by Amartyajyoti Basu

The story of modern capitalism is often told through the lens of the factory whistle and the punch clock – symbols of progress and industrial modernity. Yet, in colonial Calcutta, between 1920 and 1960, these symbols represented something far more sinister: a system of exploitation that used time itself as an instrument of control. The transport workers of this era – tram operators, bus drivers, conductors, and support staff – experienced not the orderly benefits of industrial progress, but a regime designed to extract maximum labour while denying them security, dignity, or fair compensation.

In the decade earlier to 1920s, Calcutta witnessed a rise of motorized transport, creation of new manufacturing industries causing massive labour migration from neighboring provinces and rise of the new class of workers—the transport workers. The transport workers were often migrant workers from neighboring provinces of UP and Bihar, rest of Bengal, and Punjab. The introduction of a new transport system went in tandem with the demand of the new industries created in the city and its suburbs.

The Global Struggle and Colonial Betrayal

The struggle over work-time has been one of the defining conflicts of modern labour history. Work-time serves us as a measure of abstract labour thar is sold to the employer. A struggle over work-time thereby is a struggle over the control of the workers of their own labour. The Haymarket incident in Chicago in the 1880s made the eight-hour workday a rallying cry for working-class movements worldwide. By the 1920s, the reduction of work hours had become recognized as a political right in capitalist states. The U.S. Congress enacted the eight-hour workday in 1886, and European nations gradually adopted similar standards, enshrining leisure time as a matter of political entitlement.

The colonial world, however, presented a different picture entirely. While workers in the West secured these rights, colonial Calcutta’s transport workers in 1920 endured twelve-hour workdays with no provision for casual leave or any other form of paid time off[i]. This was not merely a lag in development – it was systematic exploitation enabled by colonial power structures.

The workers were not silent receivers of this unjust treatment. There were multiple instances where they had organized demanding for better livelihood and working conditions. The strike of 1921 marked a turning point. For the first time in Bengal, transport workers demanded the fixation of an eight-hour workday, payment of allowances for overtime, and the introduction of casual and privilege leave[ii]. The workers were not simply asking for abstract rights – they were demanding control over their time and recognition of their humanity beyond their capacity to labour.

The government’s response was to appoint the Calcutta Tramway Strikes Committee, which recommended reducing the workday from twelve to nine hours and introducing three weeks of annual leave at half pay. While this fell short of workers’ demands, it appeared to represent progress. However, implementation revealed the hollowness of colonial reform. Even by 1939, nearly two decades later, leave with full pay remained unknown to many workers, and payment for gazetted holidays was not guaranteed.

The Report on Labour Conditions in Tram and Bus Services reveal that formal reduction of work hours masked continued exploitation through various mechanisms that revealed the ingenuity of colonial capitalism in extracting labour while minimizing costs. [pp. 33-63]

The pro-rata system of wage payment exemplified this exploitation. Drivers and conductors employed on a daily rate basis were theoretically paid in full for their shift, even if their actual work period was less than the total spread-over due to bus breakdowns or other reasons. However, in practice, when a bus’s total income for a shift was low due to breakdown, workers were often paid only a portion of their wages ‘by mutual agreement’ – a euphemism for coercion.

Some firms developed elaborate pro-rata systems. One firm paid its workers one rupee per trip in case of forced reduction in working hours. Another paid two rupees if a breakdown occurred before noon, with higher payments for afternoon breakdowns. These systems created uncertainty and insecurity, making it difficult for workers to plan their lives or budget their expenses. The risk of mechanical failure was transferred from employer to worker.

Overtime presented another mechanism of exploitation. While not officially compulsory, it was often unavoidable due to the rotation of duties. The calculation of overtime differed from that laid down in the Factories Act, shortchanging workers. Workers received an overtime allowance equivalent to only quarter of a day’s pay for work up to two hours beyond the standard seven hours and fifteen minutes of ‘platform duty.’ An extra half-day’s pay was given for two to four hours beyond platform duty.

