blue color | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
Where would we be without the auto drivers, cooks, housekeepers, delivery guys and the countless other people whose lives are so intertwined with ours? While they regularly pop into our homes, what do we really know about them? Shades of Blue by Good Business Lab brings to the fore the unseen lives of blue collar workers in a series of interactive panels.
Good Business Lab, a non-profit research organization based in Bengaluru, has presented the exhibition as an experiential center to highlight the well-being of workers and is the result of years of evidence-based research in this area. The blue-collar economy and the large informal economy form a substantial core of the working population in India and keep the entire country machinery running.
“It is therefore important to engage with such issues. Our work was largely carried out in labor-intensive contexts and since academic language is not easily understood, we have tried to express our findings in a manner that that can reach a wider audience,” says Satyavarta KK, communications manager at Good Business Lab.(GBL).
blue color | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
According to Satyavrat, the emerging gig economy along with the apparel and automobile industry controls a large part of India’s workforce. A gig economy can be defined as a labor market characterized by a proliferation of short-term contracts or independent work, as opposed to permanent jobs.
“Our aim was to introduce specific industries and take a look at the lives of blue collar workers. Although we interact with them on a daily basis, we are also quite distant from them. By summarizing the daily lives of people in Shades of Blue And how it is different from our lives helps create a deeper connection,” he says.
The team at GBL believed that such a demonstration was necessary because it would involve more people in the labor economy and emerging issues regarding the labor market. “Based on our research, we wanted to showcase the lives of people working in two specific sectors – one from the apparel industry and the other from the gig economy, expressed by a cab driver on one of the many digital platforms, in which almost all of us All are included. ,
The Good Business Lab’s project design team went into the details of qualitative research and created two composite characters whose ‘day in the life’ visitors to the exhibition would experience. The displays use both cloth and denim fabric, most of which sport QR codes for interested parties to follow GBL’s work in that area.
Shades of Blue is presented by Good Business Lab in partnership with Alliance Française de Bangalore and will be on view from January 21-31, 2023.