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Abstract
It is often claimed that industrial restructuring leads to diminished roles for trade unionism and other forms of labour organisations by informalising employment and relocating production. Drawing on selected case studies from long-term fieldwork in regions of India, this article shows that trajectories of industrial restructuring and the responses by organised labour over the past two decades have been diverse. It is argued that the diverse response not only reflects structural opportunities and constraints for labour to be organised in particular ways, but also different histories and experiences of labour association. Contrary to the presumption about the general demise of trade unionism and the apparent unattainability of class solidarity in contemporary globalised capitalism, it is observed that India’s labour movement is experiencing a degree of resurgence, and new forms of labour organisations and activism are emerging, especially involving informal workers in the formal sector. That these innovative forms of mobilisation are shaped by experiences and aspirations that do not conform to the established institutionalised frameworks for dispute resolution has important policy and political implications.
Acknowledgements
The fieldwork for this research was assisted by Arpit Gaind, Joy Karmakar and Pankaj Waghmare, and funded by the Faculty Research Fund, SOAS, University of London. I am indebted to comments received by members of the Historical Materialism and World Development Research Seminar (HMWDRS) and the editorial team of the special issue for this volume, in particular Jonathan Pattenden and Liam Campling who closely read this paper at several stages. I also benefitted from comments by the two anonymous reviewers, as well as participants of the Economics Department Seminar, SOAS (London) and the 44th Annual South Asia Conference (Madison, Wisconsin), where early versions of this paper were presented. The usual disclaimers apply.
Notes
1. ‘Class is defined by men [sic] as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition’ (Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 10); Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism; and Bensaïd, Marx for Our Times.
2. Banerjee, Globalisation, Industrial Restructuring; and Roy, “Unorganised Manufacturing, Flexible Labour.”
3. Armstrong et al., Capitalism Since 1945; Broad, “Globalization and the Casual Labor Problem”; Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence; and Shaikh, Capitalism.
4. Hensman, Workers, Unions; for debates on the slowdown in the 1960s, see Nayyar, Industrial Growth and Stagnation.
5. Wright, “Working-Class Power, Capitalist-Class Interests”; Silver, Forces of Labor; and Silver, “Theorising the Working Class.”
6. Breman, The Labouring Poor in India; Harriss-White, India Working; Banerjee, Globalisation, Industrial Restructuring; Hensman, Workers, Unions; Das, “Reconceptualizing Capitalism”; Mezzadri and Srivastava, “Labour Regimes in the Indian Garment Sector”; and Pattenden, Labour, State and Society in Rural India.
7. Anant, “Labour Market Reforms in India”; and Miyamura, “Emerging Consensus.”
8. Sen, Working Class of India; Bhattacherjee, “Organized Labour and Economic Liberalization”; and Hensman, Workers, Unions.
9. Mohan and Jha, “Sept 2 Strike.”
10. tnlabour, “General Strikes.”
11. Menon, “Indian Trade Unions Are Getting Bigger.”
12. Shyam Sundar, “Industrial Conflict in India.”
13. Bhatt, We Are Poor but So Many; Bhowmik, “Cooperatives and the Emancipation of the Marginalized”; Chowdhury and Roma, “A Case Study of the NFFPFW”; Shyam Sundar, “Current State and Evolution of Industrial Relations in Maharashtra”; D’Cruz and Noronha, “Hope to Despair”; Sen, “Organizing the Unorganized Workers”; and Shyam Sundar, “Industrial Conflict in India.”
14. International Commission for Labor Rights, “Merchants of Menace”; Monaco, “Bringing Operaismo to Gurgaon”; Shyam Sundar, “Industrial Conflict in India”; and Aravamudan, “Can We Sit Down?”
15. Standing, Global Labour Flexibility; Munck, Globalization and Labour; Doogan, New Capitalism; Sanyal and Bhattacharyya, “Beyond the Factory”; Davies and Vadlamannati, “A Race to the Bottom in Labor Standards?”; and van der Linden, “The Crisis of World Labor” amongst many others.
16. Wright, “Working-Class Power, Capitalist-Class Interests”; Silver, Forces of Labor; and Silver, “Theorising the Working Class.”
