Understanding the Complexity of Defining the Working Class

Ask anyone what the “working class” means, and they’ll likely give you a quick answer – factory workers, daily wage earners, people who do manual labor. But the moment you try to draw a clear boundary around who belongs to this class and who does not, the definition starts to slip. In the context of India, this challenge becomes even sharper. The working class here is not a neat, unified group. It is fragmented, internally contradictory, and constantly shifting – shaped by forces as varied as colonial history, caste hierarchies, gender inequality, and the ongoing churn of economic liberalization. Understanding why this class is so hard to define is not just an academic exercise; it is the first step toward understanding Indian society itself.

Why the working class seems simple – but isn’t 🔗

At first glance, the concept of the working class appears straightforward. Sociologist M. Holmstrom described it as people who share a similar economic situation – wage earners and the self-employed – who are distinguished from property owners, employers, and managers by a common interest and shared consciousness of those interests. Karl Marx, similarly, defined the working class as those who sell their labor power for wages and do not own the means of production.

But as soon as we move from theory to reality, the picture changes dramatically. The working class at the conceptual level seems fairly simple, but the problem magnifies the moment one tries to define it precisely – because it is not a homogeneous entity. It is, in fact, a complex, contradictory, and constantly changing group. Even the concept of “class consciousness” – the idea that workers recognize their shared interests and act collectively on them – becomes difficult to apply, given the deep internal divisions that run through the working class.

This difficulty shows up in two opposing conclusions that analysts often reach: either that the working class is shrinking, or that almost everyone except those at the very top qualifies as working class. Both are symptoms of the same problem – the absence of a fixed, universally accepted definition.

The Indian context: why definition is even harder here 🔗

While defining the working class is a challenge globally, India’s situation is far more complex for at least three specific reasons: the forced intrusion of British capital into India’s economy; the simultaneous existence of multiple relations of production; and the persistent identification of the working population with primordial features such as caste, religion, and other ethnic divisions.

These are not minor complications – they go to the heart of how the working class was formed and how it continues to operate. India’s working class did not emerge through a simple, linear process of industrialization the way the European working class is often described. Instead, it developed in a society already deeply layered with pre-existing hierarchies, and those layers never disappeared.

Colonial origins and multiple relations of production 🔗

The modern working class in India has its roots in the plantations, modern industries, and railways established during the British period. Colonial policies dismantled traditional industries such as handloom weaving, displacing skilled workers while simultaneously creating new laboring populations in factories, mines, and transport networks. These workers were subjected to harsh conditions, low wages, and minimal rights.

But what made India different from Western industrial societies was that even as modern wage labor emerged, older economic arrangements – feudal agricultural relations, artisanal production, subsistence farming – continued to coexist alongside it. This meant that workers did not all occupy the same relationship to production. Some were factory employees, others were agricultural laborers tied to land through semi-feudal arrangements, and still others moved between both. This simultaneous existence of multiple production relations is one reason a single, clean definition of the working class has always been elusive in India.

Internal divisions that fracture class identity 🔗

Even within wage-earning workers, the working class in India is far from uniform. It is divided along several fault lines – each of which complicates the idea of a shared class identity.

Caste: the most persistent divider 🔗

Caste has historically determined occupational roles in India, and that influence has not faded with modernization. Structural inequalities rooted in caste determine who gets what kind of job and under what conditions. Workers from Dalit, Adivasi, OBC, and Muslim communities are disproportionately concentrated in informal employment. Data shows that nearly 79 percent of people belonging to Dalit, Adivasi, OBC, and Muslim communities work in informal employment of some kind, and they are 25-30 percent more likely to be poor and economically vulnerable compared to other social groups.

Even within the formal sector, caste networks shape hiring. Many businesses rely on community referrals and informal recruitment channels that can perpetuate the exclusion of marginalized groups. Caste-based discrimination controls the supply and price of labor in ways that remain largely untouched by economic liberalization. The result is a working class internally stratified not just by income or occupation, but by the social identity of workers themselves.

Gender: a compounding layer of inequality 🔗

Gender adds another dimension to this fragmentation. Women constitute a large portion of the working class – particularly in agriculture, domestic work, and the textile sector – but they consistently face wage gaps, job insecurity, and poor working conditions. While jobs are segmented on the basis of gender, caste, and education, new forms of segmentation are also emerging – including age and intra-household factors – keeping women limited to only certain avenues in the modern economy.

