Workers in developed countries are facing the onslaught of ‘austerity measures’- the predominant state response to the ongoing capitalist crisis, while those in developing countries are being pushed into the ever-growing informal sector, with low pay, no benefits, and no right to organise.  In India, workers in the formal sector are also facing similar impacts, characterised by jobless high growth and privatization of the public sector and services model. Large companies have closed down, even entire industries, leaving workers jobless, so that they can be pushed into the informal workforce. Even the production process shop floors are run through the use of a contract labour system. In the era of neoliberal globalisation, there is the privatisation of profits and the nationalisation of losses everywhere in the world. Agriculture activities also have been critically impacted by de-peasantisation and dispossession of lands. Further, in the rural, coastal and forest economy, there has been a collapse of livelihood, loss of control over commons and natural resources. The general agrarian crisis has led to an increase in indebtedness leading to a series of farmer’s suicides, and pauperisation resulting in massive displacement and distress migration.

This Charter reflects the aspirations of more than 500 million working people, primarily in the informal sector, across the length and breadth of India: working in the urban or rural, formal or informal sector, in wage employment, self-employment, home-based and domestic employment, and includes all socially oppressed and excluded working people, whether earning a livelihood or not.  There is a convergence of both traditional identities (like caste, gender and community) and that of class.  As the NCEUS report states: “What is quite significant is that 79% of the informal or unorganised workers (502 million by 2012), 88% of the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, 80% of the OBC population and 84% of the Muslims belong to the poor and vulnerable group. They have remained poor at a bare subsistence level without any job or social security, working in the most miserable, unhygienic and unliveable conditions, throughout this period of high economic growth since the early nineties.”  People in the informal sector are excluded from the fruits of the ‘high economic growth’ story of India; the growth story that over-shadows critical issues such as jobless growth, the deep agrarian crisis, unemployment, flexibility in employment, distress migration, new and old forms of discrimination at the workplace, loss of traditional means of livelihoods, privatization of public sector and services, and gradual denigration of all forms of labour legislation. The state is leaning more and more towards a policy framework that is based on profits for the corporations rather than social welfare for the people. 

 It is incumbent upon the state to recognise this vulnerability and act upon it for the welfare of the citizens of this country. It is important in this era of jobless growth, for the state to ensure the right to employment and decent work for the people.  People have to be placed before profit in state policy. The Indian state has the minimum responsibility to uphold the ‘constitutional morality’ which constitutes the inherent strength of the Indian Constitution, which evolved out of the mass upsurge of the anti-colonial struggle.