We thought we had hired a driver.
The man had been showing up at the farm in Bettahalsoor for three weeks. Same time each time, friendly and neatly dressed. Same car. He drove the bakery’s orders into Bangalore, sent a WhatsApp message for every completed community, all without knowing more than maybe 10 words of english. We were paying him through a daily rate that I had negotiated upward because I had decided, in some unexamined Swedish corner of my head, that paying twice the going market rate was the responsible thing to do for a person who was now meaningfully part of how the bakery works. That was the story I was operating inside.
The driver gave me his phone and apparently it was his brother on the other side, with good English. The conversation lasted about four minutes. By the end of it, I had understood that the man at the farm each morning does not own the car. He is paid a monthly salary by someone else, a man I had never met, who has fourteen vehicles operating across Bangalore on more or less the same arrangement. The 2x daily rate I was so pleased with had not been reaching the person I imagined I was paying. It had been reaching the man with fourteen cars.
I sat with that for a few hours, feeling angry and cheated, before I could see clearly what had actually been happening.
The Swedish operating system told me there was a problem here. The Indian one tells me there is a system.
The Swedish frame
In Sweden, when you pay another adult to perform work, the system asks one question above all others. Did the person you paid hold F-skatt status at the time of payment? F-skatt is the formal tax registration that says “this person is a contractor and handles their own tax.” If they don’t have it, the law treats you as the de facto employer, with all the obligations that come with that classification: social charges, holiday allowance, occupational injury, sick pay liability. The architecture is built on the assumption that you always know who you are paying, and what their relationship to you is. Eighty percent of the Swedish workforce is covered by collective bargaining agreements (kollektivavtal); for the rest, the F-skatt test does the work. Bilateral. Identifiable. Two named parties, on the record.
This is the operating model I brought to Bangalore. Not consciously, because nobody examines the operating system they grew up inside. The model just runs.
The Swedish word for it, the one I keep reaching for, is ordning och reda. Order and tidiness, roughly, but not quite. It is closer to a world arranged so that every adult is accountable to identifiable other adults, and the trail of payment matches the trail of responsibility. It is the same instinct that makes a Swedish supermarket place every product on a shelf with its origin and its sourcing written on the label, and a Swedish company believe that publishing the salary band of every role is the obvious thing to do. The trail is supposed to be legible.
The story I had been telling myself about the driver was a small enactment of that instinct. I had named a person. I had paid him directly, I thought. I had paid him more than the rate, because the rate seemed low. I had been doing the Swedish thing. And I had been wrong about almost every load-bearing element of it.
The layer that has been here for two hundred years
There is a paper called “Sardars, Jobbers, Kanganies,” written in 2008 by the economic historian Tirthankar Roy and published in Modern Asian Studies. The first thing that struck me when I read it last weekend was the bibliography. The figure I had been discovering this week, the man with fourteen cars who supplies labour and vehicles and absorbs the operational risk and takes a margin in the middle, is not new. He has names in every region of India. In Bombay he was the jobber or muqadam. In the eastern plantations he was the sardar. In the south he was the kangany. Roy’s argument is that these names describe the same load-bearing function: a single intermediary who handled recruitment, discipline, housing, credit, and wage distribution for the actual employer, and was the only legible interface the colonial mill, the railway, or the plantation ever needed to deal with.
That was in the 1880s. In 2024, a paper appeared in the Indian Journal of Labour Economics by two researchers, Parvathy and Kamath, with a title that gives the whole game away: “Labour Contractors (Thekedaars) to Human Resource Companies.” Their argument is that the function has not changed in 140 years. The thekedaar has become more legally sophisticated, sometimes wears a polo shirt, sometimes operates as a registered Staffing Solutions firm. But the role has not moved. The same person still does the matching, the screening, the housing, the wage transfer, and the replacement when somebody doesn’t show up. He is the layer through which Indian urban labour has been organised, with brief interruptions, for as long as urban Indian labour has existed.
The Periodic Labour Force Survey, released in September 2024, puts more than ninety percent of India’s workforce in informal employment. Fifty-eight percent of regular wage and salary earners have no written contract. The category my Swedish operating system kept asking for, the bilateral identified on-the-record relationship, is the exception in this economy, not the norm.
