ABSTRACT
In the past four decades, there has been a huge shift in the patterns of global production as transnational corporations engage in global 'labour arbitrage' on a grand scale, offshoring whole operations and outsourcing partial ones to developing countries. Under the global manufacturing system, transnational corporations structure and preside over an international wage hierarchy. As Beverly Silver has persuasively shown, the labour movement is weakened in sites of disinvestment but ultimately strengthened in sites of expansion. China is becoming the 'epicentre of global labour unrest', according to Silver and Zhang. The Delhi industrial belt, like China's Pearl River Delta, has become a focal point of working-class formation and composition. In Gurgaon, many people are dazzled by the shopping-malls and corporate towers and cannot see the development of a massive industrial working class. The sweatshop artefact of the nineteenth century is again the symbol of super exploited labour in the global economy.
