direct connection between actually existingcapitalism in Pakistan and the global political economy (see below).


28. United Nations Population Fund 2009.29. “Informalization” has also been acute in the agrarian economy where an estimated 30 million

people are now landless. Changing tenure relations in land have given rise to a massive reservearmy of agricultural wage labor (Zaidi 2005, 123).

30. Gennari 2004, 5–10.31. In 2010 the Pakistani parliament passed legislation to change NWFP’s name to Khyber-

Pakhtunkhwa.32. Addleton, 1992; Lefebvre, 1999.33. Between 2007 and early 2011 alone, Islamabad’s population increased from 1.2 million to

1.33 million, an increase of 10.8 percent. See www.mopw.gov.pk/PopulationDynamicsBy Prov-ince.aspx (accessed 23 February 2011).

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Since the late 1990s Islamabad/Rawalpindi has been the fastest growing ur-ban center in Pakistan—largely due to its being the center of government andthe headquarters of the military. In Islamabad in particular a great deal ofinfrastructural development—particularly the construction of roads—has re-cently taken place and this has resulted in the creation of (mostly informal)employment opportunities. Both of the twin cities are among the most attrac-tive locations for migrants from Khyber–Pakhtunkhwa as well as thesurrounding districts of the Potohar Plateau.

This expansionary trend was given a major fillip by the events of 11 Septem-ber 2001. Facing the threat of a freeze on their bank deposits and other assets,Pakistanis living in Western countries sent large amounts of money back into thecountry.34 The United States overtook Saudi Arabia as the single biggest sourceof remittance incomes; crucially “American remittances to Pakistan differ mark-edly from the Middle East remittances as the recent increase of the former ismotivated mainly by the search for economic profits while the latter is primarilyfor helping finance daily needs.”35 These remittances were invested in the stockexchange and real estate market. In Islamabad, there was a steep increase inland prices and an attendant boom in housing construction.

In short, the unhindered mobility of large amounts of capital in the twin cit-ies—one of the major characteristic features of the neoliberal epoch—hasfacilitated the expansion of the housing construction market and with it infor-


34. Government statistics indicate that foreign remittances increased by 26.8 percent in the 2000s(Government of Pakistan 2010).

35. Oda 2009, 8–12.

Cotton and textile industry, Tirupur, India. The textile industry in India, “which operatedalong Fordist lines until the late 1970s, later underwent a transformation in which largefactories…gave way to small workshops in which weaving, stitching, looming, and othersuch processes became spatially distinct.” (Credit: ILO Photo/Khemka A., 2000)

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mal labor practices. Multiplier effects include intensified mining of granite andmarble and an increase in the number of informal transport providers.

While informal employment—and subcontracting in particular—has alwaysbeen a feature of the housing construction industry, informal employment prac-tices have become more pronounced and the labor market even morecompetitive in the wake of the above-mentioned processes. As noted above, lit-tle meaningful consolidated data exists on contracting practices in the Pakistaniconstruction industry, but an Indian comparison is instructive: “In construc-tion, an estimated 10.7 million construction workers, accounting for 83 percentof all construction workers in India, were employed through contractors.”36 Incomparison, the textile industry, which operated along Fordist lines until thelate 1970s, later underwent a transformation in which large factories withvalue-added processes that were all consolidated gave way to small workshopsin which weaving, stitching, looming, and other such processes became spa-tially distinct. Power loom workshops in Faisalabad, one of my secondaryresearch sites, are found in residential neighborhoods and employ less than 10workers on average.37

If this process of fragmentation is explained by the desire of owners and thegovernment to undermine workers’ organizations, it is also linked to changes inthe global political economy.Specifically the internationalization of productionmeant the beginning of the practice of “outsourcing”—as it is now fashionablyknown—in which the preferred industrial setting was the informal, small-scaleworkshop. In this process the local industrialist—who from the mid 1970s on-wards was either abandoning operations entirely or shifting toward trade—started to play the role of a subcontracting firm, happy to adopt this role be-cause of the relative security that could be derived from associating with themultinational firm (in the sense that profits were consistent and governmentregulation was nonexistent). This is not to take away from the fact that the multi-national firm could cancel the contract at short notice, one of the major benefitsthat flexible accumulation strategies accord such companies.

