“Union Regimes”: Discipline and Punish in Three Indian Maritime Trade Unions

Abstract

This critical study stands at the intersection of two prominent themes within the studies of industrial relations and the sociology of labour respectively, namely, the decline, renewal, and transformation of trade unionism in the context of neoliberal globalization on the one hand, and labour process theories pertaining specifically to labour discipline/control on the other. Illustrated with ethnographic snapshots of three prominent maritime trade unions in India, this paper conceptualizes the “union regime”—a labour disciplinary regime based on the trade union's perceptual and attitudinal conditioning of its members, which ends chiefly in benefiting the employers and the unions. Furthermore, the paper describes the specific mechanisms of union disciplining from a Foucauldian theoretical perspective. The complicity of trade unions in the “discipline and punish” of the very workers that they represent leads to the alarming speculation that, at the perplexing crossroads of transformation, trade unionism is at the risk of becoming an extension of the ideological arsenal of global capitalism.

Keywords:

• trade union
• labour discipline
• seafarer
• India
• neoliberalism

Acknowledgements

I thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and the journal editor Chen Shuoying for her helpful editorial facilitation. I am deeply indebted to the Seafarers International Research Centre (SIRC) of Cardiff University for funding this research project. I am also immensely grateful to Professor Helen Sampson and Professor Mick Bloor for guiding me through my MPhil thesis research on which this article is based; the limitations of this study remain entirely my own responsibility.

Notes

¹Able-bodied Seaman (AB), Bosun, and Serang are all ranks of seafarers onboard ships, though Serang is now a defunct category.

²In the morning's talk, the union had also been telling the audience how hard they are working on their behalf.

³“10-pass,” a level in Indian educational system, equivalent to completion of secondary school education.