[| I, CWAS |]

The menace of trade union militancy
By Amulya Ganguli |
While painting a rosy picture before Parliament of India becoming the manufacturing hub of small cars as the first step to greater industrialisation, Finance Minister P Chidambaram, the bete noire of Communists, chose to ignore one crucial factor: the habitually disruptive role of the trade unions, especially the two associated with the CPI and CPI-M -- the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) and the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) respectively.

As is widely known, especially to the business community, the two can hardly be called the standard bearers of sobriety and responsible conduct. As a top-ranking leader of AITUC, Gurudas Dasgupta, admitted in a rare moment of candour in a TV interview, labour leaders have not always stressed the need for productivity on the shop floor but focussed almost exclusively on their demands relating to salary and work conditions. I have to befriend industrialists: Buddha

Nowhere has this excessive emphasis on extracting the most out of the managements been more in evidence than in the state where the communists have ruled unchallenged for nearly three decades.

And the fallout is there for all to see -- the precipitous decline of West Bengal from a leading position in the industrial and business sectors in the 1950s and 60s to a virtual industrial and corporate wasteland at present.

As even West Bengal's Marxist Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has admitted, the decline followed the flight of capital when the unions resorted to militant and often violent tactics, including the phenomenon of 'gherao' or forcibly confining the company executives within the office or factory premises till the workers' demands were conceded.

What is unfortunate is that far from learning from their mistakes in West Bengal, the trade unions have remained defiantly unrepentant.

Their latest target in the state is the IT sector despite the chief minister’s desperate attempts to keep it outside their purview in view of the non-stop, 24-hour nature of work in the call centres and other IT establishments.

It may not be an exaggeration to say therefore that irresponsibility has been the hallmark of the trade union scene in India. A major reason for this disruptive attitude is the close association of the political parties with the unions and the resultant one-upmanship between them.

As a result, no sooner does one union -- say AITUC -- comes close to reaching an agreement with the management, another -- say CITU -- steps up the demands, thereby scuttling the negotiations. Not surprisingly, violence is invariably built into such a situation.

When nearly all the parties have a trade union wing -- the Congress has the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC), reputedly the largest in the country, and the BJP has the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh -- such competitive militancy is unavoidable since their objective is often political rather than economic.

Notwithstanding the attention the trade unions and their political bosses (who hold influential positions in their parties) receive from the media, the work force represented by them constitutes less than 10 per cent of the total working population. The rest are in the unorganised sector, who suffer the most when the unions call for bandhs, hartals and other forms of work stoppages since these agitations deprive the daily labourers of their meager earnings.

As long as the unions retain their inordinate clout, the chances of a dramatic breakthrough on the industrial front are not too high. A hint of what can happen was available when the employees of the Airports Authority of India (AAI) -- both white collar and blue collar -- went on strike recently in protest against the proposed privatisation and modernisation of the New Delhi and Mumbai airports.

Although the strike was called off, CPI-M general secretary Prakash Karat has asked the government not to go ahead with the privatisation process. Another round of demonstrations, go-slow procedures and eventually strikes is therefore not unlikely.

A few months earlier, an industrial dispute in the Gurgaon area near New Delhi took an ugly turn as a result of violent clashes between the workers and the police. A feature of the outbreak was the reported involvement of outsiders in creating the disturbances, which was the inevitable result of the close links between the unions and the political parties.

This interaction often makes the employees of a company helpless spectators as the matter is taken out of their hands by the 'central' leaders of the unions and the parties with their own but mainly political agendas.

As is known, the attempts by the Manmohan Singh government to initiate labour reforms are being held up by the unions on the grounds that they cannot accept the so-called American-style 'hire and fire' system. They are unwilling even to allow such reforms in the special economic zones, thereby nullifying the very concept of such enclaves.

India's democratic tradition obviously rules out any draconian attempt to curb the unions, which will be counter-productive anyway. But the pity is that even a consensus between political parties on labour reforms is unattainable not only because each party pretends that its heart bleeds for the workers, but also because each one of them does not want to make it easy for the other to enact a law even if, privately, they agree on its usefulness.

Perhaps the most cussed in this respect are the communists because, first, they are supposed to be the guardian angels of the proletariat and, therefore, back even their irresponsible conduct since the comrades regard it as necessary for building up a revolutionary temper.

Secondly, they have the advantage of wielding power without responsibility in New Delhi as they are in a position to pull down the government although they are not in the government themselves. Yet, unless the unions are tamed, there is little hope of fulfilling Chidambaram's dream.

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