Patronage and Class in UrbanPakistan

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PATRONAGE AND CLASS IN URBAN

PAKISTAN
Aasim Sajjad Akhtar
Published online: 01 Jun 2011.
To cite this article: Aasim Sajjad Akhtar (2011) PATRONAGE AND CLASS IN URBAN PAKISTAN, Critical
Asian Studies, 43:2, 159-184, DOI: 10.1080/14672715.2011.570565
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PATRONAGE AND CLASS

IN URBAN PAKISTAN
Modes of Labor Control
in the Contractor Economy
Aasim Sajjad Akhtar
ABSTRACT: Of the rich academic literature that has emerged on the growth and dyna-
mism of the informal economy in South Asia in recent years very little work has
focused on the Pakistani context. This article builds upon the growing body of work
on informal employment by identifying and explaining modes of labor control in
the housing construction industry in metropolitan Pakistan. The crucial role of the
subcontractor and his exploitative relationship with workers is discussed in a Gramscian framework. Workers are ensconced in a hegemonic relationship with
contractors due to oppressive structural conditions as well as a culture of dependency that contractors have nurtured. Against the backdrop of the shift from Fordist
to flexible accumulation regimes, the author argues that the present conjuncture is
marked by the prevalence of extra-economic forms of control such that workers
conceive of contractors as patrons. The instrumentalization of cultural norms of reciprocity by contractors does not mean that the laborcapital relationship is
unchanging and rooted in culture. In fact, personalized patronage networks coexist with impersonal market ethics dynamically so as to produce and sustain the
hegemony of capital.
A consensus is growing in scholarly as well as policy circles that the informal

1
sector is here to stay. Through the 1970s and 1980s the mainstream view
championed by the International Labour Organization (ILO) was that the informal sector was marginal and that it would eventually be subsumed into the
formal sector. Instead, the informal sector has grown steadily, mostly in southISSN 1467-2715 print/1472-6033 online / 02 / 00015926 2011 BCAS, Inc. DOI:10.1080/14672715.2011.570565
ern countries but also in the North. The ILO has documented that over half the
workforce in Latin America, over 70 per cent in Sub-Saharan Africa, and over 80
percent in India is informalized.3
In this article I build upon the considerable amount of scholarly literature on
informality that adopts a worker-centered perspective.4 A large majority of
workers in the global South, it is now recognized, are subject to informal labor arrangements, including workers in the formal sector. Among the more
prominent exponents of the informal employment concept are the Government of Indias National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector
(Nceus) and the Multilateral Expert (Delhi) Group on Informal Sector Statistics.
While the focus of most research on informal employment remains the specific
conditions of work, modes of labor control, particularly subcontracted (including home-based) labor, are receiving increased attention.5
It seems intuitive to argue that the sheer lack of power of the working class is
both cause and consequence of informal employment, including subcontracted work. Indeed there is little doubt that owners, managers, and
middlemen of various kinds impose exploitative conditions upon workers and
that the latter are typically unaware of and unable to secure their basic rights (as
envisaged under Pakistans constitutional framework and international labor
covenants). I contend, however, that domination must be examined in Gramscian terms; in the context that I have researchedconstruction workers in
urban Pakistancontractors are able to induce the consent of workers by
instrumentalizing cultural norms of reciprocity (which are far from unchanging). As I will explain, this is a hegemonic state of affairs insofar as capital
valorizes and reproduces its domination over labor.
My case study is the housing construction industry in metropolitan Pakistan.6
Details of my fieldwork and research methodology are given below. It is important to note that very little available literature is available on informal
employment in the Pakistani context. This is in sharp contrast to India, which is
the site of considerable research on informalization, a literature upon which
this article draws. Barbara Harriss-Whites insights about the informal economy
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
160
The term informal economy is now increasingly replacing informal sector. The change reflects an acknowledgment of the historical realities of actually existing capitalism. Recent
scholarship has even expanded the terms of the debate and posited the existence within the informal economy of a non-capitalist production space, or what can be thought of as a need
economy. See Sanyal and Bhattacharyya 2009.
Scholars such as Sassia Sassken (2001) have illustrated how rapid informalization is taking
place in the citadels of global capitalism such as New York City.
International Labour Organization 2002. By informal labor I mean workers who do not enjoy
legal recognition and entitlements, often work without written contracts, and, with exceptions, are not collectively organized. Examples include self-employed vendors, landless wage
laborers in rural areas, and subcontracted workers of the kind I document in this article.
Such a perspective requires an in-depth analysis of the composition, causes and consequences of informal employment arrangements. See Chen et al. 2006: 213233.
For our purposes, informal employment refers to wage employment without the security of
tenure or protection under formal law, and, additionally, widespread subcontracting practices.
The research on surgical instruments and powerlooms was in two cities: Sialkot and Faisalabad, respectively. Housing construction was in Islamabad/Rawalpindi.
Critical Asian Studies 43:2 (2011)
Workers such as this laborer in Rawalpindi are ensconced in a hegemonic relationship

with contractors due to oppressive structural conditions as well as a culture of dependency
that contractors have nurtured. (Credit: ILO Photo/Crozet M., October 2005)
7
in India offer a good starting point for the present discussion. For HarrissWhite, the intermediate classes, namely, the self-employed, kulak farmers,
traders, merchant money lenders, and other groups associated with the secondary and tertiary sectors of the agrarian economy are the dynamic new face of
modern India. My research confirms Harriss-Whites contention that the intermediate classes are ruthless, rely on personalized patronage networks, and
rise to dominance not only through a marriage of convenience with the State
but also through the particular way power is practiced in and through markets.
I will show how the exploitation of subcontracted workers is reproduced
through a complex relationship with the housing subcontractor. This relationship is a microcosm of the personalized impersonalism of capitalism in a
southern society such as Pakistan. Importantly, current modes of labor control,
and extra-economic coercion more specifically, differ from (ideal-type) patronclient relations of a pre-capitalist variety, notwithstanding the apparent
similarities. This point will be reinforced in an examination of recent literature
from a variety of social contexts, highlighting the fact that the existence of patronage relations does not preclude the possibility of political action. Thus in
specifying the hegemony of capital over labor in the current conjuncture I reject
explanations that reduce the dynamic capitallabor relation to a patronclient
stasis that is embedded in an unchanging culture.
Nevertheless one of the questions that motivates this study is why hierarchical authority relations of patronage, which are typically associated with
7.
Harriss-White 2003 and 2005.
161
status-bound rural settings, are so prominent in the relatively more mobile urban working environment. At the level of theory such case studies raise critical
questions about the teleological strands in orthodox Marxist thinking about
modernity insofar as they illustrate that the prototype of an alienated urban
working class removed from all bonds of the past is conspicuous by its absence in postcolonial societies such as Pakistan. Indeed I believe that it is
necessary to think of the relationship between culture, politics, and economics
in dynamic terms. In this regard I will interrogate the relationship between cultural norms of reciprocity, the manner in which such norms are politicized by
the state and dominant classes, and objective economic changes brought about
by the shift from Fordist to flexible accumulation strategies.
My specific aim in this article is to explain how the housing subcontractor exercises power in and through the labor market in the Pakistani housing
construction industry. Importantly, however, I focus not only on the political
strategies of the subcontractor but also on how workers and artisans perceive
their relationship with the contractor and on how their relationship facilitates
8
or impedes coherent class action. In this regard I refer to Marxs classic distinction between class-in-itself and class-for-itself at various points throughout
the article.
In the final analysis, I contend that in southern societies such as Pakistan,
informalization (in the sense of informal employment practices) cannot be
thought of simply as a process that began in the 1970sor one that will eventually disappear. Nor should it be considered as synonymous with traditional
patronclient relations that have remained frozen in time. Instead
informalization is best understood as the articulation of shifts in global capitalism over the past thirty to thirty-five years with dynamic patronage-based forms
of labor control. Informalization is a process of rapid change whereby the ethics
of the marketplace are becoming ever more dominant, yet in which personalincluding ascriptiveties are prominent despite the disappearance of
the traditional setting for patronclient relations. Understanding the maze of
personal and impersonal dynamics that workers must collectively navigate is
necessary in order to avoid culturalist narratives or purely functional explanations of workers exploitation that neglect the importance of cultural and
political dimensions of the laborcapital relation.
Flexible Accumulation Regimes and Labor

