Organizing in the Informal Sector: A Case Study in Mumbai’s Shipbreaking Yards
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Building on empirical data collected through interviews with representatives of the Mumbai Port Trust Dock and General Employees Union, the International Metalworkers’ Federation, and shipbreaking workers, this paper presents the results of a case study conducted from 2011 to 2013 in the shipbreaking yards of Mumbai. I first examine India’s liberalization shift in the early 1990s and observe its effect on the transformation of labour markets, then present a brief overview of the literature related to unions and the informal economy. Using the conceptual framework developed by Sousa Santos (2004 Sousa Santos, B. 2004. “A Critique of Lazy Reason: Against the Waste of Experience.” In The Modern World-System in the Longue Durée, edited by I. Wallerstein, 157–98. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Accessed January 2, 2016. http://www.ces.uc.pt/bss/documentos/A%20critique%20of%20lazy%20reason.pdf. [Google Scholar]) around the “sociology of absences, the sociology of emergences and the work of translation” and the analytical tool developed by Comeau (2005 Comeau, Y. 2005. Grille pour la Réalisation de Monographies Portant sur des Luttes Collectives [Carrying monographs on collective struggles: A grid]. Montréal: Centre de recherche sur les innovations sociales, UQAM. [Google Scholar]) to study collective struggles, the core of the article explores the development of shipbreaking activities in India, chronicles the history of collective action in the shipbreaking industry, discusses practices, strategies and demands put forward by the unions, and identifies issues arising from the difficulties facing traditionally organized unions engaged in transforming their practices to adapt to the growth of the informal economy.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it