The outsourcing of production has been accompanied by an intensificationof subcontracting practices. Jobbers in big factories had been a crucial cog inowners’ strategies to discipline labor as long ago as the colonial period.38 Thesubcontractor is today’s incarnation of the colonial-era jobber, exercising agreat deal of power, particularly in relation to home-based labor, but alsovis-à-vis workers in industries such as housing construction (see below).

The Contractor Economy—Research Details

My fieldwork, which was conducted between October 2006 and October 2007,involved extensive interactions with contractors (thekedaars) as well as work-


36. National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector 2007, 38.37. For a trade union to be registered with the Labour Department in any one commercial enter-

prise, the prescribed requirement is a minimum of ten formally employed workers. In manycases even if an enterprise employs ten or more workers, fewer than ten are formally regis-tered.

38. See Sen 2002.

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ers in the housing/construction industry in the twin cities of Islamabad andRawalpindi. During an earlier period (March–August 2004) I had met with con-tractors and workers while doing commissioned work on trade unionism39 inthe informal surgical instruments and power looms industries in Sialkot andFaisalabad cities respectively. I include mention of the latter industries in the fol-lowing analysis because they provide useful comparative material.

I met with seven housing contractors in the Rawalpindi/Islamabad area overthe course of my research. Each of these contractors had arrangements with var-ious (skilled) subcontractors—craftsmen or artisans—who brought with them ateam of unskilled workers to complete an agreed-upon task. I spent a good dealof time with each of the seven main contractors and observed their exchangeswith the subcontractors and their teams of workers. I went on to develop a rela-tionship with four of the subcontractors; in the analysis below all information Iprovide pertains to all eleven of these contractors except at points where Iclearly distinguish contractors and subcontractors. I spent the most time withthe unskilled workers, numbering twenty-eight, who formed the teams of work-ers of the four subcontractors. The final classification is in terms of local andmigrant workers; twenty-two of the twenty-eight were local workers.40

I conducted my research in three different locations. I met the contrac-tors—and through them my other informants—at the housing constructionsite. Then I spent approximately two months following the contractors aroundduring their workdays, which is how I developed a sense of the nature of theirbusiness operation. Finally, the majority of time in the field was spent withworkers in their places of residence, which is where they talked freely abouttheir work arrangements and social backgrounds. I was only invited to workers’residences after meeting them at the construction sites repeatedly and develop-ing a relationship with them.

Contractors

I will first provide details of the personal backgrounds of the contractors andtheir working methods. As a general rule, contractors hail from the same class asworkers. During my research I found that contractors were variously the sons ofsubsistence farmers, low-grade government employees, factory workers, orsmall shopkeepers. In the prototypical agrarian social formation, patrons hailedfrom the exploiting class and clients from the exploited class. This importantdifference clarifies the dynamic and entirely modern nature of the patronagebond in the case presented here.

The shared sociological background of contractors and workers is crucial tounderstanding the operation of the contractor economy41 inasmuch as personal


39. This work was done for the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (Piler), basedin Karachi.

40. I did not plan in advance to establish this distinction, however in the course of my fieldwork itbecame obvious that there are significant differences in the attitudes and practices of migrantand local workers as well as the way contractors treat each group.

41. The term “contractor economy” is courtesy of Gazdar (2004).

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relations—or at the very least familiar backgrounds—are its defining feature.What distinguishes the contractor from the subordinate classes from which heemerges is the fact that he is “street smart.” By this I mean that he is able to un-derstand the dynamics of actually existing capitalism and particularly the needto cultivate relationships with various political-economic agents along the valuechain, thus securing himself a place in the vast patronage network that I will out-line presently.42

The contractor typically rises through the ranks, initially starting off as aworker, or skilled craftsman (subcontractor), and eventually developing thecontacts and overall wherewithal to take on housing contracts in his own right.43

Two of my seven contractors started off as helping hands in small wholesale out-fits selling material such as marble where they came into contact with skilledcraftsmen who functioned as subcontractors. They proceeded to become partof the craftsmen’s team of unskilled workers and then slowly to develop theskills needed to become subcontractors in their own right. Personal enterpriseand savvy appeared to be critical to these one-time helping hands slowly learn-


42. My findings about contractors correspond to the general thrust of a book-length study by DeNeve (2005) about upward social mobility in the informal textile production industry in TamilNadu.