My use of informal employment requires a brief discussion of the macro-level
shifts in the global capitalist regime over the past two or three decades so as to
make the link between my localized research and the broader political economy
picture. David Harveys The Condition of Postmodernity stands out as the most
prescient exposition on the evolution of capitalist modernity in northern coun-
8.
162
While I have mentioned the intermediate classes, my purpose here is not to engage at length
with the question of how much power the intermediate classes exercise within the social formation at large, which was the subject of most of the seminal works on the subject, including
that of Kalecki (1972). Harriss-Whites book-length study also contains a detailed discussion
tries. Harvey analyzes the relationship between postmodern aesthetics,

politics, and emergent flexible regimes of accumulation (in the wake of the
gradual decline of Fordist production methods).
Writing more than two decades ago, Harvey was responding to those who argued that a new postindustrial society had emerged and that humanity was
swiftly moving in the direction of an end of history utopia. He argued that the
deindustrialization of many northern cities and the fashioning of new cultural
forms needed to be understood in relation to changes in the global capitalist
system and specifically the burgeoning contradictions of this system. These
changes were operationalized by the neoconservative regimes that had come to
power in the countries of the North, particularly the administrations of Ronald
Reagan (USA) and Margaret Thatcher (UK). While Harveys focus was the North,
his observations on the nature of the new accumulation regime bear great relevance to southern countries such as Pakistan.10 Harvey identifies the following
characteristics of labor control under flexible regimes:
flexibility with respect to labour processes, labour markets, products, and
patterns of consumption[which signals a] move away from regular employment towards increasing reliance upon part-time, temporary or subcontracted work arrangements[which in turn] open up opportunities
for small business formation, and in some instances permit older systems
of domestic, artisanal, familial (patriarchal), and paternalistic (godfather,
guvnor or even mafia-like) labour to revive and flourish as centerpieces
rather than as appendages of the production system. [C]lass consciousness no longer derives from the straight class relation between capital and
labour, and moves onto a much more confused terrain of inter-familial
conflicts and fights for power within a kinship or clan-like system of hierar11
chically ordered social relations.
I wish to make several important qualifications in light of Harveys characterizations. First, even before the major shift toward flexible accumulation regimes
in the early 1970s, sellers of labor power in the manufacturing and service sectors of southern economies were not meaningfully protected by the law. Written
contracts, to the extent they existed, were weakly enforced and the use of coercive force to suppress labor radicalism by owners and the state was
commonplace. With the onset of flexible accumulation regimes, workers have
become even more vulnerable, especially in light of the fragmentation of
on the intermediate regime (IR) formulation. My focus is the specific relations cultivated by
contractors with workers and how this system of patronage inhibits/facilitates a politics of
class.
9. Harvey 1989.
10. In short, the new accumulation regime glossed over the crisis of overproduction through liberalized financial markets, thereby freeing capital from the constraints of welfarism and state
regulation. The bargaining power of labor was reduced both in the North and South. The impositions of the international financial institutions (IFIs) ensured that already dependent
economies such as Pakistan were made even more vulnerable to the vagaries of international
markets, and workers lost ground in the class struggle against capital.
11. Harvey 1989, 14752.
163
large-scale industry and the attendant explosion of small-scale production units

12
in which trade union organization is conspicuous by its absence.
Second, and crucially for the purposes of the present analysis, we must distinguish between the northern and southern contexts within which the
revival of older forms of labor organization along artisanal, familial, and
paternalistic lines wasand still istaking place. In the North it can broadly
be argued that a process of sociological individuation has taken place over time
and that impersonal exchange norms have been institutionalized accordingly.13
This premise having been stated, it is possible to empirically test Harveys hypothesis that older systems of domestic, artisanal, familial (patriarchal), and
paternalistic (godfather, guvnor or even mafia-like) labour are being revived.14
In contrast, while the colonial state in most non-Western societies demonstrated a formal commitment to impersonal exchange norms in the market and
in the struggle for political resources, in practice it reified primordial identities such as race and caste.15 Notwithstanding Webers insistence on the
patrimonial essence of non-Western societies, I argue that it was the colonial
states need to maintain social control that led to the institutionalization of what
Harvey calls artisanal, familial, and paternalistic identities in the colonies; these
identities were operative in all social and political exchange, including in the labor market.
The postcolonial state in Pakistan has regularly employed strategies similar
to its colonial predecessor in order to undermine insurrectionary forms of politics, along class and other lines. In short, in southern societies such as Pakistan
there can be no meaningful distinction between newer and older forms of
labor organization because the impersonal exchange norms that became prevalent in the North never took root in the South.16 Indeed the state and dominant
12. A comprehensive shift in the manufacturing industry in Pakistan took place during the
eleven-year-long Zia dictatorship (197788). The decade and a half or so before Zia took over
was a period of unabashed labor militancy in Pakistan in metropolitan centers such as Karachi
(Ali 2005). Workers were able to organize within large industrial units, particularly in the textiles industry. By the middle of the 1970s big industry started to suffer the effects of structural
contradictions as well as the nationalizations of private factories effected by the populist Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) government. The results included overemployment and capital flight
(Noman 1988). While workers had been subject to a significant amount of repression during
the period of militancy, the existence of large industrial towns facilitated comparable resistance. With the decline in the industry and the beginning of a process of fragmentation, the
situation changed qualitatively.
13. In the broadest terms, impersonal exchange norms predominate between sellers and buyers
in the marketplace and between individual citizens and state institutions.
14. Having said this, there is now a detailed enough literature on working-class history that asserts
the centrality of norms and networks in shaping the formally impersonal exchange patterns
that prevail in the North. I would suggest that a strict binary between northern and southern
societies is problematic and it is more apt to distinguish them in relative terms. See also footnote 16 below.
15. For a comprehensive discussion on the politicization of such identities in British India, see
Dirks 2001.
16. To the same extent, of course. I have noted above that in Western societies the capitallabor relation has never been completely impersonal in the sense of the ideal-type. There is,
nevertheless, a clear difference between the relatively more impersonal exchange norms that
164
classes continue to be committed to personalized exchange norms in the shape

