ILPC 2026

The construction industry, or rather the construction process is unique in that it deals with a production process which constantly moves. The finished product, whether a building or a road or a bridge or any other form of what is known as the ‘built environment’, goes through a specific production process employing labour supervised by experts such as engineers and architects. However, the labour process involved in constructing something includes a series of activities that can be broken down and divided into specific tasks. This means like many production processes; the final product is constituted by different constituent parts employing different kinds of labour. Whether it is the stage of building the foundation, or moving from the plinth level to the slab level, the roofing, the electrical works, woodwork and other similar activities. These activities entail a specific form of labour required, but, also the category of the helper, who forms the basic minimum of what a construction worker is, at least, in the case of India, and in the case of this paper, Mumbai. Now, this divisible work process uses all forms of informal work practices, wherein a lot of workers are not recognised by any state authorities, and are directly under the control of a labour contractor, who himself uses various subcontractors at different points for different tasks in the process of building. This extensive network of contracting and sub-contracting is the world within which the worker in construction is embroiled and its stability ensures a wage to reproduce him or herself. However, at the same time, the very space within which construction work takes place is owned and controlled by the builder-capitalist who is investing capital to produce a commodity to be sold in the real estate market. The real estate market, unlike the world of work, is a formal and recognised sector, which includes a plethora of intermediaries such as property dealers, real estate consultancies, marketing agencies, banks as well as the eventual customers who purchase these properties. The state, both in its role of the planner and regulator, as well as the ‘welfare granting’ benefactor is at the centre of this whole maze. The paper, using current fieldwork on the residential real estate sector in Mumbai, seeks to understand how is the labour process in construction integrated into the business process or in other words, how does the process of accumulation within real estate hinge on contracting and sub-contracting at different points of time. It seeks to raise the following questions to understand the location of labour and the labour process in the world of real estate: In what ways do workers in their daily involvement in the labour process affect the process of building? How do delays (time) in building affect the processes of accumulation and business profits? In what ways does the state, as a regulator of the urban expansion and planning, seek to regulate lives of the worker, while at the same time assuming the role of 'supreme' regulator of all built environment in the city? Finally, what changes in practices can be seen with new regulations and a tendency to shift towards a regime that is more conducive to global investment flows?