43. This is similar yet different from the contractor in the power looms and surgical instrumentsindustries where the established ustad-shagird (teacher–apprentice) system is in operation.Only after an extensive apprenticeship is one able to rise through the ranks, possibly becominga patron to numerous workers and establishing a reputation as a reliable contractor.

Workers on a construction site in Islamabad. “Workers’ lack of collective action and theimmense surplus pool of labor ensures that, on the whole, contractors are able to maintaina position of dominance.” (Credit: ILO Photo/Crozet M., October 2005)

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ing about the operation of the contractor economy, building contacts, andgenerating the capital required to embark on their own.

Contractors are small managerial capitalists who employ labor. They operateat very thin margins, competing with one another for contracts and rarely en-gaging in collective action, except when workers at a particular job site threatencollective action of their own (see below). They are vulnerable to the vagaries ofthe market themselves, which is perhaps why they have little sympathy for theharsh plight of workers. Of the eleven contractors with whom I came in contact,at least four have had to resort to menial wage labor themselves in the not toodistant past to compensate for a lack of housing contracts. One contractor ex-plained his “predicament” in this way:

How are we any different from the workers? We ourselves are workers. Ihave struggled very hard to build some contacts and earn some contracts. Istill have to take up daily-wage work myself when there are no contracts.No one does me any favors—whatever I have managed has been becauseof hard work. It is unfair for workers to complain about me; they simplydon’t put in as much work as I do.All of my (contractor) informants noted that success is contingent on estab-

lishing contacts with wholesalers as well as police and administrative officials,who can provide official favors. Each of my informants has well-established tieswith preferred wholesalers who provide materials at competitive rates. Particu-larly crucial are wholesalers dealing with cement, bricks, and other material thatis required in large quantities for construction purposes.44 I noted that at leastthree contractors shared wholesalers, and that wholesalers do not provide ma-terials at exactly the same rate to all, even though the difference was notsubstantial. The preferential treatment appeared to be a function both of famil-iarity and reliability; in other words preferential rates were offered to thosecontractors who the wholesaler had known over a longer period and who had areliable record in clearing debts.

My informants were all keen to maintain good relations with police and otherstate functionaries. In the housing/construction industry interactions with thestate are far less frequent than in the power looms and surgical instruments in-dustries, in which worker unrest is more common. Nonetheless housing/construction contractors do maintain links with the police in particular on ac-count of unexpected eventualities such as conflicts with workers or even withsuppliers/transporters. In the four cases of worker-related conflicts that I ob-served in my research, contractors enjoyed the complete support of the policeand both parties collaborated to fleece the worker.45 In conflicts with more pow-


44. When contractors take on smaller jobs such as renovations of homes in which major construc-tion work is not required, they refuse to purchase materials because the scale of the operationallows for a very small profit margin. In this case their function is solely to provide the neces-sary labor.

45. In the incidents to which I was witness, the contractor did not pay his worker on time or lessthan the agreed amount. When workers protested, however meekly, the contractor employedhis police contact to scare the workers with penal action. The workers then paid bribes to the

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erful individuals such as wholesalers, however, the outcome is unpredictablebecause the other party maintains links with the police as well.

In establishing their contacts my informants readily employ familiar identi-ties such as biraderi (patrilineal lineage) and shared ethno-linguisticbackground although such affiliations do not necessarily guarantee their inter-ests per se. So, for example, in all four cases in which the police were contacted,contractors invoked biraderi relations. In one case an assistant superintendentof police was a first cousin. I noted that even in cases where contractors couldnot rely on established personal relations, they tried to establish some linkthrough mutual relations.

