One of the biggest challenges faced by India today is to generate quality employment. Even in areas of rapid per capita income growth, typified by the Gujarat model of neoliberal state-sponsored technological development, there is a substantial and increasing decent work deficit. Across India more generally, the decent work deficit is, in fact, growing along several dimensions, leading to ‘growth without development’ or ‘non-inclusive growth’. This article analyses quality of employment in India across subnational spaces – among states and between rural and urban locations – using three International Labour Organisation decent work dimensions: ‘employment opportunity’, ‘social security benefits’ and ‘social dialogue’. The analysis is based on published government data, for the period 1993–1994 to 2011–2012 – the period covered by the liberalisation experiment. The conclusion is that economic growth has not contributed significantly to employment quality. Although employment opportunity is significantly higher in the developed states, coverage of social security benefits and scope for social dialogue among regular salaried/wage workers are significantly less in these areas than in underdeveloped regions. Indeed, employment opportunity is significantly higher in rural areas, and the condition of workers in urban areas is not significantly better than in rural locations. Furthermore, over time, the difference in quality of employment across subnational spaces has either increased or remained stagnant.

This article documents an ethnographic case study designed to provide deeper insight into the manifestation of political opinion in the rural areas of Alberta, Canada. Employing “a method of listening,” the study demonstrates that rural Albertans, like rural Americans, are feeling politically alienated and angry in ways that go beyond ideological preference, age or income level. In fact, the grievances unveiled in this study are connected directly to key aspects of their social identites: to thier sense of belonging as Albertans, as “ordinary citizens” and as explicitly rural. Importantly, these forms of alienation are often experienced as being layered, frequently melting into each other and strongly informing both these citizens’ strong support for anti-establishment politics and the rather negative fashion in which they interpret the plight of newcomers to Canada and of Indigenous Canadians.