02 ISSUE VIII
OCTOBER 2025
OCTOBER 2025
Race to the Bottom
What do the union struggles of IT workers in India tell us about the present crisis in the global tech sector?
By Aditi Dey
Something very interesting has happened in India over the last year. Information Technology (IT) workers have begun to join tech workers unions, such as Karnataka State IT/ITes Union (KITU) and All India IT/ITes Employees Union (AIITU), in larger numbers than ever before. Some of their core demands include an end to extraneous working shifts of twelve to sixteen hours, social security provisions, and the right to take a break from their screens.
Image by Pranjall Kumar, via Unsplash.
This is an extraordinary change in a sector that was famously known to be apolitical. IT workers in India have long distanced themselves from blue-collar workers, who are usually known to have or belong to unions and are political actors accustomed to thinking about their labor in relation to capital and the state. But now, IT unions are working with state governments to be included in the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, after years of being legally exempted as “workers” or “workmen.” A large part of this ambiguity came from the Indian government’s desire to untether the relentless growth of the IT sector at the turn of the twenty-first century to messy matters of industrial relations and workers’ rights. But this time around, the tide is turning, as evident in southern states such as Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. So the question is, what do the IT union struggles in India tell us about the present crisis in the global tech sector?
Working conditions of the IT sector began to worsen with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. The new paradigm of ‘work from home’, while reducing the pains of commuting every day, has redefined what work means altogether. The hard-won separation between home and the workplace was bridged, and work seeped into all crevices of domestic life. Many white collar professionals have recounted that the ability to ‘switch off’ from work has receded, with employers mounting demands for more productivity within ‘work from home’ arrangements. Many have noted a new horizon of expectations where workers are expected to be available through weekends, vacations, and social events, and, of course, to work late into the night.
While the pandemic exposed the domestic lives of workers to exploitation, significant transformations took effect in the industry at large. The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and large language models, after decades of research and development, has brought dramatic changes to the business model of large companies. A.I. has begun rapidly automating low-skilled, backend jobs that employed large numbers of workers in the IT sector worldwide. For many multinational companies and governments, this is also being positioned as a prized opportunity for cost-cutting. Jobs such as entry-level coders, programmers, and backend developers are quickly facing the reality of labor redundancy. These very jobs constitute the mainstay of the Indian IT sector, employing over five million workers.
India is among the many countries in the Global South where the IT revolution is characterised as a success story of neoliberal reforms. In the 1990s and early 2000s, cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad became the destinations for global firms to outsource their backend operations, especially around the time of the Y2K bug and the dotcom bubble. A liberalized economy, with abundant tax and infrastructural concessions, allowed for these global business operations to function, with high levels of state investment. In the process, visions of ‘India Shining’ were launched in new global cities like Bangalore, which strived to become the new Silicon Valley of the East. In fact, the current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi’s reign has been built on authoritarian politics, relying heavily on technocapitalist plans such as ‘Digital India’, which positions India as a global leader in technology. The real story of India’s IT success was deeply rooted in low-end and low-waged jobs that employed young students from scores of private engineering colleges in the country, offering very little scope for innovation or growth. It was always a race to the bottom, while manufacturing, among other crucial sectors of the economy, was deprioritised.
During my doctoral fieldwork in Bangalore, I would often ask technology workers in interviews about their thoughts on the news regarding AI threats to the tech sector in India and worldwide. Surprisingly, almost all of them claimed that there was no real threat and that the sector was undergoing significant churn and change. The denialism felt odd, especially given how IT union memberships had been soaring, gaining enormous attention through their campaigns, indicating deep trouble in the sector. So what does the future look like for the technology sector in India, in cities like Bangalore? Indeed, what does it look like for the rest of the world?
The IT jobs that defined India’s software boom may disappear in the future. There may actually be different kinds of jobs, at lower skill levels, that are adjacent to AI and enable it to work. Maybe not. Whatever the future may look like, the past was markedly different.
In my research on India’s technological history, specifically focusing on the story of Bangalore, I have discovered a fascinating history of technology and labor.
Bangalore, then known as the “Science City,” was chosen during the moment of decolonization by Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of an independent India, as the site for premier state-owned industries in high-technology manufacturing such as machine tools, electronics, computer hardware and defense. While the industrial dreams of the new nation were all but realized and ultimately deemed a failed project at the moment of neoliberal reforms and denationalization in the 1990s, in cities like Bangalore, they laid the technical, material, and human foundations for the new IT city to rise and perform outsourced work for global firms. Until now.
Aditi Dey is a PhD candidate in the Politics department at the New School for Social Research. Her research focuses on technology, politics and urbanisation in India.