Redefined Labour Spaces: Organising Workers in Post- Liberalised India 9781138201194, 9781315105888

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Redefined Labour Spaces

This book discusses the transformation of labour movements and trade unionism in post-liberalised India. It looks at emerging collectivism, both in formal and informal sectors, and relates it to changing political and industrial relations. Bringing together studies of resistance, struggles and new forms of negotiations from different industries – agriculture, fisheries, brick kiln, plantations, IT, domestic workers, shipbreakers, sex workers, and miners – this book exposes the myths, realities and challenges that the present generation of workers in India face and struggle with. With contributions from leading thinkers in the field, the work deepens the understanding of the current Indian labour spaces, possibilities for contestations and articulations from below. The volume will be useful to students and researchers of labour studies, economics, sociology, development studies and public policy. It will be an invaluable resource to those engaged with industrial relations, trade unions, human rights, social exclusion as well as labour organisations and research institutions. Sobin George is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Studies of Social Change and Development, Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru, India. Shalini Sinha is the India Country Representative of the global actionresearch-policy network, Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), and is based in New Delhi, India.

“The global ascendency of the neoliberal economic reforms, for almost four decades now, has had profound implications for the politics of labour, in particular for the conventional strategies of organisation and mobilisation. The present volume, edited by Sobin George and Shalini Sinha, seeks to examine and analyse the plethora of responses and resistances by labour in India to claim/reclaim spaces for itself. Given that there has been a dearth of relevant literature on this theme, the volume is a welcome contribution. Furthermore, it is solidly grounded, in terms of capturing the processes ‘from below’ across several sectors (ranging from traditional to modern), empirically nuanced and analytically thought-provoking. This very worthwhile collection of chapters engages remarkably well with the discourses on labour spaces in contemporary India and deepens our understanding significantly.” Praveen Jha, Professor of Economics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India “This volume is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand challenges faced by the contemporary labour movement. While providing fresh insights into the nature of these challenges, it avoids pessimism by reflecting on new possibilities for organising through inspiring case studies – a wonderful contribution to knowledge on this issue, for scholars, the engaged public and activists alike.” Caroline Skinner, African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, South Africa, and Urban Research Director, Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) “The informal economy dominates the Indian economy in terms of size, and yet far from enough is known about the empirical realities of informal workers. This book is a valuable contribution to advancing knowledge about ways in which informal workers have mobilised to improve their life situations, as well as new forms of mobilisations within the organised sector.” Ratna M. Sudarshan, Former Director, Institute of Social Studies Trust, New Delhi, India

Redefined Labour Spaces Organising Workers in Post-Liberalised India

Edited by Sobin George and Shalini Sinha

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Sobin George and Shalini Sinha; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Sobin George and Shalini Sinha to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-20119-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-10588-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of figures List of tables List of contributors Foreword Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction

viii ix xi xv xvii xviii 1

S O B I N G E O R G E AN D SH A L IN I SIN H A

PART I

The contemporary Indian labour space 1 Labourscape and labour space in post-liberalised India: critical reflections

15

17

S O B I N G E O R G E AN D SH A L IN I SIN H A

2 Unionisation in post-reform India: a review of trends and trajectories

45

R A J E S H K A L A R I VAYIL A N D SMITH A S. N AIR

3 Globalisation dynamics and the working-class movement: an agenda for future K . R . S H YA M S U N DA R

62

vi

Contents

PART II

Responding to informality: new approaches 4 Breaking the bondage: organising brick kiln workers in rural Punjab

93

95

R I N J U R A S A I LY

5 Safeguarding livelihoods in fisheries: a complex organisational challenge

117

N A L I N I N AYA K

6 The struggle for space: organising street vendors in India

139

SHALINI SINHA

7 Domestic workers’ movement in Maharashtra: organising experiences of Pune City Domestic Workers’ Organisation

158

S U J ATA G O TH OSKA R

PART III

New articulations 8 New identities require new strategies: union formation in the Indian IT/ITES sector

179

181

E R N E S TO N O R O N H A AN D P RE MIL L A D’CRUZ

9 The SEWA Lok Swasthya Mandali: a dual experiment in organising and service provision in Gujarat

208

S A P N A D E S A I A N D MIRA I CH ATTE RJE E

10 “As human beings and as workers”: sex worker unionisation in Karnataka, India

226

G O W R I V I J AYA K UMAR, SH UB H A CH A CKO A N D S U B A D R A PA N CH AN A DE SWARAN

11 Organising the unorganised: academic and activist insights from shipbreaking yards in Mumbai YA N I C K N O I S E UX AN D V. V. RAN E

250

Contents

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PART IV

The new waves: myths and realities

273

12 Mistaken identities in information technology sector in India: implications for unionisation

275

SOBIN GEORGE

13 Possibilities and barriers of workers’ co-operative: lessons from failed takeover experience of a closed mine in Jharkhand

296

S A N TA N U S A R K AR

14 Uprisings by women in tea plantations: contextualising the Pombilai Orumai movement in Kerala

318

J I TH I N G .

Glossary Index

339 341

Figures

1.1

Number of strikes and lockouts in India between 1991 and 2014 1.2 Workers affected due to retrenchment in India between 1995 and 2013 3.1 The pyramid model of disintegration 3.2 The “cross” model of integration 3.3 Informal workers’ movement: a continuum and structure 9.1 SEWA Health’s core activities 11.1A Jean-Pierre Durand’s job centrifugation dynamic

38 39 70 75 82 210 272

Tables

1.1 1.2

Workforce distribution across industry, 2011–12 Percentage of population by usual principal status by gender and sector, 2011–12 1.3 Average daily wages of regular and casual workers, 2004–5 and 2011–12 1.4 Social security measure available across industry groups 1.5 Type of job contract across industry sectors 1.6 Availability of paid leave across industry sectors 1.7 Mode of payment across industry sectors 1.8 Distribution of workers by industry group and social group, 2011–12 1.9 Growth of registered trade unions and their membership in India since 2000 1.10 Number and membership of workers’ unions by major industry sections for the year 2010 2.1 Membership of formal and informal workers in central trade union organisations 1989, 2002 4.1 Brick kiln technologies currently prevalent in India 4.2 Wages of brick kiln workers: government/ negotiated by BMS 4.3 Membership of workers across gender in Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), 2000–13 6.1 Growth of membership of NASVI 8.1 UNITES and FITE: a comparison 9.1 LSM’s dual activity base: the crossover between revenue streams and health service

19 21 22 23 26 27 29 31 36 37 51 97 105 109 146 201 213

x

Tables

12.1 Social security benefits available for IT and ITES employees 12.2 Type of job contract for IT and ITES employees 12.3 Educational backgrounds of IT and ITES employees in India 12.4 Caste background of employees in the IT and ITES sectors in India

279 280 282 283

Contributors

Shubha Chacko is the Executive Director of Solidarity Foundation, Bengaluru. She has three decades of experience in the area of human rights and development and works closely with grassroots-level organisations working on issues of gender and sexuality. She completed her master’s in social work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. Mirai Chatterjee is Director of the Social Security team at Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), Ahmedabad, India. She is currently chairperson of the National Insurance Vimo SEWA Cooperative Ltd and actively involved with the Lok Swasthya Health Cooperative, of which she is also the founder. She was a commissioner in WHO’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health and an advisor to the National Commission on Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, USA, and an MPH from Johns Hopkins University, USA. Premilla D’Cruz is Professor, Organisational Behaviour, Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad, India. Her research interests include emotions in organisations, workplace bullying, self and identity, organisational control, and ICTs and organisations. She has been involved in several studies of the Indian ITES-BPO industry, including studies of employee work experiences, collectivisation and workplace bullying. Sapna Desai is a public health specialist who focuses on women’s health, community health workers and impact evaluation. Previously, she worked with SEWA for close to a decade, where she led the scaling up of LSM’s community health worker. She has a doctorate from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK, and an MS from Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, USA.

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Contributors

Jithin G. is a doctoral fellow at Centre for Political Institutions, Governance and Development, Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC), Bengaluru, India. He is an alumnus of the Department of Political Science, University of Hyderabad, where he completed his post-graduation. His current academic interests include political mobilisation, trade unions and the politics of bureaucracy. Sobin George is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Studies of Social Change and Development, Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru, India. He holds a PhD from the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His areas of research and writings cover labour rights, social gradients of health and marginalities and development. He is the author of the book Work and Health in Informal Economy: Linkages from Export-Oriented Garment Sector in Delhi (2016). He was previously with the Indian Council of Social Science Research, Indian Institute of Dalit Studies and Centre for Education and Communication, New Delhi. Sujata Gothoskar is an activist based in Mumbai, India. She has been working for the rights of women workers in the unorganised sector for several years. She has researched and written extensively on the struggles of domestic workers and their mobilisation. Her research areas include women and work, women’s right to livelihood, organising and struggles. Rajesh Kalarivayil is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Work, Tezpur University, Assam, India. He did his doctorate from the Centre for Studies in Science Policy, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. His research interests are livelihood and globalisation and health technologies in society. Smitha S. Nair completed her doctorate from the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She is currently associated with Department of Social Work, Tezpur University, Assam, as part of the guest faculty. Her research interests include gender, health and social movements which are closely associated with her doctoral research on women’s health movement in India. Nalini Nayak is an activist, feminist and trade unionist based in Kerala, India. She has been involved with coastal communities and their issues for over three decades and is a founder member of the International Collective in Support of Fishworkers. She is at present the

Contributors

xiii

general secretary of the Self Employed Women’s Association, Kerala, of which she was a joint founder. She has written extensively on fishworkers and women workers in the informal economy. Yanick Noiseux is with the Department of Sociology at Université de Montreal, Canada. His work focuses on the renewal of trade unionism, the transformation of work and social policy in the context of globalisation. He is the director of the interdisciplinary and interuniversity research group on employment, poverty and social protection (GIREPS) and is a member of the Center for the Study of Integration and Globalization (CEIM). Ernesto Noronha is Professor, Organisational Behaviour, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India. He has extensively studied the Indian ITES-BPO industry, including studies on employee work experiences and collectivisation. His areas of research and writing cover a wide range of subjects, including labour relations, ethnicity and diversity at work, organisational control, and information and communication technologies and organisations. He completed his doctorate in industrial sociology from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. Subadra Panchanadeswaran is Associate Professor and Director of the PhD Program at Adelphi University School of Social Work, USA. Her research examines the intersections of gender-based violence, HIV/AIDS and substance use disorders internationally. Her most recent research examines the impact of mobile phone technology on female sex workers’ lives in India. V. V. Rane has been with the trade union movement since 1989. He represented the shipbreaking workers’ union from India at International Labour Organization, Basel, and World Maritime University, Sweden. He is also a guest faculty member at Global Labour University, Tata Institute of Social Sciences and NML Institute of Labour Studies. Rinju Rasaily teaches sociology at School of Liberal Studies, Ambedkar University, Delhi, India. She has a PhD from the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She works on questions of labour with a focus on plantation labour, workers’ health, exclusion based on identities and issues of livelihood and development. She worked previously with V. V. Giri National Labour Institute, Noida, as a faculty member, CEC, Delhi, and SAMA Resource centre for women, Delhi.

xiv

Contributors

Santanu Sarkar is Professor of HRM and Labour Relations at XLRI, Jamshedpur, India. His areas of interest include cross-cultural issues in labour relations, union attitude, workplace homicides, and workers’ co-operative and global unions. He has published his work in the Journal of World Business, Asia Pacific Journal of Management, Industrial Relations Journal, International Journal of Manpower, Asian Business and Management, Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation, Journal of Human Values, Indian Journal of Labour Economics and the Indian Journal of Industrial Relations, among others. Shalini Sinha is the India Country Representative of the global actionresearch-policy network, Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), and is based in New Delhi, India. Her work focuses on developing and documenting decent work and livelihood opportunities for women workers in the informal economy, especially women workers in urban locations. Earlier she worked as an independent consultant specialising in labour, gender and social development issues with several national and international NGOs and funding agencies. She has published extensively on gender and pro-poor issues in the Indian and the South Asian context. K. R. Shyam Sundar is Professor of Human Resource Management at XLRI – Xavier School of Management, Jamshedpur, India. He has published over sixty research articles and book reviews and written twelve books (including two edited ones) concerning labour apart from undertaking several research projects for organisations such as ILO, European Union and ICSSR. His areas of research include globalisation and employment relations, labour standards, industrial relations and social dialogue. Gowri Vijayakumar is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University, USA. She teaches courses on social movements, gender and sexuality with a transnational perspective. Her research focuses on the relationship between sex worker activism and the politics of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in India and Kenya.

Foreword

I have always believed that organising is the only way for workers to change their lives and their conditions. My experience of working in SEWA with women of the informal economy has shown that coming together, gaining confidence and confronting their situation as a group, as a collective, as a union, changes their lives for the better, leading to better earnings and more opportunities of all kinds. It is also a defence mechanism. As workers are being pushed out of their spaces by new forces, the collective, the union, is the only way that they can fight back and retain their positions. For women particularly, organising is an empowering experience that changes their lives, and the lives of their families. However, the forms of organising need to change as society changes. In India, we have an aspirational workforce of young people looking for a better life, better jobs, better earnings. Education has expanded hugely in the past two decades, and workers have sacrificed and invested in their children. At the same time the world of work has changed with new technologies and new markets. Forms of organising which depend on formal jobs and fixed employer–employee relationships are no longer effective as most jobs are precarious and in any case more than half the workforce is self-employed. In a labour market where workers move from job to job, and in and out of self-employment, their identity as a “worker” tends to get blurred, and so uniting as workers becomes more difficult. Capital, on the other hand, has a strong identity and strong organisations. Organisations of workers, whether as trade unions or co-operatives or other collective forms, have become weaker, whereas employers’ associations and trade associations of all kinds now have a seat at every table. Yet for most human beings, there is a yearning for justice and for equality. A need to protect themselves from the exploitation of others, to assert themselves and to secure better conditions for themselves. In

xvi

Foreword

most situations workers of all kinds do organise, do come together with or without the help of outside forces. It is by building on these tendencies to organise that a new working class can emerge. The chapters in this volume show us how workers are organising in their own space and in their own way, and through their organising are articulating their vision of a better society. At the same time, international or “global” trade unions are reforming themselves to deal with the challenge of global capital. Perhaps these forms of organising are the precursors to the new working class. As this volume shows, the new working class will be led by the energy of emerging women and by those who see themselves as self-employed. It will be forged by millions of local organising groups networked into a movement by the joint efforts of those committed to social justice, including NGOs, trade unions, co-operatives and other member-based organisations. Renana Jhabvala National Coordinator, Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), Chairperson, Homenet South Asia, and Chair, Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO)

Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time in coming and many individuals and institutions have supported us in this journey. We are especially grateful to the authors who stood by us through the many stages of revision and refining this volume. The book would not have been possible without the encouragement of Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES), which decided to support us even as the idea was germinating in our own heads. Thank you Damyanty Sridharan for your faith in us; it kept us going when the road got rough. We are also very grateful for the support extended to us by Federatie Nederlandse Vakbeweging (FNV). Wilma Roos and Prabhu Rajendran have supported us in many generous ways, reinforcing our belief that this story needed to be told, and the churning here in India had many lessons globally too. They, like us, believed that the workers’ struggle in India was not quiescent, but needed a new lens – gently suggesting insights and ideas, pointing towards new and emerging ideological spaces, always encouraging us to articulate our observations sans the mainstream idiom. Without their support, this volume would not have been possible. The chapter on sex workers’ organisation in Karnataka state is a reprint from the Global Labour Journal, vol. 6, no. 1, 2015, pp. 79–96. We thank the journal for giving permission to include in this volume. We thank the unknown reviewers of this work. Their comments and suggestions helped us fine-tune each paper. Our gratitude is also due to Shoma Choudhury, commissioning editor of Routledge, for her constant support and able leadership in taking this script through the production process. We also thank our student friends Jithin, Abdul, Omkar, Arun and Saalim at ISEC, Bangalore, and the entire production team at Routledge for their help at various stages of the production of this work. Finally, we would like to acknowledge our gratitude to the unrecorded real-life workers’ struggle and collective action, which have inspired us to bring forth this collection of chapters.

Abbreviations

AGM AIBTMF AICCTU AINSW AIPWA AITUC APNSW ASSOCHAM BIFR BJP BMS BPL BPO BWI CATW CAW CBA CBD CBO CBPOP CEO CFFA CITU CMFRI COYOTE

annual general meeting The All India Bricks and Tiles Manufacturers Federation All India Central Council of Trade Unions All India Network of Sex Workers All India Progressive Women’s Association All India Trade Union Congress Asia-Pacific Network of Sex Workers Associated Chambers of Commerce of India Bureau of Industrial and Financial Reconstruction Bharatiya Janata Party Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh below poverty line business process outsourcing Building and Woodworkers International Coalition against Trafficking in Women Committee for Asian Women collective bargaining agreement Conference on Bio-diversity community-based organisations Centre for BPO Professionals chief executive officer Committee for Fair Fisheries Agreements Centre of Indian Trade Unions Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics

Abbreviations CPI CPI(M) CPSTU CRZ CSO CSR CTUO CWF CWO DMSC DOTS EAS EC EEO EEZ EIA ESMA FAO FCBTK FCRA FDI FES FICCI FIET FITE FoA/CB FNV GDP GFA GoI GoK GUF HBW HCL

xix

Communist Party of India Communist Party of India (Marxist) Committee of Public Sector Trade Unions Coastal Regulation Zone Central Statistical Organisation corporate social responsibility Central Trade Union Organisations Coastal Women’s Forum Council of Workers’ Organisations Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee directly observed treatment, short-term method Employee Assistance Scheme executive committee equal employment opportunity Exclusive Economic Zone Environment Impact Assessment Essential Services Maintenance Act Food and Agriculture Organisation Fixed Chimney Bull Trench Kilns Foreign Contribution Regulation Act foreign direct investment Friedrich Ebert Foundation Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry International Federation of Commercial, Clerical, Professional and Technical Employees Forum for IT Employees Freedom of Association and Collective Bargaining Federatie Nederlandse Vakbeweging gross domestic product global framework agreements Government of India Government of Kerala Global Union Federations home-based workers Hindustan Computers Limited

xx

Abbreviations

HMS HRM ICSF IDA IDBI IJP ILC ILO IMD IMF IMF INP INTUC IRS IT ITES ITPA ITPF ITUC IUF

KDHPC KSWU LGBTI LME LPF LSM MBO MCBTK MiC MNC MoEF MoLE MPTDGEU

Hind Mazdoor Sabha human resource management International Collective in Support of Fishworkers Industrial Disputes Act Industrial Development Bank of India internal job posting Indian Labour Conference International Labour Organization International Institute of Management Development International Metalworkers’ Federation International Monetary Fund Indo-Norwegian Project Indian National Trade Union Congress industrial relations system information technology information technology-enabled services Immoral Traffic Prevention Act Information Technology Professionals’ Forum International Trade Union Congress The International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations Kanan Devan Hills Plantations Company Karnataka Sex Workers’ Union lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex London Metal Exchange Labour Progressive Front Lok Swasthya Mandali member-based organisations movable chimney bull trench kilns mineral in concentrate multinational corporation Ministry of Environment and Forests Ministry of Labour and Employment Mumbai Port Trust Dock and General Employees’ Union

Abbreviations MRTU & PULP MSME MWCD NACO NALSA NAPM NASSCOM NASVI NCEUS NCL NCLIR NDA NDMC NF NFF NFITU NGN NGO NNSW NPMO NRF NRHM NSSO NTUI OBCs OECD PCDWO PCO PDS PLA PLC PPE PSU

xxi

Maharashtra Recognition of Trade Unions and Prevention of Unfair Labour Practices Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Ministry of Women and Child Development National AIDS Control Organisation National Legal Services Authority National Alliance of People’s Movements National Association of Software and Services Companies National Alliance of Street Vendors in India National Committee for Enterprises in Unorganised Sector National Center for Labour National Commission of Labour Inquiry Report National Democratic Alliance New Delhi Municipal Committee National Federation National Fishworkers’ Forum National Front of Indian Trade Unions New Generation Network non-governmental organisation National Network of Sex Workers National Platform for Mass organisations National Renewal Fund National Rural Health Mission National Sample Survey Organisation New Trade Union Initiative other backward classes Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Pune City Domestic Workers’ Organisation Programme for Community Organisation public distribution system Plantation Labour Act Plantation Labour Committee personal protection equipment public sector undertaking

xxii

Abbreviations

PUCL–K RBI RSBY SCs SEVAK SEWA SEZ SICA SIFFS SITA SMEFI SMM STs TCS TGB TIP TL TPS TU TUCC TVCs UDF UNCLOS UNFPA UNI–APRO UNI UNITES USAID USWSSB UTUC (LS) VAMP VRS WB WEF WFF

People’s Union for Civil Liberties–Karnataka Reserve Bank of India Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana scheduled castes Self Employed Vendors Association of Karnataka Self Employed Women’s Association special economic zone Sick Industrial Companies Act South Indian Federation of Fishermen’s Societies Suppression of Immoral Traffic Acts Small and Medium Enterprise Finance Initiative Shramik Mahila Morcha scheduled tribes Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. Tata Global Beverages trafficking in persons team leader Toyota Production System Trade Union Trade Union Coordination Centre town vending committees United Democratic Front UN Convention on the Law of the Sea United Nations Population Fund UNI–Asia Pacific Regional Organisation Union Network International Union for ITES employees United States Agency for International Development Unorganized Sector Workers Social Security Bill 2007 United Trade Union Congress (Lenin Sarani) Veshya Anyay Mukti Parishad Voluntary Retirement Scheme World Bank World Economic Forum World Forum of Fish Harvesters and Fish Workers

Abbreviations WFFP WFTU WHO WIEGO WTO

xxiii

World Federation Fisher People World Federation of Trade Unions World Health Organization Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing World Trade Organization

Introduction Sobin George and Shalini Sinha

Commenting on the organisation of flexible production, Krishan Kumar noted certain key concerns in industrial relations related to decline of mass unions and centralised wage bargaining and the rise of workers’ networks based on region, race or gender or other cultural identities (Kumar 1995: 76), especially in the post-industrial societies. While it remains to be an unresolved question whether such conditions of post-industrial society exist in India or whether the new labour mobilisations are natural responses to flexible production, it is not possible to overlook the changes that have been happening in the industrial and labour landscapes, in a fairly similar vein, with the processes of trade liberalisation, export promotion and labour market deregulation. Developments, especially pertaining to expansion of informal sector and informalisation of formal sectors, have shown that the policies of labour market reforms that considerably flexibilised and reformulated labour relations have implications for the collective organisation of workers. While some of these processes, undoubtedly, weakened the existing conventional labour mobilisations, they also led to the rise of several new forms of resistances and reconfigurations of labour spaces. These initiatives need special attention for their approaches, strategies, claims, contradictions and, above all, the new discourses that they tend to create to redefine the contemporary Indian labour space. The purpose of this book is to comprehend various forms of collective organisations of workers in the present Indian labour landscape, which is, though constrained by the processes emanating from the neoliberal policies, opening up possibilities for new forms of resistances, negotiations and re-articulations of labour space from below.

The post-liberalised Indian labour space There are several reasons to consider that policies and processes of economic liberalisation tend to control and discipline labour and weaken the existing collective organisations in the process. It is true

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Sobin George and Shalini Sinha

that the major challenge of existing mainstream trade unions in India has been to organise the informal sector workers, who are scattered and segregated along various sociocultural markers, skill levels and are spread over a spectrum of activities in agriculture, manufacturing and service sectors. The labour market reform policies further added to these structural constraints by flexibilising labour laws and increasing informality even in organised sectors. Scholarship on informality already highlighted various issues arising out of such constraints on conditions of work, wages, well-being and collectivisation in several sectors in India. Sekar and Mohammad (2001), for instance, have brought out the appalling conditions of workers in the manufacture of locks, beedi rolling, diamond cutting and textiles including handloom and powerloom sectors. Mishra and Srivastava (2002) shed light on long hours of work in handloom sectors; George (2006, 2014) on informality and unfavourable conditions of workers in electronic and automobile sectors; Banerjee and Nihila (1999) and Dewan (2001) on the unfavourable conditions of work in the fish processing units in the export zones and Mohankumar and Singh (2011) on the decline of living conditions of gem polishing and construction industries. Studies also brought out other pertinent issues of informal employment such as physical conditions at workplace (Chaachi 1999; Pais 2002), low earnings in the informal sector in general and for women in particular (Unni 2001), piece rate payment system (Singh 2001), new forms of bondages (Breman 2010), feminisation at lower-end manufacturing jobs (Vanamala 2001; Ghosh 2002; Swaminathan 2002) and casualisation of jobs (Gupta 1995; Despande and Despande 1998; Shariff and Gumber 1999). Some of these studies also shed light on the informalisation of formal sector jobs (NCEUS 2007; George 2016). The National Sample Survey Organisation’s (NSSO) recent data on employment and unemployment (2011–12) also indicate to this continuing trend of informality. For instance, the data showed that informal employment in 2011–12 in India stood at 93.2 per cent with nearly 85 per cent in urban India and 97 per cent in rural India. The share of female employment in non-formal sectors at all-India level is nearly 97 per cent, whereas it is 90 per cent for men. Women workers were also found to be over-represented in less economically recognised sectors like domestic duties and collection of goods/sewing/ tailoring/weaving for household and under-represented in categories of self-employed own-account worker and self-employed employer. The appalling conditions of work in the informal sectors continue with their visible repercussions on wages and aspects such as social security, legal protection, work contracts, mode of payment, etc. The NSSO data

Introduction

3

(2011–12) further shows that even though the real wages of casual and regular workers improved, the male–female wage differentials continued to be high. What is most striking is the non-availability of social security entitlements to 80 per cent of rural and 63 per cent of urban workforce, even if the country enacted a social security act. Similarly, service conditions and payment of wages remain highly informal as nearly 85 per cent of workers in rural and 72 per cent in urban India do not have a formal written contract with the employers; 38 per cent in rural and 12 per cent in urban India are still daily wage labourers and 70 per cent of the workforce do not have facilities like paid leave. This is found to be true for all sectors, including India’s information technology sector, where 50 per cent of jobs are without any written job contract. These are further analysed in the first chapter. The country is all set for another round of labour law reforms under the current National Democratic Alliance (NDA) regime in order to (presumably) facilitate the ongoing trade liberalisation project as part of economic liberalisation. The initial phase of labour law reforms included the flexibilisation of certain clauses in the significant legislations such as Industrial Disputes Act 1947, Trade Union Act 1926, Minimum Wages Act 1948 and the Contract Labour (Regulation and Control) Act 1970. These have eased the processes of restructuring, retrenching and closure of firms. Similarly, public utility status has been extended to several industry sectors, which makes striking of work illegal. Enactment of the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) Act, 2005, limited the scope of application of acts like The Minimum Wages Act, 1948, the Trade Union Act, 1947, and the Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act, 1946, in the SEZs. The proposed labour reforms aim to dismantle various worker protecting provisions in the acts such as Factories Act 1948, the Apprenticeship Act 1961 and the Labour Laws 1988. Most of the amendments proposed in these acts are aimed at further informalisation of work. For instance the proposed amendment to increase overtime work from 50 to 125 hours would also enable the employer to come up with practices of huge compulsory overtime. The proposed amendments to the apprenticeship act could allow the employers to undertake significant part of the production with trainees with a nominal cost of stipend, thereby drastically reducing employment opportunities (George 2014). It should also be noted that a large group of informal sector workers across various industrial sectors are outside the purview of several labour legislation, and also social security measures such as Employees’ State Insurance Scheme, Pension Scheme, Maternity Benefit, Provident Fund and Gratuity are not applied to a wide spectrum of workers in the informal sector.

