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In India, about 90 percent of the labor force is “informal,” meaning that workers lack benefits and protections against workplace accidents and arbitrary firing. But, even in the most stigmatized informal sectors, workers sometimes find ways to improve their situation. Economists V. Kalyan Shankar and Rohini Sahni look at how this played out with waste pickers in the city of Pune, focusing on a woman named Pagabai.

Shankar and Sahni write that Pagabai moved to the city as a young teenager with her slightly older husband in the early 1970s, after a drought made their previous rural agricultural existence untenable. They landed in a slum area called Indira Vasti and had six children. But Pagabai’s husband left and started another family in Mumbai, leaving her to find a way to support herself. Initially, she did this by begging at the nearby Pune University campus.

By the 1980s, new government buildings and affluent housing in the area around Indira Vasti offered various informal employment opportunities. Pagabai’s sister-in-law’s mother-in-law introduced her to the waste picking trade. They would sneak onto the university campus, seek out paper and other recyclable trash, and carry it to a waste dealer three or four kilometers away.

The work was difficult and dangerous, Shankar and Sahni write, but trash was increasingly plentiful. And the work was open to women, who were paid significantly less than men in other informal sectors like construction. Pagabai’s children helped with the collection and with cleaning the garbage.

But the informal nature of the work created hazards. Watchmen and police officers might stop them, accuse them of stealing, and even destroy the trash they had collected.

In 1993, Shankar and Sanhi write, some Pune trash pickers organized as a trade union called Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat (KKPKP). The union eventually won recognition from the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) for the help they provided with managing city waste, in the form of identity cards for the informal workers.

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For Pagabai, the card was her first state-recognized identification. It allowed her to enter the university through the main gate rather than sneaking in. And in 2006, the university officially contracted with KKPKP to hire eight waste pickers, including her.

In 2008, KKPKP spun off a worker-owned cooperative called Solid Waste Collection and Handling (SWACH), which reached a deal with PMC to handle door-to-door waste collection in some neighborhoods. PMC began providing protective gear and job benefits to the workers and also helped pay for administrative costs. In addition to profits from selling recyclable waste, the SWACH workers received monthly trash collection fees from households. Pagabai’s daughters and daughter-in-law became SWACH members, gaining a more stable and less hazardous form of waste employment than she had had early on.

While the younger generation’s work was technically the same field, Shankar and Sahni write, “[i]t was qualitatively different from what Pagabai and others had experienced for a greater part of their working life. From itinerant waste pickers, they had turned into regular workers.”

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By: V. Kalyan Shankar and Rohini Sahni

Women’s Studies Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 3/4, PRECARIOUS WORK (FALL/WINTER 2017), pp. 245–262

The Feminist Press at the City University of New York