Moral Economies of Remuneration: Wages, Piece-Rates, and Contracts on a Delhi Construction Site

The article tracks the forms and practices of remuneration that structure production in the Indian construction industry. As in other areas, construction in India is characterized by the widespread use of contract labor. Self-described “modern” construction sites, like the one I focus on in this article, present production as being governed by strict piece-rate contracts. Yet, as the article demonstrates, actual processes of production on the site were remunerated in multiple ways. While the main contracting company on the site was remunerated on a strict piece-rate basis, workers were almost always remunerated by a day wage. The vast majority of these workers were brought to the site under sub-contractors linked to them through networks of kinship, caste, and village residence, which enable long-term relations of credit and debt. The article argues that these forms of remuneration encode two quite different imaginations of work and the appropriate relations between employers and workers; what I call moral economies of remuneration. The forms of reciprocity that structure workers’ remuneration imply long-term, if asymmetrical, obligations between doers and givers of work. The piece-rate envisions the employment relation as a finite market transaction. By attending to the tensions that arise within the production process, the article demonstrates that this is a not a tension between “modern” contract and “traditional” patronage. Rather, production was dependent on an imperfect translation between these two moral economies of remuneration. In the fraught negotiations on the site around the form of work’s remuneration, sub-contractors, workers, and supervisors attempted to shift, maintain, and perhaps gain from this complex structure of production.