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Sobin George and Shalini Sinha

Though there are certain sector-specific interventions such as for beedi workers, construction workers and toddy tappers as well as insurance schemes (like RSBY), which came up as part of the social security programmes, NSSO 68th round data on employment and unemployment showed that as much as 71.73 per cent of the Indian workers still do not have access to any social security scheme.

Defending and redefining labour space: the new waves Although trade unions in the organised sector have been instrumental in creating a vibrant labour space by articulating the rights of workers and resisting several anti-labour policies of the neoliberal state, their inabilities to adequately reach to the informal sector and address the immediate concerns of these workers received wider criticism. It was also argued that large trade unions divided the larger class consciousness of the workers due to their political affiliations and obligations. What is more alarming, however, is the shrinking of mainstream trade unions in the organised sector along with the general decline of the sector. For instance, data from Ministry of Labour, Government of India, showed that only 1 per cent of the Indian workforce is unionised and about 97 per cent of TU membership is from the formal sector, which employs only 35 million workers. Women’s membership and participation in key positions of the unions also continue to be low. Unionisation membership has showed a decline in the post-reform period in India. Membership in the unions in the post-reform period, especially between 2000 and 2010, declined by 0.56 per cent, while it had a marked growth by 9.14 per cent between 1980 and 1989. Also, the informal sector, where labour rights violations are rampant, continues to be largely non-unionised. This is further discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. In short, there is enough evidence to support the argument that various processes under neoliberal globalisation lead to weakening of organised labour resistances. Even if trade union membership and activities showed a decline, it is incorrect to say that labour space in India is silent. We have seen several new initiatives of organising workers, particularly in the informal sector in India, which attempted to contest anti-labour practices and claim labour space from below. As Rina Agarwala argued several initiatives of organising workers in the informal sector “created new institutions” and “forged new social contract with the state” by overcoming the constraints of informalisation and contractualisations (Agarwala 2013). Some of them, for instance, the experience of Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), agriculture workers,

Introduction

5

domestic workers, migrants, street vendors, fisher folks, waste pickers, construction workers, and beedi workers, are well documented (Dietrich and Nayak 2006; Srinivasulu 2008; Bhowmick and Saha 2012; Agarwala 2013; Kabeer et al. 2013; Neetha 2013; Sankaran 2013). While some initiatives, for instance the movement of shipbreaking workers, street vendors and the agriculture workers, which are largely with the support of mainstream established trade unions, endeavour to build “larger working class movement” (Thompson 1963) some others are “every day struggles” of the weak and oppressed workers (Scott 1985; Scott 1990) at a micro level, which may or may not converge with larger movements. Some of the new movements, for instance, the information technology professional’s collective, believe in non-confrontational approaches, political neutrality and allying with employers. Another set of movements are issue – specific sudden uprisings. Such movements, in some instances, could also act as political pressure groups and get their concerns represented in a political context where parties compete to win workers to their side, as Agarwala (2013) highlighted by quoting the example of construction workers’ movement from Tamil Nadu. Nevertheless, it does not imply that such strategies would be successful in every context, especially when there is a nexus between capital and the State. Irrespective of the ideological positions one takes on these uprisings, it is important to note that there are different collective and isolated forms of resistances and movements emerging both locally and at a larger level as responses to the management and disciplining strategies of all forms of capital, which need more attention. There were several attempts to understand the movements outside the realm of the initiatives of formal trade unions for its new philosophies, strategies and approaches for mobilisations. Depending on their context specific strategies Ahn and Ahn (2012) categorised them as co-operative models, study circle model, self-help model, welfare aid model, hieratical network model, friendship house model, skill development model, information technology training model and social mobilising model. It must be noted that these are very loose categories, but can be broadly put under the new collectivisations. The organising efforts of some of these initiatives should be mentioned here for their fresh views, strategies and approaches. The nature of organisations varies across regions and sectors, and these include trade unions, federations, national alliances, regional networks and labour NGOs. Many are “new and unique” forms of organising – their current shape and form evolving, organically, and reflecting the history the workers’ movement that they symbolise. The interests which drive these

6

Sobin George and Shalini Sinha

organisations are also diverse, ranging from growing urbanisation and a burgeoning migrant workforce; feminisation of labour which at times reinforces patriarchal biases even though makes women an earning member; a stagnant agricultural economy and suicidal small farmer; and a growing prosperity which refuses to trickle down. The unions in some of the informal sectors, to a great extent, could successfully engage in collective bargaining by breaking their old barriers. The Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) is a striking example. Initiatives in sectors like agriculture, self-employed women, shipbreaking workers, street vendors, domestic workers are also important mobilisations of this genre. What made the big difference, perhaps, is their strategy to reach to workers and mobilise them by transcending the spatial and sectoral limitations and their approach to articulate workers’ problems in a persuasive language of citizenship rights. It is important to note that most of the successful organisations of workers in the informal sector contextualised themselves within the limitations and possibilities of the sector rather than aiming for a radical change in the structure and organisation of the sector. While such short-term approaches and strategies are criticised for these “compromises”, it could attract workers since their strategy, to a certain extent, have been capable of resolving their immediate problems at workplace. These new movements mobilise workers across multiple employers and contractors within a sector. Sometimes, the union itself acted as the main institutional mechanism, which provided a single identity for the members. The new unionism thus opened up various alternative avenues for workers to organise. The major change here is the shift from employer-based union to sector-based union with the trade union as its institutional focal centre. Another noted difference relates to their approaches. Since issues of workers are changing with employers and locations, the new initiatives found it important to have an issue-based approach than “grand” labour and political agenda. Other than some of the common issues such as living/minimum wages, safety and compensation, these new unions in the informal sector addressed issues of workers at a very local level, sometimes even on a case to case basis. It must also be highlighted that besides the specific issues, they also engaged in a host of issues ranging from developmental needs like skill training and micro finance, to social security and child care and education. Another important marker is their context specific strategy by taking the specificities and diversities of the sector into account. For instance, shipbreaking workers’ unions in Mumbai and Alang organised workers who are associated with employers and contractors under the same

Introduction

7

platform in all the yards with a single identity as shipbreaking worker among all other caste- and language-based internal differences. Strategies also varied from sector to sector. Unlike the invisible and voiceless home-based workers, the street vendors come together easily, forming small organisations, in localised group or association – often to resolve their immediate problems or in response to particular issues. So, organising them has been relatively less cumbersome, and yet as has been noted from experience all over the world, very rarely do these organisations register or build strong and sustainable organisations. For home-based workers, the strategy was different as it was extremely difficult to bring them together.

What is new in new trade unionism? While the context specific new initiatives of workers’ organisations offer several new possibilities for workers to voice their citizenship rights, they are often criticised for the emphasis on short-term solutions and for undermining the long-term organisational objectives and labours right agenda. Some of these movements are also criticised for their apolitical nature, which in a way limit them from forging alliances and politically engaging with policymakers on larger issues, where the root causes of their immediate problems perhaps lie. For instance, it is difficult to prioritise whether one should address the immediate manifestations of informalities such as job insecurity, overwork and low wages or the larger processes of flexible specialisation and labour market deregulation, which possibly brought about such precarious situations. While a context specific intervention may be helpful to address the manifestations, the processes could be addressed only with political engagements. Another important question is the play of certain employment related identities, which form the binding forces of the members of the new collectivisations. For instance, the IT employees collective invoked questions of class based on their identity as professionals. The growing apathy of middle classes who form this layer of “post-industrial” workforce towards trade unionism is one of the reasons, as Kumar (1995) also argued, behind such experiments although there are class based internal subdivisions within the IT sector and most of their problems are also similar to that of any workman. While the membership to a professional organisation endowed them with a distinct identity and self-perception, such mobilisations could not defend the rights of workers and engage with the state machineries as it was witnessed during the layoffs in several IT companies, which started from 2015. These are further discussed in Chapters 8 and 12.

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Like traditional unions, new initiatives also face several challenges due to the general shrinking of labour space. High worker turnover, mobility and scattered locations still continue as major hurdles for collective action for several unions. The state – industrialist nexus, which is mostly anti-labour is another issue. Membership expansion also remains as a major challenge for the unorganised workers’ unions due to the invisibility of workers. It is important to highlight that some of the organisations of informal workers are functioning not on workers’ or employers’ contribution, but purely on external supports/funding. This could raise serious questions on their sustainability and internal governance. International funding to worker mobilisation is also criticised for their possible larger interests (both capitalistic and political) to fund worker mobilisations. It has, hence, become increasingly difficult to understand the processes of collective organisation and construction of collective identity in the world of work in the post-liberalised India. This is not merely because of the complexities associated with the structural understanding of the sector, but also due to the emerging need to understand issues beyond structure and the advancement of the debates on social movements by the new social movement theorists, who opened up the questions of identity, context specificity and importance of autonomy and self-determination. It is furthermore difficult to understand when such organisations have global patronages, mostly in terms of financial aid and international advocacy activities, by cross-cutting collective region based class consciousnesses, sub-national or national identities and interests. They also engage in cross-movement alliances and mobilise external allies to gain solidarities across board. While the existing workers’ movements are to be understood in the changing political and industrial relations, the new movements of workers, require more understanding in the context of the interplays of other markers of differences. The focus of the present book is this imperative of new collective organisation in India, its forms and trajectories. The book also aims to showcase and critically understand the new waves of alternative mobilisations in India. Among others, the important questions that the chapters in the book address are as follows. How can we understand the changes in main stream trade unions? How are new forms of organising different from traditional ones? What are their strategies to organise workers and sustain the momentum? Whether such mobilisations are capable of effectively engaging with the employers and state machineries to represent their concerns? If so, how do they do it? Do such movements confine only to a local space or engage

Introduction

9

in wider collaborations to act as political pressure groups? How are social identities understood in new forms of organisations vis-à-vis class identities? Whether such models are sustainable in the context of their heavy dependence on global patronages and external financial support and finally, what are the new discourses that they create in the labour space?

Organisation of the book The chapters in this volume are arranged under four interrelated themes. The first part is on the contemporary Indian labour space. This chapter, by Sobin George and Shalini Sinha, provides a comprehensive account of the labourscape by highlighting informality, conditions of living and trends in unionisation drawing from official data. The chapter also offers a discussion on the nature of the Indian labour space and the way by which certain dominant discourses tend to shape the labour space. Rajesh K. and Smitha S. Nair review the trends of unionism in India by highlighting its different phases and offer an in-depth discussion on the types and trajectories of alternative mobilisation after the process of economic liberalisation. Shyam Sundar discusses how new labour movements in the informal sector responded to the stalemate created by the labour market reform and offers a “model” for restructuring new workers’ movement. Chapters in the second part discuss some of the existing successful collective organisation of workers in the informal sector and their strategies, which make them relevant. Rinju Rasaily examines the organising experience of Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) among the brick kiln workers in rural Punjab who are caught up in the intertwining of issues of migration, caste and related backwardness. The chapter also outlines some of the specific strategies adopted by BMS, which made positive results for union mobilisations. Nalini Nayak offers a fresh discussion on the mobilisation of fishworkers (artisanal marine fishing community) and the visibility they gained at the national and international levels. Shalini Sinha provides an account of the plight of street vendors, and traces the evolution and innovative role played by the national network of street vendors, especially the new discourse of entrepreneurship that the union created. Sujata Gothoskar discusses the strategies that the Pune City Domestic Workers’ Organisation adopted to organise the domestic workers who are scattered over the city. Chapter 7 also highlights the vulnerability of domestic workers emanating from a complex matrix of caste, migration, poverty, patriarchy and work insecurities and ways by which the union addresses these issues.

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The third part focuses on the recent collective organisations, which attracted attention for its new approaches. Among others, Ernesto Noronha and Premilla D’Cruz discuss two collectivisations active in the IT sector, which invoked the professional identity of the call centre agents to mobilise them. Chapter 8 argues that the earlier attempts by UNITES, which also mobilised agents by keeping their identity at the centre stage, were not very successful due to its internal organisational issues. However, bringing the case of FITE, another initiative, the chapter notes that the value of professionalism as created by the industry continues to inform their identity formation and it has implications for union formation. Hence, it is equally important for any collective of employees in the IT sector to have the same democratic and non-hierarchical structures, which go with the notion of professionalism that the employees cherish. Sapna Desai and Mirai Chatterjee offer a discussion on a unique co-operative of women health workers established by SEWA in Gujarat. What makes this initiative important is that other than the usual mobilising activities, the co-operative promotes self-reliance and health security among its members by providing services such as life-saving health education to members and their communities, access to primary medicines health security and financing support and referral services for tertiary care. Gowri Vijayakumar, Shubha Chacko and Subadra Panchanadeswaran analyse how the assertion of worker identity enables sex workers in Karnataka to strengthen their movement for dignity and labour rights. Yanick Noiseux and V. V. Rane give an account of the struggles of Mumbai Port Trust Docks and General Employees Union, which is a mainstream trade union, in organising the unorganised workers in shipbreaking yards in Darukhana, Mumbai. While there is a common allegation that formal sector–established trade unions shy away from organising unorganised workers, the present case highlights how they can use their machineries and resources to reach to unorganised workers in the same sector by crossing the traditional boundaries and methods. The chapters in the final part focus on the possibilities and limitations of the approaches of alternative mobilisations and new uprisings in the organised sectors. Sobin George critically examines whether the identity of “professionals”, which the ITES collectivisations invoked to mobilise, was real and whether such attempts subvert the class and other layers of differences within the sector, which are relevant for organising. He notes that the constructed professional identity of IT employee was a “disciplinary logic”, which necessitates a counter strategy for the unions rather than reproducing the same values of professionalism in the union. Santanu Sarkar critically examines the

Introduction

11

possibilities and limitations of workers’ co-operatives to enter new areas like reopening of closed enterprises. Highlighting the failed efforts of a workers’ co-operative in reopening of a mine in Jharkhand, Chapter 13 argues that such initiatives do not have fair standing as an economic enterprise and are therefore incapable of attending to the social side of member community. Jithin G. analyses the recent uprising of women workers in the organised tea plantations in Munnar, Kerala, in the name of Pombilai Orumai, which opened up several issues in the male-dominated traditional trade unionism in the plantation sector. We hope that the chapters in this volume will be useful to the readers in making sense of the contemporary diverse Indian labour space.

References Agarwala, R. 2013. Informal Labour, Formal Politics and Dignified Discontent in India. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Ahn, P. S. and Ahn, Y. 2012. “Organising Experiences and Experiments among Indian Trade Unions: Concepts, Processes and Showcases”, The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 5(4): 573–593. Banerjee, N. and Nihila, M. 1999. “Business Organisation in Leather Industries of Calcutta and Chennai”, in Bagchi, A. K. (ed.), Economy and Organisation: Indian Industries under the Neo-Liberal Regime, pp. 147–187. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Bhowmick, S. K. and Saha, D. 2012. Street Vending in Ten Cities in India. New Delhi: National Association of Street Vendors of India, www.streetnet.org.za/docs/research/2012/en/NASVIReport–Survey.pdf (accessed on 23 May 2016). Breman, J. 2010. “Neo-Bondage: A Fieldwork-Based Account”, International Labour and Working Class History, 78: 48–62. Chaachi, A. 1999. Gender, Flexibility, Skill and Industrial Restructuring: The Electronic Industry in India, Working Paper, No. 296. The Hague: Institute of Social Sciences. Despande, K. L. and Despande, S. 1998. “Impact of Liberalisation on Labour Market in India, What Do Facts from NSSO’s 50th Round Show”, Economic and Political Weekly, 33(22): 31–39. Dewan, R. 2001. “Ethics of Employment and Exports: Societal Dialogue and Fish Processing Export Units in India”, in Oberai, A. S., Sivananthiran, A. and Venkata Ratnam, C. S. (eds.), Labour Issues in Export Processing Zones: Role of Social Dialogue, pp. 221–273. New Delhi: ILO. Dietrich, G. and Nayak, N. 2006. “Exploring the Possibilities of CounterHegemonic Globalisation of the Fishworkers Movements in India and Its Global Interactions”, in Santos, B. D. (ed.), Another Production Is Possible: Beyond Capitalist Canon, pp. 381–414. London: Verso.

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George, S. 2006. “Labour Practices and Working Conditions in TNCs: The Case of Samsung India”, in Chang, D. (ed.), Labour in Globalising Asian Corporations: A Portrait of Struggle, pp. 107–130. Hong Kong: Asia Monitor Resource Centre. George, S. 2014. “Deregulation and the Fading Labour Agenda: Evidence from Transnational Automobile Companies in India”, Economic and Political Weekly, 49(46): 19–21. George, S. 2016. Work and Health in Informal Economy: Linkages from Export Oriented Garment Sector in Delhi. New Delhi: Daanish Books. Ghosh, J. 2002. “Globalization, Export-Oriented Employment for Women and Social Policy: A Case Study of India”, Social Scientist, 30(11&12): 17–60. Gupta, S. P. 1995. “Economic Reforms and Its Impacts on Poor”, Economic and Political Weekly, 30(22): 1295–1311. Kabeer, N., Milward, K. and Sudharshan, R. 2013. “Organizing Women Workers in the Informal Economy”, Gender and Development, 21(2): 249–263. Kumar, K. 1995. From Post Industrialism to Post Modernism: New Theories of the Contemporary World. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Mishra, N. K. and Srivastava, R. S. 2002. “Labour and Employment in the Informal Textile Industry in Kanpur”, Labour and Development, 8(1&2): 27–61. Mohankumar, S. and Singh, S. 2011. “Impact of the Economic Crisis on Workers in the Unorganised Sector in Rajasthan”, Economic and Political Weekly, 46(22): 66–71. NCEUS. 2007. Report on Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganised Sector. New Delhi: National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector, http://dcmsme.gov.in/Condition_of_workers_ sep_2007.pdf (accessed on 19 April 2015). Neetha, N. 2013. “Paid Domestic Work Making Sense of the Jigsaw Puzzle”, Economic and Political Weekly, 48(43): 35–38. Pais, J. 2002. “Casualisation of Urban Labour Force, Analysis of Recent Trend in Manufacturing”, Economic and Political Weekly, 37(7): 631–652. Sankaran, K. 2013. “Domestic Work, Unpaid Work and Wage Rates”, Economic and Political Weekly, 48(43): 85–89. Scott, J. C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, J. C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Sekar, R. H. and Mohammad, N. 2001. Child Labour in Home Based Lock Industries of Aligarh. Noida Uttar Pradesh: NLI Research Studies Series, V.V. Giri National Labour Institute. Shariff, A. and Gumber, A. 1999. “Employment and Wages in India Pre and Post Reform Scenario”, The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 42(2): 195–215.

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Singh, M. 2001. “Political Economy of Labour, A Case Study of Surgical Instruments Manufacturing Industry at Jalandhar, Punjab”, in Kundu, A. and Sharma, A. N. (eds.), Informal Sector in India, Perspectives and Policies, pp. 216–229. New Delhi: Institute of Human Development. Srinivasulu, C. 2008. “Agriculture Labour Union in Independent India: A Case Study of Andhra Pradesh”, The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 51(4): 1039–1051. Swaminathan, P. 2002. Labour-Intensive Industries, but Units without “Workers”: Where Will ILO’s Social Dialogue Begin? Working Paper No. 168. Chennai: Madras Institute of Development Studies. Thompson, E. P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Victor Gollancz. Unni, J. 2001. “Gender and Informality in Labour Market in South Asia”, Economic and Political Weekly, 36(26): 2360–2377. Vanamala, M. 2001. “Informalisation and Feminisation of a Formal Sector Industry, a Case Study”, Economic and Political Weekly, 36(26): 2378–2389.

Part I

The contemporary Indian labour space

1

Labourscape and labour space in post-liberalised India Critical reflections Sobin George and Shalini Sinha

The labour landscape in India has seen several changes subsequent to the introduction of labour market deregulation policies. The sectoral and structural changes, as studies have already highlighted, include increase of atypical employment as part of the general expansion of informal sector (Nath 1994; Gupta 1995; Despande and Despande 1998; Maiti and Mitra 2010), informalisation of formal sector (NCEUS 2009; Goldar 2010), decline in real wages and well-being (NCEUS 2007; Papola 2008; Institute for Human Development 2014; George 2016), decline of agriculture and allied sectors (Bhalla and Singh 2009; Rajkumar and Shetty 2015), stagnation of manufacturing sector (Agarwal and Ghosh 2015; Roy 2016) and expansion of certain segments of service sectors (Rajkumar and Shetty 2015). The past two decades also witnessed a decline of trade union membership in India, which is generally attributed to developments such as transformations in production systems, labour market and employment relations. Among others, what probably rearrange or determine the labour space are the production processes, labour relations and labour control and disciplining strategies by the employer and through laws enforced by the state and the way in which workers respond to these. These processes can also create particular patterns of labour spaces and certain “dominant discourses through various channels in the public sphere” (Castells 1998). For instance, the added focus on economic growth and its preconditions of labour market flexibility always come with the proposition that trade unions are obstacles to growth. While such moral economic explanations of growth are pervasive and dominant in any liberalised economy like India, what is perhaps less discussed is the way in which labour is losing its space in the production landscape and the capability of such policy discourses to create an antipathy to any form of organisation of workers in the public sphere, as is evidenced in the public and mainstream media reactions to the recent strikes in various

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manufacturing and service sectors. In this context this chapter attempts to critically understand the contemporary labourscape and labour space in India. The labourscape here refers to the structure, composition and nature of work and workforce in various sectors. Labour space implies the space available/created for labour to engage with capital and state including its agencies of governance at various levels in addressing their collective concerns and everyday struggles through various means at both macro and micro levels. The specific questions that the chapter aims to deal with are as follows: What is the nature of Indian labourscape in terms of forms, types and characteristics of employment, wages, collective organisation and labour resistance. What are the contemporary dominant discourses that create and appropriate the labour space? Finally who are the actors in it and how do they do it?

The contemporary labourscape Several studies have already highlighted that labour market reform policies, which emphasised on flexibilisation of labour laws, retrenchment and closure of large-scale industrial activities as part of flexible specialisation, disinvestments, privatisation and subsequent casualisation of work, had an adverse impact on labour in India (Breman 1996, 2001; Bhowmik and More 2001; Mahadevia 2001; Ghosh 2008). The significant factors that condition the contemporary Indian labour landscape perhaps are the intra- and inter-sectoral changes in agriculture, manufacturing and services; casualisation of jobs and informality in labour relations. Among others, the paradox of decline in the share of agriculture and manufacturing in GDP, despite its continuing higher share of employment along with the expansion of service sector without correspondingly generating employment, which set the Indian labourscape, needs some attention here. The data as extracted from the national sample survey 68th round on employment and unemployment, for instance, showed that agriculture, forestry and fishery still account for more than 50 per cent of employment in rural India (see Table 1.1). Similarly, manufacturing and construction together account for nearly 24 per cent of the Indian workforce. The share of manufacturing in urban India is 21 per cent. The service sector expansion is highly urban centric and limited only to certain segments of industrial categories such as wholesale and retail, transportation and storage, information and communication, real estate, public administration, education, health and social work, which constitute nearly 56 per cent of urban employment. Out of these the highest share is from the traditional wholesale and retail sector and repairing works. This uneven growth and employment in these sectors considerably determines and affects the labour relations

0.06

12.67 6.91 4.2 0.95 0.14 0.4 1.83

2.73 2.1 100

0.06

12.58 6.89 4.17 0.94 0.15 0.42 1.81

2.82 2.15 100

6.05 4.89 100

2.23 2.47 9.96

9.80 3.68

10.10 21.55

0.47

5.72 0.98 21.21 0.87

Source: NSSO 68th round, employment and unemployment (2011–12), unit-level data.

