Work Relations and the Pandemic: An Anthology

COVID-19 unleashed massive havoc on the lives, income and livelihood of the vast majority of working people, in India and elsewhere. In our country, more than fifty per cent of the total workforce lost their jobs. The economy shrank by a quarter. Millions of migrant workers walked back to their homes, defying the lockdown and all manners of barriers.

The pandemic exposed the extreme precarity and lack of social protection of the large majority of the working-class communities in the country. To understand the impact of the pandemic on different segments of the working class, especially those of the informal sector, CEC organised a series of Labour Dialogues in 2020. The objective was also to contribute towards building appropriate labour strategies, by bringing together trade union activists, academics, feminist activists, labour historians, journalists and others in a single forum. This anthology is a bi-product of that endeavour.