of what appear to be traditional identities so as to undermine class-based political action.
Of course, the material basis of patronclient relations has been transformed
considerably over time, alongside the discursive meanings of patron and client. An exhaustive literature review on this particular subject is beyond the
scope of this article, but the point to be made is that one of the most basic struggles of workers has been to become a class-for-itself in a patronage-based
political order.17 Harriss-White puts it most pertinently:
If class struggle is first a struggle over class and only second a struggle between classes, we might say that the overwhelming majority of the Indian
workforce is still engaged in the first struggle while capital, even though
stratified and fractured, is engaged in the second. If one thing is clear from
the complexities of Indias workforce it is that its social structure makes la18
bor easy to control and hard to organize.
Recent studies that have mapped newer forms of labor organizing under conditions of informality suggest that the prevalence of patronage norms does not
necessarily preclude political action, if by political action one means not only
classical class-based mobilization. Rina Agarwala, for instance, has argued that
workers subject to informal employment arrangements in India have eschewed
traditional forms of class-based organizing and instead started employing the
language of citizenship to demand welfare benefits from the government.19 Similarly, Jennifer Chun has documented the symbolic politics of labor of
working women in South Korea and immigrant communities in the United
States, asserting that informally employed workers are constantly involved in a
basic struggle for recognition and that, to a significant extent, they stake their
claim on economic resources by invoking ethical claims that are premised on
their membership within a wider community.20
These studies are important for what they suggest both about the possibilities of labor organizing under flexible accumulation regimes and about the
limitations of these (new) forms. They show that the formal trade union movement is being forced to recognize the existence and claims of informally
employed workers outside traditional occupations. In short informal workersor at least those that Agarwala, Chun, and others have documentedare
able to transcend objective constraints and give new impetus to workers movements.
In so doing informal workers have helped articulate a new language of labor
politics in which class is less central a discursive component than citizen or
community. It is worth comparing this new politics to that documented in
17.
18.
19.
20.
prevail in Western societies and the much more personalized forms of exchange in southern
societies such as Pakistan (even while there is considerable variation within the South itself).
For a good overview of the academic debate on patronclient relations, see Roniger and
Gunes-Ayata 1994.
Harriss-White 2003, 41.
Agarwala 2006; 2008.
Chun 2009.
165
21
the studies of everyday forms of resistance made popular by James Scott.

Scott emphasizes the notion of a moral economy, or the fact that shared ethical norms exist across class divides. While workers (or in Scotts case, peasants)
harbor no illusions about the class inequities that exist in their real lives, they
nevertheless maintain relationships with class opponents that are not singularly
confrontational and can in fact contain elements of mutuality.
I believe that the apparent mutuality that is a feature of the laborcapital relation (in certain defined contexts) is just as likely to preclude collective action
of workers as it can motivate ethical claims for a just allocation of economic resources. Importantly Agarwala and Chun foreground their mapping of the
symbolic politics of labor by illuminating the suffocating structural environment within which informally employed workers have to survive. In other
words they do not water down the antilabor posture of state or capital and seek
only to assert that workers employ ingenious methods to compel oppressive
classes and governments to give workers some share of the economic spoils.
Whereas in Agarwalas and Chuns case studies the idiom of citizenship or
community improves workers bargaining power, in (most) other casesincluding the one that I present herethere is no silver lining, and structural
violence against workers is not offset by the emergence of innovative labor organizing practices. In fact, the newer forms of labor organizing actually reflect just
how hegemonic capitalism has become insofar as a politics of classwhich
foregrounds the irreconcilability of capital and laborhas now been replaced
by a politics in which the proverbial community or notion of equal citizenship is valorized.22
In my case study, workers remind contractors of shared ethical commitments
every once in a while, but this does not mean that any major and sustained gains
are being made by labor and in most cases political action is purely reactive.
Even while workers invoke ideas of community and citizenship, they lament
the fact that they possess little collective bargaining power vis--vis those above
them in the patronage chain. One of my informants offered the following anecdote:
We were powerful once. Those were the days when labor leaders were not
concerned with keeping the bosses and government officials happy and
instead were committed to really doing something for us. We were more
confident too and we used to keep our leaders in check. But now our lead-
21. Scott 1985.

22. Here I think it is important to discuss briefly Partha Chatterjees recent work (2004) on what he
calls the politics of the governed in which he posits in a manner not dissimilar to Agarwala
that subordinate class politics in southern societies such as India is now based around the idiom of governmental welfare. Chatterjee argues that this domain of political society is
distinct from the classical liberal domain of civil society, which eulogizes legality and bourgeois conceptions of rights. Furthermore, he contends, the subordinate classes that reside in
political society have learned how to secure governmental welfare benefits in their own distinctive way. I feel that Chatterjee understates the retreat of working-class politics of a bygone
era while overstating the political savvy and bargaining power of those who reside in political
society.
166
Brickyard worker near Islamabad. This