59.39 0.52 7.85 0.24

59.43 0.51 7.82 0.24

Male

Total

Male

Female

Urban

Rural

Agriculture, forestry and fishery 59.35 Mining and quarrying 0.54 Manufacturing 7.88 Electricity, gas, steam and air0.24 conditioning supply Water supply, sewerage, waste 0.06 management and remediation activities Construction 12.75 Wholesale, retail, repair of motor 6.92 vehicles Transportation and storage 4.23 Accommodation and food service 0.96 activities Information and communication 0.14 Financial and insurance activities 0.38 Real estate activities, public 1.85 administration, other administrative service and technical activities Education, health and social work 2.65 Other activities 2.06 Total 100

Industry

Table 1.1 Workforce distribution across industry, 2011–12

6.71 5.28 100

2.18 2.59 10.10

9.62 3.49

10.26 21.27

0.33

5.97 0.98 20.27 0.95

Female

6.36 5.08 100

2.21 2.53 10.03

9.71 3.59

10.18 21.42

0.4

5.84 0.98 20.76 0.91

Total

3.62 2.87 100

0.74 0.98 4.17

5.82 1.74

11.99 11.11

0.18

43.99 0.66 11.70 0.42

Male

All India

3.91 3.03 100

0.72 1.03 4.13

5.69 1.66

11.93 10.92

0.14

44.46 0.64 11.31 0.44

Female

3.76 2.95 100

0.73 1 4.15

5.76 1.7

11.96 11.02

0.16

44 0.66 11.51 0.43

Total

20

Sobin George and Shalini Sinha

and conditions of work. Most importantly, it sustains and expands the prevailing informality in employment since better jobs are limited only to certain segments of public sector and service sector, where the growth is without producing new jobs. The official data endorses this trend of growing informality along with the expansion of informal sector in India. Informal employment in India has shown a trend of expansion since the 1990s with the privatisation of public institutions, casualisation in the formal sector and as part of the overall growth in the informal sector. The National Committee for Enterprises in Unorganised Sector (2007) report estimated that informal employment in India was as much as 394 million (about 92%) in 2004–05 with an increase of 54 million from 1999 to 2000. The report also highlighted that informal jobs in the formal sector showed an increasing trend in India with 29.1 million in 2004–05 as compared to 20.5 in 1999–2000. Estimations based on NSSO data on employment and unemployment (2009–10) revealed that 94 per cent of India’s workforce is in the informal sector. The NSSO 68th round data shows that informal employment in 2011–12 in India stood at 93.2 per cent (Table 1.2). Also, informal employment is more in rural India as compared to urban India. While it is nearly 85 per cent in urban India, 97 per cent of employment in rural India is informal in nature. Informal employment also showed significant gender dimensions. The overall share of female employment in non-formal sectors at allIndia level is nearly 97 per cent, while it is a little less than 90 per cent for men. Rural India has the lowest share of women working in formal regular salaried sector with a share of 1.34 per cent as against 5.43 per cent men workers. The male–female differential is notably higher in urban India, where the share of men in non-formal work is 76 per cent and the corresponding share of women is as much as 94 per cent. Other noticeable inference, which is adding to the skewed gender distribution, is the considerable lower presence of women in the section of self-employed own-account worker and self-employed employer, which are relatively better categories of work in terms of remuneration and conditions of work, both in rural and urban India. For instance, their under-representation is significant in self-employed own-account worker (2.8% for women against 20.5% for men). There are certain sectors where female employment is over-represented also. They are considerably over-represented (as compared to men) in the non-/less economically recognised sectors like domestic duties (rural 18.48% and urban 36.38%) and collection of goods/sewing/tailoring/weaving for household (20.3%). Data from Census 2011 also show the lower rate of work participation of women in the group of main workers as compared to men and the higher rate in the group of marginal workers.

1.34 2.86 0.08 6.46 0.29 6.55 0.53 25.11 18.48 23.69 0.89 1.18 3.62 8.92 100

5.43 21.70 0.78 6.47

0.49 18.62 1.15 30.44 0.16 0.25

1.17

1.21 3.38

8.73 100

8.82 100

1.19 3.5

1.04

0.39 12.72 0.85 27.83 9.12 11.71

3.43 12.49 0.44 6.47

7.34 100

1.11 2.32

3.53

0.21 7.84 1.82 29.43 0.21 0.08

23.61 17.46 1.45 3.59

Male

Total

Male

Female

Urban

Rural

Source: NSSO 68th round, employment and unemployment (2011–12), unit-level data.

Regular salaried/wage employee Self-employed own-account worker Self-employed employer Self-employed unpaid family worker Casual labour public work Casual labour other work Seeking/available for work Attend educational institution Attend domestic duties only Free collection of goods/sewing/ tailoring/weaving for household Rentier/pensioner/remittance recipient Disable Others including begging, prostitution Children 0–4 age group Total

Category

7.21 100

1.20 2.68

1.54

0.01 1.81 0.88 25.97 36.38 11.61

6.10 2.79 0.05 1.76

Female

7.28 100

1.15 2.49

2.57

0.12 4.95 1.37 27.77 17.56 5.61

15.21 10.43 0.78 2.71

Total

Table 1.2 Percentage of population by usual principal status by gender and sector, 2011–12

8.3 100

1.2 3.1

1.9

0.4 15.5 1.3 30.1 0.2 0.2

10.7 20.5 1.0 5.6

Male

Total

8.4 100

1.2 3.4

1.1

0.2 5.2 0.6 25.4 23.6 20.3

2.7 2.8 0.1 5.1

Female

8.4 100

1.2 3.2

1.5

0.3 10.5 1.0 27.8 11.6 10.0

6.8 11.9 0.5 5.4

Total

22

Sobin George and Shalini Sinha

Main workers are those who worked for more than six months a year, and marginal workers include those who have worked for less than six months. While men constituted 45.1 per cent in the group of main workers as per the Census 2011 figures, the corresponding share of women was as low as 14.7 per cent. However, women outnumbered men in marginal work, reiterating the linkages of women’s work in the less protected sectors. While women constituted 11 per cent in the group of marginal workers, it was 6.6 per cent for men. While data show a steady increase in the informal employment, it is important to understand whether such employments are “decent” and remunerative. We have taken indicators such as wages, availability of social security benefits, nature of job contracts, eligibility for paid leave and mode of payment of wages to understand the informality of employment. Have wages in the informal sector grown? Data show that wages of casual workers both in the rural and urban India increased between 2004–05 and 2009–10 (Table 1.3). It recorded an increase by Rs 59 for males and Rs 40 for females in rural India and Rs 57 for males and 36 for females in urban India. Data show that the real wages (inflation-adjusted wages) of casual and regular workers also improved in this period. What is important, however, here is the persisting male–female wage differentials for casual and regular workers and a huge gap in wages between the casual and regular workers. Similarly, reinforcing the argument of informality and appalling conditions of work, the data showed that as much as 80 per cent of rural and 63 per cent of urban workers do not have any social security entitlement (see Table 1.4). They belong to the most exploited section Table 1.3 Average daily wages of regular and casual workers, 2004–5 and 2011–12 Rural Male

Urban Female

Female/ Male

Male

Female

Female/ Male

203.28 75.1

153.19 43.88

0.75 0.58

380.33 132.34

310.56 79.07

0.82 0.6

2004–5 Regular Casual

144.93 55.03

85.53 34.94

0.59 0.63 2011–12

Regular Casual

324.22 114.09

223.81 75.15

0.69 0.66

Source: NSSO 61st and 68th rounds, employment and unemployment, unit-level data.

PF/ pension

Agriculture, forestry 2.53 and fishery Mining and quarrying 3.32 Manufacturing 6.44 Electricity, gas, steam 11.93 and air-conditioning supply Water supply, 1.44 sewerage, waste management and remediation activities Construction 0.68 Wholesale, retail, 2.68 repair of motor vehicles Transportation and 3.49 storage

Industry

1.36 0.34 1.57 0.21

0.04

0.34 1.20

0.87

0.60 1.02 –

1.31

0.22 0.55

0.33

Only healthcare and maternity benefit

0.48

Only gratuity

1.47

0.13 1.20

0.65

0.88 2.13 3.40

0.84

PF/ pension and gratuity

Table 1.4 Social security measure available across industry groups

0.95

0.22 1.62

2.08 3.37 2.00

0.40

Pf/pension and healthcare and maternity benefit

0.99

0.21 0.35

1.06

0.88 0.98 2.40

0.22

Gratuity and healthcare and maternity benefit

13.91

1.09 4.21

8.01

23.50 6.20 46.18

3.55

74.80

92.61 84.67

86.44

64.03 74.74 29.26

85.27

100

100 100

100

100 100 100

100

Total

(Continued)

3.18

4.47 3.52

1.05

4.37 3.55 4.63

5.34

Not Don’t PF/pension and gratuity eligible know and healthcare and maternity benefit

0.60

2.87

1.08

1.03

0.98

0.40 0.66

11.35

13.53

10.74

11.80

1.61 4.94

Only gratuity

4.03

PF/ pension

0.65 1.16

1.82

1.39

1.10

6.58

1.43

Only healthcare and maternity benefit

0.55 1.60

3.36

3.64

4.07

3.68

0.97

PF/ pension and gratuity

1.20 1.89

2.89

2.79

5.84

9.03

1.66

Pf/pension and healthcare and maternity benefit

Source: NSSO 68th round, employment and unemployment (2011–12), unit-level data.

Accommodation and food service activities Information and communication Financial and insurance activities Real estate activities, public administration, other administrative service and technical activities Education, health and social work Other activities Total

Industry

Table 1.4 (Continued)

0.47 0.92

1.89

1.32

2.75

7.19

0.24

Gratuity and healthcare and maternity benefit

3.46 13.05

41.29

43.77

41.34

24.56

2.10

88.24 71.89

33.14

32.14

26.22

30.05

83.18

3.42 3.89

2.84

3.18

4.08

4.69

5.79

Not Don’t PF/pension and gratuity eligible know and healthcare and maternity benefit

100 100

100

100

100

100

100

Total

Labourscape and labour space in India

25

of the Indian workforce. Only 8.3 per cent of the working population in rural areas and 18.21 per cent in urban areas have all social security benefits including provident fund, gratuity, healthcare and maternity (only for women). Construction sector has the highest share (92.61%) of workers without any social security benefit. Agriculture, forestry and fishery sectors (primary sector), where 44 per cent of Indian workforce is employed, have workers as much as 85.27 per cent without any form of social protection. Other sectors where workforce share is high and social security entitlements are low are manufacturing, wholesale and retail. While Indian manufacturing sector employs 12 per cent of the workforce, 74.74 per cent of them are without any social security entitlement. Similarly, 84.67 per cent of workers in wholesale, retail and associated sectors, which employ 11 per cent of the total workforce, do not have any form of social security. Data on availability of social security provisions also enable us to understand the extent of casualisation in other sectors as well. What is important to note is that one can find considerable share of casual workers, who are without any means of social protection even in the modern service-led sectors. For instance, only 25 per cent of the workers in the information technology sector have all social security provisions (PF/pension and gratuity and healthcare and maternity benefit) and 30 per cent in this sector work without any social security measure. Similarly, nearly 26 per cent in the financial and insurance activities, 32 per cent in real estate, public administration and technical work and 33 per cent in education, health and social work sectors are not covered under any social security scheme. Another important indicator, which explains informality, is the type of job contract. Data show that nearly 85 per cent of workers in rural and 72 per cent in urban India do not have a formal written contract with the employers (Table 1.5). It is not surprising from rural India since more than 50 per cent of employment is in the primary sector, where work is mostly on a daily basis as well as seasonal. Nonagriculture sector in rural India is also highly informal in nature, and only 12 per cent workers in rural India were with more than three years of work contract. Similarly, only 22 per cent of workers in urban India had a written job contract of more than three years. Among various industrial sectors, the informality in terms of absence of job contract was the highest in construction. While the sector accounts for 12 per cent of the Indian workforce, as much as 97 per cent of them were without a written job contract. Similarly as much as 89 per cent of workers work without any formal job contract in wholesale and retail sector, which employs 11 per cent of the workforce. The story

Table 1.5 Type of job contract across industry sectors Industry

Contract not written

1 year or less

1–3 years

More than 3 years

Total

Agriculture, forestry and fishery Mining and quarrying Manufacturing Electricity, gas, steam and airconditioning supply Water supply, sewerage, waste management and remediation activities Construction Wholesale, retail, repair of motor vehicles Transportation and storage Accommodation and food service activities Information and communication Financial and insurance activities Real estate activities, public administration, other administrative service and technical activities Education, health and social work Other activities Total

86.34

4.10

0.83

8.73

100

71.33

1.03

2.09

25.55

100

83.80 46.67

2.52 2.82

1.74 3.72

11.94 46.79

100 100

83.08

1.88

5.49

9.55

100

97.26 88.58

1.13 2.94

0.26 1.38

1.35 7.10

100 100

79.73

2.51

1.40

16.36

100

90.40

3.41

1.82

4.36

100

49.75

8.36

5.15

36.74

100

43.86

4.05

4.79

47.30

100

45.99

3.36

3.36

47.29

100

42.54

3.19

3.42

50.85

100

92.39 79.07

2.16 2.57

0.55 1.65

4.90 16.72

100 100

Source: NSSO 68th round, employment and unemployment (2011–12), unit-level data.

Labourscape and labour space in India

27

is same in other major sectors such as manufacturing (83.8%). While agriculture, construction, manufacturing and wholesale/retail sectors have more precarious employment, the share of jobs with formal written contract was relatively more in service sectors (probably upperend jobs). Data show that sectors like education, health, information technology, financial services and insurance have comparatively lesser number of workers without any written job contract. At the same time, it also raises concern that as much as 50 per cent of jobs in India’s much celebrated information technology-based sector are without any formal written job contract. Data also show that 70 per cent of the Indian workforce is employed in such environments where facilities like paid leave are not available (Table 1.6). The proportion of workers without paid leave is more

Table 1.6 Availability of paid leave across industry sectors Industry

Eligible for paid leave

Not eligible for paid leave

Total

Agriculture, forestry and fishery Mining and quarrying Manufacturing Electricity, gas, steam and airconditioning supply Water supply, sewerage, waste management and remediation activities Construction Wholesale, retail, repair of motor vehicles Transportation and storage Accommodation and food service activities Information and communication Financial and insurance activities Real estate activities, public administration, other administrative service and technical activities Education, health and social work Other activities Total

15.81 32.32 24.71 71.26

84.19 67.68 75.29 28.74

100 100 100 100

19.60

80.40

100

4.12 21.43

95.88 78.57

100 100

27.16 20.14

72.84 79.86

100 100

73.29 77.72 70.59

26.71 22.28 29.41

100 100 100

76.51 16.27 29.26

23.49 83.73 70.74

100 100 100

Source: NSSO 68th round, employment and unemployment (2011–12), unit-level data.

28

Sobin George and Shalini Sinha

in rural India with 80 per cent. Nearly 60 per cent of workers in urban India do not have the facility of paid leave. Non-availability of paid leave also indicates the higher incidence of loss of pay for workers due to eventualities like own sickness, sickness of family members and any other emergencies that compel them to be absent from work. Such eventualities can add to their income and job insecurities since these jobs, on the one hand, are short term or seasonal and, on the other, could be easily substituted by easily and cheaply available labour force. Neetha (2014) highlights the gender and social group dimensions in the availability of paid leave. She notes that “more than half of the women from upper castes were eligible for paid leave in both rural and urban areas, while Muslim women have the lowest proportion in urban areas, at 30%” (ibid: 58). Out of various industrial sectors, construction, agriculture, manufacturing and wholesale/retail have the highest share of workers without paid leave (see Table 1.6). These sectors together have around 79 per cent of the total employment, which shows the severity of informality in the Indian labour market. The availability of paid leave is found to be mostly with the organised sector jobs across all industrial categories and some service sector jobs such as information technology, financial and insurance services, real estate, education, health and social work. Mode of payment is another important indicator, which helps to understand informality in labour relations. As Table 1.7 shows only 55 per cent of the Indian workforce receive monthly based salary. As much as 38 per cent in rural and 12 per cent in urban India are daily wage workers. Payment based on piece rate is also prevalent. While 40 per cent of workers in the agriculture and allied sectors receive wages on a monthly basis, 34.18 per cent are daily wage labourers in the sector. The sector also has other informal modes of payment such as piece rate and lump sum basis, which is the work that the worker has to offer against a sum total received as advance. Out of all industrial sectors, monthly based salary was the lowest in the construction sector. While only 10 per cent workers received salary on a monthly basis and 20 per cent on a weekly basis in this sector, majority (62%) of them were daily wage labourers. Manufacturing and wholesale/ retail sectors have more than 60 per cent workers on a monthly salary basis. Similarly, most of the workers (more than 70%) in the tertiary sector, including IT, financial and insurance services, education and health, received monthly based salary. However, it should be mentioned that their share in the total workforce is less than 5 per cent.

Table 1.7 Mode of payment across industry sectors

Agriculture, forestry and fishery Mining and quarrying Manufacturing Electricity, gas, steam and airconditioning supply Water supply, sewerage, waste management and remediation activities Construction Wholesale, retail, repair of motor vehicles Transportation and storage Accommodation and food service activities Information and communication Financial and insurance activities Real estate activities, public administration, other administrative service and technical activities Education, health and social work Other activities Total

Regular monthly salary

Regular weekly payment

Daily payment

Piece rate payment

Others

40.18

14.99

34.18

5.52

5.13

39.86

26.48

26.44

6.65

0.56

60.35 91.94

17.58 0.66

11.19 6.61

9.35 0.49

1.53 0.29

40.76

47.78

9.94

0.24

1.29

10.16 72.78

20.57 9.05

61.86 13.98

4.80 2.68

2.61 1.51

68.28

6.76

19.34

3.22

2.40

69.91

7.25

17.83

2.56

2.45

97.30

0.90

0.92

0.43

0.45

97.10

0.66

0.90

0.22

1.13

92.80

1.80

4.13

0.66

0.62

95.90

1.24

1.59

0.57

0.69

70.83 55.09

7.37 12.69

15.30 25.75

3.88 4.46

2.63 2.01

Source: NSSO 68th round, employment and unemployment (2011–12), unit-level data.

30

Sobin George and Shalini Sinha

Class fragmentation and the play of cultural identities What perhaps less discussed in the literature of unionisation is the play of caste and other cultural markers, even though Indian society still has caste-based occupational divisions. This is mainly due to the dominance of Marxists schools, which keep class-based capital–labour dichotomy in the centre of analysis of collective organisations based on the assumption that the proletarian class consciousness would transcend other intra-cultural identities in the lines of caste, ethnicity, religion and language. Such identities, being strongly embedded in the social structure and everyday life could, however, construct a “worker self” as a Dalit worker or an Adivasi worker or a Dalit woman worker based on their dominant and experienced identities. In other words, there could be “graded differences” between a Dalit and non-Dalit in their experience as a worker, although they belong to the same class of worker with equal economic conditions. It is also doubtful that to what extent even the class-based political mobilisations or trade union movements could address the questions of dominance, subjugations and resistance emanating from caste, religion, gender and regional markers. The social background of workers in various industry of occupation gives some interesting indications on the play of cultural identities in the Indian labourscape. As it is clear from Table 1.8, as much as 81 per cent of Scheduled Tribes in India are in traditional, law-paying and exploitative sectors of agriculture, hunting, forestry and construction. Though we have an eloquent scholarship on the mobility of Dalits (see Ram 1995; Mayer 1996; Kapur et al. 2014), nearly 64 per cent of Dalits are in the above-mentioned elementary and traditional occupations, reinforcing the definite caste dimensions of traditional unorganised occupations. The share of OBC and upper- and middle-level caste groups in such occupations is 58 per cent and 45 per cent respectively. It should also be noted that certain social and religious groups are under-represented or over-represented in a number of top-level occupational categories in comparison with their share in the total population. For instance, in occupational categories such as legislators, senior officials, managers, professionals and technicians, Scheduled Tribes (ST), SC and Other Backward Classes (OBC) are notably underrepresented with regard to their share of population and also the share of these occupational groups to the total (George 2014a). STs and SCs are considerably over-represented in elementary occupations, which include casual labourers, agriculture workers, street vendors, garbage collectors, domestic help, among others (ibid: 195). The study (George

Labourscape and labour space in India

31

Table 1.8 Distribution of workers by industry group and social group, 2011–12 Industry group

ST

Agriculture, hunting and 70.96 forestry Fishing 0.25 Mining and quarrying 1.58 Manufacturing 4.06 Electricity, gas and water 0.36 supply Construction 9.67 Wholesale and retail trade; 3.81 repair of motor vehicles, motorcycles and personal and household goods Hotels and restaurants 0.49 Transport, storage and 3.08 communications Financial intermediation 0.34 Real estate, renting and 0.16 business activities Public administration and 2.69 defence; compulsory social security Education, health and social 1.89 work 0.46 Other community, social and personal service activities Other 0.22 Total 100

SC

OBC

Others

Total

45.97

48.14

39.11

47.07

0.49 1.30 8.41 0.39

0.47 0.69 11.63 0.38

0.27 0.68 12.37 0.50

0.40 0.89 10.53 0.42

18.75 7.02

10.08 11.46

6.53 16.19

10.74 11.28

0.78 6.87

1.61 6.13

1.73 6.41

1.38 6.09

0.54 0.80

0.61 1.23

2.04 2.37

0.99 1.38

3.52

2.21

4.43

3.17

2.43

2.87

4.99

3.32

1.94

2.15

1.69

1.82

0.79 100

0.33 100

0.69 100

0.52 100

Source: NSSO 68th round on employment and unemployment, unit-level data, 2011–12.

2014a) also showed that there is a considerable over-representation of some sections of Muslims in the informal occupational categories of retailing and street vending. There are also some industrial sectors like plantations in India where ethnicity plays a role in constructing worker subjects. For instance Rasaily (2015) highlighted that ethnicity plays a role in constructing the women worker subjects in North Bengal tea gardens and there is an interface of gender and ethnicity (read tribal) associated with the inferior positions of the workers. Similarly, studies have brought out the marginal positions of fishworkers (Dietrich and

32

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Nayak 2006), street vendors (Bhowmick 2002; Bhowmick and Saha 2012; George 2014a), brick kiln workers (Breman 2010), domestic workers (Chigtari 2007; Neetha 2009; Mehrotra 2010; Madhumathi 2013) and migrant ethnic minority groups from North-East India in metropolitan cities (McDuie 2012) that are associated with their religion, caste, ethnicity and race. Though there was no major change in the employment and class structure, a repositioning was evident in some sections of the Indian middle classes with the emergence of a small new affluent middle class with the expansion of service sector in the country. It is difficult to disaggregate this group from the data sources. However, even if we put the industrial categories including wholesale/retail/transport, communication, hospitality, health, education, financial intermediation, real estate and public administration together, in which the members of this group are, certain caste dimensions appear. It shows that the share of Adivasis and Dalits is notably lower than that of the upper- and middle-level caste groups in such occupations and their presence is concentrated at the lower rung of these jobs. It supports the arguments that with the expansion of service sector Dalits are unfavourably included in the lower rung of such jobs (Thorat and Attewwell 2010) and caste reinvents in such occupations in some way or other (Harriss White et al. 2014). The mentioned studies have well illustrated this process of reinvention of caste in various forms in the new-generation occupational hierarchies.