Crucially, however, the contractors’ ongoing efforts to develop “personal” re-lations with various political-economic agents are but instrumentalengagements in which the contractors and those with whom they seek to ex-change goods and services seek to extract the maximum possible economicbenefit. In other words, while both the contractor and the wholesaler/trans-porter/state functionary invoke terms that suggest familial relationships, bothparties do so quite cynically.46 While the exchange between contractors and thewholesaler/transporter/state functionary is clearly a political exchange implyinga long-term relationship between the parties involved, personal ties are not en-during per se and the mutuality of the relationship is a function purely ofcalculable benefit. This explains the ease with which one party ends its relation-ship with the party whenever economic sense demands it.

Here I will briefly discuss the relationship between contractors and subcon-tractors: no meaningful hierarchy exists between them, and they clearlyconsider one another competitors. On numerous occasions during my field-work I observed acrimonious exchanges as each accused the other of notfulfilling their (verbal) agreement. I noticed that competition was most fiercewhen an effort was being made to win the favor of an employer who was per-ceived to be a fruitful contact, one who could put them in touch with futureemployers. The only time that both seemed to be interested in colluding in anymeaningful way was when they had to suppress worker dissent (see below).47

Ultimately because of the intense competition between contractors and the lackof barriers to entry in housing construction, contractors’ control over workersis tenuous. However, workers’ lack of collective action and the immense sur-plus pool of labor ensures that, on the whole, contractors are able to maintain aposition of dominance.


police functionaries to avoid being implicated in a criminal case. Both the contractor and po-lice functionary emerged beneficiaries.

46. For example, the term bhai (brother) is often used by both parties. Where there is a noticeableage gap between two individuals involved in a transaction, the younger party employs the termchacha (father’s younger brother).

47. Throughout my relatively long period of interaction with contractors, the only time they ex-pressed any nervousness about my activities was when they found out that I was meeting withworkers separately from them. They were immediately suspicious that I might incite the work-ers against them.

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Workers as Dependents

It took some time for workers to trust me with what they considered to be inti-mate information, particularly concerning their relationships with contractors.This speaks to the fundamental characteristic of informal employment in thehousing construction industry: fear that derives from a complete lack of job se-curity. It is important to clarify that almost all of the workers with whom I cameinto contact warmed to me considerably upon hearing about my long-term in-volvement with workers’ organizations. During initial meetings workers clearlyperceived me to be an acquaintance of their employers and frank discussionsabout my political orientation and earlier engagements with working-classmovements were crucial in helping me build trust. A good number of workerstold me quite openly that they were at first guarded about sharing theirthoughts and feelings with me but opened up after having established my com-mitments; a handful actually contacted me regularly on their own initiative.48

All of the twenty-eight workers with whom I interacted extensively expresseda sense of “gratefulness” that they had secured somewhat regular employmentas part of their respective subcontractors’ teams.49 They explained how they de-veloped links to subcontractors through personal contacts—typically relativeswho were already employed by subcontractors—and these led to their employ-ment. From the very beginning then, the relationship between contractor andworker is “personalized” and therefore the latter feels he has to abide by estab-lished social regulations and “pay back” the contractor (as well as his kin whoput him in touch with the contractor) for providing him with stable work. It isimportant to note that the workers feel grateful that they have secured employ-ment in this established manner, rather than gratitude toward the contractorper se. One of my respondents said:

I am just grateful that I have found some semblance of regular work. Ofcourse he [subcontractor] is not very good to us. He withholds our pay-ments, makes us work more than is agreed, and threatens to fire us. But Ihave no option but to keep quiet and accept his behavior. If I make a fuss Imight lose the work. And I cannot afford that. It is so difficult to find workthese days.I consider this state of affairs hegemonic not because workers view the con-

tractor as being a benefactor as such but because they have come to accept thatthe only way to secure a livelihood in the given conditions is to secure the lat-ter’s largesse. There is a sense that things could be different, but in the currentconjuncture workers perceive the system of domination to be stable and theirconcern is with how to navigate it and survive. Workers’ ambivalent attitude to-ward contractors cannot be overstated: In one of the few studies of home-basedwork in Pakistan the authors do not nuance their observations when they sug-


48. Over the course of my fieldwork I came to concur completely with the contention of Bourdieuet al. (1999, 610) that the most successful ethnographic research among subaltern groupstakes place when the interviewer and interviewee are “interchangeable.” In other words it iscrucial to dispense with the delusion of perfect impartiality.

