adopted selected paternalistic practices, which help to increase workers' feelings of security without compromising plant efficiency.

These factors and conditions help to explain the relatively early achievement of a level of commitment consistent with the immediate requirements of the new industrial sector. While the level of commitment proved to be greater than casual observation of Puerto Rican industrialization would have suggested, full commitment has yet to be attained. The process of commitment is clearly in an evolutionary stage during which the current mixture of traditional and modern views of the market, employment relations, and society will give way to a complex of attitudes and associations more consistent both with the new opportunities that industrialization offers and with the limitations it imposes.

CONCLUSION

This account of the development of the Puerto Rican industrial labor market has dealt with three broad aspects of the process-the conditions and motives governing entry into the market, the nature of the adaptation made by workers within the new environment, and some of the possible explanations for the relative ease with which the currently observable level of commitment has been achieved. It seems appropriate to state the significant findings of our study in a number of general propositions and at the same time to indicate some of the questions that remain unanswered:

1. Motivation based on a maximizing rationale for entry into and involvement in the industrial labor market appears to be favorable for the achievement of commitment, when there is a reasonable satisfaction of workers' expectations. Our findings in Puerto Rico are fully consistent with this proposition. It was our hypothesis that under such motivating conditions commitment may be achieved more easily than when entry is impelled by dire need and a complete lack of alternative sources of income. Since need in this sense was not a dominant consideration governing entry of our sample workers to the industrial labor market, we have no clear test of the implications of forced entry for commitment. Whether such need is actually less favorable for commitment than a rational motive of maximization therefore cannot be determined here but must remain in the realm of untested hypotheses.

2. Exposure to and involvement in commodity or labor markets prior to industrialization facilitates entry into, as well as continuity

within, the industrial labor market. Prior exposure not only acquaints the potential industrial worker with the operational mechanism of the market, but it also is likely to be associated with the acquisition of new wants and a greater tendency to base decisions related to one's job on rational economic grounds. Both the achievement of commitment and efficiency in the functioning of the market may thereby be served.

3. Exposure to markets will be reinforced as a facilitating factor where considerable transformation of social and economic relationships has occurred in the preindustrial setting as a result, for example, of the development of large-scale commercial agriculture. Given such a transformation, the further changes necessary to accommodate the demands of industrialization may be achieved without serious and persistent difficulties. The former plantation and other rural wage earners in our sample evidenced no greater difficulty in adapting to industrial employment than did the urbanized workers. The paucity in the sample of workers who had been independent peasants precludes a comparison of their adaptability to industrial conditions with that of others. However, the very scarcity of peasants in the sample may suggest a greater adherence to traditional values and social forms and a correspondingly greater resistance to the incentives and demands of the new industrial

sector.

4. Feldman and Moore have advanced the hypothesis that commitment as a means to development is reinforced when the process of change includes the gradual achievement of the ends of development. Our observations in Puerto Rico are consistent with experience elsewhere in confirming this hypothesis. The early realization of tangible benefits from industrial employment, together with fulfillment of expectations of continued gains, has undoubtedly served to minimize the problems of gaining commitment. This observation highlights the importance of providing immediate incentives for overcoming obstacles to an efficient reorganization of production processes and relations. 5. In the case of persons who become industrial workers out of a rational consideration of alternatives, financial incentives may be of decisive importance not only for inducing entry but also for motivating subsequent responses within the market. Since these workers enter the market with a fairly well-developed store of unsatisfied wants and readily acquire new wants, it is reasonable to expect that they will continue to respond to financial incentives, even though nonfinancial incentives gradually assume increasing importance. The effectiveness of financial incentives for motivating behavior beyond initial entry in the

case of workers who seek the satisfaction of limited and immediate needs cannot be determined from our study. These workers may be passive participants without interest in maximizing their income, whose involvement remains perfunctory. On the other hand, with continued exposure such individuals may develop increasing responsiveness to financial incentives as their wants broaden.

6. Efficient performance on the job is neither synonymous with nor dependent on the attainment of full commitment. It suffices that, in Feldman and Moore's terms, commitment be achieved within the loci of intrinsic work factors and the market. These are the loci within which the process of commitment is likely to be most rapid. Our Puerto Rican workers demonstrated the relative ease with which the maintenance stage of commitment could be reached within these two loci, even while commitment in the other loci of social affiliation and social structure remained at a much earlier stage of development.