The labour space The second argument that this chapter proposes to put forward for further discussion is that the processes which set the labourscape in India also play a role in constructing certain kinds of worker spaces. The labour space construction, however, is not always a process that starts from the above. It occurs through negotiation, in some instances also through conflicts, with the workers, depending on the nature of the sector and local contexts. We will examine how certain processes and actors both from above and below create dominant discourses on what labour should be in the contemporary phase of capitalism. Among others, what probably informed the possible nature of labour space in advanced capitalism are the justifications around the processes of economic liberalisation and institutional reforms. Deregulation as an agenda for increasing industrial efficiency has taken its present form largely from the arguments of get the prices right and government failure. Chang (2003) explains how these arguments

Labourscape and labour space in India

33

have assumed importance in the debate of industrial growth since the 1980s. He summarises this view as follows: Attempts to do against the market logic and force industrialisation in developing countries have resulted in a host of inefficiencies. Such policies made capital artificially cheap with a view to promoting investments, especially when combined with policies such as minimum wage laws, which make labour artificially expensive, meant that the production techniques used in many developing countries often of the wrong kind, resulting an inefficient use of resources. (Chang 2003: 168) This view, undoubtedly, emphasises to take away the measures that ensured minimum wages and welfare for workers as well as the reduction in the role of the state and any wage-negotiating organisation. Labour cost advantage, as we argued elsewhere (George 2014b), in fact provided a “moral” explanation in a more imposing language of economic gains and economic growth and development. The global division of labour as well as the relocation of industries to places where cost of labour is less and labour laws are flexible showed that this view has informed the labour practices and labour relations in various occupational settings. The buyer-driven international value chains of garments and electronics, which have multiple layers of subcontracting arrangements based on labour cost advantages reaching up to localised informal production settings to home-based units, are typical examples of it. Another important discourse that this view makes is about efficiency and new production techniques to realise cost minimisation. The theory of flexible specialisation (Piore and Sabel 1984), which emphasised the need to bring about changes in the relationship between state and labour market, fragmentation of production and minimising the role of trade unions in wage negotiations, is the base of this strand of discourse. The production techniques like the lean production, line production and just in time, to name a few, are emerged out of such logic of flexible specialisation on efficiency. We can see such practices of fragmentation and division of jobs into core and periphery, especially in the large-scale manufacturing units of electronics, automobiles, garment manufacturing and even in service sector jobs. For instance automobile companies like Toyota Kirloskar in India keep a significant part of their production work in their subsidiary peripheral units besides keeping a reserve workforce on a contract basis. The Toyota production of just in time is also widely discussed for its focus on efficiency improvement through labour control and disciplining (Das and George 2006). Similarly, electronic

34

Sobin George and Shalini Sinha

manufacturing firms like Samsung defragmented their productions even to home-based settings (George 2006). Studies have shown that these new production practices are designed in such a way that they can discipline the labour space and check any collective labour resistance significantly. For instance, George (2014b) noted that the Toyota Production System (TPS) at Toyota Kirloskar Bangalore, which emphasises on efficiency, has inherent measures of labour control that have implication for the salary, promotion and job security of workers. The study also noted that use of contract workers, outsourcing of associated works and stringent performance evaluation systems are part of TPS (ibid: 19). Such discourses, which are supported by the strong international corporate power, tend to be part of the official discourses of the state on growth and development. The international financial institutions like the World Bank and the powerful industry organisations like the ASSOCHAM, FICCI and NASSCOM in India are capable of lobbying with the governments for incentives and policies to reduce input costs and increase competence. These bodies also legitimise it through their organised powers and generating discussions on the need for the state to be investment friendly. As we discussed elsewhere (George 2014c) investment climate reports of the World Bank is one such instrument, which is widely quoted by media and politicians who advocate for labour market flexibilisation. For instance, this report considers the “degree of regulation” of industry and business as one of the major indicators of investment friendliness among others and argues that several Indian labour laws, especially the Industrial Disputes Act and Contract Labour Act, are obstacles to attracting investments (World Bank and IFC 2004). The report has a hiring and firing index (in which higher scores denote more labour regulations and less investment friendliness), which is based on the ease with which a worker could be made jobless. Irrespective of the increasing instances of job losses the report ironically states that the existing regulations put India in a group of difficult countries, where retrenchment is less possible. To quote the report “Indian labour laws give firms significantly less control over their hiring and firing decisions than China’s labour code provides and the Indian labour legislation is even more restrictive than legislation in Malaysia and the Russian Federation” (World Bank and IFC 2004: 29). The proposal based on their report obviously is for further labour deregulation, which enables the unfettered process of hiring and firing at the will and convenience of the employers. The World Bank report also presents rating of Indian states based on their investment climate by Indian business managers in which states like Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and

Labourscape and labour space in India

35

Maharashtra are at the top and states including Kerala and West Bengal, where some amount of labour space is still left, at the bottom. The states, which the report ranked high on better business climate, are the ones which rigorously followed the reform projects and also dismantled large organised sectors like textiles and mills.1 The emphasis on simplification of regulatory frameworks, self-certification on factory regulation, labour inspection with prior permission and public utility service status in the recent industrial policies of these states also indicates to it.2 The move to further flexibilise the labour laws shows the power of such dominant discourses to appropriate the labour space in India. It is, hence, argued that the lobbying of this group on efficiency, cost minimisation, flexibilisation and growth gets reflected in the industrial, labour, land acquisition, export, import and tax policies, which have implications for labour market. Media is another powerful medium through which such dominant discourses emerge.3 As Kohli (2012) argued, media houses, being owned and managed by corporate powers, use their influence in making political preferences in their favour by propagating the dominant discourses. For instance, in line with the official version of the state and the positions taken by the World Bank and industrial groups, print and visual media tend to focus more on issues such as the number of man days lost and losses incurred to employers and to the economy while reporting instances of labour resistance. Incidents of strikes due to issues such as non-settlement of charter of demands, victimisation, non-payment of wages and allowances, layoffs, and wage revision are also always projected as “as militant, anti industry and anti growth” by the corporate media (George 2014b). Media coverage on the strikes at Maruti automobiles, Toyota Kirloskar, the garment industry workers’ protest in Bangalore and the all-India strike called jointly by trade unions are striking examples. What is important to note is that such media, being influential among people, not only legitimate their political preferences but also create an antipathy in the public sphere on the legitimate protests of workers. Discourses from below: mobilisations and resistances There is enough evidence to believe that trade union movement in India is on a decline mainly due to their inabilities to reach to the informal sectors, where more than 90 per cent of Indian workforce is. The reasons are several, ranging from victimisation of the employer, legal issues and difficulty in establishing employer–employee relationship to

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resistance from organised union workers. This is also part of the larger issues such as transformations in production systems, labour market and employment relationships. Data show that the number of unionised workers in India is only a little more than 5 million against a total workforce of 460 million. In other words only 1 per cent of the Indian workforce is unionised. What is more important is that about 97 per cent of TU membership is from the formal sector, which employs only 35 million workers. Data also indicate that the average membership per union declined from 1,063 in 2007 to 986 in 2008, which explains the trajectory of traditional trade unionism in India. The unionisation processes in the post-reform period in India has witnessed a decline (Table 1.9). While the total membership grew at a rate of 9.14 per cent between 1980 and 1989, the growth rate was −0.56 per cent between 2000 and 2010. Similarly, the number of registered unions marked a negative growth of 11.52 per cent while it had shown a growth of 3.58 per cent in the pre-reform period. Sector-wise status of unionisation is presented in Table 1.10. In terms of the number of unions, manufacturing has the highest share

Table 1.9 Growth of registered trade unions and their membership in India since 2000 Year

Number of registered unions

Men (’000)

Women (’000)

Total (’000)

2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 ACGR

66,056 66,624 68,544 74,649 74,403 78,465 88,440 95,783 84,642 22,284 19,376 10,264 16,154 – 10.83

4,510 4,392 5,102 4,854 2,954 6,334 7,754 5,751 7,420 4,388 3,185 6,203 6,470 2.78

910 1,481 1,871 1,423 443 2,385 1,206 2,126 2,154 2,092 1,912 1,218 2,712 8.40

5,420 5,873 6,973 6,277 3,397 8,719 8,960 7,877 9,574 6,480 5,097 7,421 9,182 4.05

Source: Ministry of Labour (various years).

Source: Ministry of Labour (various years).

539,556 64.84 114,860 81.51 566,639 92.13 9,894 84.20 30,905 94.57 91,111 57.05 4,170 100 10,919 86.89 38,947 57.60 40,163 83.82

226 (7.7) 148 (5.04) 486 (16.55) 55 (1.87) 65 (2.21) 127 (4.33) 3 (.10) 10 (.34) 107 (3.64) 130 (4.43) 79 (1.8) 166 (5.7) 2936 (100)

775,347 21,758 698,154 110,743 11,769

233 (7.9) 45 (1.5) 1001 (34.09) 26 (.89) 29 (.99)

22,037 98,074 318,5046

22.61 53.81 62.48

55.86 81.72 52.02 93.09 68.09

%

Agriculture, forestry and fishery Mining and quarrying Manufacturing Electricity, gas, steam and air-conditioning supply Water supply, sewerage, waste management and remediation activities Construction Wholesale, retail, repair of motor vehicles Transportation and storage Accommodation and food service activities Information and communication Financial and insurance activities Real estate activities Professional, scientific and technical activities Administrative and support service activities Public administration and defence; compulsory social security Education, health and social work Other activities Total

Men

Membership

Number of unions submitting returns (%)

Sector

75,417 84,193 1,912,320

292,636 26,063 48,424 1,857 1,776 68,606 0 1,648 28,664 7,753

612,690 4,868 643,984 8,225 5,516

Women

Table 1.10 Number and membership of workers’ unions by major industry sections for the year 2010

Total

832,192 140,923 615,063 11,751 32,681 159,717 4,170 12,567 67,611 47,916 77.39 97,454 46.19 182,267 37.52 5,097,366

35.16 18.49 7.87 15.80 5.43 42.95 0.00 13.11 42.40 16.18

44.14 1,388,037 18.28 26,626 47.98 1,342,138 6.91 118,968 31.91 17,285

%

100 100 100

100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100

100 100 100 100 100

%

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Sobin George and Shalini Sinha

with 34 per cent of the total unions followed by transportation and storage (16.55); agriculture, forestry and fishery (7.9%) and wholesale and retail (5.04%). In terms of the number of unionised workers, agriculture, forestry and fishery sectors have the highest share with 1.38 million followed by manufacturing with 1.34 million, construction with 0.83 million and transportation and storage with 0.62 million. Sectors which have a significant number of workforce yet unionisation was relatively less include wholesale and retail (2.76% of total unionised workers) and all other servicerelated sectors. The unionisation also has a strong gender dimension in India. Though women’s participation in the unions increased over a period of time, it continues to be notably lesser than males. As of 2010, out of total unionised workers, female membership was 37.5 per cent. It varied considerably across industrial sectors. While women comprised of more than 45 per cent of unionised workers in manufacturing and agriculture, their presence was lower in construction, wholesale/retail, mining and quarrying and information and communication. The share of unionised women is quite impressive in more organised service sectors like health, education and social work. The post-reform period also saw a decline in the number of strikes and lockouts in the country (see Figure 1.1). The reported cases of

1,400 1,200

Number

1,000 800 No of strikes 600

Lockouts

400 200

1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

0

Year

Figure 1.1 Number of strikes and lockouts in India between 1991 and 2014 Source: Statistics on Industrial Disputes, Closures, Retrenchments and Lay Offs in India (various years) Labour Bureau, Government of India.

Labourscape and labour space in India

39

strikes and lockouts reduced to 318 in 2012 from 1,714 in 1992 by 8 per cent. This, however, does not imply that the labour problems are less in the post-industrial period. On the other hand, it indicates the higher degree of disciplining of workers and decline of the power of trade unions in the post-reform period. Studies have highlighted the higher levels of dissatisfaction among workers in the post-reform period and their resistance to it. For instance, Sundar (2015) noted that though the number of strikes and lockouts declined, workers’ mobilisations in these protests were “remarkable”. He also argues that the “average size and magnitude of work stoppages was higher and rose considerably”, which also included violent forms of protests indicating the overall worker dissatisfaction in the post-reform period (ibid: 52). It should be noted that alternative mobilisations, especially in the informal sector, also gained momentum in this period. The number of workers retrenched (see Figure 1.2) in the post-reform period also indicate the disciplining of labour space. What is important to note is that these data indicate only reported cases from the formal sector. While the macro-level data portrayed a gloomy picture of labour space, one cannot deny the resistances happening at the local level. There are always issue-specific local resistances at the workplace, which lead either to negotiations and

Workers Affected 4,000 3,500 3,000 2,500 2,000 1,500 1,000 500 0

3,668 3,242

3,242 2,372 1,792

2,963 2,503

2,944 2,911

2,693 2,184

2,030

1,295

1,748 1,237 884

559 264

47

Figure 1.2 Workers affected due to retrenchment in India between 1995 and 2013 Source: Statistics on Industrial Disputes, Closures, Retrenchments and Lay Offs in India (various years) Labour Bureau, Government of India.

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Sobin George and Shalini Sinha

settlements in their own way or to further conflicts. Neethi (2016) discussed how local processes set the space for labour to negotiate with capital through various means highlighting the cases of apparel food processing and electronic firms in Kerala. Such approaches emphasise that there are no common labour spaces and are not always constructed from above, but also constructed locally with the active engagements of workers.

Concluding remarks The contemporary Indian labourscape is very diverse and complex and is characterised by inequalities, sectoral asymmetries, informalities, dominations, hierarchies and marginalities based on the markers of caste and gender. It also constructs certain kinds of labour spaces, which are disciplined by means of various policies of the state and production practices and are normalised by creating dominant discourses arising out of the moral justification on the growth theory of neoliberalism. The Indian public sphere, which is dominated by middle-class values, is mostly anti-labour, mainly due to the influence of this dominant discourse of neoliberalism that labour market deregulation is the way out to increase efficiency and competitiveness. Though there are movements and resistances occurring at the micro level as part of the everyday struggle, it is doubtful whether these could create a powerful counter discourse in the public sphere. Some of such movements, being politically neutral, end up in allying with the employers, while other isolated movements stand out separately. Some alternative movements problematise identities more than class questions, though worker subject is a complex construction of class and cultural identities. The trajectories of contemporary labour mobilisations are to be understood in these possibilities and limitations.

Notes 1 The closing down of the textile mills in Mumbai and Ahmedabad has led to the expansion of the informal sector. For a discussion, see Bhowmik and More (2001). 2 For more details, see new industrial policies of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat. 3 For a discussion on media and discourse creation, read Herman and Chomsky (1988) and Castells (2009).

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References Agarwal, M. and Ghosh, S. 2015. Structural Changes in the Indian Economy, CDS Working Paper 465, http://cds.edu/wp–content/uploads/2015/12/ WP465.pdf (accessed on 11 March 2016). Bhalla, G. S. and Singh, G. 2009. “Economic Liberalisation and Indian Agriculture: A Statewise Analysis”, Economic and Political Weekly, 44(52): 34–44. Bhowmick, S. K. 2002. Hawkers and the Urban Informal Sector: A Study of Street Vending in Seven Cities. New Delhi: National Association of Street Vendors of India (NASVI), http://wiego.org/sites/wiego.org/files/publications/ files/Bhowmik–Hawkers–URBAN–INFORMAL–SECTOR.pdf (accessed on 23 May 2016). Bhowmik, S. K. and More, N. 2001. “Coping with Urban Poverty, Ex–Textile Mill Workers in Central Mumbai”, Economic and Political Weekly, 36(52): 4822–4835. Bhowmick, S. K. and Saha, D. 2012. Street Vending in Ten Cities in India. New Delhi: National Association of Street Vendors of India, www.streetnet.org. za/docs/research/2012/en/NASVIReport–Survey.pdf (accessed on 23 May 2016). Breman, J. 1996. Footloose Labour – Working in India’s Informal Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Breman, J. 2001. “An Informalised Labour System, End of Labour Market Dualism”, Economic and Political Weekly, 36(52): 4804–4821. Breman, J. 2010. “Neo-Bondage: A Fieldwork-Based Account”, International Labour and Working Class History, 78: 48–62. Castells, M. 1998. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers. Castells, M. 2009. Communication Power. New York: Oxford University Press. Chang, H. J. 2003. Globalisation, Economic Development and the Role of the State. London: Zed Books Ltd. Chigtari, S. 2007. “Articulations of Injustice and the Recognition – Redistribution Debate: Locating Class, Caste and Gender in Paid Domestic Work in India”, Law, Social Justice and Global Development Journal, 1: 2–19, http:// go.warwick.ac.uk/lgd/2007_1/chigateri (accessed on 15 January 2016). Das, K. L. and George, S. 2006. “Labour Practices and Working Conditions in TNCs: The Case of Toyota Kirloskar in India”, in Chang, D. (ed.), Labour in Globalising Asian Corporations: A Portrait of Struggle, pp. 273–302. Hong Kong: Asia Monitor Resource Centre. Despande, K. L. and Despande, S. 1998. “Impact of Liberalisation on Labour Market in India, What do Facts from NSSO’s 50th Round Show”, Economic and Political Weekly, 33(22): L31–L39. Dietrich, G. and Nayak, N. 2006. “Exploring the Possibilities of CounterHegemonic Globalisation of the Fishworkers Movements in India and Its

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Global Interactions”, in Santos, B. D. (ed.), Another Production Is Possible: Beyond Capitalist Canon, pp. 381–414. London: Verso. George, S. 2006. “Labour Practices and Working Conditions in TNCs: The Case of Samsung India”, in Chang, D. (ed.), Labour in Globalising Asian Corporations: A Portrait of Struggle, pp. 107–130. Hong Kong: Asia Monitor Resource Centre. George, S. 2014a. “India’s Retail Trade Revolution: Socio Religious Dimensions of Employment Loss and New Forms of Urban Exclusion”, Journal of Exclusion Studies, 4(2): 191–203. George, S. 2014b. “Lockout in Toyota Kirloskar: The Future Space of Labour”, Economic and Political Weekly, 49(17): 18–20. George, S. 2014c. “Deregulation and the Fading Labour Agenda: Evidence from Transnational Automobile Companies in India”, Economic and Political Weekly, 49(46): 19–21. George, S. 2016. Work and Health in Informal Economy: Linkages from Export Oriented Garment Sector in Delhi. New Delhi: Daanish Books. Ghosh, B. 2008. “Economic Reforms and Trade Unionism in India: A Macro View”, Indian Journal of Industrial Relations, 33(3): 355–384. Goldar, B. 2010. Informalisation of Industrial Labour in India: Are Labour Market Rigidities and Growing Import Competition to Blame?, www.isid. ac.in/~pu/conference/dec_10_conf/Papers/BishwanathGoldar.pdf (accessed on 22 January 2016). Gupta, S. P. 1995. “Economic Reforms and Its Impacts on Poor”, Economic and Political Weekly, 30(22): 1295–1311. Harriss White, B., Basile, E., Dixit, A., Joddar, P., Prakash, A. and Vidyarthee, K. 2014. Dalits and Adivasis in India’s Business Economy: Three Essays and an Atlas. Gurgaon: Three Essays Collective. Herman, E. F. and Chomsky, N. 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books. Institute for Human Development. 2014. India Labour and Employment Report 2014. New Delhi: Academic Foundation. Kapur, D., Shyam Babu, D. and Prasad, C. B. 2014. Defying the Odds: The Rise of Dalit Entrepreneurs. Gurgaon: Random House India. Kohli, A. 2012. Poverty amid Plenty in the New India. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Madhumathi, M. 2013. Women in Urban Informal Sector: A Study of Domestic Workers. New Delhi: Abhijeet Publications. Mahadevia, D. 2001. “Informalisation of Employment and Poverty in Ahmedabad”, in Kundu, A. and Sharma, A. N. (eds.), Informal Sector in India, Perspectives and Policies, pp. 125–142. New Delhi: Institute of Human Development. Maiti, D. and Mitra, A. 2010. Skills, Inequality and Development. New Delhi: Institute of Economic Growth, www.iegindia.org/upload/publication/Workpap/ wp306.pdf (accessed on 17 January 2016). Mayer, A. 1996. “Caste in an Indian Village: Change and Continuity 1954–1992”, in Fuller, C. (ed.), Caste Today, pp. 32–65. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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McDuie, D. 2012. Northeast Migrants in Delhi: Race, Refuge and Retail. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Mehrotra, T. S. 2010. Domestic Workers: Conditions, Rights and Responsibilities – A Study of Part-Time Domestic Workers in Delhi. New Delhi: Jagori. Nath, G. B. 1994. “Flexibility of Labour Market: Theoretical Approaches and Empirical Evidences from India”, Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 47(4): 513–521. NCEUS. 2007. Report on Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganised Sector. New Delhi: National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector, http://dcmsme.gov.in/Condition_of_workers_ sep_2007.pdf (accessed on 19 April 2015). NCEUS. 2009. The Challenge of Employment in India: An Informal Economy Perspective. New Delhi: National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector, http://dcmsme.gov.in/The_Challenge_of_Employment_in_ India.pdf (accessed on 19 April 2015). Neetha, N. 2009. “Contours of Domestic Service: Characteristics, Work Relations and Regulation”, The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 52(3): 489–506. Neetha, N. 2014. “Crisis in Female Employment: Analysis across Social Groups”, Economic and Political Weekly, 49(47): 50–59. Neethi, P. 2016. Globalisation Lived Locally: A Labour Geography Perspective. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Papola, T. S. 2008. Employment Challenge and Strategies in India. New Delhi: International Labour Organization, Sub–Regional Office for South Asia, www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/– – asia/– – ro– bangkok/documents/ publication/wcms_100238.pdf (accessed on 19 May 2015). Piore, M. J. and Sabel, C. F. 1984. The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity. New York: Basic Books. Rajkumar, J. D. and Shetty, A. B. 2015. “GDP Sectoral Growth Rates: What Is Driving Growth?”, Economic and Political Weekly, 50(9): 108–110. Ram, N. 1995. “Social Mobility and Status Identification among Scheduled Castes: A Synoptic View”, in Sharma, K. L. (ed.), Social Inequality in India: Profiles of Caste, Class, Power and Social Mobility, pp. 440–458. Jaipur: Rawat. Rasaily, R. 2015. Vulnerables in the Small Tea Grower Sector: Locating Ethnicity and Gender Interface in the STGS Value Chain in North Bengal. Thiruvananthapuram: CDS–NRPPD. Discussion paper, No. 48, http://cds. edu/wp–content/uploads/2015/07/48_RINJU.pdf (accessed on 9 December 2015). Roy, S. 2016. “Flattering Manufacturing Growth and Employment: Is ‘Making’ the Answer?”, Economic and Political Weekly, 51(13): 35–42. Sundar, K. R. S. 2015. “Industrial Conflict in India in the Post Reform Period: Who Said All Is Quiet on the Industrial Front?”, Economic and Political Weekly, 50(3): 43–53. Thorat, S. and Attewwell, P. 2010. “The Legacy of Social Exclusion: A Correspondence Study of Job Discrimination in India’s Urban Private Sector”,

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in Thorat, S. and Newman, K. S. (eds.), Blocked by Caste: Economic Discrimination in Modern India, pp. 35–51. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. World Bank and IFC. 2004. India Investment Climate and Manufacturing Industry, www.wdronline.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/14378/ 31210done0IN00ICA01public1.pdf?sequence=1 (accessed on 17 January 2016).

2

Unionisation in post-reform India A review of trends and trajectories Rajesh Kalarivayil and Smitha S. Nair

The post-liberalisation period, especially post-1990s, has seen several changes in the labour landscape of India. Among others, the most important ones were privatisation, deregulation and closure of public sector industries and decline of “sunset industries”, which were the traditional base of trade unions in the formal sector, and the rise of high-technology-driven industries owned by multinational corporate houses. Studies have pointed out that the beginning of neoliberalism led to a shift towards privatisation (Agnihotri 2005). In the labour front these features have contributed to the contractualisation and informalisation through subcontracting and casualisation of labour (Harriss–White and Gooptu 2001; Bhandari 2008). These have also led to the decrease in the strength of traditional trade unions (Bardhan 2001) and opened up the spaces for new forms of unions in the informal/unorganised sector (Mohanty 2009). It has been argued that labour flexibility facilitated by economic liberalisation has resulted in changes in the structure of traditional trade unions, mainly as a result of trade unions exploring unconventional constituencies in the labour market (Bhowmik 2005; Sunder 2006; Mohanty 2009). It is in this context that the chapter examines the trends and trajectories of unionisation in the post-reform period in India. In exploring the trends and trajectories of unionisation, the chapter analyses the extent and form of unionisation and the issues raised by the unions.

Changing trajectories of trade unionism in India: a brief review History of trade unionism in the country could be divided into four phases in accordance with the larger socio-political changes in the country. The first phase spans between the 1950s and 1960s and is largely associated with the expansion of organised sector along with

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high growth in public sector employment. This phase is characterised by the patronage and control of the state or the ruling party. According to Rajni Kothari, in independent India, the Congress party system was the party of consensus; there were other parties that were formed during this period but they remained parties of pressure. Most of the parties remained aligned to the politics of the Congress party while being convinced that the way forward was poverty alleviation as envisioned by Jawaharlal Nehru (Kothari 1964). In this period the ruling Congress party had an influence on unionisation in the public sector. Its control over state machinery played a pivotal role in the growth of Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC) as one of the leading trade unions in the public sector in the first phase (Bhattacherjee 1999). There was state control over the labour movement, and different labour legislations such as the Industrial Disputes Act (IDP), 1947, that came up to regulate the industrial relations system during this phase were a testimony to it. The first phase of unionisation was also characterised by low level of industrial strife (Johri 1967). The second phase, from the mid-1960s to 1979, was characterised by the rise of different micro movements against the failed promises of the state. It was in the late 1960s and 1970s that the Nehruvian consensus started to crumble (Menon and Nigam 2007). In spite of the promises of development the inequalities among the classes had only increased. People questioned the development tenets of the state and the promises made during independence. This phase was characterised by the high rate of inflation, rising food prices, and slowdown in manufacturing output (Nayyar 1981; Joshi and Little 1994). Unionisation underwent a shift in this period. In the early part of this phase there was a proliferation of trade unions affiliated to political parties other than the Congress. This change is attributed to the disenchantment of labour movement with INTUC’s strategies for the promotion of labour welfare (Bhattacherjee 1999). The post-Emergency (1975–77) period witnessed the decline in the strength of major central trade unions (Bhattacherjee 1999). This decline is attributed to decrease in permanent employment, rise of independent trade unions (Bhattacherjee 1999), rise of advanced mass production and processing industries and the addition of young and technically skilled employees into the workforce (Pendse 1981). The second phase of unionisation was characterised by high level of industrial strife (Johri 1967). This period was also marked by intense inter-union rivalry as indicated by the increase in industrial disputes involving more than one central trade union (Bhattacherjee 1987). In the second phase, unionisation also saw the emergence of labour union

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leadership outside the rank and file of established political parties (Bhattacherjee 1999). Further unionisation during this phase had different effects for public and private sector. While the employees in the public sector received considerable benefits, their counterparts in the private sector had to bargain hard for benefits (RoyChowdhury 2003a). Another important shift in unionisation strategy during this phase was the emphasis of trade unions on decentralised collective bargaining compared to the centralised lobbying. According to Bhattacherjee one of the major reasons for this shift is the uneven development of firms within the industry. The decentralised bargaining mode was increasingly seen in the growth sectors (Bhattacherjee 1999). The third phase (1980–91) of unionisation in India as Ahn (2010) noted was characterised by intense economic and political crisis. This was a reflection of the larger socio-political changes taking place in the country. Rajiv Gandhi, who became the prime minister in 1984, loosened the reins on the “license raj” giving limited access to Indian markets. Increased flexibility of labour market achieved through economic liberalisation enabled firms to outsource and subcontract their production which had a profound impact on industrial relations (Ahn 2010). Unionisation in this phase was characterised by widespread industrial strife in both public and private sectors. The public sector strike in Bangalore during 1980–81 and the Bombay (now Mumbai) textile strike of 1982 are the major industrial conflicts that determined the future course of unionisation in the country (Bhattacherjee 1999). The immediate effect of the Bombay textile strike was the withering away of state patronage in unionisation and the emergence of decentralised bargaining agreements (Van Wersch 1992). This phase also saw the proliferation of unions without any party affiliation in major industrial centres (Bhattacherjee 1987). An important trend noted in this period was the increasing regional diversity in the labour– management relations of the country. While cities like Bangalore and Bombay witnessed a rise in the firm-based/plant-based unions, labour– management relations in Calcutta were determined by centralised unions (Bhattacherjee 1999). The fourth phase (1992–2000) was characterised as the period of liberalisation, globalisation and privatisation. Susie Tharu and Tejaswini Niranjana (1996) have referred this to as the “Mandal/ Mandir/ Fund – Bank years”. Economic liberalisation policies facilitated high economic growth, particularly in the tertiary sector (Chanda 2002). The entry of transnational corporations leading to a greater inflow of foreign direct investment (FDI) was also prominent in this phase (Chaudhuri 1995). In contrast to direct interventions as in the first

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phase, the focus of the state in this phase shifted to managing labour relations through policy and legal instruments. State interventions in the form of disinvestment policies and amendments in labour laws were anti-labour and pro-capital. For instance, retrenchment of public sector workers as high as 78,000 was facilitated through the National Renewal Fund created by the Government of India in 1991, created with an objective to provide compensation to employees affected by the restructuring process (Zagha 1999). After examining the four phases in brief, the changing trajectories can be summarised as: unionisation in post-independent India was under the patronage of the Congress party. However, the by 1970s and the 1980s, the failure to deliver promises resulted in the disenchantment with the politically affiliated trade unions in general and INTUC in particular. This led to the emergence of independent trade unions that employed militant strategies to demand workers’ rights. As a result, this period witnessed severe industrial strifes. The neoliberalisation policies in the 1990s ushered in a new phase of labour market management strategies which completely changed the landscape of workers’ collective action in the country. Scholars have formulated diverse views about labour relations in the context of globalisation. There are two strands of analysis on the impact of neoliberal policies and globalisation on industrial relations. The first one is that the technological advancements due to trade liberalisation and resulting flexibilities in production process increased the bargaining power of employers. According to this analysis the differential mobility of capital in comparison to labour and outsourcing of production to informal sector diminished the bargaining power of worker unions. A counter claim to these arguments is that the very forces which threaten workers’ mobilisation and unionisation offered possibilities of strengthening of the same (Mohanty 2009; Sunder 2015). In the following section we examine the trends within the trade unions in the post-reform period, which will illustrate the point that the contingencies of globalisation and neoliberal policies have forced workers’ collective action to reinvent itself in the changing scenario.

