Landless dalits and adivasis have occupied parts of a corporate rubber plantation at Chengara in Kerala for five years. Despite being pressurised in various ways, they have held out, sticking to their demand of land for them to pursue livelihoods. None of the agreements so far reached with the state government has been satisfactorily implemented. Yet, the issues raised by the Chengara struggle have a social and economic significance that no government can afford to ignore.

Government officials and functionaries still shudder at the name of Fatehpura taluka in Dahod, a tribal district in Gujarat. In August 2010, India’s first union of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) workers, called the Rashtriya Rojgar Khatri Kamdaronu Kayda Union (RRKKKU), had exposed a massive scam in which Rs 4.18 crores of NREGA money had been siphoned.

An assessment of the Maruti Suzuki Employees Union’s struggles against the Suzuki management in Manesar (Gurgaon) reveals that like central trade unions, plant unions also tend to reproduce a form of bureaucratic functioning. This results in a split between leaders and the rank and file – a tendency which often leads to the betrayal of the interests of the struggling workers.

Examining the Marathi translation of The Communist Manifesto published in 1931 and situating it in the socio-historical context of workers’ movements in Mumbai in the 1920s and 1930s, this paper argues that the so-called subordinated classes engaged with it and created a workers’ public that was in conversation with the elite public sphere. But it holds that the vernacular version had to navigate the structures of language and a social structure in which caste was an important feature to make itself comprehensible to other intellectuals, trade union leaders and workers.

The manner in which rights at work have been identified and articulated within both the International Labour Organisation and India since the founding of the agency in 1919, bears a close similarity.