Haryana Broke Its Sanitation Workers' Strike With Firing Squads of Paperwork, Not Justice

On September 12, sanitation workers across Haryana called off the longest strike of their lives — 37 days, the state's biggest in three decades — after the government dangled just enough to split the union and dismiss the holdouts. What they did not win was the one demand that mattered most: regularisation for the more than 13,000 contract workers who do the state's dirtiest, most dangerous labour for a fraction of a government salary and none of its protections.

These are not abstract "sanitation workers." In Haryana, as across India, the job of clearing garbage and sewage is caste-assigned. It falls almost entirely on Valmikis, a Dalit community placed at the very bottom of a hierarchy that still treats their labour as ritually polluting even as it depends on it completely. The state's own reservation system has, perversely, let other castes claim the government sweeper jobs on paper while subcontracting the actual work back to Valmikis as unpaid or underpaid "badli" proxies — a scam that hollowed out Dalit representation in these posts from over 58 percent in 2003 to barely 32 percent today, even as Valmikis still do nearly all the work, for less.

So when 13,091 contract workers walked out on August 6 alongside 3,418 permanent colleagues, backed by the Nagar Palika Karamchari Sangh, they were striking against exactly that arrangement: caste-coded precarity dressed up as merit-based hiring. The state's answer was not negotiation but a deadline — return by September 5 or face "legal and disciplinary action." When workers held the line, the Urban Local Bodies Department began issuing dismissal notices. Cracks opened in the union under that pressure, and by September 12, Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini's government had a deal: risk allowances, medical leave, insurance bumps, a vague promise of "in-principle" recruitment against vacant posts. Regularisation itself — the demand that would have converted precarious, disposable labour into secure employment — was set aside, citing an unspecified "legal hurdle."

This is how the state disciplines essential workers everywhere, but the caste dimension here makes the mechanics unusually naked: a government that depends on a community's labour to keep its cities from drowning in garbage will hand out cash allowances before it will hand out job security, because allowances don't touch who gets to be a permanent employee of the state and who stays disposable. It's also useful to note whose votes the government was minding — Haryana officials reportedly worried about alienating the Valmiki community as a BJP-aligned voting bloc, which is precisely why material demands got a written agreement while structural ones got postponed indefinitely.

The workers weren't naive about the trade. This was their second walkout in five months — a shorter one in May, then this 37-day marathon — and each round has extracted incremental concessions without touching the underlying architecture: reservation categories captured by castes who never do the labour, proxy hiring that launders the exploitation, and a state content to let contract workers absorb all the risk of a job with a documented, often fatal hazard record. Regularisation is coming back, because the workers who empty Haryana's gutters know that risk allowances don't survive the next budget crunch, and firing squads of dismissal letters are always one deadline away.

Sources

The Tribune: FIRs, dismissals, suspensions — how Haryana govt forced sanitation workers to end strike
The Tribune: Haryana sanitation workers end 37-day strike after agreement
ThePrint: The Great Indian Sanitation Scam
Indian Express: CM accepted our demands
WSWS: Workers Struggles — Asia, Australia and the Pacific