Over three-fourths of India’s labour force works within the informal economy. Amongst non-agricultural workers, the share of the informal workforce has grown from 68 percent in 1999-2000 to 84 per cent in 2009 -10 (ILO, 2012). Globally, the informalization of work has been assumed to lead to the demise of organized labour, but evidence from India indicates that large and growing numbers of informal workers belong to officially-recognised trade unions. In this paper, I review the literature on collective organization amongst informal workers and analyze large-n national employment survey data to examine unionization in India’s informal economy. I find that union membership is associated with a significant increase in earnings, controlling for social group, education and occupational characteristics. This relationship, however, does not hold for women, who are disproportionately concentrated in the lowerrungs of the informal workforce as home-workers and domestic workers.

Women and sociallydisadvantaged groups are less likely to belong to unions, while better-educated workers have higher odds of being union members. Widespread informality in India is unlikely to disappear. India’s high GDP and urban growth in recent decades have not been associated with a concomitant expansion in formal employment. Formal manufacturing and services employ a small proportion of Indian workers, and, as elsewhere in the world, technological changes as well as a mismatch in skills have resulted in large numbers of “surplus” workers. The 50 million or so unskilled workers who will join India’s urban workforce in the coming decade will most likely be absorbed in the informal economy. Given the magnitude of the informal workforce in India, governmental efforts to secure broad-based improvements in living standards must address working conditions and prospects for informal workers. Based on my findings, I argue that labour organization within the informal economy will play a critical role in this regard, by pushing the state to intervene in support of workers, enact and enforce legislation and implement welfare programmes for informal workers.