The upheavals of World War II prepared a new labour regime in twentieth-century India, in employers’ chambers, government offices, and in the newly established Labour Department, but as crucially, at the workplace and on the shop floor. This article studies the case of Calcutta port, an important military port in Southeast Asia after the fall of Singapore and Rangoon, where the complex historical processes resulting from the war generated an unprecedented impetus for the transformation of the labour regime. It examines the powerful impact and dynamics of the war at two levels: at the level of long-run changes in the work organization, and, through a microhistory approach, at the level of workers’ everyday wartime experiences. Under wartime exigencies, the employers introduced ad hoc, piecemeal, but significant reforms – food rations, bonuses, higher wages, housing provisions, and regularization of employment – that were more extensive than originally conceived of and proved to be irreversible, and, ultimately, cracked open a labour regime based on casual labour. The focus on workers’ experiences shows us how the measures designed for stabilization and efficiency proved to be profoundly unsettling in the context of dramatic events that pervaded the workplace. In the shadows of the war, workers and employers experienced a balance of forces in flux. Labour relations were marked by anticipations, hostility, tensions, and, increasingly, sharpness of conflict. The article argues that, by the end of the 1940s, the employers and the state had overcome an industrial relations crisis through nothing less than a restructuring of port labour relations, creating a highly regulated “formal sector” with significant welfare provisions.

第二次世界大战的剧变在 20 世纪的印度、雇主商会、政府办公室和新成立的劳工部准备了一个新的劳工制度，但同样重要的是，在工作场所和车间。本文以新加坡和仰光沦陷后的东南亚重要军港加尔各答港为例，其因战争而产生的复杂历史进程对劳工政权的转型产生了前所未有的推动力。它从两个层面考察了战争的强大影响和动力：在工作组织的长期变化层面，以及通过微观历史方法，在工人日常战时经历的层面。在战时的紧急情况下，雇主们进行了临时的、零星的但意义重大的改革——口粮、奖金、更高的工资、住房供应和就业正规化——这些比最初设想的更广泛，并被证明是不可逆转的，并最终打破了以临时工为基础的劳动制度。对工人体验的关注向我们展示了为稳定和提高效率而设计的措施如何在工作场所普遍发生的戏剧性事件的背景下被证明是令人深感不安的。在战争的阴影下，工人和雇主经历了不断变化的力量平衡。劳资关系的特点是预期、敌意、紧张，以及越来越尖锐的冲突。文章认为，到 1940 年代末，雇主和国家通过港口劳资关系重组克服了劳资关系危机，