All too often, in this age of disconnection and scattered focus, employee dissatisfaction is expressed in symbolic gestures — individual acts of defiance that amount to “lying down” on the job (tang ping as practised by China’s youth, for example) or doing the bare minimum (as seen in the post-pandemic wave of “quiet quitting”). Creating ripples that quietly and quickly dissipate, there is little about these actions that inspires change or provokes a reaction. Before the great, well-oiled machinery of capital and industry, they are the most minor of irritants, abstractions that are easy to brush aside or roll over.

Which is what makes the protest launched last Saturday by workers at a toll plaza on the Agra- Lucknow highway remarkable. Unhappy over the paltry Diwali bonus they received,

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