The factories are running again. Production lines that fell silent during the April–May strike wave have resumed across the Delhi–NCR industrial belt. Many workers are back at their machines. Others never returned. When police began making arrests, many fled to villages in Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh and have since been unable to recover their jobs. Revised minimum wage notifications have been issued in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, but implementation remains uneven. Hundreds of workers remain in jail, and many activists continue to face criminal proceedings. The strike has ended. The conditions that produced it and the conflicts that followed it have not.The April–May strikes marked the largest wave of industrial action the National Capital Region has witnessed in more than a decade. Across more than 150 industrial sites in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, and Uttarakhand, workers long divided by contractual employment, migration, and precarious work acted collectively for perhaps the first time on this scale. The strikes demonstrated that a workforce widely assumed to be too fragmented to organise could still disrupt production across one of India's most important industrial corridors.The central question, however, is not why the strikes occurred but what has happened since. Strike waves do not become movements by themselves. Whether April marks a turning point will depend on whether the collective capacities briefly revealed during the strikes can outlast the efforts of employers and the state to restore the conditions under which resistance once again becomes too costly to sustain.This struggle over the aftermath of April, rather than the strike itself, will shape the future of labour politics in India's largest industrial corridor. Delhi-NCR: Transport Disrupted As Cab, Auto Unions Launch Three-Day StrikeWages on Paper, Wages in HandThe April–May strike wave secured an important concession. Within days of the mobilisation, both Uttar Pradesh and Haryana revised their minimum wage notifications. Yet the announcements also exposed the limits of what governments were prepared to concede within a labour regime organised through contractual employment and weak enforcement.In Uttar Pradesh, revised monthly minimum wages were fixed at Rs 13,690 for unskilled workers, Rs 15,059 for semi-skilled workers and Rs 16,864 for skilled workers. Haryana notified a minimum wage of Rs 15,220 for unskilled contract workers. The contrast was especially striking because the Haryana government's own tripartite wage committee had recommended a minimum wage of Rs 23,096 only months earlier. The final notification remained nearly one-third below that recommendation.Even these revised wages remain unevenly realised in practice. The notification does not determine what workers actually receive. The contractor stands between the company and the wage. Across much of the NCR industrial belt, companies disclaim responsibility for wages by shifting liability onto contractors, who in turn pass responsibility further down the chain. Workers employed through these arrangements possess few effective means of enforcing the notified rates.According to the Jan Hastakshep fact-finding investigation, while many larger companies displayed the revised wage notifications following government pressure, numerous smaller establishments had yet to implement them. Employer organisations, including the Haryana Industrial Chamber of Commerce, publicly argued that even the revised wage was unaffordable. The notifications therefore demonstrated both the capacity of collective action to extract concessions and the institutional limits of those concessions.More fundamentally, wages were never the only issue that brought workers onto the streets. Twelve-hour shifts, unpaid overtime, denial of basic workplace facilities and routine abuse by supervisors remain commonplace across much of the contract workforce. On these questions, little has changed.Nor has the balance of power inside the workplace shifted. During negotiations, several companies reportedly assured workers that participation in the strike would not invite disciplinary action. In numerous documented cases, those assurances have not been honoured. Rather than formal dismissals, many workers have simply found their contracts quietly left unrenewed, leaving little documentary trace while effectively excluding them from future employment.The strike may have ended. The retaliation has not.May Day and Mazdoors: How Urdu Poets Have Portrayed the Plight of the WorkersTwo Industrial Belts, Two OutcomesThe contrasting trajectories of the April–May strikes in Haryana's Gurgaon–Manesar industrial belt and in Noida cannot be explained by differences in worker militancy. Workers in both regions displayed extraordinary courage. The decisive difference lay elsewhere. Manesar possessed, however fragile, an organisational infrastructure. Noida did not.In Manesar, organisational resources already existed, even if they were limited and contested. The Belsonica Auto Components India Employees Union, despite losing official recognition continued to remain active in the industrial belt. The Inquilabi Mazdoor Kendra had also been organising among industrial workers in the region. These organisations did not by themselves produce the strike, which spread rapidly across workplaces through workers' own networks. What they did provide, however, was something less visible but ultimately more important: an organisational infrastructure capable of negotiating with employers, documenting violations, coordinating legal support, maintaining contact with workers after the strike had subsided and monitoring the implementation of the revised wage notifications.It is this often invisible work of organisation, rather than the dramatic moment of mobilisation itself, that frequently determines whether a strike leaves behind durable collective capacities or quickly dissolves under the pressures of repression and everyday survival.Noida presented a starkly different picture. Employing an estimated 1.2 to 1.7 million workers across roughly 15,000–20,000 industrial units, it had little sustained working-class organisation despite its enormous industrial concentration. The April mobilisation emerged largely spontaneously. Workers walked out after learning of the revised wage notification in Haryana, and information spread rapidly through WhatsApp groups, labour colonies and shop-floor conversations. But when the protests expanded, there were no recognised negotiating committees, legal support structures or organisational networks prepared for what followed.The comparison illustrates an enduring lesson in labour politics. Spontaneous mobilisation can disrupt production and force immediate concessions. Sustaining those gains requires institutions capable of preserving communication, coordinating legal defence, documenting violations and maintaining workers' confidence once employers and the state begin to reorganise. The difference between Manesar and Noida was therefore not the presence or absence of repression. It was the presence or absence of organisations capable of responding to repression.Workers in both industrial belts continue to face the consequences of the strike. In Gurgaon–Manesar, legal proceedings against several activists remain ongoing despite many having secured bail, while workers continue to confront dismissals, non-renewal of contracts and other forms of workplace retaliation. Organisational networks have not prevented repression; they have made it possible to contest it collectively.The scale of repression in Noida, however, was qualitatively different. Uttar Pradesh Police registered multiple FIRs, detained hundreds of workers and activists, and implicated more than a thousand