Unionisation in the post-reform period The verification of trade union membership of the central trade union organisations (CTUOs) by the Ministry of Labour and Employment, Government of India, in 2002 shows an increase in the membership of the unions during the period 1989–2002. The unionisation rate increased from 4.3 per cent in 1980 to 6.3 per cent in 2002 (Ahn

Unionisation in post-reform India

49

2010). The increase in the rate of unionisation from 1989 to 2002 was influenced by the structural changes in the workforce that was the result of the adoption of neoliberal economic policies. It has been argued that the changes in the pattern of unionisation was a consequence of the structural shift in employment – from permanent to temporary and casual employment resulting from the drive for labour flexibility in the post-reform period. This period shows erosion in the membership of formal workers across CTUOs affiliated to national political parties (Table 2.1). Central trade unions such as All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) and INTUC registered a decline in the membership of formal workers, close to 40 per cent and 20 per cent respectively. Even though there was an actual rise in membership of unions in the formal sector during the period 1989–2002, the proportion of formal workers to informal workers decreased from 88 per cent in 1989 to 69 per cent in 2002. The decrease in the proportion of formal sector workers in the unions has two possibilities: (1) the decrease in employment growth in the formal sector, or (2) informalisation and contractualisation of labour. The decrease in the membership of formal sector workers was a result of the decline of traditional industries such as textiles and food products which were historically known for their strong unions (Sunder 2015). The employment growth fell from 2.4 per cent in 1988–87 to 1993–94 to 1.4 per cent in 2009–10 to 2011–12, while the GDP grew from 4.6 per cent to 7.4 per cent in the same period (Misra and Suresh 2014). The 1990s witnessed a decline of employment in public sector manufacturing in the name of labour rationalisation. The organised sector also saw a decline in the same period; employment reduced from 2.48 per cent in 1978–83 to 1.38 per cent in 1983–88 to 1.05 per cent in 1993– 94 (RoyChowdhury 2003b). Restructuring of the production process contributed to the mobility of capital and thereby enhancing the bargaining power of the employers (Bardhan 2001). Lockouts, closures and subcontracting were important strategies employed in reducing permanent employment (Shrouti and Nandkumar 1995). The loss of permanent employment in the organised sector is closely associated with the high incidence of lockout during the period 1990s and 2000s (Sunder 2006). Employment in the private sector manufacturing also witnessed a decline as a result of large-scale closures (Hensman 2001). According to Hensman (2001) plants in Bombay belonging to Ciba Geigy, Abbott Laboratories, Roche Pharmaceuticals, Hoechst, Boots, Boehringer–Mannheim and Parke–Davis closed down, reducing some of the best jobs in India and the worst affected from all these changes were women.

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Labour reforms, which were introduced to liberalise contractual employment in the 2000s, intensified the loss of employment in the organised sector (Hensman 2001). The falling strength of permanent employees weakened the power of unions (Bardhan 2001). Further the industries that came up in the post-reform period such as software industry, business process outsourcing companies (BPOs) and retail business which were the source of large-scale employment failed to offer a conducive environment for unionisation (D’Cruz and Noronha 2013). Trade unions were also facing a legitimacy crisis as socioeconomic institutions. The crisis of legitimacy of labour unions essentially stemmed from their passive acceptance of labour restructuring as the only way to survive in the competitive market. Trade unions in the public sector had little control over the retrenchment of workers in the initial phase of economic liberalisation (RoyChowdhury 2003b). The trade unions compensated for their loss in the formal sector by making inroads into the informal sector. The proportion of informal sector workers for all CTUOs increased from 11.7 per cent in 1989 to 42.27 per cent in 2002 (Table 2.1). The increase in the proportion of union membership of informal sector workers to formal sector workers during the period in general indicates that all the registered central trade unions extended their constituencies to the informal sector. However, the nuances within the unionisation of informal sector are intriguing. Political party–affiliated CTUOs registered around a 50 per cent rise in the membership of workers in the informal sector. While CTUOs such as INTUC and AITUC registered an increase in the membership of informal sector workers from 7.67 per cent in 1989 to 12.4 per cent in 2002 and 1.1 per cent in 1989 to 19.2 per cent in 2002 respectively, the membership of informal sector workers in Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) saw an increase in real terms between 1989 and 2002. However, the percentage of unionised informal sector workers in BMS to the total informal sector workers declined from 22.4 in 1989 to 17.5 in 2002. A similar trend can be seen for other CTUOs such as Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), Hind Mazdoor Sabha (HMS), United Trade Union Congress (Lenin Sarani) (UTUC[LS]) and Trade Union Coordination Centre (TUCC). The decrease in the influence of BMS among informal sector workers could be attributed to the labour movement’s dissatisfaction with the anti-labour policies of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government during 1999–2004. This could be ascertained from the statement made by Hasmukhbhai Dave, the then general secretary of BMS, who stated that the workers were annoyed with the government for its amendments to the labour laws (Rajalakshmi 2001).

Source: Ahn (2010).

BMS INTUC AITUC HMS CITU UTUC(LS) TUCC SEWA AICCTU LPF UTUC NFITU–DHN NFITU–KOL Total

6,215,797 3,954,012 3,442,239 3,338,491 2,678,473 1,373,268 732,760 688,140 639,962 611,506 606,935 569,599 33,620 24,884,802

As of Dec. 2002

3,116,564 2,692,388 938,486 1,480,963 1,775,220 1,343,256 230,139 n.a. n.a. n.a. 584,523 529,762 530,000 13,221,301

As of Dec. 1989

Verified membership

21.4 23.9 42.7 19.6 4.14 54.3 75 44.2 78.9 48.6 54.7 68.3 13.8 42.27

% of informal workers in 2002

11.15 4.42 1.9 10.71 1.7 27.5 86.6 n.a. n.a. n.a. 53.1 n.a. n.a. 11.7

% of informal workers in 1989

78.5 76.1 57.3 80.4 95.8 45.7 25 55.8 21.1 51.4 45.3 31.7 86.1 69.2

% of formal workers in 2002

88.8 95.5 98.1 89.3 98.3 72.5 13.3 n.a. n.a. n.a. 46.9 n.a. n.a. 88.3

% of formal workers in 1989

Table 2.1 Membership of formal and informal workers in central trade union organisations 1989, 2002

17.5 12.4 19.2 8.6 1.45 9.75 7.2 4 6.6 3.9 4.3 5 0.06 100

2002

100

19.9

22.4 7.67 1.1 10.2 1.9 23.7 12.8

1989

% of unionised informal sector workers as % of total informal sector workers

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An impact of globalisation was increased competition in the market which reflected on labour in the form of reduction in permanent employment, increase in contractual labourers and informalisation of work (Shrouti and Nandkumar 1995; Hensman 2001). The implication of informalisation for labour movement was that it discouraged workers in the informal sector and casual labourers from organising. Further the informalisation process reduced permanent employment and thereby reducing the strength of trade unions in the formal sector (Bronfenbrenner 2000). However, it is argued that globalisation and its constituent reform processes in work also hold the opportunity for mobilising labour across the ideologically divided constituencies of labour movement (Sunder 2015). Increased informalisation of labour market in India has resulted in initiatives across the country towards organising the workers in the informal sector (Mohanty 2009). The period 1989 to 2002 saw the emergence of initiatives like Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), All India Central Council of Trade Unions (AICCTU) and Labour Progressive Front (LPF). These new players represented a wide range of organisational and institutional constituencies with varied ideologies ranging from regional political parties to non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Variations in the level of unionisation among contractual and permanent workers at the state level has also been observed. In West Bengal the union penetration among permanent workers was dominant, while in Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Delhi the unionisation among contractual workers was dominant (Bhandari 2008).

Organising through alliances and organising for policy changes The 1990s witnessed major economic changes which reflected in the relationship between state, capital and labour. The changes that determine the alignment between state, capital and working class in the neoliberal period are the withdrawal of state from its redistributive role, increasing role of state in disciplining labour through coercive and persuasive policies, organised labour resorting to protests in response to these changes and finally the weakening ties of labour movement with Left-leaning/social democratic parties/governments (RoyChowdhury 2003b). Globalisation resulted in the decrease of trade union density rates which has severe implication for the bargaining power of unions (Pizza 2005). Unionisation in the post-reform period is also a response of labour towards its changing relationship between state and capital and its decreasing bargaining power. Mohanty (2009) has argued that

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the trade union movement responded to the realignment of state, capital and working class in the neoliberal period by building partnerships and broad coalitions to achieve social policy goals. In this section we will examine these points in detail. According to Shyam Sundar there were several attempts of active coalition building among central trade union organisations (CTUOs) with the public sector as the major focus of protests. The Committee of Public Sector Trade Unions (CPSTU) consisting of the HMS, AITUC, CITU and Joint Action Front from Bangalore, formed in the 1980s, was an important initiative in the coalition building among CTUOs (Sunder 2006). An important result of the coalition building among CTUOs was the Bangalore Public Sector Units strike in 1981– 82. The new economic policies implemented in the 1990s caused widespread discontent among the labour class, which played a catalytic role for collective action among the working class in the country (Sunder 2006). The 1990s marked a period of active alliance formation among various trade union bodies (Sunder 2006). The Sponsoring Committee of Trade Unions and the National Platform for Mass organisations comprising of workers organisations from both organised and unorganised sectors and agricultural labour were formed in the 1990s to fight privatisation and anti-labour policies (Sunder 2006). The period also saw the emergence of coordinating bodies at the sector level (Sunder 2006). Coordinating committees of unions involving employees in the banking and finance sector, electricity employees, engineers and workers’ unions in the unorganised sector were formed during this period. However, the alliance building among workers’ unions was temporary during this phase (Sunder 2006). Industrial conflict increased during the post-reform period with increase in workers’ mobilisation leading to work stoppages and longlasting lockouts (Sunder 2015). Denial of trade union rights and the “drive for labour flexibility through contract labour” are major causes of industrial unrest in the post-reform period (Sunder 2015: 53). During the first round of reforms (1991–96) the trade unions were successful at the macro level in resisting anti-labour policies that were pushed as part of economic liberalisation process; however, they failed at the micro level in resisting the workers’ retrenchment strategies of employers such as voluntary retirement schemes (VRS) schemes (Hensman 2001). Large-scale mobilisation of labour in the post-reform period was witnessed during 2000–2001 when the labour unions resisted the policies that attempted to change labour laws (Hensman 2001) The form of labour protests underwent changes in the post-reform period. The frequency of work stoppages decreased, while the participation of

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workers in work stoppages increased (Sunder 2015). Sunder (2015) observed a declining trend of workers’ participation in the lockouts towards the second half of 2000s. A decline in the workers’ participation in lockouts indicates that the protests at individual establishment level decreased in the post-reform period. The change in the form and strategies of labour protest leads us to another feature of labour collective action in the post-reform period. Labour is seen as enlarging the scope of collective action from individual enterprise level to the industry level and national level through building alliances across different trade unions. Post-1990s there has been an all-India strike almost every year. Sunder (2015) accounts for fourteen all-India strikes between 1990 and 2013. The latest all-India strike was on 2 September 2015. Eleven trade unions called for an all-India strike on September 2015 to protest against the anti-labour policies of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government. Two important aspects about the changing form of unionisation during this period are worth mentioning here. First, labour protest strategies were focused on building large coalitions cutting across political affiliations, emphasising on the unity of labour. The postreform period also witnessed this change in the workers’ collective action when the unaffiliated independent trade unions in the organised and unorganised sectors came together in 2001 to form the New Trade Union Initiative (NTUI) as a federation of independent trade unions. The formation of NTUI was the response of independent unions faced by excess pressure of labour market deregulation and infringement of workers’ right in the post-reform period (Mohanty 2009). The challenge for independent unions at the enterprise level came from “the product market competition as an argument to hold down costs”, which forced these unions to form federations at the industry level for effective bargaining (Mohanty 2009: 7). The NTUI also underlined the need for broad workers’ coalition cutting across sectors and regions to resist the challenges for labour in the post-reform period. However it is argued that the alliances forged between organised and unorganised trade unions through the new trade union responses remain “unformed” as there is a conflict of interest between the organised and unorganised workers (RoyChowdhury 2003b). Second, the major demands raised during the agitation were more focused on policy changes and state action towards protection of the interest of labour. The Maharashtra bandh in 2001 is an example of this trend in the labour collective action – forming broad partnerships and raising policy-oriented demands. The Maharashtra bandh was a result of the unity forged between unions affiliated to various Left

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organisations, Congress, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Shiv Sena. The unity stemmed from the “extreme insecurity among members of all unions” (Hensman 2001: 18). The Maharashtra bandh was a call upon the state to intervene to protect the interests of the labour. According to Hensman (2001: 18) the major demands of the agitation were (1) the Maharashtra Assembly must pass and forward to the President a decision reversing the earlier decision to change the labour laws. (2) The Maharashtra government must also oppose the changes in labour legislation proposed by the Central government. (3) The rights of contract workers must be recognized in the Maharashtra Recognition of Trade Unions and Prevention of Unfair Labour Practices. (MRTU and PULP) A careful examination of the demands raised by the labour movement points out the inclusion of social security and labour welfare issues in the protest agenda. The changing priorities in the protest agenda indicate the shift in the perception of trade unions towards the state. The trade unions place more importance on the role of the state in addressing their problems and hence direct their collective action against the state. This will become clearer when we examine the range of issues that trade unions have raised during the all-India strikes in the post-reform period. The issues included removing ceiling in social security laws, lifting the ban on public sector recruitment, regularisation of contractual employment, universal coverage of social security, enhancement of minimum wages to Rs 10,000 on universal basis, recognition of scheme-based workers such as anganwadi workers, rollback of disinvestment or privatisation policies, strengthening the skill base in the labour market, enhancing employability of workers, ratification of core International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions, effective implementation of labour laws, containing inflation and improving the efficiency of Public Distribution System (PDS) (Sunder 2015).

Unionisation at the firm level At the firm level issues raised by the protestors in the post-reform period are demands for increase in wages, improved service conditions, forming new unions and contractualisation (Sunder 2015). Out of these, formation of workers’ union and contractualisation are issues

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that are directly related to labour rights. It is noted that in India protest resulting from infringement of labour rights has become common in the post-reform period and such protest is seen more in industries like automobiles, aviation, electronics, food products and garments which are exposed to global market fluctuations (Sunder 2015). The employers use a wide range of strategies in dealing with unionisation of workers at the firm level. These include non-recognition or denial of politically affiliated unions and unions affiliated to Left organisations, denying collective rights, contracts that are exploitative in nature, individualisation of employment, threatening legal procedure and using pressure to avoid union formation. Workers who engage in union activities are threatened and relocated to non-union regions or other production locations (Harriss–White and Gooptu 2001; Neethi P. 2012; Sunder 2015). The site of industrial conflict in the post-reform period has also witnessed a shift in terms of the geographical features as well as the constituencies involved in protests. As Sunder (2015: 49) noted “the industrial areas that are established around the emerging urban centers like Gurgaon, Manesar, Ludhiana, Greater Noida, Pune–Chakan area and Sriperumbudur are the new sites of rapid unionisation as well as fierce struggle for labour rights”. The workers who are the face of emerging wave of trade union movement and struggle are young as well as skilled in high technology (Sunder 2015). The skill base of workers in advanced technology is considered as a desirable element for the growth of trade unions. This is another instance where globalisation and neoliberal economic policies with their potential for technology, transfer are providing opportunity for the unionisation and workers’ struggle. At the firm level there is also a shift in the nature of the demands raised by protesting unions. The issues raised by trade unions range from trade union recognition, contractual labour issues, bargaining rights, allotment of shares and information on utilisation of corporate social responsibility funds by the company (Sunder 2015). Outsourcing of production at the local level has facilitated the entry of diverse socio-political and religious institutions in mediation of labour and capital. Neethi P. (2012) has examined the prominent role played by religious institutions as an emerging trend in the postreform period, particularly the Catholic Church in creating spaces for recruitment, management and control of labour (Neethi P. 2012). She has analysed the role of religious and community-based organisations like the church, Kudumbasree and local governing bodies in recruiting, managing and controlling labour in industries in the South Indian state of Kerala. These actors, according to her, have brought in

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diverse forms of labour control and surveillance strategies including patriarchal and religious values, peer group pressure and technological surveillance (Neethi P. 2008, 2012, 2014). A common trend that has emerged from the analysis of the labour spaces is the powerlessness among the workers to unionise. But labour response to these emerging spaces of control has been through adoption of subtle and covert forms of resistance. In the case of Kudumbasree, Neethi P. (2014) has elaborated a form of camaraderie among women from different units, which made it possible for them to raise demands for each other.

Unionisation in the informal sector Multiple forms of unionisation in the informal sector have been adopted by different groups and organisations. CTUOs have adopted the strategy of forming separate wings for organising workers in the informal sector (Sunder 2015). As indicated in the verification of membership of trade unions in 2002 (Table 2.1) all the CTUOs like BMS, INTUC, AITUC, HMS, CITU, UTUC(LS), TUCC and UTUC have a large number of workers from the unorganised sector in their membership. The traditional unions through these units within the federation organise workers in the informal sector, provide legal aid and guidelines to the informal sector workers, demand state intervention in securing their rights and organise protest and demonstrations to bring visibility to the issues and problems of workers in the informal sector (Sunder 2006). Informal workers’ union for women has primarily emerged in collaboration with the traditional trade unions (Kabeer et al. 2013). Another form of unionisation of informal sector workers corresponds to trade union – NGOs like Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA). SEWA organises women workers who are selfemployed and working in the unorganised sector. According to the 2002 verification of union membership for CTUOs, SEWA had a membership of 3,04,194 members in the informal sector. An emerging form of unionisation of informal workers corresponds to the international organisational networks like Homenet. Homenet India is an affiliate of Homenet South Asia with a membership of 85,074 home-based workers in twenty-nine home-based workers’ organisations across thirteen states of India.1 The affiliate organisations at the national level organise and mobilise workers in the informal sector and link them to the umbrella organisations at regional and global levels. A closely related form of unionisation adopted is to organise informal sector workers sector-wise and to align them as sector-wise unions with an aim of building wider organisations (Chowdhury and Roma 2009).

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The National Center for Labour (NCL) is an example of this strategy in organising informal sector workers. NCL is a national federation of unorganised sector workers from agriculture, fisheries, construction, domestic workers, migrant workers and contract workers. Different forms of unions which emerged in the post-reform period have also witnessed class-based political strategies as employed by the workers in the informal sector to claim their rights (Agarwala 2006). The important demands of the unorganised workers are right to livelihood and social security, right to social protection, good working conditions, access to natural resources and public places, recognition of status as workers through laws and right to “representation and negotiation with appropriate counterpart” (Sankaran and Madhav 2013: 14). One of the important strategies adopted by the initiates like the National Centre for Labour (NCL) was to approach the state through pressure tactics like mobilising the workers at the grassroots level in demanding their right for livelihood and social security (RoyChowdhury 2003b). These strategies benefited the workers in the informal sectors with the setting up of sectoral welfare boards in some states (Agarwala 2006). Collective action of the informal sector workers met with success when the Unorganised Sector Workers Social Security Bill 2007 was passed in the Rajya Sabha in 2008. Groups like NCL along with other constituent partners were instrumental in bringing about this policy change (Mohanty 2009).

Conclusion The post-reform period marks an important phase in the trade union movement of the country. This chapter has attempted to provide a glimpse of the changes and the responses that are underway in the labour movement. Labour flexibility facilitated by economic liberalisation has resulted in changes in the structure of traditional trade unions and opening up the space for new forms of unions attempting to unionise the informal/unorganised sector. This phase also saw changes in the approaches of trade unions on building partnerships with other labour organisations. Along with issues related to workers’ rights, the postreform period saw the inclusion of labour movement’s demand for policy reforms and social security to protect the interest of labour. The period saw the emergence of diverse strategies like NGO–trade union partnerships, co-operatives–trade union partnerships, emergence of federation of loosely knit trade unions and network of trade unions affiliated to international organisations to the fore front of labour mobilisation. The picture that emerges from the analysis of the trade

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union movement in the post-reform period is that the trade unions are actively engaged in attempts to regain their strength and prominence by making inroads into non-traditional constituencies and innovating unconventional forms and strategies to unionise labour. However, it is becoming more and more difficult for labour to protect itself from the onslaught of capital as the state becomes capital friendly. The key to unionisation in the post-reform period lies in the success of trade unions to build wider partnerships and coalitions.

Note 1 Information as provided in the website of Homenet South Asia, available at www.homenetsouthasia.net/HomeNet_India.html, accessed on 2 August 2016.

References Agarwala, R. 2006. “From Work to Welfare”, Critical Asian Studies, 38(4): 419–444. Agnihotri, I. 2005. “Globalization and the Women’s Movement in India”, www.cwds.ac.in/OCPaper/GlobalisationReport.pdf (accessed on 10 September 2011). Ahn, Pong–Sul. 2010. The Growth and Decline of Political Unionism in India: The Need for a Paradigm Shift. ILO DWT for East and South-East Asia and the Pacific. Bangkok: ILO. Bardhan, P. 2001. “Social Justice in the Global Economy”, Economic and Political Weekly, 36(5&6): 467–480. Bhandari, A. K. 2008. Union Membership Effect on Wage Premiums: Evidence from Organized Manufacturing Industries in India, IZA Discussion Paper No. 3747, rhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0042–7092.2007.00700.x (accessed on 21 January 2016). Bhattacherjee, D. 1987. “Union-Type Effects on Bargaining Outcomes in Indian Manufacturing”, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 25(2): 247–266. Bhattacherjee, D. 1999. Organized Labour and Economic Liberalization India: Past, Present and Future. Labour and Society Programme. International Institute of Labour Studies. Geneva: ILO. Bhowmik, S. 2005. Co-Operatives and the Emancipation of the Marginalized: Case Studies from Two Cities in India. Paper Submitted to Workshop on Membership Based Organizations of Poor, Ahmedabad, 19–21 January 2005. Bronfenbrenner, K. 2000. Uneasy Terrain: The Impact of Capital Mobility on Workers, Wages and Union Organizing. Submitted to the US Trade Deficit Review Commission, http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent. cgi?article=1002&context=reports (accessed on 10 March 2016).

