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After a traumatic lockdown in 2020, India's migrant factory workers have headed back to work and on worse terms than before. Struggling with new levels of denial of entitlements, workers respond by withdrawing from their fragile hold on formality, moving instead further into the informal sector. Based on voice notes recorded on Saajha Manch, a phone‐based community media platform, the paper examines workers' experience that their efforts to claim their rights lure them into a quagmire in a bureaucracy which sucks their energy while assuring no clear outcome. Seeing evidence of failed enforcement and structural inequality all around them, workers conclude that the law is not meant for them and hence show little interest in the new labour codes hastily enacted at the height of the pandemic. The paper highlights the dysfunction of the formal sector in delivering to its low‐waged workers who remain unserved in spite of registration and documentation in place. As they join the ranks of informality, however, migrant factory workers do not lose interest in associative and contentious activity. On the contrary, freedom from the bureaucracy of rights may be a boost to new forms of struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My essay[This paper] focuses on the marginalised people whose livelihoods depend on gathering, sorting, transporting and selling garbage in India's huge informal economy, livelihoods now challenged as municipal governments contract the recycling of waste to corporations. The evolving, bumpy geography of the waste economy creates permanent border areas of primitive accumulation and both devalorised and valorised people and places. I make a case for understanding informal sector activities, such as the work of transforming the city's detritus, as part of a vast infra-economy and the varied forms of labour performed within heterogeneous value chains of waste transformation as infrastructural labour that produces what Marx called capital's 'general' and 'external' conditions of production. Through close examination of the spatiotemporal lattice of informal municipal solid waste recycling, I demonstrate how these economies are at once highly organised and brittle, with each node in their value chains subject to disruption by state and market forces. While relative opacity, labour intensity of tasks and dependence on embodied knowledge ( metis), indeed a 'bodily' feel for space, give informal economies the capacity to resist external efforts to transform, subsume or eradicate them; lack of social security and employment protections also means that workers and micro-enterprise owners within them inhabit the thin line between survival and failure, rendering them vulnerable to economic and political fluctuations. The upshot is that the labour of waste and other informal sector workers is critical for maintaining the quality of life desired by the well off in cities of the global South, but fails to get the recognition it deserves. Waste workers are poorly compensated, regularly stigmatised and frequently invisible in policy decisions. This is an enduring inequity that demands urgent correction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]