Abstract
In the twentieth century, social security systems were largely tied to labour market outcomes. In current times, radical proposals like “universal basic income” are premised on a new understanding of labour beyond the labour market—i.e. in a context where wage-employment is no longer the “normal” condition of labour. Radical restructuring of capital–labour relations throughout the world since the last quarter of the twentieth century have resulted in forced self-employment in developing economies and precarious employment in developed economies. The new locations of labour are a product of processes which have rendered large segments of the labour force redundant or substitutable, rendering labourers’ access to social wealth a matter of moral claims rather than legitimate economic rights. The chapter argues that this transformation requires us to rethink the notion of marginality of labour in the contemporary context.
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Notes
- 1.
Lewis explicitly acknowledged his debt to classical political economy, of which Smith was one of the first and most important theorists.
- 2.
The famous second 5-year plan model in India, or the Mahalanobis model, as it is more commonly known, has been called a “variant of the Lewis model” (Chakravarty 1987, 14) and this view has been subsequently repeated in many writings on Indian Planning (Chatterjee 1995; Chakrabarti and Cullenberg 2003).
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Bhattacharya, R. (2019). Labour Beyond the Labour Market: Interrogating Marginality. In: Jammulamadaka, N. (eds) Workers and Margins. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7876-8_3
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