Indian Workers Are on the Front Line of Global Exploitation
From Europe to the Gulf states, Indian migrant workers are being recruited for the most insecure, low-paid, and dangerous jobs. The story begins at home, where India’s caste system produces a labor force vulnerable to the most extreme exploitation.
For Indian laborers, especially those from already marginalized communities, work in the Gulf States does not offer a break from the caste labor order at home. It is one of that order’s transnational extensions. (Brent Stirton / Getty Images)
All over the world, we can find Indian migrant workers subject to extreme forms of exploitation and abuse: dying in the Gulf states as a result of the US war on Iran, just as they died a few years earlier of heat exhaustion as they built the stadiums for the World Cup in Qatar; brought in to replace Palestinians on Israeli construction sites after October 2023; trapped in modern slavery on Italian farms or bamboozled into the Russian army.
This is not a coincidence but a structural design. To understand why Indians are so consistently available to do precarious work in the most dangerous places and on the cheapest terms, we have to begin in a Dalit basti in Bihar, a manual scavenger’s neighborhood in Andhra Pradesh, or an Adivasi village in Jharkhand.
The compliance that global capital values in Indian labor was first produced inside India itself. It operates through caste structures, landlessness, and the systematic informalization of work, codified by a social system that treats these workers as disposable long before they cross any border.
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