study shows that informally employed
workerswhile not under any illusion
about the injustice of their condition
and simultaneously knowing that they
are free to sell their labor power to
whomever they wish, nevertheless
consent to the exploitative work
arrangement because they believe that
adhering to patronage rules guarantees
some form of employment and hence is
a survival strategy to which many other
(potential) workers have no recourse.
(Credit: ILO Photo/Crozet M., October 2005)
ers are like everyone else and we too have become too concerned with our
23
own persons. No one believes in change anymore.
As noted above, I am wary of a reading of patronage that is exclusively cultural, or conversely, purely functional. While workers do behave as they do
because what little they can potentially get through the [patronage relation] is
greater than the expected payoffs from class action,24 the structural context that
produces this attitude must be understood holistically. To reiterate: the constitutive aspects of this given structural context are, first, the turn away from
Fordist to flexible accumulation; second, the politicization of parochial identities by the postcolonial state; and third, dynamic discourses of social
obligations.
There is no question that workersthose in my case study or in Agarwalas
and Chuns narrativesare suffering from false consciousness. To the contrary, I think that Agarwala and Chun demonstrate that workers in the postFordist world are compelled to forge new political strategies that reflect the
rebalancing of class forces that Harvey and others have meticulously documented.25
23. Ali (2005) notes that even at the height of the Pakistani labor movement in Karachi in the early
1970s, exclusive identities, and particularly ethnicity, were often in competition with an expansive class identity. The existence of a class politics, which eventually suffered a precipitous
decline, ensured that patronage politics was not hegemonic in that particular conjuncture.
24. Khan 2000, 589.
25. Chun (2009) discusses at length in the preface of her book how the militant and apparently
unified South Korean formal trade union movement, which defied the general trend till as late
167
Differences in industrial organization explain in large part the ability of workers in Agarwalas and Chuns cases to organize effectively and, as well, the
almost complete lack of collective action amongst housing construction workers in metropolitan Pakistan. My point is that patronage bonds exist within even
the most militant labor movements, and, certain exceptions notwithstanding,
that extra-economic coercion is a foundational feature of the laborcapital relation in the age of subcontracting and flexible accumulation. Moreover the
widespread extent of extra-economic coercion, even where it contains a certain
mutuality, reflects the hegemony of capital.
I understand hegemony to be the dialectic of coercive force and consent. So
even in an ideal setting, clients understand their relationship with patrons to be
double-edged; if on the one hand the patron is thought of as a benefactor, on
the other he is a known tyrant. I believe that informally employed workers, at
least in the context that I study, while not under any illusion about the injustice
of their condition and simultaneously knowing that they are free to sell their
labor power to whomever they wish, nevertheless consent to the exploitative
work arrangement because they believe that adhering to patronage rules guarantees some form of employment and hence is a survival strategy to which many
other (potential) workers have no recourse.
A system of domination is hegemonic precisely when the subordinate classes
recognize their own subjugation yet cannot challenge it decisively (aside from
everyday acts of resistance). The safety net of a patron is therefore not understoodas the false consciousness argument would have itas an
unequivocally positive institution, but rather as a means of negotiating
(through established practices) what is a fundamentally unjust social universe.
Returning to Harvey, it should be clear that a distinction needs to be made between the North and the South with regard to the nature and methods of labor
control under flexible accumulation regimes. In societies such as Pakistan many
of the changes that Harvey argues took place after the shift from Fordism to
flexibilization can be understood as follows: extant structures and modes of labor control were reinforced while the economic basis of these structures was
26
dramatically transformed.
The Context
As Harvey and other theorists of flexible accumulation note, service industries
27
have erupted over the past two to three decades. On the one hand this trend
speaks to the diminishing livelihood options in the agrarian sector, and on the
as the early part of the last decade, eventually succumbed to the material and discursive logic of
flexible accumulation.
26. See Harriss-White (2005, 114) again here: Capital is far from dissolving or destroying caste.
While it might appear that caste is neither occupationally determining nor an entry barrier, in
actual fact, control over the biggest local capitals is restricted to a narrow band of castes. At
best caste is being reworked as an economic force (sometimes as capital, sometimes cross class
but rather rarely as labour) while at worst caste is a more powerful social stratifier than class.
27. The World Bank estimated in 1995 that services accounted for two-thirds of the worlds gross
domestic product, up from half a decade earlier. See International Bank for Reconstruction
and Development 2000.
168
other to the limited scale of the large-scale manufacturing sector. Informalization in the urban Pakistani contextthe particular focus of this article
can be traced back to the substantive social changes engendered by Green Revolution technologies in the 1960s, which resulted in large-scale displacement of
the subsistence peasantry from rural areas, particularly the irrigated plains of
Punjab. While a section of those who migrated to urban areas became employed
in big factories, particularly in the textiles industry, many others slipped
through the cracks and became self-employed or informal wage laborers.
Despite the lack of employment opportunities in formal industry, the exponential increases in population have meant that ruralurban migration
28
continues at rates as high as 4 to 5 percent per annum. When this in-migration
is coupled with the considerable internal population growth of urban settlements, it becomes clear that a massive reserve army of labor has come into
being. It is from this surplus pool that the majority of workers in the housing
construction industry hail.29 The little data that exists on informalization in Pakistan confirms that employment in the construction industry (alongside
wholesale and retail trade and the hotel and restaurants sector) is almost completely informalized87.2 percent of those employed in construction are
subject to informal work arrangements.30
A significant impetus to service industries has been provided by remittance
incomes. The golden age of remittances in the early 1980s greatly impacted a
wide cross section of society. This was because Pakistani workers in the Gulf,
hailing from rural and peri-urban areas of the Punjab and North West Frontier
Province (NWFP),31 accounted for the majority of remittances. These remittances became a major reason for social mobility and substantial increases in
the consumption of nonsubsistence goods. In terms of investment, migrants focused on housing and construction as well as on small family businesses that
could provide a regular income.32
The housing construction industry in the so-called twin cities of Islamabad/
Rawalpindi has grown tremendously since the end of the 1970s. If this is a corollary of the wider social and economic changes associated with ruralurban
migration, population growth within urban settlements, and diversified
sources of wealth, there has also been marked expansion in the recent decade
and a half.33 This boom reflects the direct connection between actually existing
capitalism in Pakistan and the global political economy (see below).
28. United Nations Population Fund 2009.

29. Informalization has also been acute in the agrarian economy where an estimated 30 million
people are now landless. Changing tenure relations in land have given rise to a massive reserve
army of agricultural wage labor (Zaidi 2005, 123).
30. Gennari 2004, 510.
31. In 2010 the Pakistani parliament passed legislation to change NWFPs name to KhyberPakhtunkhwa.
32. Addleton, 1992; Lefebvre, 1999.
33. Between 2007 and early 2011 alone, Islamabads population increased from 1.2 million to
1.33 million, an increase of 10.8 percent. See www.mopw.gov.pk/PopulationDynamicsBy Province.aspx (accessed 23 February 2011).
169
Cotton and textile industry, Tirupur, India. The textile industry in India, which operated
along Fordist lines until the late 1970s, later underwent a transformation in which large
factoriesgave way to small workshops in which weaving, stitching, looming, and other
such processes became spatially distinct. (Credit: ILO Photo/Khemka A., 2000)
Since the late 1990s Islamabad/Rawalpindi has been the fastest growing urban center in Pakistanlargely due to its being the center of government and
the headquarters of the military. In Islamabad in particular a great deal of
infrastructural developmentparticularly the construction of roadshas recently taken place and this has resulted in the creation of (mostly informal)
employment opportunities. Both of the twin cities are among the most attractive locations for migrants from KhyberPakhtunkhwa as well as the
surrounding districts of the Potohar Plateau.
This expansionary trend was given a major fillip by the events of 11 September 2001. Facing the threat of a freeze on their bank deposits and other assets,
Pakistanis living in Western countries sent large amounts of money back into the
country.34 The United States overtook Saudi Arabia as the single biggest source
of remittance incomes; crucially American remittances to Pakistan differ markedly from the Middle East remittances as the recent increase of the former is
motivated mainly by the search for economic profits while the latter is primarily
for helping finance daily needs.35 These remittances were invested in the stock
exchange and real estate market. In Islamabad, there was a steep increase in
land prices and an attendant boom in housing construction.
In short, the unhindered mobility of large amounts of capital in the twin citiesone of the major characteristic features of the neoliberal epochhas
facilitated the expansion of the housing construction market and with it infor-
34. Government statistics indicate that foreign remittances increased by 26.8 percent in the 2000s
(Government of Pakistan 2010).
35. Oda 2009, 812.
170
mal labor practices. Multiplier effects include intensified mining of granite and
marble and an increase in the number of informal transport providers.
While informal employmentand subcontracting in particularhas always
been a feature of the housing construction industry, informal employment practices have become more pronounced and the labor market even more
competitive in the wake of the above-mentioned processes. As noted above, little meaningful consolidated data exists on contracting practices in the Pakistani
construction industry, but an Indian comparison is instructive: In construction, an estimated 10.7 million construction workers, accounting for 83 percent
of all construction workers in India, were employed through contractors.36 In
comparison, the textile industry, which operated along Fordist lines until the
late 1970s, later underwent a transformation in which large factories with
value-added processes that were all consolidated gave way to small workshops
in which weaving, stitching, looming, and other such processes became spatially distinct. Power loom workshops in Faisalabad, one of my secondary
research sites, are found in residential neighborhoods and employ less than 10
workers on average.37
If this process of fragmentation is explained by the desire of owners and the
government to undermine workers organizations, it is also linked to changes in
the global political economy. Specifically the internationalization of production
meant the beginning of the practice of outsourcingas it is now fashionably
knownin which the preferred industrial setting was the informal, small-scale
workshop. In this process the local industrialistwho from the mid 1970s onwards was either abandoning operations entirely or shifting toward trade
started to play the role of a subcontracting firm, happy to adopt this role because of the relative security that could be derived from associating with the
multinational firm (in the sense that profits were consistent and government
regulation was nonexistent). This is not to take away from the fact that the multinational firm could cancel the contract at short notice, one of the major benefits
that flexible accumulation strategies accord such companies.
The outsourcing of production has been accompanied by an intensification
of subcontracting practices. Jobbers in big factories had been a crucial cog in
owners strategies to discipline labor as long ago as the colonial period.38 The
subcontractor is todays incarnation of the colonial-era jobber, exercising a
great deal of power, particularly in relation to home-based labor, but also
vis--vis workers in industries such as housing construction (see below).
The Contractor EconomyResearch Details