Reports indicated that 60 to 70 percent of operatives in the traffic section regularly worked overtime for less than half an hour’s extra duty. This seemingly minor extension of the workday had significant cumulative effects on workers’ health, family life, and overall well-being. Moreover, the incentivization of overtime through additional pay meant that workers facing economic pressure – which was most of them – felt compelled to work longer hours, undermining the very purpose of work-hour limitations.

One of the most significant features of exploitation in the transport sector was the sharp divide between permanent and daily-rated workers. This stratification was a deliberate strategy to prevent worker solidarity and maintain exploitative conditions.

Permanent workers enjoyed relative security and access to benefits like privilege leave, medical leave, and paid holidays. Men with less than five years of service received fourteen days of privilege leave; those with five to fifteen years received twenty-one days; and those with more than fifteen years received thirty days. Medical leave of up to ten days per year was also granted. The engineering, overhead cable, and permanent way departments granted twelve paid holidays per year, coinciding with gazetted holidays for Hindu, Muslim, and Christian festivals.

Daily-rated workers, by contrast, lived in a state of perpetual precarity. They faced what was termed ‘involuntary unemployment’– days when no work was available due to the grouping system introduced by the Bus Syndicate during the war, bus breakdowns, petrol shortages, or other reasons. This involuntary unemployment typically ranged from five to nine days per month, for which no compensatory allowance was paid. Some owners provided khoraki (a small allowance) to drivers and conductors required to attend the garage, but this was entirely at the proprietor’s discretion.

This two-tiered system created radically different realities within the same sector. Permanent workers could be pacified with modest benefits while the majority remained vulnerable and desperate, unable to organize effectively for better conditions.

Management also framed worker ‘absenteeism’ as a problem of discipline and backwardness, deflecting attention from the exploitative conditions that made such absences necessary. The Calcutta Tramway Company reported that the wartime labour shortage had forced them to maintain a reserve force far in excess of normal requirements. Between 1939 and 1944, the average number of conductors employed per month increased by 79 percent, while the number of drivers rose by 35 percent. In ordinary times, the company employed 18 percent extra drivers and 22 percent extra conductors; during the war emergency, they kept 40 percent extra drivers and 50 percent extra conductors in reserve.

Management attributed high absenteeism to workers’ rural connections and lack of industrial discipline. Workers were said to be ‘normally absent’ after pay day, festivals, and Sundays. During the monsoon, absenteeism increased due to sickness. Newly appointed Bengali conductors were labeled ‘habitual absentees,’ with the principal cause attributed to ‘low standard of health and vitality and high incidence of malaria.’ The continuous nature of hard work was acknowledged as particularly exhausting and responsible for greater absenteeism.

Drivers – who were predominantly from Northern India – showed lower rates of absenteeism, which management attributed to their ‘better physique.’ This racialized explanation obscured the real dynamics at play. Many workers maintained their connections to village life and agricultural work as a rational strategy for survival in an economy that offered neither security nor adequate wages. Workers were not backward – they were responding rationally to exploitation by maintaining alternative sources of survival.

The system of fines imposed on transport workers reveals yet another extraordinary degree of control employers sought to exercise over every aspect of workers’ labour. Fines were imposed for breach of discipline, late attendance, and – most tellingly – refusal to work overtime. Workers had the right to appeal to higher authorities, but this was often more theoretical than practical. Significantly fines were imposed on conductors when they refused to work extra trips beyond eight hours, usually on the grounds that working on overcrowded trams produced considerable exhaustion.

The Bus Syndicate and Route Committees imposed an elaborate system of fines for running behind or ahead of scheduled times. These fines varied by route and could be substantial – ranging from a few annas per minute to eight rupees per minute. The logic was that a bus running late picked up passengers who would otherwise have taken the next bus, while a bus running ahead picked up passengers meant for the bus it was scheduled to follow. Fines paid by one proprietor went to another, creating a system of mutual surveillance and enforcement.

