Unruly order and managed precarity: continuities and ruptures in social identity and work among municipal sweepers in Pakistan, 1990s–2020s

This article examines the stark realities facing municipal waste workers in urban Pakistan in a frame of continuity and change. It brings together two periods of qualitative fieldwork conducted in Faisalabad in the mid-1990s and in Faisalabad and Karachi in 2021. Across significant change over 25 years, the technology and governance of solid waste management have shifted from labour-intensive municipal departments operating alongside informal patronage networks, to privatisation and new contractual practices. Despite decades of policy reforms, the social hierarchies within which dirty work is organised have remained remarkably resilient, with social status being recomposed rather than dismantled, and organisational and technological change doing little to improve the lives of communities historically tied to waste work. Instead, they have re-encoded caste practices and pushed frontline waste workers from having a modicum of control in a system of unruly order towards having to manage their precarity on their own.