Finding jobs and doing the work

Finding work: most self-employed people, such as plumbers, electricians and tailors, find work through contacts and word of mouth.

In factories, recruitment was often done by middlemen. In the Kanpur textile mills, jobbers called mistris recruited workers, usually from their own villages and castes, and controlled them inside the mill too.

Badli workers substitute for permanent workers on leave. Some work this way for years without getting the same pay or security. Contractors recruit labourers by giving them cash advances, which tie them to the contractor until repaid.

Doing the work: managers try to get more output by making workers work longer hours or faster. Marx and Gandhi both saw machines as a threat to employment: Gandhi objected not to all machinery, but to machines that put people out of work.

Taylorism, named after F.W. Taylor, is the 'scientific management' of work: every task timed, broken into small steps, done at a set speed.

• At the Maruti car factory, two cars leave the assembly line every minute. Workers get only 45 minutes of rest in the whole day, and many are worn out by 40.
• Even IT work is Taylorist: long 10–12 hour days, constant monitoring and targets.

The writer Harry Braverman argued that machinery deskills workers: skilled craftsmen become machine-minders doing simple, repetitive tasks, with less control over their work.

So machines raise output, but not always jobs, and not always good jobs.