Covid-19 and after: Collaboration and compromise; Confrontation and contestation? The state and workers in South Asia

Our concluding chapter pulls together the main contributions to this volume. By shifting our analytical lense away from macro scale analysis of the global, national or regional crises, we underine the centrality of focusing on the state and the mundane. We show how labour rights were protected helps us better understand the state and its operations. By focusing on workers, we gave primacy to a constituent agent, labourers, who are the backbone of the South Asian economy. In terms of understanding state-societal relations via labouring classes, we underscored how collaboration, compromise, confrontation and contestations were crucial registers simultaneously drawn upon by worker collectives and/or workers. Economic, political and social injustices cutting across the world may have had South Asian manifestations. However, the rallying call from workers is looking for a social contract the tackles global inequities and places the lives of people at the core of a socially-just world.