49. I interacted with painters, marble polishers, apprentice carpenters, and bricklayers.

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gest that “workers view the provision of work as a favour extended to them bythe subcontractors.”50

To the greatest extent possible contractors try to maintain their image as pa-trons so as to ensure that established norms are not ruptured and workers’loyalty is maintained. Not only do contractors want to avoid unrest, they also donot want to be faced with a situation in which they are forced to look for newteams of workers with whom they have no work experience. As at least oneother study of the contractor economy has noted, “contractors only hire work-ers from the casual labor market as a matter of last resort” and prefer to operatewith their established team of workers.51 The author of this study, Haris Gazdar,seems to suggest some level of dependence of the contractor on workers, butcontractors suffer only marginal losses whenever their established team ofworkers is unavailable for whatever reason. Workers, however, depend on theircontractor because he is the primary access they have to regular work. The alter-native—that of waiting on designated sidewalks of the city for day jobs—is adistant second-best.

Workers in housing construction clearly appear to be subject to what is in theliterature called “vertical subcontracting” practices in the sense that they arecompletely dependent on subcontractors to provide them with tools and haveno autonomy in relation to work tasks.52 In some forms of work the skill differ-ence between the subcontractor and the worker is not substantive, such aspainting. Painters appear to have a more floating relationship with subcontrac-tors rather than being part of a “permanent” team. In any case, this does notequate to substantively more autonomy as compared to other workers.

Historically rooted perceptions and practices clearly underlie the operationof the labor market and reinforce occupational rigidities. Contractors under-stand these rigidities and they use them to buttress stereotypes in their hiringpractices, consolidating historical trends of particular ethnic/linguistic/biraderigroups doing particular kinds of work. So, for example, it is a well-known factthat Pakhtuns dominate jobs in which heavy, unskilled labor is the major re-quirement.53 I found that all marble polishers in my sample of workers werePakhtun migrants. Over the course of time spent with them, and particularly af-ter visiting their places of residence, I estimated that Pakhtun migrants make upapproximately 50 percent of the labor in the marble industry in Islamabad andRawalpindi. What emerged was a supply line of labor extending all the way backto migrant villages, linked to the cities through a handful of Pakhtun contractors


50. Khan et al. 2005, 56.51. See Gazdar 2004, 26. In the course of my research I did come across contractors hiring casual

labor because of unforeseen circumstances (an established worker was incapacitated or thejob in question required more labor than was immediately available). My observations here,however, are based only on the twenty-eight workers who, at various points in time, remainedpart of the “regular” team of workers employed by the subcontractors.

52. Watanabe 1983, quoted in National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector2007, 52.

53. There is also a certain social stigma associated with menial labor, which Pakhtuns seem lessconcerned with. Many local Punjabis are unwilling to undertake unskilled physical jobs, evenwhen they are in a position of acute economic need.

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who had originally also come to the city as migrant labor many years earlier.Thus it is hardly surprising that—despite their being part of a class-in-it-self—workers very rarely consider themselves a class-for-itself and more oftenthan not think of themselves as part of an extended clan.54

My Pakhtun informants were more positive about their relationship withcontractors than other migrant workers as well as nonmigrants. They explainedthat the kinship connection involved a social obligation to the contractor, toother intermediaries who facilitated the working arrangement, and to those stillat home in the village who harbor a desire to use the same kinship connection tomigrate to the city and secure work. One Pakhtun migrant worker told me:

We are obliged to maintain a good relationship with our malik [subcon-tractor] because other boys in our village are also hoping to come toIslamabad. The malik has provided employment to many of us from thesame village and he can be counted upon to do so in the future. That iswhy we must make sure that we work hard for him and not give him anyreason to stop coming back to our village.In the case of nonmigrant workers, the dynamic is different. There is far less

cliquish behavior because there is no alienation from the local community andworkers do not live in rented housing as a group, instead going home to theirnuclear families. Local workers tend to resent the clan-like dynamic prevailingamongst migrant workers (and although they rarely admit as much, the fact thatmigrants work more for less) and this encourages locals to also develop a dis-tinct identity, most obvious in the derogatory remarks they make about themigrants.55

Local workers are far more assertive than their migrant counterparts in largepart because the subcontractor is not responsible for arranging employmentfrom the village and their dependence on him is thus less acute. The local work-ers are more familiar with subcontracting practices and specifically with thepiece rates that other sub contractors pay and this puts them in a stronger bar-gaining position. However, even local workers told me—albeit with a greatersense of lament —that they were indebted to the subcontractors and that theydid not want to jeopardize the existing work arrangement in any way. In the caseof the local worker too, the contractor’s hiring practices emphasize familiarityso that established patronage bonds can be regularly invoked.

