Wildcat strikes and militant protests have spread across several industrial belts in India in the last few months. Workers in various industries are demanding eight-hour workdays, wage increases, overtime pay, better workplace safety and basic amenities such as drinking water and toilets.
In April, news presenters tut-tutted over footage of burning cars and stone-pelting workers in the national capital region, which includes several industrial cities surrounding the capital, New Delhi, in the country’s north. Police have attacked workers with batons and tear gas and made hundreds of arrests. Hundreds more are missing—possibly abducted by police or company goons. Authorities have denounced the strikes as the work of communist “outside agitators” or as a subversive plot by Pakistan. They have even pressed terrorism charges.
Workers from oil refining and petrochemicals, auto parts, textiles and garments, steel and domestic services have come out. The actions have spread by example—workers’ militancy or partial wins in one struggle have given workers elsewhere the confidence to act. The wildcat strikes, involving many tens of thousands, have shaken the country’s labour movement and industrial relations far more than the annual one-day set-piece general strikes called by the national trade union federations, which involve 100 million workers or more.
Indeed, one such set-piece general strike occurred on 12 February. Leftists reported that, as in past years, union officials in many workplaces tried to undermine the day of action’s disruptive potential by counselling workers to organise a protest rather than a strike, or even a mere meeting outside work hours. The passive and tokenistic nature of the annual general strike elicits little interest from big business. That is a contrast to the alarm provoked by the militancy of this strike wave from below.
Most strikers are contract workers employed by subcontractors rather than directly by the workplace where they work. They are paid lower wages and are denied the social security provisions that permanent workers doing the same work at the same plant receive. The national trade union federations tend to cover permanent workers much more than contract workers. In India’s organised manufacturing sector, 40 percent of workers are now contract workers. It is a substantial increase compared to the early 2010s.
The spontaneous spread of these actions makes sense given the working conditions. It is common to work twelve-hour days with no overtime pay and only two days off a month. Labour economists say that to maintain a household in a small city, the minimum wage should be about 30,000 rupees a month (about A$440). Most of the striking factory workers earn closer to 10,000 rupees, the minimum wage in many states. In practice, however, nearly two-thirds of Indian workers earn less than the minimum wage, according to the most recent labour force survey, conducted by the Ministry of Statistics. Domestic workers involved in the strike wave, for instance, receive around 8,000 rupees.
On top of that, there is the impact of the war on Iran. The price of cooking gas in India has risen fourfold or even eightfold in some places. Gas cylinders are the primary cooking fuel in cities and account for a significant share of monthly household spending for most workers. Many migrant workers are leaving cities to return to the countryside because they cannot afford to eat.
A 2026 report on heat stress in the garment industry by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai provides a broader sense of factory conditions. Of the surveyed workers, most work in buildings with metal or asbestos roofs that lack adequate airflow, let alone air conditioning, alongside machines such as dyers that operate at over 120 degrees Celsius. Most report difficulty obtaining permission to go to the toilet. Over a third report no reliable source of drinking water on the factory floor. A large majority of the workers (who are mostly women) report clinical symptoms of dehydration, urinary infection and disruptions to menstruation. To top it off, India experienced a severe heatwave in late April.
The timeline of spreading protests and strikes gives a sense of the dynamics. On 2 February, protests and strikes broke out at an Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL) refinery in Barauni, Bihar, sparked by a workplace death. On 23 February, 30,000 workers struck at another IOCL refinery, in Panipat, Haryana. A workplace accident had left two dead and a third requiring an amputation, after management refused to allow the timely entry of an ambulance.
As videos of police repression of Panipat workers went viral, other workers took inspiration: steel workers in Surat, Gujarat, at ArcelorMittal Nippon (but employed by a contracting company that also subcontracts to IOCL); paint/petrochemical workers in Bharuch, Gujarat; IOCL workers in Salem, Tamil Nadu, and in Vadodara, Gujarat.
In early April, strikes broke out in the town of Manesar, Haryana—first among thousands of auto-parts workers, then textile and garment workers. The chief minister of Haryana responded with both a carrot and a stick: the stick of arrests and “public disturbance” laws to prevent workers from organising in public, and the carrot of raising the state’s minimum wage by 35 percent. This still left wage rates well below the demands of the protesting workers—the minimum wage had not been raised since 2015.
Nevertheless, the partial concession gave workers in the neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh confidence to make similar demands. The industrial city of Noida erupted from the second week of April. As well as factory workers in textiles and garments, women domestic workers and gig workers joined protests. The state’s chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, is a notorious spewer of anti-Muslim hate. He is touted as a potential successor to Narendra Modi as a prime ministerial candidate because of his popularity among the core voter base of the ruling far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party).
The police in Uttar Pradesh are among the most brazen in their anti-Muslim harassment. They also routinely turn a blind eye to Hindu fundamentalist vigilante groups who beat and lynch Muslims. It is the Noida protests above all that have provoked government accusations of Pakistani plots and that have received the harshest police repression. Prominent trade unionists in the state were placed under house arrest to stop them from consorting with the strikers. Yet here too the authorities made a concession by raising the minimum wage by 21 percent.
It is important to situate the strike wave in a larger context—three issues in particular. First, new Labour Codes came into force last November (after being enacted in 2020), strengthening the position of business owners and weakening the position of workers. They are the biggest attack on workers’ conditions in decades and are a significant plank of the Modi government’s ambition to make India a global manufacturing hub. The codes make it easier to stretch the workday to twelve hours (which was already the norm in many factories), make it harder to strike legally, make it easier to fire workers, weaken factory inspections for health and safety, and decriminalise and lower penalties for industrial offences by employers. The national trade union federations view the Labour Codes as a major threat and have called for their repeal in their annual one-day general strikes in recent years. While the token annual strikes have been toothless, perhaps the strike wave can finally provide some industrial muscle to oppose them.
Second, rural living standards are dire. Many urban workers are migrants from the countryside. The flow of rural-to-urban migrant workers exerts a continual downward pressure on wages in cities, and remittances from migrant workers to their families in villages are an important source of support for households of small farmers and farm labourers. There is chronic underemployment and “disguised unemployment” (an extra pair of hands on the family farm even though they are not needed) in the countryside. This was made worse during the pandemic as millions of migrant workers fled cities when workplaces closed—many have never returned. Modi’s ongoing trade negotiations with the US will likely lower India’s agricultural protectionism and may affect not only farmers but also farm labour, as farmers lower wages to remain competitive. Modi’s attempt to pass farm laws that benefit agribusiness at the expense of farmers was stopped in 2021 by a farmers’ movement, and today’s trade deals with the USA could provoke a similar campaign.
Third, India has a high level of unemployment among university graduates—people trying to enter professional or white-collar work. Nearly 40 percent of graduates under the age of 25 are unemployed. Meanwhile, the gap between non-graduate incomes and graduate incomes for youth has narrowed over the past decade.
So this strike wave among blue-collar workers comes as other sections of society also face pressure—farm workers, small farmers, graduates and others. Trade negotiations with the USA have raised fears that increased competition from international firms will wipe out a layer of small farmers and small enterprises, who would be cast into the job market when unemployment is already high.
It remains to be seen whether the combination of repression and small concessions will end the strike wave, or whether the desperation of wide layers of society will bring fresh reinforcements into the struggle. It also remains to be seen whether these fiery strikes from below will push the staid trade union bureaucracy beyond token actions. But one thing is clear: the industrial workers of India, so often written off by academics and paternalistic union bureaucrats alike, are once more proving themselves to be a fighting force.