My fieldwork, which was conducted between October 2006 and October 2007,
involved extensive interactions with contractors (thekedaars) as well as work-
36. National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector 2007, 38.
37. For a trade union to be registered with the Labour Department in any one commercial enterprise, the prescribed requirement is a minimum of ten formally employed workers. In many
cases even if an enterprise employs ten or more workers, fewer than ten are formally registered.
38. See Sen 2002.
171
ers in the housing/construction industry in the twin cities of Islamabad and

Rawalpindi. During an earlier period (MarchAugust 2004) I had met with contractors and workers while doing commissioned work on trade unionism39 in
the informal surgical instruments and power looms industries in Sialkot and
Faisalabad cities respectively. I include mention of the latter industries in the following analysis because they provide useful comparative material.
I met with seven housing contractors in the Rawalpindi/Islamabad area over
the course of my research. Each of these contractors had arrangements with various (skilled) subcontractorscraftsmen or artisanswho brought with them a
team of unskilled workers to complete an agreed-upon task. I spent a good deal
of time with each of the seven main contractors and observed their exchanges
with the subcontractors and their teams of workers. I went on to develop a relationship with four of the subcontractors; in the analysis below all information I
provide pertains to all eleven of these contractors except at points where I
clearly distinguish contractors and subcontractors. I spent the most time with
the unskilled workers, numbering twenty-eight, who formed the teams of workers of the four subcontractors. The final classification is in terms of local and
migrant workers; twenty-two of the twenty-eight were local workers.40
I conducted my research in three different locations. I met the contractorsand through them my other informantsat the housing construction
site. Then I spent approximately two months following the contractors around
during their workdays, which is how I developed a sense of the nature of their
business operation. Finally, the majority of time in the field was spent with
workers in their places of residence, which is where they talked freely about
their work arrangements and social backgrounds. I was only invited to workers
residences after meeting them at the construction sites repeatedly and developing a relationship with them.
Contractors
I will first provide details of the personal backgrounds of the contractors and
their working methods. As a general rule, contractors hail from the same class as
workers. During my research I found that contractors were variously the sons of
subsistence farmers, low-grade government employees, factory workers, or
small shopkeepers. In the prototypical agrarian social formation, patrons hailed
from the exploiting class and clients from the exploited class. This important
difference clarifies the dynamic and entirely modern nature of the patronage
bond in the case presented here.
The shared sociological background of contractors and workers is crucial to
understanding the operation of the contractor economy41 inasmuch as personal
39. This work was done for the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (Piler), based
in Karachi.
40. I did not plan in advance to establish this distinction, however in the course of my fieldwork it
became obvious that there are significant differences in the attitudes and practices of migrant
and local workers as well as the way contractors treat each group.
41. The term contractor economy is courtesy of Gazdar (2004).
172
Workers on a construction site in Islamabad. Workers lack of collective action and the
immense surplus pool of labor ensures that, on the whole, contractors are able to maintain
a position of dominance. (Credit: ILO Photo/Crozet M., October 2005)
relationsor at the very least familiar backgroundsare its defining feature.

What distinguishes the contractor from the subordinate classes from which he
emerges is the fact that he is street smart. By this I mean that he is able to understand the dynamics of actually existing capitalism and particularly the need
to cultivate relationships with various political-economic agents along the value
chain, thus securing himself a place in the vast patronage network that I will outline presently.42
The contractor typically rises through the ranks, initially starting off as a
worker, or skilled craftsman (subcontractor), and eventually developing the
contacts and overall wherewithal to take on housing contracts in his own right.43
Two of my seven contractors started off as helping hands in small wholesale outfits selling material such as marble where they came into contact with skilled
craftsmen who functioned as subcontractors. They proceeded to become part
of the craftsmens team of unskilled workers and then slowly to develop the
skills needed to become subcontractors in their own right. Personal enterprise
and savvy appeared to be critical to these one-time helping hands slowly learn-
42. My findings about contractors correspond to the general thrust of a book-length study by De
Neve (2005) about upward social mobility in the informal textile production industry in Tamil
Nadu.
43. This is similar yet different from the contractor in the power looms and surgical instruments
industries where the established ustad-shagird (teacherapprentice) system is in operation.
Only after an extensive apprenticeship is one able to rise through the ranks, possibly becoming
a patron to numerous workers and establishing a reputation as a reliable contractor.
173
ing about the operation of the contractor economy, building contacts, and
generating the capital required to embark on their own.
Contractors are small managerial capitalists who employ labor. They operate
at very thin margins, competing with one another for contracts and rarely engaging in collective action, except when workers at a particular job site threaten
collective action of their own (see below). They are vulnerable to the vagaries of
the market themselves, which is perhaps why they have little sympathy for the
harsh plight of workers. Of the eleven contractors with whom I came in contact,
at least four have had to resort to menial wage labor themselves in the not too
distant past to compensate for a lack of housing contracts. One contractor explained his predicament in this way:
How are we any different from the workers? We ourselves are workers. I
have struggled very hard to build some contacts and earn some contracts. I
still have to take up daily-wage work myself when there are no contracts.
No one does me any favorswhatever I have managed has been because
of hard work. It is unfair for workers to complain about me; they simply
dont put in as much work as I do.
All of my (contractor) informants noted that success is contingent on establishing contacts with wholesalers as well as police and administrative officials,
who can provide official favors. Each of my informants has well-established ties
with preferred wholesalers who provide materials at competitive rates. Particularly crucial are wholesalers dealing with cement, bricks, and other material that
is required in large quantities for construction purposes.44 I noted that at least
three contractors shared wholesalers, and that wholesalers do not provide materials at exactly the same rate to all, even though the difference was not
substantial. The preferential treatment appeared to be a function both of familiarity and reliability; in other words preferential rates were offered to those
contractors who the wholesaler had known over a longer period and who had a
reliable record in clearing debts.
My informants were all keen to maintain good relations with police and other
state functionaries. In the housing/construction industry interactions with the
state are far less frequent than in the power looms and surgical instruments industries, in which worker unrest is more common. Nonetheless housing/
construction contractors do maintain links with the police in particular on account of unexpected eventualities such as conflicts with workers or even with
suppliers/transporters. In the four cases of worker-related conflicts that I observed in my research, contractors enjoyed the complete support of the police
and both parties collaborated to fleece the worker.45 In conflicts with more pow-
44. When contractors take on smaller jobs such as renovations of homes in which major construction work is not required, they refuse to purchase materials because the scale of the operation
allows for a very small profit margin. In this case their function is solely to provide the necessary labor.
45. In the incidents to which I was witness, the contractor did not pay his worker on time or less
than the agreed amount. When workers protested, however meekly, the contractor employed
his police contact to scare the workers with penal action. The workers then paid bribes to the
174
erful individuals such as wholesalers, however, the outcome is unpredictable

