Journal ArticleDOI
Reproduction Preferences and Wages: The Mineworker in Jharia Coalfields, 1895–1970:
TLDR
The concept of the minimum living wage represented mineworkers' new reproduction preferences, the compensation for the loss of supplementary earnings and their awareness of a mismatch between their work-efforts and their earnings.Abstract:
Why did workers bargain for a specific amount of wage? This was an expression of reproduction preferences of workers rather than merely any demand and supply calculation. This article brings out how the mineworkers evinced their post-traditional economic propensity, as it was in contradistinction to the ‘subsistence ethic’, in wage negotiations and work efforts. Mineworkers articulated the economic propensity upon the message derived from the self-respect campaign and respectable tastes of consumption. Their economic propensity was an excess for capital’s ‘iron law of wage’. Mineworkers interrogated the latter, and graduated to play the game of wage-work with the rules of struggles for a minimum living wage for a human, ‘civilized’ life. This concept of the minimum living wage represented mineworkers’ new reproduction preferences, the compensation for the loss of supplementary earnings and their awareness of a mismatch between their work-efforts and their earnings. This article takes the historiography of...read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
Familist Movement and Social Mobility The Indian Colliers (Jharia) 1895–1970
TL;DR: In the early decades of the twenty-first century, the movement to ensure a "civilised", human life for mineworkers in the Jharia coalfields in eastern India, had some "unsought for" results, such as the vulnerability of women excluded from certain categories of work, school dropout children and above all absence of a reproductive support system as mentioned in this paper.
Journal ArticleDOI
The compensation law and its antagonistic administration: The Indian coalfield of Raniganj, 1923-71
Debasree Dhar,Dhiraj Kumar Nite +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper , the stipulation and administration of the compensation law, in the Indian coalfield of Raniganj, between 1923 and 1971, was discussed. But, the authors did not consider the effect of the litigious and antagonistic administration on the utility of compensation law.
Journal ArticleDOI
Occupational Disease, its Recognition and Classification: The Story of an Indian Coalfield, 1946-1971
TL;DR: In this article , the authors draw upon archival materials and testimonies as oral histories to study occupational diseases in coalminers in the Raniganj coalfield of India, and find that miners with impaired lungs placed a premium on continuing their employment despite reduced working capacity, and undertaking quotidian negotiation.