What labor rights do police workers have? How are they legally delimited? This article addresses these questions through a case study of government responses to attempts by police constables in post/colonial South Asia to express job-related grievances and establish employee unions. Drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews, and archival documents collected in India over fifteen years, the analysis demonstrates that, for more than a century, class warfare within police organizations has manifested in counter-insurgency “lawfare” between senior officials and subordinate personnel regarding whether and how the latter may collectively organize to transform their living and working conditions. It further shows how in this context law as a social field has worked to subjectify rank-and-file police as an ironically exploitable and expendable class of laborers who are always already suspect of rebelling against the state that they have sworn to serve. Through revelations of a long history of structural servitude compelling subaltern police in South Asia to do questionably legal types of labor, this study raises challenging questions about how police work has been conceived and practiced globally as “security labor” and how, moving forward, we must work to reimagine what police work is, what it can be, and what it ought to be.

警务人员有哪些劳动权利？它们是如何在法律上划定的？本文通过一个案例研究政府对后/殖民地南亚警察试图表达与工作相关的不满和建立雇员工会的回应，来解决这些问题。根据十五年来在印度收集的民族志观察、访谈和档案文件，分析表明，一个多世纪以来，警察组织内部的阶级斗争已表现为高级官员和下属人员之间的反叛乱“法律”，即是否以及后者如何集体组织来改变他们的生活和工作条件。它进一步表明，在这种情况下，作为一个社会领域的法律如何将普通警察主体化为具有讽刺意味的可剥削和可消耗的劳动者阶级，他们总是已经怀疑反抗他们宣誓服务的国家。通过揭示长期存在的结构性奴役迫使南亚基层警察从事有问题的合法劳动类型，本研究提出了具有挑战性的问题，即警察工作如何在全球范围内被设想和实践为“安全劳动”，以及我们如何向前迈进必须努力重新想象警察的工作是什么，它可以是什么，它应该是什么。