ABSTRACT
Sites turn over rapidly, there is no fixed place of employment, labour requirements fluctuate day to day, and the world over it’s an industry with a high proportion of short-term temporary workers. But though it’s perhaps an extreme instance, this instability of employment and income is characteristic of most ‘labour class’ jobs in Bhilai. In general, however, ‘labour class’ people frequently move frictionlessly sideways between a range of paradigmatically ‘labour class’ jobs, though seldom upwards into formal sector employment. With some help from the ‘culture’ of their commonly workshy menfolk, their class situation forces ‘labour class’ women onto construction sites where they are vulnerable to the sexual predation of men with power over them. The old idioms are deployed to justify new forms of social distinction – in particular, that between the two classes of labour.