because the other party maintains links with the police as well.
In establishing their contacts my informants readily employ familiar identities such as biraderi (patrilineal lineage) and shared ethno-linguistic
background although such affiliations do not necessarily guarantee their interests per se. So, for example, in all four cases in which the police were contacted,
contractors invoked biraderi relations. In one case an assistant superintendent
of police was a first cousin. I noted that even in cases where contractors could
not rely on established personal relations, they tried to establish some link
through mutual relations.
Crucially, however, the contractors ongoing efforts to develop personal relations with various political-economic agents are but instrumental
engagements in which the contractors and those with whom they seek to exchange goods and services seek to extract the maximum possible economic
benefit. In other words, while both the contractor and the wholesaler/transporter/state functionary invoke terms that suggest familial relationships, both
parties do so quite cynically.46 While the exchange between contractors and the
wholesaler/transporter/state functionary is clearly a political exchange implying
a long-term relationship between the parties involved, personal ties are not enduring per se and the mutuality of the relationship is a function purely of
calculable benefit. This explains the ease with which one party ends its relationship with the party whenever economic sense demands it.
Here I will briefly discuss the relationship between contractors and subcontractors: no meaningful hierarchy exists between them, and they clearly
consider one another competitors. On numerous occasions during my fieldwork I observed acrimonious exchanges as each accused the other of not
fulfilling their (verbal) agreement. I noticed that competition was most fierce
when an effort was being made to win the favor of an employer who was perceived to be a fruitful contact, one who could put them in touch with future
employers. The only time that both seemed to be interested in colluding in any
meaningful way was when they had to suppress worker dissent (see below).47
Ultimately because of the intense competition between contractors and the lack
of barriers to entry in housing construction, contractors control over workers
is tenuous. However, workers lack of collective action and the immense surplus pool of labor ensures that, on the whole, contractors are able to maintain a
position of dominance.
police functionaries to avoid being implicated in a criminal case. Both the contractor and police functionary emerged beneficiaries.
46. For example, the term bhai (brother) is often used by both parties. Where there is a noticeable
age gap between two individuals involved in a transaction, the younger party employs the term
chacha (fathers younger brother).
47. Throughout my relatively long period of interaction with contractors, the only time they expressed any nervousness about my activities was when they found out that I was meeting with
workers separately from them. They were immediately suspicious that I might incite the workers against them.
175
Workers as Dependents
It took some time for workers to trust me with what they considered to be intimate information, particularly concerning their relationships with contractors.
This speaks to the fundamental characteristic of informal employment in the
housing construction industry: fear that derives from a complete lack of job security. It is important to clarify that almost all of the workers with whom I came
into contact warmed to me considerably upon hearing about my long-term involvement with workers organizations. During initial meetings workers clearly
perceived me to be an acquaintance of their employers and frank discussions
about my political orientation and earlier engagements with working-class
movements were crucial in helping me build trust. A good number of workers
told me quite openly that they were at first guarded about sharing their
thoughts and feelings with me but opened up after having established my commitments; a handful actually contacted me regularly on their own initiative.48
All of the twenty-eight workers with whom I interacted extensively expressed
a sense of gratefulness that they had secured somewhat regular employment
as part of their respective subcontractors teams.49 They explained how they developed links to subcontractors through personal contactstypically relatives
who were already employed by subcontractorsand these led to their employment. From the very beginning then, the relationship between contractor and
worker is personalized and therefore the latter feels he has to abide by established social regulations and pay back the contractor (as well as his kin who
put him in touch with the contractor) for providing him with stable work. It is
important to note that the workers feel grateful that they have secured employment in this established manner, rather than gratitude toward the contractor
per se. One of my respondents said:
I am just grateful that I have found some semblance of regular work. Of
course he [subcontractor] is not very good to us. He withholds our payments, makes us work more than is agreed, and threatens to fire us. But I
have no option but to keep quiet and accept his behavior. If I make a fuss I
might lose the work. And I cannot afford that. It is so difficult to find work
these days.
I consider this state of affairs hegemonic not because workers view the contractor as being a benefactor as such but because they have come to accept that
the only way to secure a livelihood in the given conditions is to secure the latters largesse. There is a sense that things could be different, but in the current
conjuncture workers perceive the system of domination to be stable and their
concern is with how to navigate it and survive. Workers ambivalent attitude toward contractors cannot be overstated: In one of the few studies of home-based
work in Pakistan the authors do not nuance their observations when they sug-
48. Over the course of my fieldwork I came to concur completely with the contention of Bourdieu
et al. (1999, 610) that the most successful ethnographic research among subaltern groups
takes place when the interviewer and interviewee are interchangeable. In other words it is
crucial to dispense with the delusion of perfect impartiality.
49. I interacted with painters, marble polishers, apprentice carpenters, and bricklayers.
176
gest that workers view the provision of work as a favour extended to them by
50
the subcontractors.
To the greatest extent possible contractors try to maintain their image as patrons so as to ensure that established norms are not ruptured and workers
loyalty is maintained. Not only do contractors want to avoid unrest, they also do
not want to be faced with a situation in which they are forced to look for new
teams of workers with whom they have no work experience. As at least one
other study of the contractor economy has noted, contractors only hire workers from the casual labor market as a matter of last resort and prefer to operate
with their established team of workers.51 The author of this study, Haris Gazdar,
seems to suggest some level of dependence of the contractor on workers, but
contractors suffer only marginal losses whenever their established team of
workers is unavailable for whatever reason. Workers, however, depend on their
contractor because he is the primary access they have to regular work. The alternativethat of waiting on designated sidewalks of the city for day jobsis a
distant second-best.
Workers in housing construction clearly appear to be subject to what is in the
literature called vertical subcontracting practices in the sense that they are
completely dependent on subcontractors to provide them with tools and have
no autonomy in relation to work tasks.52 In some forms of work the skill difference between the subcontractor and the worker is not substantive, such as
painting. Painters appear to have a more floating relationship with subcontractors rather than being part of a permanent team. In any case, this does not
equate to substantively more autonomy as compared to other workers.
Historically rooted perceptions and practices clearly underlie the operation
of the labor market and reinforce occupational rigidities. Contractors understand these rigidities and they use them to buttress stereotypes in their hiring
practices, consolidating historical trends of particular ethnic/linguistic/biraderi
groups doing particular kinds of work. So, for example, it is a well-known fact
that Pakhtuns dominate jobs in which heavy, unskilled labor is the major requirement.53 I found that all marble polishers in my sample of workers were
Pakhtun migrants. Over the course of time spent with them, and particularly after visiting their places of residence, I estimated that Pakhtun migrants make up
approximately 50 percent of the labor in the marble industry in Islamabad and
Rawalpindi. What emerged was a supply line of labor extending all the way back
to migrant villages, linked to the cities through a handful of Pakhtun contractors
50. Khan et al. 2005, 56.