This is not chaos. It is structure. It is not even informal in the way the word implies in English. It is differently formal. The matching is real, the screening is real, the credit lines are real, the replacement logistics are real. They are simply not held inside the firm. They are held inside a man with fourteen cars.
The honest concession
Here is the part I have been writing around.
The story I told myself, when I first understood the arrangement, was the easy story. The contractor was extracting rent. The driver was being underpaid. The 2x rate was being skimmed at the middle. The whole thing was a kind of mild injustice that had been hidden from me, and now that I had seen it I was implicated.
That story is partly true. The Dutch sociologist Jan Breman, who has spent fifty years on Indian informal labour, makes the case that the contractor layer structurally suppresses wages by inserting a party whose profit depends precisely on the spread between what the principal pays and what the worker receives. Breman is right that this is the mechanism. So part of the layer is rent extraction, exactly as the cynical reading would have it.
But the story I told myself was easy in a more specific way. It centred my own discovery.
The Indian Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act of 1970, in its Section 21, says something my Swedish instinct had not allowed for. If I had hired the driver directly, on the basis that I wanted to remove the middleman, I would not have been removing the legal employer. I would have been becoming the legal employer. Provident Fund obligations. ESI registration. Notice period protections under the Shops and Establishments Act. Gratuity liability after five years. The contractor was not a layer between me and a relationship I was entitled to have. Under Indian law, the contractor was the relationship. He was the worker’s employer. He was not standing in the way of something; he was holding something I had not even priced.
The 2x daily rate I had been so quietly pleased with was, to a degree I had not done the arithmetic on, the price of a service I was buying. Vehicle. Replacement when a vehicle broke down. PF and ESI absorbed elsewhere. Coordination. Availability on a date I had not yet asked for. The contractor had been doing real work. Not all of his margin was rent. Some of it was the work of being the addressable party for a worker who in the Swedish system would have an address and in the Indian one does not.
Susan Leigh Star, the American sociologist, wrote that infrastructure becomes visible at the moment it breaks. The infrastructure I had been operating inside had not broken. My mental model of it had. The discovery I felt I had made was not really about labour intermediation in Bangalore. It was about the silent operating system I had carried with me from a country where the question “who are you paying” has a single recoverable answer, into a country where it has at least three.
The question I am still sitting with
The American sociologist Rina Agarwala did three hundred interviews with informal workers across India for a book she published in 2013. Her surprising finding, the one that has stayed with me since I read it, is that India’s informal workers have largely stopped demanding rights from their employer. They demand welfare benefits from the state instead. They organise as citizens by neighbourhood, not as workers by shop floor. Her interpretation is that the employer is not, in this economy, a legible enough counterparty to be the right address for a rights claim. The state, which cannot move or hide, has become the de facto counterparty by default.
Read that against the Swedish architecture and something cracks. The Swedish system presupposes that the employer is the first and most accountable address. The Indian system, in significant practical terms, presupposes that he is not. These are not two versions of the same economy with different efficiency levels. They are two different theories of where adult responsibility sits.
I do not know which is right. I think the Swedish system encodes a kind of trygghet that the Indian one does not, and I think the Indian system encodes a kind of flexibility and risk-absorption that the Swedish one cannot afford. I think the discomfort I feel when I look at the layer is partly real ethics and partly an immune response from the operating system I grew up inside, and I have not yet untangled which is which.
What I know is that next month, when we re-negotiate, we will probably still be paying the man with fourteen cars. I will probably ask him for more transparency on what fraction of the rate reaches the driver. He will probably tell me what he chooses to tell me. The arrangement will probably continue in something close to its current shape, because nothing I have learned in this last week gives me a better design.
Twenty years of supply chain work tells me that systems that have survived 140 years of social change without breaking are usually doing more work than they look like they are doing, and that a foreigner two years into a country is a very specific kind of unreliable narrator about what that work actually is.
I will probably write about this again in a year, when we have hired and lost a few more people, and the story I am telling myself now will look as small as the story I was telling myself three weeks ago.