Paper short abstract:

Drawing upon ethnographic observations from Jharkhand Migration Survey in India the paper highlights “the right to care” of inter-state-migrant construction workers in the cityspaces as an integral yet ignored domain of labor rights and various negotiations such ignorance engenders.

Paper long abstract:

The construction industry is one of the major employers of the informal, inter-state circuital-migrants in India. The Jharkhand Migration Study reveals that around 40% of Jharkhand’s circuital-migrants across social categories are engaged in the multi-layered construction sector, functioning through multiple subcontracting relationships. Drawing upon ethnographic observations the paper highlights “the right to care” of inter-state migrants at the destination as an integral yet ignored domain of labour rights. The responsibility of care and social re-production within the sector is borne neither by the employer nor the state and the care-work is delegated to the migrant subject. The degree of care labour delegated is directly dependent on the social location inhabited, the social capital accrued and the contractual arrangements negotiated by the migrant. Further, conditions of domicility limit the access of migrants to available social security measures at the destination.The paper argues that in the absence of a homogenous set of caring-rights as an integral part of labour-rights, the responsibility of immediate social re-production of migrant-labourers at the destination is taken up by contingent commensalities, constituted by peer group of workers. These collectives constituted by a shared sense of vulnerability and practical need requires to be understood as forms of ‘domesticity’, though very different from our normative understanding of it. Such domesticities are not recognised by state-apparatus and thus restrict lived-experiences of migration from informing policy. Such epistemic injustice leads to structural violence on migrants and and sustains the vulnerabilities embedded within life-experiences of migrants belonging to marginalised social stratas.