As a general rule, migrant and local workers do not compete with one an-other, typically inhabiting exclusive occupational spaces. Although this can to acertain extent be ascribed to historically rooted occupational (caste) differ-


54. I found tremendous similarities between migrant labor in the housing construction industryand the working conditions and practices described in recent Indian scholarship. In particular,wages are lower in comparison to those of local workers, a personalized relationship exists be-tween the contractor/supplier and workers, and credit is commonly used to keep workersdependent (National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector 2007, 115–16;Mosse et al. 2005.

55. This is particularly acute in the case of Pakhtuns, who are subject to considerable abuse—mostof it benign but some less so—from Punjabis. The hyperbole usually centers around a stereo-type of the Pakhtun as lacking intelligence.

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ences, more important is the deliberate segmentation of workers bysubcontractors. In other words, hiring practices reflect the subcontractor’s de-sire to maintain clannish patterns; segmentation means that conflict erupts asmuch between workers as between workers and the subcontractor.

Class Consciousness

I have already made cursory references to the fact that neither migrant nor localworkers are inclined to mobilize horizontally on class lines and instead strate-gize in ways that (in their own eyes) guarantee employment and more generallythe bestowing of favors upon them by patrons. For workers patronage bonds of-fer some form of social security. And in the context of what is otherwise a highlyexploitative subcontractor economy, it is indeed true that the clan-like align-ments of workers do pay off, at least insofar as the contractor’s preference forfamiliarity and subservience reinforces the trend toward hiring from well-known labor pools. For both migrant and local workers, although in a more tan-gible way in the case of the former, personal relations are actively cultivated soas to avoid being fired or otherwise victimized.

This commitment to maintaining patronage relations is not simply a func-tional strategy. Workers have at least some sense that the maintenance ofpersonal relations (with subcontractors or anyone else within one’s network) isa foundational pillar of a wider social code that can be contrasted to the imper-sonal market system in which exclusively private gain is paramount. Indeed I

found that recourse to a moraldiscourse in which the subcon-tractor as patron is obliged totake care of workers as clientsproduced sporadic collective—and what effectively amounts toclass—action.

In the handful of incidents ofworker unrest that I witnessed,the contractor was forced to ac-cede to workers’ demands onlywhen they invoked mutual com-mi tments and warned thesubcontractor that he was mor-ally obliged to come good on hispromises. In particular the Pakh-tun subcontractor who dealt withPakhtun migrant workers in themarble industry was compelledon one occasion to (nominally)increase piece rates after all of thePakhtun workers stopped workin protest the fact that they hadnot received a bonus for Eid (the


Job seekers such as this man in Islamabad findthat “clan-like alignments of workers do pay off,at least insofar as the contractor’s preference forfamiliarity and subservience reinforces the trendtoward hiring from well-known labor pools.”(Credit: ILO Photo/Crozet M., October 2005)

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yearly Muslim festival that follows the end of the fasting month). Crucially work-ers invoked the Pakhtun honor code of Pakhtunwali, which obliges thesubcontractor to heed their demands.

It is also true, however, that the patronage bond is a direct impediment to thedevelopment of a corporate class consciousness through which the subcontrac-tor’s clearly exploitative character can be challenged. The patronage relationenjoys primacy such that individual workers are willing to sacrifice the interestsof other workers if cultivating their individual relationship with the subcontrac-tor demands it. The most obvious example: a number of painters were told bytheir subcontractor that they would have to work at a piece rate they felt to beunacceptable and that a relatively new painter in their team had already agreedto such terms. This resulted in a major row between the workers and paymentof a penalty in lieu of the damage they caused to equipment and the fact that thejob was not completed on time. The worker who agreed to work for less said:

They [the other workers] had it coming. Workers like them are alwayspicking fights and making things difficult for the rest of us. The malik [sub-contractor] may not be a very good man but there is no point antagonizinghim. It is not as if he was going to pay us nothing. Besides we’ve nevergained anything from challenging his authority.In the surgical instruments industries in Sialkot and the power looms indus-

tries in Faisalabad, the presence of registered trade unions suggests thatworkers’ class consciousness is more developed and collective action is there-fore more common. Of the seven trade unions that I came across, however, sixare run by contractors rather than by workers; the former use these formal insti-tutions to give cover to the exploitative terms of employment. Indeed arguablythe best-known trade unionist in Faisalabad, Aslam Wafa, who is affiliated withthe biggest workers’ federation in the country, the Pakistan Workers Federation(PWF), is widely reputed to be a middleman of the Labour Department.

In terms of mediating with the state, worker’s “representatives” such as Wafaopenly charge workers a “fee” when claiming social security payments; someworkers have to pay a “fee” simply to get a social security card. In many cases Idiscovered that workers’ registration is often cancelled by the contractor (tradeunionist) at the behest of the workshop owner. Here again workers do not nec-essarily believe that the contractor is unequivocally committed to their welfare,but I observed distinct hesitation on the part of the workers to speak negativelyof the contractor, ostensibly because they feared for their jobs and because theysaw no other means of protecting their meager “rights” but by acting in thismanner.56

In any case, in these industries too, only a limited class solidarity is evident.Because of the shared workshop space, and the nominal existence of the trade


56. When asked about what the contractor provided them, workers produced a long list that in-cluded protection from police, access to the Labour Department, which (selectively) allocatessocial security cards and the like, loans in emergencies, and facilities for washing and cleaningtheir personal belongings. In actual fact, the contractor denies workers their rights on a sys-tematic basis. In the first instance, the contractor often rejects many of the finishedimplements, particularly in the case of surgical instruments. Since workers are paid on

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union, there is at least a better developed sense of shared interests among theworkers that transcends biraderi/caste/linguistic lines.57 On the other handhowever, when any particular union is under the effective control of the con-tractor, the space for a meaningful politics of class is virtually nonexistent. Theconspiring of the massive surplus pool of labor with the personalized manner inwhich the class relation is articulated precludes class action.

Conclusion: A Yearning for the Past?

This article has examined the nature of informal employment in the housingconstruction industry in the twin cities of Islamabad/Rawalpindi in Pakistan(along with the surgical instruments and power looms industries in Sialkot andFaisalabad respectively), so as to provide an insight into the operation of flexi-ble accumulation regimes in a postcolonial society. I have sought to highlighthow extra-economic coercion in the shape of patron–client relations is crucialto the functioning of the contractor economy. Moreover I argue that patronagein the contractor economy is not rooted in an unchanging culture. Instead it re-flects the deepening of capitalism and a dominant mode of politics that is alegacy of colonial rule and that shapes the politico-cultural strategies of subor-dinate classes.

Not surprisingly, generalizations are difficult to make across the board, espe-cially ones based on the handful of contexts in which the research for this articlewas undertaken. However, some broad conclusions are worth considering as aspringboard for further and more detailed investigations into the subject. Thedurability of patronage-based modes of labor control under “flexible” accumu-lation regimes confirms that an “industrial culture”—of the kind that Marxassumed would take root as modernization proceeded—has not emerged inthe postcolonial context. Specifically, patronage bonds—which may appear tobe an historical continuity of established cultural norms but are in fact specificto the contemporary structural context—obscure the class relation and there-fore impede corporate class consciousness. This is not to rule out the possibilityof conscious political action on the part of workers—as evidenced in the workof Chun and Agarwala, and in certain instances highlighted in my sample58—but


piece-meal rates, this translates into additional labor for the same wage. Second, in the case ofaccidents in which workers are injured while operating the looms or cutting an implement,which are actually quite common, the contractor takes care of their medical needs but thenquite arbitrarily deducts a sum from their wage for the cost of the treatment. The contractor of-ten does not pay the workers on time. In the event of any such abuse, the workers have norecourse, and it is a cruel irony that the contractor himself is supposed to be protecting work-ers rights.