workers, students, journalists and organisers in a widening series of criminal cases. A significant number of those arrested were associated with Mazdoor Bigul, one of the few labour organisations active among industrial workers in the region, suggesting that the repression was directed not only at individual participants but also at the fragile organisational networks that had emerged during the mobilisation. While many have since secured bail, numerous activists continue to face prosecution, several remain detained under the National Security Act (NSA), and hundreds of workers remain in jail awaiting trial. According to the Campaign for the Release of Workers and Activists of Noida (CaRWAN), the NSA was invoked against student activist Aakriti Choudhary and journalist Satyam Verma after the prosecution reportedly failed to produce substantial evidence during bail proceedings. The resort to preventive detention, alongside prolonged criminal proceedings and the continued incarceration of workers, has substantially increased the costs of collective action.The contrast, therefore, is not between repression and its absence. It is between two different organisational capacities to confront repression. In Gurgaon–Manesar, workers entered the confrontation with unions, organisers and legal networks built over years of struggle. In Noida, repression encountered a workforce that had to improvise these capacities in the midst of the crisis itself. That difference did not determine whether repression occurred. It shaped workers' ability to withstand it.Gig Workers Demand Fair Pay and Conditions in Massive New Year's Eve StrikeWhat Resignation Actually MeansIn his work on labour politics, Vivek Chibber argues that the central question is not why workers tolerate exploitation, but why collective resistance emerges so infrequently despite exploitation being an everyday reality. The answer, he suggests, lies not in workers' consciousness or in ideological consent, but in the material conditions that shape what appears possible. Workers calculate the risks of resistance within the world as they actually encounter it.The aftermath of the April–May strikes suggests that this insight is indispensable for understanding labour politics in the NCR. Workers did not return to work because they had abandoned their grievances. Nor did they become resigned because they suddenly accepted exploitation as legitimate. They returned because the labour regime is organised in ways that make collective action extraordinarily costly. Resignation, in this sense, is not a psychological disposition or a moral failing. It is a rational response to a particular organisation of production.Contract labour is central to that organisation. Contractors do not merely recruit workers; they regulate access to future employment. A worker identified as a troublemaker rarely needs to be formally dismissed. The contractor simply stops calling. What disappears is not only a job but access to an entire chain of employment stretching across factories and industrial clusters. The possibility of exclusion therefore disciplines workers more effectively than dismissal itself.Fragmentation reinforces this discipline. Contract workers move continuously between contractors, factories and industrial clusters, while employers rely on increasingly dispersed employment relationships. The traditional factory union, built around a relatively stable workforce sharing a common employer, struggles to organise workers whose employment is deliberately divided across multiple contractors and establishments. Over three decades, employer strategies, labour market reforms and, more recently, the Labour Codes have consolidated this fragmented labour regime rather than reversing it.Seen in this light, April becomes easier to understand. The strikes briefly altered the calculations through which workers ordinarily navigate insecurity. A deepening cost-of-living crisis, the rapid diffusion of collective action across industrial belts and the swift revision of minimum wages made resistance appear less individually risky and more collectively achievable. The significance of April lay precisely in this interruption: for a brief moment, the rational calculation shifted.The weeks that followed were therefore about far more than repression. They were about reconstructing the conditions under which resignation again became rational. Quiet non-renewal of contracts restored the fear of exclusion. Mass arrests and prolonged criminal proceedings dramatically increased the perceived costs of future mobilisation. The objective was not simply to punish those who had participated in the strike, but to restore the everyday expectation that collective action carries risks no individual worker can afford to bear.This, ultimately, is what the aftermath of April reveals. Contractualisation, migration and fragmentation have not eliminated the possibility of collective action. April demonstrated that much. What they have done is transform the conditions under which collective action can be sustained. The central problem facing labour politics today is therefore not how to persuade workers to resist. It is how to build organisational forms capable of making resistance rational again.What April Made PossibleApril did not simply expose the vulnerability of workers. It exposed the limits of the organisational forms through which India's industrial working class has traditionally been organised.The experience of the strike suggests that the factory can no longer be treated as the only meaningful unit of organisation. Contract workers move between factories far more frequently than they move between villages, migration networks or labour colonies. Employment relationships are unstable; social relationships are not. The conversations that sustained the strike travelled well beyond factory gates, following the same migration circuits that connect the NCR's industrial belts to villages across Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh. Organisation that follows workers through these social worlds may ultimately prove more durable than organisation confined to a single workplace.The strikes also revealed possibilities embedded within contemporary production itself. At Richa Global, the relay was direct and rapid: mobilisation at the Manesar unit was followed within days by a walkout at the company's Noida facility, despite the absence of any formal organisational coordination between the two sites. What carried the action across was shared contractors, overlapping employment histories and informal communication networks, the same connective tissue that employers rely upon to manage a dispersed workforce, turned briefly against that purpose. Similar possibilities exist across integrated production networks stretching across multiple industrial regions. These organisational geographies remain largely invisible within existing labour institutions, even as contemporary production increasingly depends upon them.April therefore offers a broader lesson for labour politics. Contractualisation, migration and fragmented employment have not eliminated the possibility of collective action. They have transformed the terrain on which it must be organised. The challenge is no longer simply to rebuild the institutions of an earlier industrial era, but to develop organisational forms capable of following workers across contractors, factories, supply chains and migration circuits.What April changed was not the conditions under which workers labour. It was the recognition that those conditions can be collectively challenged and that the future of labour politics will depend on the organisations capable of sustaining that challenge and building a long term trade union movement. (The author is a PhD scholar at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)