51. See Gazdar 2004, 26. In the course of my research I did come across contractors hiring casual
labor because of unforeseen circumstances (an established worker was incapacitated or the
job in question required more labor than was immediately available). My observations here,
however, are based only on the twenty-eight workers who, at various points in time, remained
part of the regular team of workers employed by the subcontractors.
52. Watanabe 1983, quoted in National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector
2007, 52.
53. There is also a certain social stigma associated with menial labor, which Pakhtuns seem less
concerned with. Many local Punjabis are unwilling to undertake unskilled physical jobs, even
when they are in a position of acute economic need.
177
who had originally also come to the city as migrant labor many years earlier.
Thus it is hardly surprising thatdespite their being part of a class-in-itselfworkers very rarely consider themselves a class-for-itself and more often
than not think of themselves as part of an extended clan.54
My Pakhtun informants were more positive about their relationship with
contractors than other migrant workers as well as nonmigrants. They explained
that the kinship connection involved a social obligation to the contractor, to
other intermediaries who facilitated the working arrangement, and to those still
at home in the village who harbor a desire to use the same kinship connection to
migrate to the city and secure work. One Pakhtun migrant worker told me:
We are obliged to maintain a good relationship with our malik [subcontractor] because other boys in our village are also hoping to come to
Islamabad. The malik has provided employment to many of us from the
same village and he can be counted upon to do so in the future. That is
why we must make sure that we work hard for him and not give him any
reason to stop coming back to our village.
In the case of nonmigrant workers, the dynamic is different. There is far less
cliquish behavior because there is no alienation from the local community and
workers do not live in rented housing as a group, instead going home to their
nuclear families. Local workers tend to resent the clan-like dynamic prevailing
amongst migrant workers (and although they rarely admit as much, the fact that
migrants work more for less) and this encourages locals to also develop a distinct identity, most obvious in the derogatory remarks they make about the
migrants.55
Local workers are far more assertive than their migrant counterparts in large
part because the subcontractor is not responsible for arranging employment
from the village and their dependence on him is thus less acute. The local workers are more familiar with subcontracting practices and specifically with the
piece rates that other sub contractors pay and this puts them in a stronger bargaining position. However, even local workers told mealbeit with a greater
sense of lament that they were indebted to the subcontractors and that they
did not want to jeopardize the existing work arrangement in any way. In the case
of the local worker too, the contractors hiring practices emphasize familiarity
so that established patronage bonds can be regularly invoked.
As a general rule, migrant and local workers do not compete with one another, typically inhabiting exclusive occupational spaces. Although this can to a
certain extent be ascribed to historically rooted occupational (caste) differ-
54. I found tremendous similarities between migrant labor in the housing construction industry
and the working conditions and practices described in recent Indian scholarship. In particular,
wages are lower in comparison to those of local workers, a personalized relationship exists between the contractor/supplier and workers, and credit is commonly used to keep workers
dependent (National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector 2007, 11516;
Mosse et al. 2005.
55. This is particularly acute in the case of Pakhtuns, who are subject to considerable abusemost
of it benign but some less sofrom Punjabis. The hyperbole usually centers around a stereotype of the Pakhtun as lacking intelligence.
178
ences, more important is the deliberate segmentation of workers by

subcontractors. In other words, hiring practices reflect the subcontractors desire to maintain clannish patterns; segmentation means that conflict erupts as
much between workers as between workers and the subcontractor.
Class Consciousness
I have already made cursory references to the fact that neither migrant nor local
workers are inclined to mobilize horizontally on class lines and instead strategize in ways that (in their own eyes) guarantee employment and more generally
the bestowing of favors upon them by patrons. For workers patronage bonds offer some form of social security. And in the context of what is otherwise a highly
exploitative subcontractor economy, it is indeed true that the clan-like alignments of workers do pay off, at least insofar as the contractors preference for
familiarity and subservience reinforces the trend toward hiring from wellknown labor pools. For both migrant and local workers, although in a more tangible way in the case of the former, personal relations are actively cultivated so
as to avoid being fired or otherwise victimized.
This commitment to maintaining patronage relations is not simply a functional strategy. Workers have at least some sense that the maintenance of
personal relations (with subcontractors or anyone else within ones network) is
a foundational pillar of a wider social code that can be contrasted to the impersonal market system in which exclusively private gain is paramount. Indeed I
found that recourse to a moral
discourse in which the subcontractor as patron is obliged to
take care of workers as clients
produced sporadic collective
and what effectively amounts to
classaction.
In the handful of incidents of
worker unrest that I witnessed,
the contractor was forced to accede to workers demands only
when they invoked mutual commitments and warned the
subcontractor that he was morally obliged to come good on his
promises. In particular the Pakhtun subcontractor who dealt with
Pakhtun migrant workers in the
marble industry was compelled
on one occasion to (nominally)
Job seekers such as this man in Islamabad find
that clan-like alignments of workers do pay off,
increase piece rates after all of the
at least insofar as the contractors preference for
Pakhtun workers stopped work
familiarity and subservience reinforces the trend
in protest the fact that they had
toward hiring from well-known labor pools.
not received a bonus for Eid (the
(Credit: ILO Photo/Crozet M., October 2005)
179
yearly Muslim festival that follows the end of the fasting month). Crucially workers invoked the Pakhtun honor code of Pakhtunwali, which obliges the
subcontractor to heed their demands.
It is also true, however, that the patronage bond is a direct impediment to the
development of a corporate class consciousness through which the subcontractors clearly exploitative character can be challenged. The patronage relation
enjoys primacy such that individual workers are willing to sacrifice the interests
of other workers if cultivating their individual relationship with the subcontractor demands it. The most obvious example: a number of painters were told by
their subcontractor that they would have to work at a piece rate they felt to be
unacceptable and that a relatively new painter in their team had already agreed
to such terms. This resulted in a major row between the workers and payment
of a penalty in lieu of the damage they caused to equipment and the fact that the
job was not completed on time. The worker who agreed to work for less said:
They [the other workers] had it coming. Workers like them are always
picking fights and making things difficult for the rest of us. The malik [subcontractor] may not be a very good man but there is no point antagonizing
him. It is not as if he was going to pay us nothing. Besides weve never
gained anything from challenging his authority.
In the surgical instruments industries in Sialkot and the power looms industries in Faisalabad, the presence of registered trade unions suggests that
workers class consciousness is more developed and collective action is therefore more common. Of the seven trade unions that I came across, however, six
are run by contractors rather than by workers; the former use these formal institutions to give cover to the exploitative terms of employment. Indeed arguably
the best-known trade unionist in Faisalabad, Aslam Wafa, who is affiliated with
the biggest workers federation in the country, the Pakistan Workers Federation
(PWF), is widely reputed to be a middleman of the Labour Department.
In terms of mediating with the state, workers representatives such as Wafa
openly charge workers a fee when claiming social security payments; some
workers have to pay a fee simply to get a social security card. In many cases I
discovered that workers registration is often cancelled by the contractor (trade
unionist) at the behest of the workshop owner. Here again workers do not necessarily believe that the contractor is unequivocally committed to their welfare,
but I observed distinct hesitation on the part of the workers to speak negatively
of the contractor, ostensibly because they feared for their jobs and because they
saw no other means of protecting their meager rights but by acting in this
56
manner.
In any case, in these industries too, only a limited class solidarity is evident.
Because of the shared workshop space, and the nominal existence of the trade
56. When asked about what the contractor provided them, workers produced a long list that included protection from police, access to the Labour Department, which (selectively) allocates
social security cards and the like, loans in emergencies, and facilities for washing and cleaning
their personal belongings. In actual fact, the contractor denies workers their rights on a systematic basis. In the first instance, the contractor often rejects many of the finished
implements, particularly in the case of surgical instruments. Since workers are paid on
180
union, there is at least a better developed sense of shared interests among the
57
workers that transcends biraderi/caste/linguistic lines. On the other hand
however, when any particular union is under the effective control of the contractor, the space for a meaningful politics of class is virtually nonexistent. The
conspiring of the massive surplus pool of labor with the personalized manner in
which the class relation is articulated precludes class action.
Conclusion: A Yearning for the Past?