57. In Sialkot and Faisalabad, migrants hail from surrounding villages and therefore there is littledistinction between “migrant” and “local” workers as is the case in housing/construction inIslamabad. This shared background also encourages greater solidarity among workers.

58. I came across an important example of sustained political action during my research (and havebeen involved with this case ever since). Over the past couple of years, an organization calledthe Labour Qaumi Movement (LQM) has mobilized power loom workers in Faisalabad city andsurrounding urban settlements to challenge the existing contract system (including pur-ported trade unionists) with reasonable success. It remains to be seen whether the LQM can

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only to point out that the dynamics of “informal employment” are often inimicalto conscious class struggle.59

In arguing that modes of labor control that appear to be rooted in the “past”remain salient in the present, I am not venturing a “culturalist” explanation.60

Instead I seek to show that the ability of the modern middleman in the informaleconomy to control labor is based on the instrumentalizing of cultural normsthat are far from unchanging and instead are articulated in very distinct wayswith the impersonal ethics of the market. To invoke Harriss-White again, an un-derstanding of cultural norms, including the nature of particularistic identities,is essential in order to comprehend the “particular way power is exercised inand through markets.”

To understand how power operates in the purportedly impersonal realm ofthe market I have called for a holistic understanding of the relationship betweenpolitics, economics, and culture, one that does not seek to explain one aspect ofthe social whole as determined by any (combination) of the other(s). I have ar-gued that the economic and political upheavals that have been produced by theshift from Fordist to flexible accumulation regimes have reinforced patron-age-based forms of labor control while at the same time undermining thepotentialities for class-based political action. In making this argument I havepostulated that capitalism in Pakistan can be considered “hegemonic” becauseworkers recognize the objective fact of their exploitation yet continue to abideby patronage norms.61

I have also suggested that the contractor—and for that matter all politi-cal-economic agents who benefit from the system of domination—are keen toensure that patronage norms are continuously consolidated, which is why it isimportant to avoid thinking that such norms are unchanging. In any case, the di-alectic of objective exploitation and a lack of collective action to challenge thisexploitation produces a melancholy among workers and a yearning for an idyl-lic past. Many older workers lament that in a bygone era the labor movementwas organized and their class power allowed them to challenge owners andcontractors.

Yet there are also workers, particularly those who have not experienced anymeaningful mobilization along class lines, who consistently assert the need for


provide workers with a decisive alternative to the patronage-based political and economic or-der. In its short period of existence the LQM has secured more rights for power looms workersthan other “workers” organizations in the recent past.

59. Importantly, class struggle is inherent in every exchange between workers and those abovethem in the production/patronage chain, but this struggle is often unconscious and thereforeblunted.

60. Subaltern Studies has illuminated the various forms of identity that constitute the conscious-ness of workers and peasants in South Asia, but the initial focus on a materially rooted socialhistory of workers and peasants has recently given way to a tendency to separate “culture”from politics and economics. For a classic subalternist treatment of working-class culturewithin Subaltern Studies, see Chakrabarty 1983. In response, see Bahl 2000.

61. Here I find resonance with the argument made by Gooptu (2007), who argues that jute work-ers in Kolkata have acceded to patronage norms as a survival strategy while largely forsakingclass politics because of the changing structural context in which working-class politics andideology have been “betrayed.”

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the “communitarian” past—by which they mean the collective ethic of rurallife—to be revived. One of my Pakhtun informants had the following to say inthis regard:

People in the cities are so alienated from one another. Even in the villagesnow these influences are seeping in. But at least we still maintain somestandard of collective welfare [in the villages]. Everyone knows everyoneelse and help one another out in difficult times. We even share the goodtimes. Here [in the city] I feel very lonely and the only silver lining is that Ihave other [Pakhtun] brothers around who at least know where I am com-ing from.Further research can and should be done to interrogate the complex rela-

tionship between culture, politics, and economics so as to understand how andwhy hegemony is reproduced on a day-to-day basis and accordingly how to con-ceive of counter-hegemonic strategies. These questions, I insist, must be at theheart of an engaged research agenda in the sociology of twenty-first century cap-italist modernity.

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