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Chanda, R. 2002. Globalization of Services: India’s Opportunities and Constraints. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chaudhuri, S. 1995. “Government and Transnational: New Economic Policies since 1991”, Economic and Political Weekly, 30(18&19): 999–1003, 1005–1011. Chowdhury, A. and Roma, M. 2009. “A Case Study of the National Forum of Forest People and Forest Workers (NFFPFW) Struggle for Rights of Forest Workers”, http://wiego.org/sites/wiego.org/files/resources/files/fow_ nffpfw_case_study.pdf (accessed on 20 March 2016). D’Cruz, P. and Noronha, E. 2013. “Hope to Despair: The Experiences of Organising Indian Call Centre Employees”, Indian Journal of Industrial Relations, 48(3): 471–486. Harriss–White, B. and Gooptu, N. 2001. “Mapping India’s World of Unorganized Labour”, Socialist Register, 37: 89–118. Hensman, R. 2001. The Impact of Globalisation on Employment in India and Responses from the Formal and Informal Sectors. Working Paper, No. 15. IIAS/IISG. Amsterdam: CLARA Johri, C. K. 1967. Unionism in a Developing Economy: A Study of Interaction between Trade Unionism and Government Policy in India, 1950–1965. New York: Asia Publishing House. Joshi, V. and Little, I. M. D. 1994. India: Macroeconomics and Political Economy, 1964–1991. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Kabeer, N., Milward, K. and Sudharshan, R. 2013. “Organising Women Workers in the Informal Economy”, Gender and Development, 21(2): 249–263. Kothari, R. 1964. “The Meaning of Jawaharlal Nehru”, Economic and Political Weekly, 16(29, 30&31): 1203–1207. Menon, N. and Nigam, A. 2007. Power and Contestation: India since 1989. London: Zed Books and Fernwood Publishing. Misra, S. and Suresh, A. K. 2014. Estimating Employment Elasticity of Growth for the Indian Economy. RBI Working Paper Series WPS (DEPR): 06/2014, Mumbai: Reserve Bank of India. Mohanty, M. 2009. A Note on Trends in Unionization in India. Working Paper Series No. 641. Calcutta: Indian Institute of Management. Nayyar, D. 1981. “Industrial Development in India: Growth or Stagnation?”, in Bagchi, A. K. and Banerjee, N. (eds.), Change and Choice in Indian Industry, pp. 91–118. Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi and Company. Neethi, P. 2008. “Contract Work in the Organised Manufacturing Sector: A Disaggregated Analysis of Trends and Their Implications”, The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 51(4): 559–574. Neethi, P. 2012. “Globalisation Lived Locally: Investigating Kerala’s Local Labour Control Regimes”, Development and Change, 43(6): 1239–1263. Neethi, P. 2014. “Home-Based Work and Issues of Gender and Space”, Economic & Political Weekly, 49(17): 88–96. Pendse, S. 1981. “The Datta Samant Phenomenon – I”, Economic and Political Weekly, 16(16): 695–697.

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Pizza, J. A. 2005. “Globalizing Quiescence: Globalization, Union Density and Strikes in 15 Industrialized Countries”, Economic and Industrial Democracy, 26(2): 289–314. Rajalakshmi, T. K. 2001. “The NDA Government Is Anti-Labour”, Frontline, 18(12), www.frontline.in/static/html/fl1812/18120900.htm (accessed on 21 April 2016). RoyChowdhury, A. 2015. “Recent Changes in Labour Laws and Their Implications for the Working Class”, Sanhati, http://sanhati.com/excerpted/12592/ (accessed on 28 March 2016). RoyChowdhury, S. 2003a. “Public Sector Restructuring and Democracy: The State, Labour and Trade Unions in India”, The Journal of Development Studies, 39(3): 29–50. RoyChowdhury, S. 2003b. “Old Classes and New Spaces: Urban Poverty, Unorganized Labour and New Unions”, Economic and Political Weekly, 38(50): 5277–5284. Sankaran, K. and Madhav, R. 2013. Legal and Policy Tools to Meet Informal Workers’ Demands: Lessons from India. WIEGO Legal Brief No. 1, www.inclusivecities.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Sankaran_Madhav_ WIEGO_LB1.pdf (accessed on 2 May 2016). Shrouti, A. and Nandkumar, G. 1995. New Economic Policy, Changing Management Strategies – Impact on Workers and Trade Unions. New Delhi: Friedrich Stiftung and Mumbai: Maniben Kara Institute. Sunder, S. K. R. 2006. “Trade Unions and the New Challenges: One Step Forward and Two Steps Backward”, The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 49(4): 903–918. Sunder, S. K. R. 2015. “Industrial Conflict in India in the Post Reform Period: Who Said All Is Quiet on the Industrial Front?”, Economic and Political Weekly, 50(3): 43–53. Tharu, S. and Niranjana, T. 1996. “Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender”, in Amin, S. and Chakrabarty, D. (eds.), Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian History and Society, pp. 232–260. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Van Wersch, H. 1992. The Bombay Textile Strike 1982–83. India: Oxford University Press. Zagha, R. 1999. “Labour and India’s Economic Reforms”, in Sachs, J. D., Varshney, A., and Bajpai, N. (eds.), India in the Era of Economic Reforms, pp. 160–185. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Shyam Sundar discusses how new labour movements in the informal sector responded to the stalemate created by the labour market reform and offers a “model” for restructuring new workers’ movement.

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Globalisation dynamics and the working-class movement An agenda for future K. R. Shyam Sundar

Two models of governance Social justice has defined the policy frameworks in various fields including the labour policies since the First World War largely due to the increasingly significant role played by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and its instruments. The most significant statement that not only redefined the ILO’s Constitution but also transformed the social and economic policies of countries in the decades to come is “Labour is not a commodity”. This challenged the market perspective of labour being a mere factor of production and subject to the market forces as would any factor/commodity in terms of pricing and its allocation among the users. It not only promoted the dignity of the workers but also became a bedrock of the institutions seeking to defend and promote the interests of workers (see Winn 2014 for its origin and other details). The ILO instruments such as the ILO Conventions and Recommendations constituted as it did the international law governing and influencing the labour standards framework in the signatory and other countries significantly. Two propositions of ILO framework are: freedom of association and collective bargaining are essential democratic and efficiency enhancing institutions; complementing these are the strong labour standards monitoring system via labour inspection. Without organisational rights it is difficult to build organisations, and without organisations it is well-nigh impossible to secure and defend rights. Similarly, without state-led monitoring of rights observance it is difficult to ensure translation of laws into actual standards. These are then social justice–promoting institutions. From the lens of this chapter, freedom of association and collective bargaining constitute fundamental and inalienable rights of the working class so essential in a democratic and pluralistic society such as ours irrespective of the nature of economic system or the phases of economic transformation.

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Globalisation has dominated the discourse on economy and polity since the 1980s after the Washington Consensus. There have been profound economic, political and even sociocultural changes in the countries across the world, more so in the developing world, since then. A major impact of globalisation witnessed in both the developed and the developing countries is on industrial and employment relations. The technological revolution in transportation, communication and information technology has greatly aided the globalisation process. Globalisation process has made mobility of capital vis-à-vis labour easier and hence tilted the bargaining power in favour of capital. Globalisation discourse has brought market principles at the centre of policy formation even if they conflicted with the conventional and classical social justice principles. Two praxes have developed due to the dynamics of globalisation, organisational and economic. The economic argument is that the economic principles – i.e. at the macro level economic growth is needed for reducing poverty or capital investment is needed to generate employment and hence labour market reforms become important – dictate the economic and labour policies and trade unions need to come to terms with them. It becomes more important as the economies are far more tightly integrated than during the mixed economic regimes (e.g. capitalistic, socialistic, communistic) so that growth impulses or tardiness could be transitioned at a terrific pace to the economies tied in this spiral. The biggest economic problematic for trade unions is that operating as they do in the market economy by protesting at every possible reform measure they are being seen as “anti-worker” indeed! Again, the very market forces that destroy jobs in one segment seek to create different kind of jobs in other segments where most likely the reach of trade unions and law are weak if not absent. Secondly, the challenge is in the organisational sense. Globalisation has posed basic challenges to the collective institutions in two senses, namely questioning their legitimacy and utility. By capital restructuring and deepening, two production outcomes have emerged, namely mechanisation (rising capital intensity) and informalisation of production. While the globalisation discourse concentrated on the formal sector and stock markets for financial conduits, it created a vast mass of informal workers in the formal sector and in the informal sector. Two tendencies have developed in this process, namely the challenges posed by globalisation discourse, and the rising and the vast informal economy has forced the conventional institutions to reinvent themselves and cure

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themselves of their historical malaises; the vehicles of globalisation of product market such as technology and communications have the potential to help globalisation of workers’ movement. The biggest impact of globalisation discourse has been on the labour policy as the global financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the multinational corporations (MNCs) exerted tremendous and relentless pressure on the government to change the legal and the institutional framework in consonance with free market perspective. India came under this radar much earlier than other countries thanks to the structural readjustment loan it secured from the IMF. Much like other states, the Indian state (including judiciary) leaned towards reforms agenda and has sought to push it initially incrementally and later aggressively and comprehensively. These policy exercises have caused discontent and have the potential to hurt the interests of workers’ organisations across politics, region, spaces, sectors and economies. The spillover effects seem to hurt the interests of actors like consumers, agricultural labourers and farmers, students and other social groups conventionally exogenous to the industrial relations system (IRS). These forces have helped building wider, mass-based and co-operative and consistent resistance, even struggles, against the reforms agenda. The circulation of social institutional energies has interrogated the pro-market institutions often effectively and to a greater extent held at bay the reforms agenda at least at the national level. In the post-globalisation period, as a result of the combination of the forces mentioned earlier, “voice” mechanisms have emerged in both planned and sporadic patterns in both the formal and informal economies, and a largely and widely articulated alternative discourse has emerged which is based on rights and securities, even the livelihood security. These redefined the conventional notions of rights, securities, organisations and so on and introduced a textured understanding of the transitions in the workers’ movement. The processes have taken the attention away from the conventional corporate-based trade union organisation to multiple forms of voice organisations as expounded in this volume. The multiplicity and the variety are engaged not only in the forms of voices but also in the processes, the agenda, the dialogue processes, the mode of participation and so on. To be sure, this is not a glorification of the changes but to only to indicate the changes and reflect on the unfinished agenda. This chapter seeks to provide a model of restructuring of workers’ movement and place the changes that have

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been taking place since 1991 in it in the theoretical context and finally suggest some changes.

The classic industrial relations system (IRS) The ILO instruments, the vision of nationalists, the rights-based approach emanating from the colonial struggle, the Constitution and its vision and the struggles of the working class largely influenced the policymakers in India to define the legal and the institutional framework providing for labour rights via laws, labour law administration, judicial judgements, enforcement of labour laws and other forms of state intervention complemented by the democratic institutions such as social dialogue, trade unions, strikes and so on. State intervention largely defined the institutional processes and outcomes as the state embarking on economic planning did not wish to leave matters and processes to the market and voluntaristic forces. State intervention in the IRS complemented state-driven economic model of industrialisation (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987). State intervention was also necessary thanks to the then-prevalent inequality in the power resources of labour and capital. State intervention, tripartite bodies, collective institutions, moral Codes (Codes of Discipline and Conduct), consultation and political incorporation of social actors (e.g. involvement of trade union leaders and employers’ representatives in the policy-making bodies like the Planning Commission) founded on the principle of equitable economic progress in a large sense directed the working of the IRS during the period of economic planning. The trade unions were assured by the state “trade union security” (among others) in exchange of assurance of sustained industrial peace so necessary in the economic planning framework. Though tested and tried by several exogenous shocks to the IRS, the institutional framework largely prevailed through the decades till the advent of globalisation for two reasons, namely the sense of social justice and the constitutional vision sustained themselves as essential values notwithstanding the deficiencies in the IRS and due to path dependency rigidities. But the challenges that then arose and the responses emanating from the labour institutions, though limited, portended and in a sense defined the changes that would occur in the post-globalisation period. State intervention through political route fragmented the trade union movement and through compulsory adjudication blunted the growth of collective bargaining. Political unionism typified male-centred, formal and organised sector employed, permanently placed and urban-based worker and built organisations

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around and for this constituency through conventional methods such as strikes, conciliation, compulsory arbitration and so on – it was largely based on the “service model of unionism” where service provision as opposed to democratizing was considered essential to build union organisation. The political influences dominated the trade union movement far more significantly than imagined, and the trade unions largely operated as labour wings of political parties with attendant ideological makeups. The nature of economic growth was dominated by the government sector in both manufacturing and service sectors, among others. These two defined the “organisational spaces”. A fragmented and an “involuted” trade union movement resulted as a result of political formations at both the national and regional levels which are well known to detain us here (see Ramaswamy 1984; Rudolph and Rudolph 1987 for a detailed account of the formation of trade union federations and their ideologies). A dominant public sector in manufacturing and services sector created and sustained in the post-independence period even via nationalisation drives provided ample spaces for trade union formations. Railways, major ports, banking and insurance, central and state public sector enterprises, among others, are occupied by major central trade union organisations and the dynamics of domination dictated by competitive politics (see Sen 1997). At the same time, conflicts emerged in the process of contesting and appropriating existing organisational spaces in the private sector like cotton and jute textiles, plantations and the then-emerging industries like pharmaceuticals and engineering (see Ramaswamy 1984, 1988 for a detailed discussion of these developments). The trade union movement was centralised as it was a top-down approach followed by the central and regional trade union organisations. The circulation of trade unions within limited and defined spaces promoted competitive organisational politics, and the union energies were largely directed to sustaining, contesting and appropriating spaces within the limited framework (see the pyramid model in Figure 3.1). And even within these delimited spaces the trade unions ignored the atypical worker entities like non-regular and women workers. The trade union movement depended much on the existence of a formal employment relations and a certain size threshold of enterprises for ease of legality and economies of organising typical of organising workers in large spaces. However, this model caused saturation in the organisational spaces. The union density (though based on highly volatile data) hovers around 25–30 per cent over the decades.

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However, the so-called “constitutional and incorporated” trade unions – constitutional because the unions went strictly by the legal institutions however unhelpful they are/were, incorporated because as labour wings of political parties and ruling ones they lacked independence – could not meet with the rising aspirations of workers and tackle the workers’ frustrations arising out of constitutionalism. These led to the rise of maverick leaders in the 1970s like Datta Samant in Bombay or Kuchelar in Madras, though ironically they migrated from the conventional unionism to challenge their very roots. Thanks to their unconventional, often violence-ridden, methods – which were clearly not anticipated by the employers – the employers succumbed. Their success challenged the conventional trade unions and the latter explicitly or implicitly sought to weaken the hold of these leaders – the Bombay textile strike is reflective of these dynamics (see Van Wersch 1992). The maverick leaders negated and shunned every possible labour institution used by the conventional trade unions, namely conciliation, adjudication, extra-legal settlement by political bosses, the much-maligned balance sheets of the companies and so on. Another offshoot of frustrations with political unionism was the rise of “enterprise unionism”, an organisational model which shuns politics but relies on state machinery and operates within the contours of a “firm”. These became popular in Bombay, Pune, even Calcutta, Bangalore and Madras – in Madras it was more a negation of centralised industry pattern and not a political disassociation (see Ramaswamy 1988 for more details; see also Davala 1996), though doubts have been raised about the systemic impact of the enterprise unions thanks to the non-political character and hence allegedly absence of “ideology” which binds together workers/members for long (see Sengupta 1993). It is to the credit of the trade union movement that a broad basket of labour rights has been won through sustained and heroic struggles, legal action, political lobbying and pressure. Important accruals to working class have included dearness allowance, bonus, social security rights, employment security, participative channels for workers, dialogue forums and so on (see Sharma 1982; Sen 1997). Apart from securing the basic voice rights, the trade union movement has been able to check the employers’ power in the labour market. The judiciary too adopted pro-worker jurisprudence during the command economy period (Singh 2008). It is important to understand that notwithstanding several institutional failures the social justice framework largely defined the governance during the command economy.

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Trade unions during the command economy were criticised on several grounds. The criticisms kind of anticipated the institutional changes to occur in the post-reform period. Trade unions were held responsible for effecting cost–push inflation through their wage inflationary bargaining – the Essential Services Maintenance Act, 1981, was justified on this ground. Later the neoclassical economists added that this also hurt employment growth. The trade unions were perceived perhaps not unjustifiably as promoting the interests of “insiders” embodying the tendencies of “labour aristocracy” and this hurt its social justice image. Thanks to multiplicity, rivalries and crowding, institutionally it suffered from “organisational sclerosis”. Membership base was limited and its composition restricted largely to the dominant segment of the class – narrow model of unionism was the norm.

The post-reform period The globalisation in accordance with the prescriptions of Washington Consensus consists of a series of measures that include, inter alia, fiscal and monetary austerity, moderate taxation, lowering interest rates, floating exchange rates, elimination of government subsidies and liberalisation of foreign trade, labour market deregulation, privatisation and open door policy for foreign direct investment. A regime of easy flow of capital internationally would make more capital flow to the poor countries that have abundant cheap labour. This in turn would increase the rate of growth of their GDP. The high growth rates would trickle down to the poor. It was made out that there was no alternative to liberalisation, privatisation and all that for both growth and equity. The globalisation discourse is relevant for India. The failures of the state interventionist model in the product market by then were evident (see Kohli 1989). The Government of India has introduced a slew of economic reforms since June 1991 seeking to liberalise the rules governing the product market domestically by removing the licenses and locational restrictions to a large extent and over the years the trade and investment sector by moving away from the quantitative restrictions to a much reduced tariff system and allowing foreign investment in both secondary capital market (foreign institutional investment) and green site investments (foreign direct investment). The globalisation discourse attacks labour laws and labour institutions such as trade unions as being incompatible with the market-led economic regime. Employers and critics argue that the labour market regulatory system in India – originating in and suiting with the closed

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economy system – and the restrictive practices of labour institutions like trade unions introduce rigidities and prevent the firms to operate as per the market economic principles in the current globalised economic system. Specifically, they demand freedom in terms of hiring (flexicategory workers like fixed-term contracts and contract workers), firing (retrenching) workers, closure of unviable firms and changes in the functioning of the collective institutions like trade unions, collective bargaining and strikes which are not conducive to the competitive economic system. The very loosening of these restrictions is expected to result in benevolent outcomes noted earlier and would in the mediumto long-run benefit workers as such. The critics attack the prevalence of organised sector–biased regulatory system and call for redirection of state intervention towards addressing the unorganised sector. The implicit social contract that existed during the planned economy which simultaneously sought to serve the interests of labour and capital no longer operates in the market economy, and trade union security assurance has been at grave risk now. The state often intervenes now in the cause of capital, i.e. to contain and even repress strikes and agitations to protect the interests of capital, to retain capital in its spaces and, ultimately, to attract capital. The once-dependable judiciary is said to have been swayed by the market logic and several crucial judgements hurt at the hard-won and long-held labour rights, though revisions of the perspectives are being noted in recent times (see Singh 2008). The firms, even the government, in response to globalisation adopt labour flexibility measures like employment of contract labour and outsourcing to reduce operating costs and concentrate on core competencies. Unemployment and unorganised employment increase in the wake of these economic forces. The combined effects of these measures on the collective institutions could be adverse for two reasons: namely, the membership count could see diminution and their reduced ability to use strikes as a pressure instrument in collective bargaining. Hence organised work stoppages are expected to show a decline in the post-globalisation period. These processes assume a vicious circle in that as unions are weak they cannot strike and, even if they did, the probability of their success is low and because they cannot conduct successful strikes workers, they will not invest in unions via membership and so on. Further by depleting union resources (as organised sector employment, who are better placed in terms of dues-paying ability, is systematically reduced) it affects the ability of the trade unions to organise the unorganised labour. While these portray a bleak picture of collective institutions, several

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factors and forces have contributed ironically to the resurgence in the working-class movement. We will deal with them appropriately in the text that follows.

The two organisational models During the command and closed economy unionism there did operate a “pyramid” model of trade union coverage (see Figure 3.1). That is, as one moved up the level of forms of securities and visibility, the trade union coverage increased and these workers small in numbers working in the organised sector constituted easy target for union organising. Trade union organisations as noted earlier circulated in this narrow whirlpool. The huge mass of people in the primary sector (excluding plantations, coal mining), construction, informal segment of manufacturing, the service sector excluding government financial institutions and so on have been untouched largely during the pre-globalisation period. This is not to point accusing fingers at the conventional trade unions as they were battling to set their feet in the adversarial contexts and given the limited resources at their command (note that the financial and people resources of trade unions in India have been lower as compared to other countries) and the growing political splintering,

ea

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Figure 3.1 The pyramid model of disintegration Source: Author.

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retaining organisational spaces (forget expanding) became more important than “organising the spaces”. As noted earlier, the conventional trade union movement has secured many a gain and these would read impressive in any context in the world. If globalisation has posed new challenges, the command and closed economy posed challenges of a different kind like constraints of economic planning model, exogenous shocks (like oil prices), authoritarian state (several external emergencies and an internal emergency were declared during this period) and so on.

The cross model The market logic In the post-globalisation period, the catchword is “coordination and co-operation” and the organisational form is “networking”. The organisations cannot hope to operate individually and in isolation and much worse work in conflict. Organisational politics followed during the command and closed economy cannot be pursued in the liberalised economy. Now the firms are powerful because of the ability to relocate, restructure and expand (in several ways in the product range and diversity). Competitive markets punish both employers and trade unions if they did not respect the laws of the competition and reduce the rents to be shared thanks to the competitive pricing as sellers and buyers increase exponentially due to expanding markets. Then the “bargaining zone” is restricted unlike in the past. This is the benefit of market logic for organisations to coalesce instead of build organisations based on rivalries and maximise share of limited rents. The employers do not desire trade unions for managing the politics of governance of workers (as technology changes workload and machine management change and managerial prerogative needs to be maintained), the economics of production management (e.g. introduction of new technology, firm restructuring, product diversity) and the labour market aspects (e.g. the number and composition of workers, wage–productivity nexus). Note that their strategy is to be pricecompetitive via lower labour cost and not by other routes such as technology upgradation, human resources enrichment, rise in productivity via efficiency wages and so on, i.e. high road to development. In this scenario, trade unions cannot play self-destructive competitive organisational politics lest this would strengthen the market power of the employers. Secondly, the state is in pursuit of capital essentially from external sources to augment capital flows and is in competition

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with other state entities for the same. Capital uses its strongest weapon of “threat of relocation” and exerts considerable pressure on the states to adopt favourable tax, land, labour policies for its entry and retainment. Of course, we are not talking about the foreign portfolio capital which is short-termist in nature and flies at the slightest “shock” and causes volatility in the funds market, though it injects liquidity. We talk about the foreign direct productive investment which is fixated in the country of destination but could adopt various production strategies to signal withdrawal. The adoption of the “flying geese pattern” by the hierarchy of countries adds problems for international division of labour. Hence the bargaining power of capital vis-à-vis labour is stronger (see Bardhan 2001). Integration as a counter to market logic Several factors contribute to integration of workers’ organisations on both the horizontal and the vertical axes. One, the very techno-infra factors that have aided globalisation of production and mobility of capital could be used by workers’ organisations to connect both within and without. Two, the decline in the organised sector employment significantly affected the conventional trade unions to expand its base. The membership is a primary source of strength for a worker organisation and depletion means a search of alternatives. Three, the tremendous rise in vulnerable employment, especially the contract labour employment, reflects the pressures on and paradoxes in work organisation, and trade unions and permanent workers have realised that there is no “permanent insider” – the biggest lesson of globalisation. Four, the informal sector, as said earlier, could effectively undermine the resources of conventional trade unions and provide a bundle of alternative sites of production which are wide and deep beyond the reach of trade unions. Put simply, informal economy hurts the bargaining power of trade unions in the formal sector. The reverse channel of low wage transmission, contrary to the conventional labour market model, means union coverage should be equal to production coverage, a very hard and mighty ask! Five, the state retrenchment and withdrawal from the IRS and judicial reverse activism (as opposed to social justice paradigm it followed during the command economy largely) effectively have thrown the trade unions to the vultures of market forces. Survival game has begun. Six, the Janus-faced image of the state has created more distrust than assurances to the working class, including the huge unorganised workers. These have galvanised the protest movement. Seven, the globalisation politics penetrate the

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political parties’ agenda and orientation such that even the Left parties effect on varying scales labour law reforms and adopt pro-capital approaches in designing labour and business policies which expose the contradictions in the political unionism model. The conventional trade unions have begun to advance their industrial interests in preference to political dictates of the respective parties to which they are formally or non-informally attached. All these have brought the trade unions often conflicting in the past on a same platform to forge coordinated and mass politics of protests. Eight, the globalisation effects stray beyond the factory gates and the supply chains drive down to the lower levels unimagined. These mean that the emerging issues do not strictly belong to pure industrial relations issues (e.g. wages, working conditions) and the effects affect multiple stakeholders whose common identity is that they are victims of the globalisation politics; further, workers wear different hats and are often pushed to shift from identities (e.g. a worker to unemployed or housewife to a worker or students to combo-identity of worker-cum-students). The depth and width of production and increasing informalisation of work mean that workers’ organisations have lost the economies of organisation of workers within the bounds of a large factory or industry location. As a result the trade unions and other workers’ organisations need to stitch together a diverse and inclusive strategy to organise these workers and often seek the assistance of social institutions like the church, local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and so on (see for e.g. Gothoskar 2005). Nine, battling against the MNCs requires huge energies and grand vision, and these mean that a trade union in a firm need to coalesce with global union federations (GUFs) which is an amalgam of trade unions operating on a global scale. The left end of the spectrum in Figure 3.2 could be simple ad hoc coordinating forum of trade unions. As we travel from the left towards the right, the encompassingness and the scope and permanency of horizontal coordination and integration intensify. Horizontal integration could also mean embrace of larger social and political issues such as democracy, human rights, clean environment and equality in society. This requires that unions build alliances with environmental, women’s, peace and human rights movements, which help to broaden the appeal of unionism and increase the number of allies of unions. There is a classic conflict that arises in horizontal consolidation in that trade unions, the classic and historical organisation, do not easily and readily endorse the “class and representative character” of the NGOs for three major reasons: namely unlike the trade unions, the NGOs are not mostly membership-based and democratically

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functioning organisations, their funding is not transparent and their ability and character to espouse the cause of the working class is suspect (see Shyam Sundar 2007). However, there is much more than distrust and mutual disapproval between the two forms of organisations, as the NGOs have their spaces especially in the informal economy (see www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/–ed_dialogue/–actrav/documents/ publication/wcms_111430.pdf, accessed 29 January 2016). Potential conflicts arise as the organisations seek to subordinate political interests and put industrial interests on top; there could be political pressure from the ruling and coalition parties to moderate their protest politics. Secondly, there is a problem inherent in the large social alliances model – the multiple identities can forge a coalition only up to a certain point beyond which the fundamental interests emerge upfront which could be conflictual – e.g. say workers’ bodies coordinating with consumers to fight inflation where a wage inflation and price inflation debate could spring up or a green movement conflicting with workers’ movement as the former’s interests could basically conflict with the latter’s interest of jobs. There is also a need to consider multiplicity of trade unions and workers’ organisations (new forms of organisations) crowding the movement with possible conflicts. However, consolidation should take place across and within segments while organisational multiplicities could still exist. All these mean that from the conventional narrow and sectarian trade union movement we have to transition to mass and wider labour movement. The vanguard of this “new movement” will be the trade unions whose history, competencies, experience and its very democratic structure push them to the “forward and leader” position in the restructuring of workers’ movement. In a dualistic labour market some coordination should occur in the informal economy. For example, there could be alliances of organisations which work for workers using the natural resources like forest, water, mining and fishery. These organisations share a common fundamental issue that workers’ rights over these resources must be protected. In these ways, horizontal coordination and integration could be built. These constitute on the horizontal terrain and we now move to the vertical terrain (see Figure 3.2). Two forces have redefined the production geography in the era of globalisation. One, production, thanks to technological innovations, could be outsourced to multiple locations and the head firm could actually produce and sell a product without even owning a machine and a production premise. Two, outsourcing of production again

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GUFs

Coordination, Integration and Unification

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Micro Units, HBW

Figure 3.2 The “cross” model of integration Source: Author. Note: GUFs – Global Union Federations; NFs – National Federations; HBW – Home-based workers.

means creating a supply chain networks which are wider across the globe and deeper within a country – for example, a garment production outsourced to, say, India could further be allocated to contractors and a chain of subcontractors such that each minor producer is not aware of for whom the product, say, a button or a hook, is being manufactured. For two reasons labour is on a weak platform in the global arrangement of production and the entry of MNCs in a big way. One, the supply chain operations are deep and beyond the coverage of formal union coverage and public sector inspection system.