17. Anner, “Workers’ Power in Global Value Chains.”
18. Anner, Solidarity Transformed; and Anner, “Labor Control Regimes.”
19. The organised sector is defined as factory under the Factory Act of 1948. See Government of India, Office of the Labour Commissioner, “The Factories Act.”
20. Government of India, Ministry of Finance, Economic Survey 2015–16, 135–136.
21. Sen, Working Class of India.
22. Banerjee, Globalisation, Industrial Restructuring; and Mehrotra et al., “Creating Employment,” 66.
23. Goldar, “Growth in Organised Manufacturing Employment”; Chandrasekhar and Sharma, “On the Spatial Concentration”; and Pandey and Shetty, “ASI Results for 2011–12.”
24. Kundu and Saraswati, “Migration and Exclusionary Urbanisation in India.”
25. For further details, see Miyamura, “Rethinking Labour Market Institutions.”
26. For a statistical analysis of institutional forms of labour organisations, see Miyamura, “Rethinking Labour Market Institutions.”
27. Standing, Global Labour Flexibility.
28. Roy, “Unorganised Manufacturing, Flexible Labour”; and Hayter, The Role of Collective Bargaining, 309.
29. Davies and Vadlamannati, “A Race to the Bottom in Labor Standards?”
30. Anner, Solidarity Transformed.
31. Bhatt, We Are Poor but So Many.
32. Silver, Forces of Labor; and Silver, “Theorising the Working Class.”
33. Ramaswamy, Worker Consciousness and Trade Union Response; and Sen, “West Bengal.”
34. Miyamura, “Rethinking Labour Market Institutions.”
35. Chibber, Locked in Place.
36. While the BJP has involved Hindu nationalist ideology, Maharashtra’s regional party Shiv Sena emerged as a Maratha-supremacist political movement. See Gupta, Nativism in a Metropolis; and Hansen, Wages of Violence.
37. Banaji and Hensman, Beyond Multinationalism; Hensman and Banaji, “A Short History of the Employees’ Unions”; and Hensman, Workers, Unions.
38. Teitelbaum, Mobilizing Restraint.
39. Shyam Sundar, “Industrial Conflict in India.”
40. Wright, “Working-Class Power, Capitalist-Class Interests”; Silver, Forces of Labor; and Silver, “Theorising the Working Class.”
41. Anner, Solidarity Transformed; and Anner, “Labor Control Regimes.”
42. Anner, Solidarity Transformed.
43. Although the case discussed in this article featured prominent roles played by company or plant-based unions independent of party affiliation, the implication is not about preventing political parties to engage with the labour movement. Indeed, the fieldwork carried out for this research have shown that unions and union leaders affiliated to the same political party may play very different roles depending on the regional and organisational contexts. See Miyamura, “Rethinking Labour Market Institutions.”
44. Bhattacherjee, “The ‘New Left.’”
45. Miyamura, “Diversity of Labour Market Institutions in Indian Industry.”
46. Bhattacharya, “Challenging ‘Make in India.’”
47. International Commission for Labor Rights, “Merchants of Menace.”
48. Ibid.
49. Silver, Forces of Labor; and Anner, Solidarity Transformed.
50. Shyam Sundar, “Industrial Conflict in India.”
51. International Commission for Labor Rights, “Merchants of Menace.”
52. See also Monaco, “Bringing Operaismo to Gurgaon.”
53. Breman, “The Study of Industrial Labour in Post-Colonial India”; Harriss-White, India Working; Mezzadri and Srivastava, “Labour Regimes in the Indian Garment Sector”; and Pattenden, Labour, State and Society in Rural India. See also Mezzadri and Pattenden’s contributions in this volume.
54. Shyam Sundar, “Industrial Conflict in India.”
55. Menon, “Indian Trade Unions Are Getting Bigger.”
56. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 10; and Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism.
57. Sharma, “Government Ropes in India Inc to Frame Norms for Contract Labour.”
58. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), “Election Manifesto,” 31.
59. Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), “Engaging Contract Workforce.”
60. Selwyn, The Global Development Crisis.