The intersection of caste and gender creates especially acute disadvantage. Discrimination often starts before workers even enter the labor market, as structural inequalities rooted in caste and gender shape which opportunities are available and on what terms. Women from Dalit and lower-caste backgrounds, for instance, are heavily concentrated in domestic work and manual labor – sectors marked by the lowest wages and least legal protection.

The formal-informal divide 🔗

Another major fracture within the working class is the divide between formal (organized) and informal (unorganized) workers. India’s informal sector accounts for around 80 percent of non-agricultural employment, and informal work is generally characterized by employment insecurity, lack of protection against workplace accidents, and the absence of social security benefits like pensions and healthcare.

Since the economic reforms of 1991, this divide has deepened. A fundamental shift in the structure of employment has occurred, in which permanent or directly hired workers are increasingly substituted with temporary contract workers – a process known as informalisation. Even within formally organized industries, informal or contract workers made up more than a third of the total manufacturing workforce as of 2016. This creates a two-tiered working class whose members may share the label “worker” but whose actual conditions of employment are vastly different.

The problem of class consciousness in a divided working class 🔗

A class, in sociological terms, is not just a category of people with similar economic conditions – it also implies some degree of collective awareness and shared political action. But in recent times, the concepts of common interest and shared consciousness have become difficult to actualize for the working class, due to their own internal divisions and diverse socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds.

Trade unions, which historically served as vehicles of working-class solidarity, have themselves been fragmented by caste and regional identities. When workers from different castes, regions, and religions struggle to recognize a shared identity, collective action becomes difficult to sustain. This is not a failure of the workers themselves – it reflects the structural complexity of a class that was never homogeneous to begin with.

Sociologist Jan Breman’s concept of “footloose labor” captures part of this reality – rural migrants in the industrial sector who lack job security, social benefits, and stable class identity. They drift between occupations and locations, making it hard to organize them into a coherent political or economic force.

Why the boundaries of the working class keep shifting 🔗

The working class is not static. Its composition changes as economies transform, as new industries emerge, and as old ones decline. Globalization and economic liberalization since 1991 have opened new avenues for skilled labor and expanded the middle class, while also contributing to the informalisation of labor, the weakening of trade unions, and widening income disparities – all of which affect the boundaries of the working class.

Meanwhile, urbanization continues to draw agricultural laborers into industrial and service sector work, blurring the line between rural and urban working classes. The growth of the gig economy adds yet another category – platform workers who technically run their own micro-businesses but functionally work for wages with no labor protections. Where do they fit in the working class? Countries like India have been slowly undergoing social change, expanding the size of the urban working class – but exactly who counts as part of it remains contested.

Why acknowledging internal differences matters 🔗

Given all of this complexity, it might be tempting to abandon the category of “working class” altogether as too messy to be useful. But that would be a mistake. The working class remains a distinct social entity with its own characteristics – it is simply one that cannot be understood through a single, flat definition.

Acknowledging the internal differences within the working class – across caste, gender, region, religion, and employment type – is not just intellectually honest. It is practically essential. Policies designed for a homogeneous working class will inevitably serve only a subset of actual workers. Labor codes that perpetuate and worsen the division between formal and informal segments of India’s working population make this problem worse, not better.

Understanding who the working class actually is – in all its contradictions and diversity – is the precondition for any meaningful analysis of labor conditions, inequality, and social change in India. The category is contested, but it is indispensable. The challenge is to use it carefully, with full awareness of the heterogeneity it contains.

What do you think? Given that caste, gender, and the formal-informal divide cut so deeply through India’s working class, is it still meaningful to speak of a single “working class” – or does this fragmentation demand entirely new frameworks for understanding labor and inequality? And how should policymakers account for these internal divisions when designing labor protections?

References

1. https://www.achieveriasclasses.com/working-class-in-india/
2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/375962373_Understanding_Social_Classes_in_India
3. https://idronline.org/questioning-the-informal-formal-binary/
4. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X18301943
5. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08039410.2025.2504501
6. https://www.dalvoy.com/en/upsc/mains/previous-years/2025/sociology-paper-ii/industrial-class-structure-social-structure-function-analysis
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_class
8. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/25166026221123482