For daily-rated drivers and conductors, these fines did not directly affect their wages, but for those working on a commission basis, the late or early running of a bus had immediate financial consequences. This created pressure to maintain strict adherence to schedules, regardless of traffic conditions, passenger needs, or the physical state of the vehicle. Workers were punished for circumstances beyond their control, internalizing the discipline employers demanded.

Wartime Opportunism and Post-War Retrenchment

The Second World War brought significant changes that revealed the opportunistic nature of colonial labour exploitation. Labour scarcity during the war opened doors for new and casual workers, but the post-war period witnessed a process of separating formally and informally employed workforces, facilitated by large-scale retrenchments. Many wartime entrants were dismissed with legal backing. Measures aimed at casualizing employment relationships tended to target women first, suggesting a trend toward separating core and peripheral workforces along gender lines.

The divide between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ employment, which would become so central to discussions of labour in postcolonial India in the works of Ravi Ahuja and Hatice Yıldız, among others, was entrenched during this period. The wartime expansion had temporarily blurred these boundaries, but the post-war retrenchment re-established and even strengthened them. Formal workers gained increasing access to regulated work hours, paid leave, and other benefits. Informal workers remained subject to the vagaries of daily-rated employment and perpetual insecurity.

Conclusion: The Architecture of Exploitation

The analysis of work-time regimes in early to mid-twentieth-century Calcutta reveals a system deliberately designed to maximize exploitation. The formal trend towards reducing work hours, particularly after the 1920s, benefited primarily permanent workers in organized industries. A significant portion of the workforce – including daily-rated workers, seasonal workers, and those in unregulated sectors – remained outside the purview of these improvements.

The sharp divide between permanent and daily-rated workers manifested in radically different experiences. While some workers enjoyed regulated hours, paid holidays, and leave provisions, others worked overtime including holidays and Sundays without legal protection. The ‘No Work, No Pay’ norm meant that paid holidays were often non-existent for daily-rated workers. In the transportation sector, while tram workers gained certain benefits through struggle, bus workers remained subject to pro-rata payment systems that encouraged longer working hours.

Every mechanism examined – casualization, pro-rata wages, forced overtime, the permanent-daily divide, the fine system, unpaid ‘involuntary unemployment,’ and the racialized ‘absenteeism’ narrative – worked together to extract maximum labour while denying workers security or fair compensation. This was not an incomplete transition to industrial modernity but a fully realized system of colonial capitalist exploitation.

The fractured clock of colonial Calcutta kept different times for different workers, and in that fracturing lay the architecture of exploitation. Colonial capitalism functioned – and extracted surplus value – precisely through maintaining these divisions. Workers were subjected to industrial time discipline when it suited employers but denied its benefits when those would cost money. They were blamed for maintaining rural connections that were survival strategies necessitated by inadequate wages and job insecurity.

The story of transport workers in colonial Calcutta thus reveals how capitalism in the colonial context used time itself as an instrument of control and exploitation. The coexistence of different work regimes ultimately ensured a process of capital accumulation that produced more control than autonomy for workers, more profit for employers than dignity for laborers. In the fractured clock lay not the promise of modernity but the violence of exploitation.

[i] The Statesman and the Friend of India, October 2, 1920.

[ii] Calcutta Gazette (Supplementary), April 13, 1921, 695.

Amartyajyoti Basu is a PhD candidate at Ambedkar University Delhi. His thesis revolves around the history of transport services in Calcutta in both colonial and post-colonial period. He is interested in looking into how the concept of work is framed in historiographical terrains and how looking into the history of service work such as transport can challenge it.

Edited by Mayukh Chakrabarty

Featured image: Calcutta Tram Way Workers’ Union strike in 1945, photo by Clyde Waddell, via Wikimedia Commons.