A final word of caution must be entered concerning these summary statements. They have not been subjected to tests under conditions other than those prevailing in Puerto Rico. On the other hand, they are generally consistent with the hypotheses advanced in Feldman and Moore's conceptualization of the commitment process. Elevation to the status of truly general propositions, however, must await empirical testing in a variety of environmental contexts.

10 THE LABOR MARKET IN INDIA

Morris David Morris

This paper is devoted to an analysis of certain features associated with the mobilization of a labor force and its commitment in Indian industry. "Commitment," as used here, refers to the participation by workers in industrial employment on some permanent basis as measured by objective behavioral indexes. The paper deals successively with the recruitment of the work force and the degree to which it has become permanent in industry, with the work force's attitudes or ideological responses that bear on commitment, and with the degree to which trade unions have emerged to express these attitudes through formal organization. The data are drawn mainly from research in the Bombay City cotton textile industry and the Tata Iron and Steel Company, Jamshedpur, Bihar.

We shall limit our discussion to that portion of the work force employed as wage labor in organized large-scale industrial units that typically operate throughout the year, and in which capital equipment is powered by inanimate sources of energy. The analysis encompasses those portions of the Indian economy in which the corporate form predominates and where the writ of factory legislation has traditionally run since 1881. To the extent that the conclusions apply to other newly developing regions, their relevance is possibly restricted to regions in which the pressure of population on the land is very heavy.

RECRUITMENT OF AN INDUSTRIAL WORK FORCE

Alleged Labor Shortage

Although there is full agreement that in India today unemployment is widespread in both rural and urban areas, most scholars have assumed, on the basis of the conclusion of the 1929 Royal Commission on

• The research on which this paper is based was made possible by a grant under the Ford Foundation Foreign Area Training Fellowship Program and by a supplemental grant from the American Philosophical Society. The grantors, of course, bear no responsibility for the content of the paper. I owe debts of gratitude for materials and ideas to a great many people in India and in the United States. I cannot name them all, but I must specifically thank the officers and staff of the Tata Iron and Steel Company who made possible the collection of the Jamshedpur data.

Labor, that urban industrial development suffered from an absolute shortage of labor prior to 1925.1 This purported shortage of labor is supposed to have affected the rate of industrial growth and to have shaped the attitudes and behavior of workers entering industry.2 No real distinction was made between the shortages of skilled and of unskilled labor in Indian industry. Rapidly developing economies can be expected to be short of the skills and techniques for which they have had no previous need. The lack of skilled labor, however, has been misconceived as a shortage of raw unskilled labor from which other forms of labor could be created.

One view is that, because labor was short in industry, employers had to scramble for their work forces and make all sorts of concessions that weakened their hold on the workers. Because of the absence of effective discipline by employers, employees were able to indulge in the luxury of all too frequent returns to the villages to which they were unyieldingly devoted. The alternative, and entirely contradictory, view recognizes the potential surplus of labor in the cities and argues that, as a consequence of this surplus, employers were able to abuse workers unmercifully and employ them under the most arduous conditions. Since working conditions in the factories were so bad, labor tended to remain in the villages or go back to the land for recuperative purposes.4

Whatever the hypothesis, workers retained their rural links. This retention of identification with traditional rural forms of social and economic existence is supposed to have prevented the growth of urban and industrial or proletarian types of behavior, and to explain the purported high rates of absenteeism and turnover and the slow growth of trade

1 Report of the Royal Commission on Labour in India (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1931), p. 21. Cf. Oscar A. Ornati, Jobs and Workers in India (Ithaca: Institute of International Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, 1955), p. 35, which refers to "the excess of jobs over job-seekers which typified Indian industries for the period between 1900 and 1935."

2 Report of the Royal Commission on Labour in India, pp. 11-14; D. H. Buchanan, The Development of Capitalistic Enterprise in India (New York: Macmillan Company, 1934), pp. 294-295; and Vera Anstey, The Economic Development of India (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1929), p. 56.

3 Indian Factory Labour Commission, 1908, Vol. 1, Report and Appendices (Simla: Government of India, Central Press Branch, 1908), pp. 18-19.

4 G. B. Jathar and S. G. Beri, Indian Economics, Vol. 1 (3rd ed.; London: Oxford University Press, 1931), pp. 71–72; D. R. Gadgil, The Industrial Evolution of India in Recent Times (4th ed.; London: Oxford University Press, 1942), pp. 127-130; and Charles A. Myers, Labor Problems in the Industrialization of India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), pp. 43-44.