This article has examined the nature of informal employment in the housing
construction industry in the twin cities of Islamabad/Rawalpindi in Pakistan
(along with the surgical instruments and power looms industries in Sialkot and
Faisalabad respectively), so as to provide an insight into the operation of flexible accumulation regimes in a postcolonial society. I have sought to highlight
how extra-economic coercion in the shape of patronclient relations is crucial
to the functioning of the contractor economy. Moreover I argue that patronage
in the contractor economy is not rooted in an unchanging culture. Instead it reflects the deepening of capitalism and a dominant mode of politics that is a
legacy of colonial rule and that shapes the politico-cultural strategies of subordinate classes.
Not surprisingly, generalizations are difficult to make across the board, especially ones based on the handful of contexts in which the research for this article
was undertaken. However, some broad conclusions are worth considering as a
springboard for further and more detailed investigations into the subject. The
durability of patronage-based modes of labor control under flexible accumulation regimes confirms that an industrial cultureof the kind that Marx
assumed would take root as modernization proceededhas not emerged in
the postcolonial context. Specifically, patronage bondswhich may appear to
be an historical continuity of established cultural norms but are in fact specific
to the contemporary structural contextobscure the class relation and therefore impede corporate class consciousness. This is not to rule out the possibility
of conscious political action on the part of workersas evidenced in the work
of Chun and Agarwala, and in certain instances highlighted in my sample58but
piece-meal rates, this translates into additional labor for the same wage. Second, in the case of
accidents in which workers are injured while operating the looms or cutting an implement,
which are actually quite common, the contractor takes care of their medical needs but then
quite arbitrarily deducts a sum from their wage for the cost of the treatment. The contractor often does not pay the workers on time. In the event of any such abuse, the workers have no
recourse, and it is a cruel irony that the contractor himself is supposed to be protecting workers rights.
57. In Sialkot and Faisalabad, migrants hail from surrounding villages and therefore there is little
distinction between migrant and local workers as is the case in housing/construction in
Islamabad. This shared background also encourages greater solidarity among workers.
58. I came across an important example of sustained political action during my research (and have
been involved with this case ever since). Over the past couple of years, an organization called
the Labour Qaumi Movement (LQM) has mobilized power loom workers in Faisalabad city and
surrounding urban settlements to challenge the existing contract system (including purported trade unionists) with reasonable success. It remains to be seen whether the LQM can
181
only to point out that the dynamics of informal employment are often inimical
59
to conscious class struggle.
In arguing that modes of labor control that appear to be rooted in the past
remain salient in the present, I am not venturing a culturalist explanation.60
Instead I seek to show that the ability of the modern middleman in the informal
economy to control labor is based on the instrumentalizing of cultural norms
that are far from unchanging and instead are articulated in very distinct ways
with the impersonal ethics of the market. To invoke Harriss-White again, an understanding of cultural norms, including the nature of particularistic identities,
is essential in order to comprehend the particular way power is exercised in
and through markets.
To understand how power operates in the purportedly impersonal realm of
the market I have called for a holistic understanding of the relationship between
politics, economics, and culture, one that does not seek to explain one aspect of
the social whole as determined by any (combination) of the other(s). I have argued that the economic and political upheavals that have been produced by the
shift from Fordist to flexible accumulation regimes have reinforced patronage-based forms of labor control while at the same time undermining the
potentialities for class-based political action. In making this argument I have
postulated that capitalism in Pakistan can be considered hegemonic because
workers recognize the objective fact of their exploitation yet continue to abide
by patronage norms.61
I have also suggested that the contractorand for that matter all political-economic agents who benefit from the system of dominationare keen to
ensure that patronage norms are continuously consolidated, which is why it is
important to avoid thinking that such norms are unchanging. In any case, the dialectic of objective exploitation and a lack of collective action to challenge this
exploitation produces a melancholy among workers and a yearning for an idyllic past. Many older workers lament that in a bygone era the labor movement
was organized and their class power allowed them to challenge owners and
contractors.
Yet there are also workers, particularly those who have not experienced any
meaningful mobilization along class lines, who consistently assert the need for
provide workers with a decisive alternative to the patronage-based political and economic order. In its short period of existence the LQM has secured more rights for power looms workers
than other workers organizations in the recent past.
59. Importantly, class struggle is inherent in every exchange between workers and those above
them in the production/patronage chain, but this struggle is often unconscious and therefore
blunted.
60. Subaltern Studies has illuminated the various forms of identity that constitute the consciousness of workers and peasants in South Asia, but the initial focus on a materially rooted social
history of workers and peasants has recently given way to a tendency to separate culture
from politics and economics. For a classic subalternist treatment of working-class culture
within Subaltern Studies, see Chakrabarty 1983. In response, see Bahl 2000.
61. Here I find resonance with the argument made by Gooptu (2007), who argues that jute workers in Kolkata have acceded to patronage norms as a survival strategy while largely forsaking
class politics because of the changing structural context in which working-class politics and
ideology have been betrayed.
182
the communitarian pastby which they mean the collective ethic of rural
lifeto be revived. One of my Pakhtun informants had the following to say in
this regard:
People in the cities are so alienated from one another. Even in the villages
now these influences are seeping in. But at least we still maintain some
standard of collective welfare [in the villages]. Everyone knows everyone
else and help one another out in difficult times. We even share the good
times. Here [in the city] I feel very lonely and the only silver lining is that I
have other [Pakhtun] brothers around who at least know where I am coming from.
Further research can and should be done to interrogate the complex relationship between culture, politics, and economics so as to understand how and
why hegemony is reproduced on a day-to-day basis and accordingly how to conceive of counter-hegemonic strategies. These questions, I insist, must be at the
heart of an engaged research agenda in the sociology of twenty-first century capitalist modernity.
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PATRONAGE AND CLASS

A consensus is growing in scholarly as well as policy circles that the informal

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Workers such as this laborer in Rawalpindi are ensconced in a hegemonic relationship

Harriss-White 2003 and 2005.

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Flexible Accumulation Regimes and Labor

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tries. Harvey analyzes the relationship between postmodern aesthetics,

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large-scale industry and the attendant explosion of small-scale production units

Critical Asian Studies 43:2 (2011)

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classes continue to be committed to personalized exchange norms in the shape

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the studies of everyday forms of resistance made popular by James Scott.

21. Scott 1985.

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Brickyard worker near Islamabad. This

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(Credit: ILO Photo/Crozet M., October 2005)

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28. United Nations Population Fund 2009.

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The Contractor EconomyResearch Details

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ers in the housing/construction industry in the twin cities of Islamabad and

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relationsor at the very least familiar backgroundsare its defining feature.

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erful individuals such as wholesalers, however, the outcome is unpredictable

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50. Khan et al. 2005, 56.

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ences, more important is the deliberate segmentation of workers by

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Critical Asian Studies 43:2 (2011)

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Conclusion: A Yearning for the Past?

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