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Two, MNCs are arguably equipped with much stronger resources that make them more powerful vis-à-vis [local] trade union organisations even if political unions. There is a need to build interfaces and co-operation among the players on the workers’ side. There could be organisational resources from the demand and the supply side. On the demand side, i.e. trade unions operating at the MNCs’ local units could seek assistance from the GUFs operating in that sector as GUFs have regional and national structures and branches. The impulse is to strengthen the bargaining power of trade unions in terms of resources such as information, money, strategists and organising infrastructure, and intervention by the GUFs can help in this process. On the supply side, the GUFs even have to participate in starting trade union organisations in the MNCs that have union avoidance and no collective bargaining policy and strategy (see for e.g. Nestle India story at www.iuf.org/nestle/iuf_asiapacific/, accessed 25 January 2016). The decline in union membership globally affected the global union federations both politically and financially (see Garver et al. 2007). Then the GUFs to protect interests of workers in both the North and the South need to adopt a “pragmatic programme of organisation” to intervene in the unions and bargaining issues in developing and emerging countries. The case for global unionism is clear and simple. The bargaining power of national-oriented unions has been eroded because capital has become global and, as a response to this trend, labour unions need to globalise – “if business and capital go global, then government and labour should follow suit” (Breintenfellner 1997). It is important to relate to the “branding” of GUFs as “global unions” by the ITUC (www.ituc–csi.org/global–unions, 122, accessed 25 January 2016). Global unions are “international trade union organisations working together with a shared commitment to the ideals and principles of the trade union movement” (ibid.). While there have been encouraging signs on the global solidarity front (see Breintenfellner 1997; Hodkinson 2005, for details of positive action), there are several tricky issues. The basic issue that has been at the heart of international solidarity is whether there will be genuine solidarity between the unions in rich and poor countries or if it will be characterised by “dependence” (Gumbrell-McCormick 2004). The divide between the North and the South within the ITUC on the issue of “social clause” (and the problem of global labour arbitrage) or export subsidies (see ITUC online for further information on this) is well known. The international union movement is divided between the

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pluralistic Anglo-Saxon model of industrial relations espoused by the ITUC (see for e.g. Greenfield 1998; Gumbrell-McCormick 2004) and the class conflict model followed by the WFTU (see www.wftucentral. org/history/, accessed 3 February 2016). At the bottom of the vertical of the cross, the micro units and the lowest part of the supply chain exist and, as we move upwards, the integration levels increase and at the peak of the vertical of the cross lie the GUFs who are presently sector-wise. GUFs are a part of international trade union organisations like ITUC. There is also the competing Left international trade union like WFTU. The horizontal integration and coordination at the vertical peak will take care of the global integration, and this could not have come in the absence of globalisation – note one of the mandates of the Council of Global Unions is “consider political and strategic initiatives and actions to confront global forces that work against the interests of working people and families” (www.global–unions.org/IMG/pdf/cgu– agreement.en.pdf, accessed 25 January 2016). The global networks like WIEGO and StreetNet, on the other hand, deal with the rise of informality through their networks. In other words, on both fronts (i.e. formal and informal) global organisations have come into existence primarily as a result of the dynamics of globalisation to handle the issues in a global manner. In other words we need to move away from the “pyramid” model of organisational coverage to the “cross model” of unionism in order to combat the adverse forces unleashed by globalisation dynamics. The “cross” model of working-class movement needs to be complemented by globalisation of the trade union movement. Implications of the “cross model” of organisation Several important implications emerge out of the new model of organising. We will briefly advert to them for want of space (see Shyam Sundar 2015a, 2016 for greater details). One, national boundaries vanish and global players enter the organising and protest realms. Two, several forms of organisations, conventional (e.g. under the Trade Unions Act, 1926), new forms of organisations (e.g. trade unions– cum-co-operatives/information and employment agencies) and nonunion organisations (e.g. labour NGOs registered under the Societies Act, 1860) and so on. Three, informal workers’ movement comprise diversities and constitute a continuum and overlap and intermingle with the so-called formal sector – in other words, the segmentation in

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fact gets erased and identities change fast, and it is possible multiple identities could emerge (e.g. a worker and a supplier to the same factory). Four, labour regulatory instruments expand numerously from the simple contract of employment to international instruments, and the institutions range from a sole proprietary or a home-based worker to an MNC or an international organisation. Informational spaces of working-class movement Organising spaces include web portals, social media and information conduits. The communication revolution has been created and capitalised on by capital to organise production even at will. But the same medium offers rich “potential” as a site of protest and organising for trade unions. Trade unions in the West have made significant progress, while those in India are yet to launch on this medium significantly. Trade unions are “helped by the improved means of communications that are created by modern industry and that place the workers of different localities in contact with each other” (Karl Marx quoted in Lee 2000). Further, the strategy of trade unions in the era of intensified globalisation is to match the spread of firms by globalizing the trade union movement. The fantastic changes in the transport, information and communication technologies that promoted international divisions of labour also aided the trade unions in (a) building networks and alliances, (b) conducting global as well as local struggles and coordinate them, (c) disseminating information in real time and (d) building solidarity. Communication revolution enables transmit of information on struggles in real time across the globe and solidarity is mobilised not only physically but also electronically, for example, online campaign through emails, jamming the website of the targeted employers, naming and shaming the “dirty employers” and email petition mobilisation. Unions have used the internet in various ways, namely pursuit of industrial disputes (e.g. “cyber strike” which means using the Internet to send in protest messages and symbols to the management of the protest site, its subsidiaries in every country, its shareholders, retailers and distributors) (Breintenfellner 1997; Moody 1997), pressuring the government to respect human and labour rights and often urging release of trade union and activist leaders, urging the management to negotiate with independent and democratic workers’ unions, pressuring the big corporations to implement the labour standards and so on.

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Globalisation dynamics: towards a cross model of workers’ movement in India Restructuring and reorientation of conventional trade union movement: the horizontal Thanks to the very forces of globalisation such as the revolutions in communication and technology, globalisation of capital (in the form of global supply chain), the employer and the state offensives against the working class and so on, three counter effects have taken place to strengthen the collective institutions and show the potential for corrective action. One, the mainstream trade unions and parallel forms of organisations have increasingly organised the informal workers like the contract workers, the self-employed, street vendors, waste pickers and so on. Two, an institutional and struggle interface has emerged between the informal workers’ organisations and the global trade unions and workers’ networks (e.g. domestic workers, street vendors, contract workers). Three, owing to the globalisation of workers’ movement, there is increasing pressure from protest groups and trade unions to use global instruments like ILO Conventions, global framework agreements and national policies (GFAs), laws and regulations at the national level to institutionalise employment relations and labour rights in India for both the organised and the unorganised workers. The mainstream trade unions have adopted five strategies to organise and address the concerns of informal workers. One, they have organised informal economy workers such as Hamals, hawkers, maidservants and bullock cart drivers at various places under their banner (see Ahn 2007 for a number of instances). Two, they have taken up issues and demands of informal economy workers in their public agitations like All-India strikes, marches to Parliament, and petitions. For example, they agitated for the enactment of a comprehensive legislation for social security for unorganised sector workers, legal right to work and so on. Three, they have been principally demanding some form of regularisation of employment of informal-type workers like contract and casual workers. Four, they have attempted to build an encompassing organisation to wage battles on the policy front. The National Platform for Mass Organisations (NPMO) was formed in the 1990s, and it comprises organisations of workers in both organised and unorganised sector, agricultural sector and so on. This has been defunct for some time and needs to be revived. Five, they have constantly revised the struggle agenda, often broadening it to reflect the larger canvas of the movement.

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The difficulties in organising the workers in the unorganised sector are radically different from those discussed earlier in the context of the organised sector workers. There are several challenges in organising the workers in the unorganised sector. One, for most of the workers in this sector no employer–employee relationship exists. Two, most of the labour laws are founded on the existence of employer–employee relationship and are restricted to establishments employing at least ten workers; hence most labour laws do not apply to them. Often labour laws work as a basis or even a cover for organising workers, which facility does not exist for many of them. Three, the workers work at various sites, home, streets, different construction sites, small sheds, households and so on, and the conventional organising site, namely the workplace, does not exist in the case of many of these workers. Four, even if laws or sections of laws are applicable to them, the enforcement is often poor owing to poor visibility and scattered existence of these workers, not to mention the hostility of the employers/contractors. Five, organising women workers needs to consider the social barriers, the level of literacy and education of the target group, the unhelpful attitude of the contractors, middlemen involved and other stakeholders such as consumers, households, police and local authorities. This is reflected in the official and reliable statistics on the central trade union organisations (CTUOs), though dated. The verified membership of the CTUOs increased from 12.27 million in 1989 to 24.88 million in 2002. This was mainly because of the increase in the membership of unorganised sector workers who constituted 39.4 per cent of the total membership of CTUOs (Datt 2008). The increase in the agricultural and rural workers’ membership itself accounted for nearly 30.7 per cent of the total verified membership. The reform policies and programmes have brought together the trade unions on a common front. The unity and common front have taken some institutional forms. The more the Government of India has tried to push labour reforms in the Indian Labour Conference (ILC), the CTUOs participating in the ILC toughened their resistance to these reform initiatives and unity among them increased notwithstanding the differing political affiliations and ideological differences (see Shyam Sundar 2016 for details). The CTUOs have built a common front at the macro level for two purposes, namely to act as a “pressure group” in the pluralistic political set up to influence public policies and to conduct protest programmes including strikes (see Shyam Sundar 2015a for more details on the protest patterns). Since 2010, commendable “unified and coordinated” protest programmes of various kinds have been launched by the major CTUOs including the INTUC and

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the BMS. Though the BMS withdrew from the national strike held on 2 September 2015 on the basis of assurances given by the NDA government (see Shyam Sundar 2015c), persistence by the NDA government of core labour law reforms of hire and fire has toughened up the stance of BMS (see Jha 2016). The conduct of sixteen countrywide strikes and other forms of struggle at all levels (see Shyam Sundar 2015a, 2015b for more details on the structure of protests) has not only successfully challenged the reform agenda of the government but also institutionalised the protest politics. The workers’ movement has progressed from the politics of resistance to politics of protest to politics of defining counter agenda. These trends are reflected in the “politics of disengagement” waged by the conventionally affiliated trade union organisations by pursuing the “industrial interests” in marked preference to “political party interests”. This too has been cemented in the protest institutionalisation process. Besides the conventional union model, new forms of organisations like union-cum-co-operative institutions such as the long-established and well-known Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) and Kagadkach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat (union of rag-pickers and waste collectors) in Pune, new informal sector union networks like the National Alliance of Street Vendors in India, workers’ co-operatives, self-help groups (e.g. Building and Woodworkers International, Delhi) and so on have emerged in organising particular groups of unorganised workers (Bhowmik 2008; Ahn 2007; http://swachcoop.com/ about–swachpune.html, accessed 14 August 2012). Organisations have sought to cover several sections of the informal economy, from agricultural workers to the home-based workers, the details of which cannot be presented here for want of space (the contributions in this volume attest to such diversity). More remarkable than the organisational restructuring is the widening of the protest agenda. From the conventional micro-level and conventional issues of economic and conditions of work, the protest movement enlarged its vision to include economic issues such as efficiency of public distribution system, inflation, external economic policies, broader labour market issues like the right to work, formalising informality, wider industrial and employment relations issues like social security for the unorganised sector, fundamental governance issues like universal coverage of labour laws (see Shyam Sundar 2015a, 2016 for details of protest issues and issues for social dialogue). It is reflective of transition from being the “trade union movement” to the “working-class movement” which articulates multiple voices and represent diverse interests and seek to redefine not only the industrial

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relations framework but also the economic and governance framework by broadening the issues. This is also indicative of a kind of neo-social movement unionism that is emerging in the sense that it is rooted in the understanding of the realities of spillover and diffusion of workers’ interests and politics into political and social realms. Reflecting the peculiarities of the informal sector is the emergence of social and political bargaining in it in place of conventional collective bargaining which operates in the highly restrictive employment contract framework in the formal sector (see Shyam Sundar 2016). This is especially true of informal economy. The absence of clear employer–employee relations and the involvement of multiple actors in the organisation and conduct of work and business mean more bargaining points, stakeholders and diverse interests, such as consumers, local people, pedestrians, municipality, residents. The methods as well as the issues also become diverse as a result (see Figure 3.3).

Employer-Employee Relationship

WORKER

INDUSTRY

Contract Casual Trainees Fixed Term Etc.

Apparel Textiles Micro Unity Agriculture

No Employer-Employee Relationship

ESTABLISHMENT NonDirectory Establishments (NDE)

DEMANDS/ISSUES

METHODS

• Regular work/Permanency • Social Security • FoA/CB Rights • Conditions of Work

• Strikes/Struggles • Litigation • Negotiation • Political Action

INSTITUTIONS • Trade Union/Collective Bargaining • Laws/Labour Administration • ILO Conventions

Domestic Work, etc.

OAE

Self Employed, Street Vending, etc.

DEMANDS/ISSUES

METHODS

• Visibility • Identity • Spatial Rights • Securities • Right to Work

• Advocacy • Litigation • Negotiation • Lobbying • Struggle • Media

INSTITUTIONS • Social Bargaining • Trade Unions • Workers’ Organisations • New Laws/Administration/ Police/Civic Bodies • Citizen Groups • Judiciary • ILO Conventions

Figure. 3.3 Informal workers’ movement: a continuum and structure Source: Author. Notes: NDE – An establishment with hired worker employing fewer than six persons daily on a fairly regular basis. OAE – An establishment without any hired worker on a fairly regular basis is termed as an own-account establishment. It is normally run by members of the household. FoA/CB – Freedom of association and collective bargaining.

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Coordination on the vertical: role of global unions in establishing union and bargaining rights and improving wages and service conditions in India Two sorts of action have unfolded to establish good governance of industrial relations and counter the power of the MNCs. Trade unions and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have emerged with varying strategies (boycotts, engagement with company through organisation and negotiation, etc.) to counter the power of MNCs. In order to promote good governance various international instruments like ILO’s Core Conventions (rechristened as fundamental human rights), OECD Guidelines on Multinational Enterprises, the UN’s Global Compact and the global framework agreements (GFAs) have been used more extensively than before. A framework agreement is one that is negotiated between an MNC and a GUF concerning the international activities of the company and deal with basic union rights and substantive conditions of employment. Usually, the GFA would be valid for a tenure of two to three years and would normally cover all the subsidiaries of the company and would require the MNC to notify its subcontractors and licensees of the agreement and encourage compliance by them (see Garver et al. [undated] for a discussion of organisation drives and strategies of GUFs; Stevis 2010 for an analysis of GFA and global social dialogue). The International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations (IUF) is one of the global unions that has in recent years sought to promote unions and bargaining in MNCs in various countries through interventions at both national and the MNCs’ headquarters levels (see www.iuf.org; Claussen and Ingdal 2009). The strategy of IUF consisted in creating and strengthening union representation within global companies in food and other industries such as Nestle, Coca-Cola and Unilever in various countries, especially the developing and emerging countries. The IUF, the International Metalworkers Federation (IMF), the Building and Woodworkers International (BWI) and others have been working on establishing and protecting union and collective bargaining rights and addressing the labour market issues. The IUF has conducted several struggles and campaigns for securing and protecting union and collective bargaining rights, for example Lipton Tea Factory (Pune), Nestle India and Horlicks (see Shyam Sundar 2016 for details of these and other struggles and campaigns). It may be noted here that GFAs have very little presence in India. But there is tremendous scope for building vertical solidarity through the

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use of GFA. There is a dire need for “educating” the management and the trade unions by the global organisations. The GFAs could provide the global framework for ensuring trade union and collective bargaining rights at the plant level, i.e. the global to local, the labour rights would flow in. In this sense, the widening of global social dialogue assumes importance. The workers’ organisations in India for self-employed workers, home-based workers, domestic workers, waste collection workers and so on are part of several global networks like the WIEGO, Committee for Asian Women (CAW) and Migrant Forum for Asia. The WIEGO, the CAW, and other global network organisations along with the national-level informal economy organisations like SEWA and NASVI have pursued at the global level to (a) play an influential role in establishing ILO Conventions, (b) promote them in various countries, (c) influence policies on the unorganised sector workers at the national level and (d) help in organising the unorganised sector workers (see http://wiego.org/wiego/organisation–representation–past–activities– accomplishments, accessed on 14 March 2012, for various examples of achievements by these global networks, www.mfasia.org/india, www.idwn.info, accessed 12 March 2012).

Informational spaces of organisation in India The labour law and governance reforms strategy pursued in India has shifted from a “centralized, nation centered” strategy to “decentralised and region based” one – the unbending opposition politics, persistent and potent workers’ struggles, and other factors have rendered the efforts of the central government to initiate reforms at the central level. In fact, the Business Standard editorial recently called for a shift from the central to regional reform strategy thanks to these factors (see Business Standard 2016). The real strategic reasons for decentralisation reforms are to localise protests (if any), weaken workers’ solidarity, “informational failures” (national level information is more visible than regional ones) and so on. The government can adopt the “notification route” which even stakeholders would not be aware of (e.g. Sharma 2016). Given the vast size of the country and in the absence of connecting information networks between the regional-level trade unions, the information travel is slow and even absent. The workers’ movement needs to use web resources to create a centralised news forum at which the various constituents could upload the relevant information and also share information. Information is an asset in the complex modern world wherein strategic and far-reaching labour

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governance reform measures are taken at the decentralised or micro levels. These would aid solidarity among and enable learning effects for trade unions. Due to the interactive nature of the web resources, strategies and knowledge could be shared and there could be learning and debating process also. Learning because there is dearth of information on the organisational strategies, labour market realities and so on. Debating because e-sites reduce costs and neutralise distance. There is a need for labour-friendly organisations like FES and global organisations and their labour units like ILO–ACTRAV and WIEGO (these as examples) that need to establish and strengthen on this front. We consider web resources as organising instruments and spaces. The existing web infrastructure in India (e.g. www.labourstart.org/india/; ntui.org.in) is poor and underutilised by major trade unions. The typical response of the trade unions in India has been that a significant proportion of the industrial and informal segments of the service sector workers are not well educated and not web literate. These no longer hold good as both technology and workers’ profile have changed. The web unionism and web struggle is a potential that Indian trade unions are yet to exploit.

Knowledge as a tool of organisation and politics of contestation It is important to understand the international organisations like the World Bank, OECD, International Institute of Management Development (IMD, Swiss-based), World Economic Forum (Swiss-based) and other organisations have developed ease of doing business, competitive index and so on to measure the extent of favourable economic, institutional, legal and labour market factors for the conduct of business and to enhance the competitiveness of firms/countries apart from initiating a large research base founded on neoclassical paradigm of competitive market economy extended to labour market and industrial relations also (see Shyam Sundar 2003 for a good survey of these exercises). These exercises and research base largely supporting the free market perspective have had considerable impact on the employers (as a lobby group), the state (bureaucracy and the executive), the media and the middle-class thinking (e.g. the study of Fallon and Lucas 1991; Besley and Burgess 2004). These have not gone uncontested. The ILO, ITUC (earlier the ICFTU) and research scholars have successfully challenged the Ease of Doing Business Exercise by the World Bank and the bank has dropped ranking the countries on the labour market rigidity measures due to the intervention of and dialogue by the ILO (e.g. ILO/GB

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2007). Research scholars in India (e.g. Bhattacharjea 2006) have systematically exposed the inadequacies and shortcomings in the major research works by, say, Besley and Burgess (2004), and these have led to the refinement of the methodologies, though. The research findings by neutral scholars, which contest the harmful impact of labour institutions like trade unions, labour laws and the labour regulatory institutions (e.g. Deshpande et al. 1998, 2004; Papola et al. 2008), have further weakened the case against labour institutions. But the ripples are largely in the academic arena and the workers’ organisations are not strong in using these counter researches to lobby against reform measures. This reflects the weak interface and exchange of information between the actors and the academics. However, there is a serious need for trade unions to try to think of ways and means of advancing the cause of labour rights without being seen as “anti-growth agents”. Trade unions wage struggles and contest authority primarily on the basis of membership strength and emotional richness underlying their class status and to a greater extent through lobbying primarily based on the political identities. However, in the post-globalisation period, the polemics surrounding the labour institutions has expanded its universe beyond the borders of the country. A new offensive backed by sophisticated and even “prior-driven” research and policy lobbying is on. Trade unions need to reckon with these new realities. Now the battle is more in the “realm of ideas”. The weapon of protests needs to be used judiciously in the sense that trade unions should mount similar counter-offensive and strike work to put extra pressure to drive home their agenda. Trade unions need to put up on the negotiating table a counter economic program that would at once ensure employment generation and decent work and growth. The “jobs-problematic” is the hardest hurdle for trade unions as they face crises in several senses here, say, by protesting against reforms which could create jobs. But trade unions must covey the message to the society that labour–management co-operation is essential even in the competitive market economy and trade unions could raise their legitimacy by willingly and on its own terms participating in the productivity-enhancing negotiations. Productivity bargaining neutralises the labour cost aspect and it is a sure way to win employers’ recognition. Again in the macro sense trade unions should welcome foreign investment so long as labour rights are protected as investment boosters are needed in the economy. Capital’s colour need not bother so long as labour rights are protected. In a sense, a different kind of “organising and coordinating agenda” needs to be derived and sustained by the workers’ movement – ideas not only

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anchor workers’ movement but become “organising spaces”. This is a kind of “modernism” that trade unions should proactively embrace without seriously hurting their ideological orientations.

Few words more: towards the utopian centralist and corporatist model of workers’ movement Typically in a chapter of this sort there cannot be conclusion. What we propose to do is to put forth an agenda for consideration by trade unions and workers’ organisations for strengthening the cross model which we advocate here. In the “cross model” we saw earlier, the bargaining power and organisational centralisation (a form of corporatist institutional governance) rise as we move from the left end of the horizontal part of the cross to the right end. The assumption is that few major organisations will reduce organisational conflicts and enhance bargaining power of them, though vertical control down the organisation becomes problematic. The ultimate form of centralisation is “monopoly organisation” model which may be unhealthy as some extent of competition works well for the organisational members. So the unification can approximate to “neo-oligopoly model”, i.e. having a few apex bodies. This might appear as a “utopian” solution given the tremendous multiplicity of workers’ organisations. However, the structure of centralisation and unification is the possible solution to combat increasing corporate restructuring and the reform-leaning state (including the judiciary). The Left-based trade unions do not differ significantly in terms of their ideology (which is basically to contest capitalism) but their politics and their anchoring in their deep-rooted history do not allow unification – all that the Left-based unions are willing to have is “issue-based unity”; the earlier merger proposal of CPI and CPI(M) did not survive even briefly. However, the coordinated unity that we witness now could not have been imaginable some five decades before! So, globalisation forces will impart a sense of fantastic dynamics and such solutions that are advocated here may not be ruled out. The point is to build counter-institutions to challenge the market hegemony. There are also problems on the other fronts. But, ideally, there could be three or four fronts, the Left (HMS to ultra-Left), the Gandhian centrist (INTUC, NLC, etc.), the Hindutva (BMS and Sena and MNS could merge), regional unions’ confederation (LPF and others) and informal workers’ confederation. Alternatively two councils could be constituted. One, the Council of Workers’ Organisations (CWO) which could comprise suitable

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representation of organisations from the aforementioned organisations which have a certain minimum membership base; two, organisations of informal workers could form Confederation of Informal Workers’ Organisation and could take on the interests of informal workers. Further, with the grand idea of the ILO to launch measures to formalise informality as the twenty-first century progresses and with struggles and reforms, structural reverses would take place in the sense that more would belong to the formal front. The low-cost globalisation model is not sustainable in the long run as there cannot be permanent low-cost entity for competition would sooner or later displace them. Low-cost model and fragmentation could also affect aggregate demand on the one hand and suffer from rigidities in the capital market as savings rate will decline as the consumption rate will be involved in “catching-up” exercises. So theoretically, informality and fragmentation cannot sustain the pressures created from the demand and the supply sides. So informality is not a sustainable model in the long run for businesses, and hence, in the long run there could be sectoral mergers in the union sector also.

References Ahn, P.-S. 2007. Organising for Decent Work in the Informal Economy: Strategies, Methods and Practices. New Delhi: Subregional Office for South Asia and Geneva: Bureau for Workers’ Activities. Bardhan, P. 2001. “Social Justice in the Global Economy”, Economic and Political Weekly, February 3(10): 467–480. Besley, T. and Burgess, R. 2004. “Can Regulation Hinder Economic Performance? Evidence from India”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 119(1): 91–134. Bhattacharjea, A. 2006. “Labour Market Regulation and Industrial Performance in India: A Critical Review of the Empirical Evidence”, Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 49(2): 211–232. Bhowmik, S. K. 2008. “Labour Organisations in the Twenty-First Century”, Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 51(4): 958–968. Breintenfellner, A. 1997. “Global Unionism: A Potential Player”, International Labour Review, 136: 531–555. Business Standard. 2016. “Reform Imperatives: Greater Focus on State-Level Reforms Needed”, Business Standard, January 24, 2016, www.businessstandard.com/article/opinion/reform-imperatives-116012400717_1.html (accessed on 25 January 2016). Claussen, J. and Ingdal, N. 2009. Organisational Review of the Development Cooperation by the Union of Education Norway, Norad Report 11/2009 Review. www.norad.no/globalassets/import-2162015-80434-am/www.

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norad.no- ny/filarkiv/vedlegg- til- publikasjoner/organisational- reviewof-the-development-cooperation-by-the-union-of-education-norway.pdf (accessed on 12 June 2012). Datt, R. 2008. “Regional and Industrial Spread of Trade Unions in India”, Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 51(4): 993–1000. Davala, S. 1996. Enterprise Unionism in India. New Delhi: Fredrich Ebert Stiftung. Deshpande, L. K., Sharma, A. N., Karan, A. K. and Sarkar, S. 2004. Liberalization and Labour: Labour Flexibility in Indian Manufacturing. New Delhi: Institute for Human Development. Deshpande, S., Standing, G. and Deshpande, L. 1998. Labour Flexibility in a Third World Metropolis. New Delhi: Commonwealth Publishers for Indian Society of Labour Economics. Fallon, P. R. and Lucas, R. 1991. “The Impact of Changes in Job Security Regulations in India and Zimbabwe”, The World Bank Economic Review, 5(3): 395–413. Garver, P., Buketov, K., Hyewon Chong and Beatrice Sosa Martinez. 2007. “Global Labor Organising in Theory and Practice”, Labor Studies Journal, 32(3): 237–256. Gothoskar, S. 2005. “New Initiatives in Organising Strategy in the Informal Economy – Case Study of Domestic Workers’ Organising – Executive Summary”, http://wiego.org/publications/Gothoskar. . .summary.PDF (accessed on 30 January 2016). Greenfield, G. 1998. “The ICFTU and the Politics of Compromise”, in Melksinswood, E., Melkins, P. and Yates, M. (eds.), Rising from the Ashes? Labor in the Age of “global” Capitalism, pp. 180–189. New York: Monthly Review Press. Gumbrell-McCormick, R. 2004. “The ICFTU and Trade Unions in the Developing Countries: Solidarity or Dependence?”, in Verma, A. and Kochan, T. (eds.), Unions in the 21st Century: An International Perspective, pp. 197–190. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hodkinson, S. 2005. “Is There a New Trade Union Internationalism? The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions’ Response to Globalisation, 1996–2002”, Labour, Capital and Society, 38: 37–65, www. labourstart.org/wrkingusa_shtml. www.uia.org/uiata/gallin.html. ILO/GB. 2007. For Debate and Guidance: Fourth Item on the Agenda, the United Nations and Reform: Developments in the Multilateral System, World Bank Doing Business Report: The Employing Workers Indicator, www.ilo.org/WCMSp5/groups/public/- ed_norm/- - relconf/documents/ meetingdocument/wcms_085125.pdf (accessed on 26 January 2016). Jha, S. 2016. “As Govt. Presses for Labour Reforms, Trade Unions Reunite”, The Hindu, January 26, 2016, www.thehindu.com/news/national/as-govtpresses-for-labour-reforms-trade-unions-reunite/article8152687.ece (accessed on 26 January 2016). Kohli, A. 1989. “Politics of Economic Liberalization in India”, World Development, 17(3): 305–328.

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Lee, E. 2000. How the Internet Is Changing Unions, www.labourstart.org/ workingusa_shtml (accessed on 26 January 2016). Moody, K. 1997. “Towards an International Social Movement Unionism”, New Left Review, 225: 52–72. Papola, T. S., Pais, J. and Sahu, P. P. 2008. Labour Regulation in Indian Industry: Towards a Rational and Equitable Framework. New Delhi: Institute for Studies for Industrial Development (ISID), European Union (EU), International Institute for Labour Studies (IILS), and Bookwell. Ramaswamy, E. A. 1984. Power and Justice: The State and Industrial Relations. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Ramaswamy, E. A. 1988. Worker Consciousness and Trade Union Response. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rudolph, L. I. and Rudolph, S. H. 1987. In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State. Bombay: Orient Longman. Sen, S. 1997. Working Class of India History of Emergence and Movement, 1830–1990. Calcutta: K. R. Bagchi & Company. Sengupta, A. K. 1993. Trends in Industrial Conflict in India, 1961–87. New Delhi: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. Sharma, G. K. 1982. Labour Movement in India (Its Past and Present from 1885 to 1980). New Delhi: Sterling Publishers. Sharma, Y. 2016. “Government to Take Executive Route for Key Labour Reforms Like Wage Rationalisation for Contract Workers”, The Economic Times, 29 January 2016, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/ policy/government-to-take-executive-route-for-key-labour-reforms-likewage- rationalisation- for- contract- workers/articleshow/50764082.cms (accessed on 29 January 2016). Shyam Sundar, K. R. 2003. “Trade Unions and New Strategies for Organising Labour: New Wine in Old Bottle?”, Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 46(2): 287–304. Shyam Sundar, K. R. 2007. “Trade Unions and Civil Society: Issues and Strategies”, Indian Journal of Industrial Relations, 42: 713–734. Shyam Sundar, K. R. 2015a. “Industrial Conflict in India in the Post–Reform Period: Who Said All Is Quite on the Industrial Front?”, Economic and Political Weekly, 50(3): 43–53. Shyam Sundar, K. R. 2015b. Industrial Relations in India – Working Towards a Possible Framework for the Future, Project Report Submitted to ILO – ACTRAV, New Delhi (July 2015). Shyam Sundar, K. R. 2015c. “Why Not Talk to the Trade Unions?”, The Business Line, 2 September 2015, http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/ opinion/why-not-talk-to-the-trade-unions/article7608274.ece (accessed on 14 June 2012). Shyam Sundar, K. R. 2016. Aspects and Dynamics of Collective Bargaining and Social Dialogue in the Post–Reform Period in India. New Delhi: Synergy Publishers. Singh, G. 2008. “Judiciary Jettisons Working Class”, Combat Law, November– December, 24–33.

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Stevis, D. 2010. International Framework Agreements and Global Social Dialogue: Parameters and Prospects, www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/@ed_ emp/documents/publication/wcms_122176.pdf (accessed on 12 June 2011). Van Wersch, H. 1992. Bombay Textile Strike, 1982–83. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Winn, J. 2014. “Labour Is Not a Commodity”, Mapping Out Assumptions on “Labour” in the Co-Operative Movement, http://josswinn.org/2014/11/27/ labour-is-not-a-commodity-mapping-out-assumptions-on-labour-in-the-cooperative-movement/ (accessed on 22 January 2016).

Part II

Responding to informality New approaches

4

Breaking the bondage Organising brick kiln workers in rural Punjab Rinju Rasaily

The brick kiln industry in North West India has received academic and public attention in the recent past for the continuity of its traditional forms of labour bondages. The intertwining issues of migration, caste, family labour including child labour and related backwardness, which add to the bondedness of the workers, make the sector more complex to understand. The importance and the requirement of this “lowcost” sector in India are directly linked to the thriving construction and infrastructural development sectors. Although informal in nature the industry is under the ambit of labour laws such as the Factories Act 1948, Payment of Gratuity Act 1972 and Employment Provident Fund 1952, to name a few.1 Nevertheless, despite being organised, this sector presents an acceptance of a system that is akin to bondage. The presence of children and older family members as workers is also paradoxical given a strong presence of trade unions in this sector. It therefore makes it a case of concern to examine how and why such systems continue to operate and see how the organising strategies of a union enable or disable organising activities. This industry has remained one of the traditional industries in Punjab in north-west India. The chapter seeks to draw attention to the section of the workforce who are landlessness, marginalised, accentuated by their social locations marked by caste identities. By contextualising in the changing mode of production relations the chapter also addresses the processes of mechanisation and regulations that are taking shape in this industry. While discussing these overarching issues, the chapter focuses to document the new forms of organising initiatives by non-conventional labour organisations such as the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) among the brick kiln workers in Punjab. It also outlines some of its specific strategies, which yielded positive results and examines whether organising workers led to any qualitative changes in labour relations and conditions of work.

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Factoring production: technology, capital and labour India accounts for 10 per cent of global world production of clay fire bricks in the world (Maithe 2013). It is the second-largest producer after China. India produces 150–200 billion bricks and consumes about 25 million tonnes of coal annually and employs about 10 million workers.2 Despite being one of the oldest industries and being credited for engaging maximum numbers of migrant workers after construction sector (Gupta 2003), this industry continues to function as an informal industry (Santha and Athena 2013; Bandyopadhyay and Sen 2014). The majority of the brick kilns in India are in northern and eastern parts. There are three categories of brick kiln manufacturers.3 All India there are about 140,000 brick kilns with approximately 13 million workers directly and indirectly dependent on this industry4 who contribute to global production. Despite the magnitude of the industry’s economic contribution; the entrepreneurs argue that this industry because of its low capital base, unlike cement, iron ore, glass, automobile and electrical, does not receive favourable policies/subsidies from the government. Because of the rurality of this sector with most of the employers “traditionally comprising of the non-literate section” and existence of smaller localised groups, there is an absence of “visible lobbying” at the policy level.5 It is important to understand where the brick kiln sector is situated in the present context of the globalised economy. Along with this, it is pertinent to reflect why despite escalating demand this sector is not modernised. One of the tangible questions that arise is, why is this industry not modern? What is it that deters the employers/owners of the brick kiln sector from modernisation? Why is this industry not modern? The Indian brick kiln industry practises the traditional methods of firing for the production of bricks, i.e. the clamps, movable chimney bull trench kilns (MCBTK), or fixed chimney bull trench kilns (FCBTK)6 unlike the developed nations wherein an automated extrusive method is used for firing in a continuous kiln (Development Alternatives 2012). Table 4.1 reflects the quantum produced under each type of brick kiln technologies used across the different regions in India. As Maithe’s (2013) report discusses, the Gangetic plain because of its rich alluvial soil is considered good for brick making unlike the peninsular soils that comprise of regur (black cotton), red or lateritic soils that are difficult for brick making. Therefore FCBTK is used for

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Table 4.1 Brick kiln technologies currently prevalent in India Kiln type

Regional spread

Approximate contribution in brick kiln production (%)

Clamps

Central, west and southern India

25

Fixed chimney BTK

Indo-Gangetic plains (north and east India) and several clusters in south and west India

70

Zig-zag

West Bengal and a few clusters in north India

3–4

VSBK (vertical shaft brick kiln)

Central and east India

1

Source: Maithe (2013: 9).

large-scale production under the scattered small-scale production with the use of the open clamps in the latter. Attempts to mechanise this sector, especially in the southern states of Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, began in 2004 by importing machines from Vietnam, Holland and Germany. This has created some degrees of discomfort especially among the small-scale brick kiln manufacturers. Had brick kilns been established in the Special Economic Zones (SEZs) or industrial zones, mechanisation would have been particularly easier because of access to infrastructural facilities. Significant reasons that restrict modernisation as argued by Ghosh (2004) continue to remain the same for this sector. First, the absence of basic infrastructural facilities such as constant power supply; second, requirement of skilled labour (that would invariably lead to increase in cost of production) and third, the location of these industries (rural and semi-rural) provides access to cheap family labour. These factors have largely kept the operations in the brick kiln industry traditional and less mechanised. Discussions with employers/owners of brick kilns units in Amritsar strongly corroborate this argument. Availability of cheap labour is the key reason that deters manufacturers from mechanisation that correspondingly works in favour of the profitable industry. The Indian brick kiln sector according to the manufacturers and recent studies reflects the competition from a European multinational company named Wienerberger. This company has a fully automated plant established in Karnataka, having a capacity of 70 million brick

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units per annum. Given the absence of policies to safeguard the unorganised brick kiln sector, there is scepticism among the manufacturers on the future of this industry. The industry being mainly unorganised, only a small number of units are registered under the Department of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME). Given this status quo, measures as adopted by the employers towards the workers seem negligible and unimportant as social relations of production are largely premised on debt bondage wherein poverty or economic deprivation becomes a significant determining factor for employment. The subsequent section on work processes and reasons for engagement in these processes reflects significant factors embedded in social and economic realities of deprivation and marginalisation. Production processes Employment in the brick kiln sector is seasonal7 and migratory in nature usually dictated by thekedars/jamadars (contractors/jobbers/ middlemen). The composition of labour in this industry is visible by its characteristic social division of labour in its production processes. Processes like moulding, baking, loading, levelling, stacking and grading of bricks are undertaken by a set of workers with a nomenclature attached to each process. For instance, the patheras as moulders are engaged in preparing the pits wherein usually family labour is engaged. The loaders who transport the dried kutcha bricks to the kiln usually in carts are called the prajapatis or bharaiwalas or kumhars. The beldars or stackers stack the bricks in the kiln for firing followed by the rapaswale who are engaged in levelling the bricks with earth and make the kiln ready for the burning process to begin. The jalaiwala, or fireman, fires the kiln and keep a watch on the way the bricks are baked. In this process, usually the male workers are engaged. The nikasiwalas are the unloaders who take out the bricks from the kilns, and stack the bricks according to their grade. The munshis maintain the records with respect to the amount of bricks produced and its commensurate wages, advances/loans taken and so on and so forth. Brick kiln owners prefer to hire people who are not from the local areas as munshis in order to avoid disputes and hurdles in account maintenance. The last in this process are the loaders who carry the bricks directly to the markets or reach out to respective clients. Apart from the munshis, who are given a consolidated salary; all the categories of labour are paid at the rate of 1,000 bricks (ibid.). The tendency to produce faster and greater quantum and therefore enhance income, coupled with factors

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of poor household income and literacy levels and limited opportunities of alternative employment, compel women and children, even if the latter are enrolled in schools, to contribute to labour. It is this category of labour whose vulnerabilities get further accentuated due to multiple identities of marginalisation as the subsequent sections discuss. Social dimensions to labour Therefore, it is critical to highlight in this chapter the social dimensions of labour, more so for the case of Punjab. Jan Breman’s (2007, 2010) work on the informal sector workers in Gujarat in particular problematised “neo-bondage” as different from the earlier forms of bondage. Neo-bondage is less personalised, of shorter duration, more contractual and monetised. He argues that there is less similarity from the earlier forms of bondage, i.e. the halipratha where bondage was either for life or may have lasted for generations and service was taken of the entire family. In the case of the brick kiln workers, he notes, bondage was seasonal in nature and the chances of “escaping” bondage is higher. Prevalence of such forms of bondage accentuates the conditions of work further when questions of where they are located in the hierarchies of caste and land ownership arise. John’s (2014) paper based upon fieldwork among the brick kiln workers in the districts of Ferozpur, Amritsar and Taran Taran of Punjab elucidates that almost 86 per cent were local labour, of which 99.4 per cent were Dalits engaged in the work of the patheris. Moreover, landlessness was found to be more pronounced among the Dalits in this study. And the size of land was remarkably less (less than 0.5 acres) of those who possessed land. This study also reiterated the fact that most of the Dalit workers prefer non-farm work or staying without work during the off-season to avoid getting stigmatised that come attached with agrarian work.8 As noted by Kainth (2010), patheras mostly hail from UP and Chhattisgarh; nikasiwalas from Rajasthan and jalaiwalas from Bihar and 81.5 per cent of the respondents from the Scheduled Castes (see Kainth 2010: 7 and 13). Mazhabis and Ranghreta Dalits of Punjab have a history of strong involvement in the Sikh movement. But their presence is poorly felt in recent times.9 Factoring bondage The continuation of debt bondage in contemporary India through the system of taking advance payment prior to off-season is high among the brick kiln workers.10 Importantly, farm work in the rural sector

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has shifted from its earlier traditional forms (jajmani system) to the patron–client relationship to a system of contractual employment. Such form of contractual employment as argued by Beteille was a preferred arrangement by the landed as it lessened the economic burden that existed earlier under the patron–client relationship in villages. Poverty is a significant denominator in the existence and practice of continued bondage, albeit in new forms of labour relations. Alienation, forces and means of production; power relations based on caste, kinship and village ties are factors embedded in perpetuating bonded labour relations, essentially debt bondage. The system of advance payments plays a crucial role in ensuring new forms of enslavement, for instance the Sumangali marriage scheme as practised in production of the garment industry in Tamil Nadu. Another important and recent dimension as postulated by Shah (2006) in her study on seasonal migration from Jharkhand to work in the brick kilns in West Bengal has been the search of “freedom of space” and not just economic compulsions. She argues that the new spurt of Puritanism within the state had allowed reproduction of the capitalist forms of exploitation. This could be one of the important reasons for migration that permeates among the youth in particular in search for such spaces. The continued existence of neo-bondage in a highly globalised economy deserves attention particularly by both conventional and non-conventional labour organisations towards enhancing the collective bargaining processes. A specific examination on unionisation and the functioning of BMS and its activities are analysed with the framework of multiple vulnerabilities in understanding mobilisation and collectivisation.

State, collective bargaining and unionisation With the enactment of the Trade Union Act in 1926, labour organisations that represented workers’ concerns began to be gradually institutionalised. At present there are twelve central trade unions11 that are recognised by the Government of India. And according to the Labour Bureau (2010), in Punjab there are 2,656 registered workers’ unions at the state level and two central trade unions and 56 employers’ union.12 The brick kiln industry is considered to be the second-largest employment provider after the railways. According to Labour Bureau (2002), the share of five central trade unions all India having brick kiln workers as members is 4,57,718 (1.8%) workers (Dutt 2008), out of which BMS has 87,961 (19.2%) workers as members, CITU with 68,413 (14.9%); AITUC with 22,294 (4.9%), HMS with 14,000 (0.3%) and

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INTUC with 6,617 (1.5%) workers as members respectively. Dutt’s paper essentially critiques CITU’s declining presence among the working class especially post-reforms and BMS emerging as the leading union all India. However, despite the role of such conventional trade unions in the labour movement, this chapter seeks to document Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh’s role in new forms of organising initiatives among the brick kiln workers. Various government reports and independent studies have documented the working conditions of the brick kiln workers (Labour Bureau 1983, 1984; Ghosh 2004; Shah 2006). Studies undertaken by the Labour Bureau (1983, 1984) under Ministry of Labour and Employment noted that the only dangerous occupation was that of the jalaiwalas (firemen) working in the brick kilns who are exposed to excessive heat stress and may face hazard with the collapse of moulded brick stacks. These reports revealed that workers were not organised as there was no reporting of trade union membership from the sample survey conducted by Labour Bureau during the early 1980s. Giving cash amount (ranging from Rs 50 to 100) to workers instead of bonus or any form of concession was practised. Only 2 per cent of workers (mainly clerical/watchmen and ward staff) were members of Provident Fund. Likewise only 2 per cent were covered under the Employees’ Family Pension Scheme. Also there was no claimant for maternity benefits. One of the main reasons for such low utilisation rate was because of heavy labour turnover given the seasonal nature of the industry. According to these reports, exposures to open air and work being seasonal, the inability to acclimatise resulted in sickness. The report (Labour Bureau 1983), however, notes that there was no improvement in basic amenities such as toilets, medical facilities, crèches and drinking water, basic prerequisite at worksites. All work and production is piece-rated which continues even till date except for select categories as mentioned earlier. How much of such work conditions have actually improved requires a critical examination at this juncture. The 2nd National Commission of Labour Inquiry Report (2002) categorically mentions the existence of a system of bondage with an engagement of working children common as a result of bondage. The Report further reiterated the need for enforcement of the Bonded Labour (Abolition) Act 1976 and also recommended (a) the establishment of a tripartite board for regulating the employment and conditions of service for brick kiln workers and (b) creation of a workers’ welfare fund board for brick kiln sector like other sectors. As the literature review resonates, wages and benefits are not adequate enough to ameliorate the conditions of these workers. Perpetuation of

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bonded family labour increases their vulnerabilities in the given mode of production relations. Workers, apart from the munshis, are paid @ 1,000 bricks produced and the value of labour power in hours per se is not calculated. The piece rate system permits the preponderance of family labour in this sector. Ghosh’s (2004) primary study in NOIDA clearly points out that the minimum number of hours required by a single worker to produce a thousand bricks was twelve hours. From the sample size, 36 per cent reported more than fourteen hours to produce a thousand bricks (Ghosh 2004). The minimum wages as fixed by the government in consultation with other stakeholders does not consider that a thousand bricks cannot be produced by a single worker in eight hours. The acceptance of family labour and the system of wage calculation, i.e. through piece rate, also determines or limits wage negotiations. The system of advance payments, as discussed earlier, ensures cyclical indebtedness. The reliance on the thekedars and jamadars for contractual work in the brick kilns lowers the bargaining capacities for better work conditions. It is in such sectors that the need for unionisation is crucial. Literature on unionisation appears to be limited in this regard. However according to a study by Kainth (2010), there are approximately two lakh brick kiln workers in 2,500 brick kilns in Punjab. The primary findings of this study too show that majority of the workers, i.e. 81.5 per cent, were Scheduled Castes. However, disaggregated data of local and migrant workers are not provided. It is important to reiterate the presence of labour from the marginalised communities from both within and outside Punjab (John and Ateeq 1998). His study conducted in the districts of Amritsar, Jalandhar and Ludhiana in Punjab had examined the participation of migrant workers in trade union activities and their awareness levels of labour legislations. In his studied sample, it was noted that 55 per cent of workers had membership under CITU, 24.4 per cent with AITUC and 20.6 per cent with BMS respectively. Complete participation of workers in the meetings of trade unions was bleak with 3.8 per cent, and with 43.5 per cent rarely participated in the meetings. Efforts at expanding the membership were less with 47.3 per cent reporting that they rarely made efforts to make new members while 32.8 per cent never made any effort. Also engaging in the process of preparing the charter of demands was low with 56.5 per cent rarely participating in this process and, moreover, 89.3 per cent never participated in union elections. Kainth’s study further reflected some level of participation in strikes/dharnas, with 26.7 per cent always took part and 55.7 per cent took part in it most of the times. And only 32.8 per cent and 42 per cent

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induced sometimes or rarely other workers to participate in strikes and dharnas. Also 88.5 per cent of the workers were regularly paying the membership fee, but there is no information on the aspect of membership renewal. This latter aspect is a crucial indicator to reflect upon the extent of organised nature of workers. Such sporadic engagements in organising activities reflect changing labour practises and decline in collective bargaining, and raise the concern of the future of trade unions as workers’ representatives in a post-globalised era. Workers, however, in this study were found to be highly satisfied with trade unions’ role in wage negotiations as compared to the dissatisfaction related to negotiations around bonus, implementation of welfare schemes, workers’ participation in management and trade unions’ role in promotion of education. Kainth’s study reveals a clear absence of welfare and other facilities and lack of awareness among workers on labour laws. It is important to mention that the organising initiatives particularly in the informal sector as noted by Ahn and Ahn (2012) vary with respect to the nature of the industry as well as the locations of labour. They mention various organising strategies as adopted to reach out to workers in the informal economy and also build trade unions. The strategies include (1) co-operative model, (2) the study circle model, (3) the SHG model, (4) the personal contact and welfare aid model, (5) the hieratical network model and (6) the friendship house model.13 The subsequent section details unionisation in Punjab with special reference to BMS in organising workers under the alternative mobilisation strategies unlike conventional trade unions. It is in this perspective that although CITU is active with a larger membership base, BMS, because of its sustainable strategies of addressing issues of income security and children’s education, calls an attention. More importantly, through this case study an attempt is made to understand, as the literature reviewed resonates, how multiple identities of workers as landless, agricultural labourers, also migrant and marginalised by caste enhance vulnerabilities. It therefore attempts at examining beyond categorisation as a class and instead seeks to recognise how such multiple identities intertwined with work informality exacerbate vulnerabilities.

Organising initiatives by BMS As highlighted earlier, preponderance of family labour gets institutionalised through forms of bondage that reinforces production relations. In such a milieu, negotiations, setting up of child labour schools with the assistance of affiliates like the BWI has proved as a landmark

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strategy for ensuring welfare of workers as well as strengthening the organisation. Building and Woodworkers International (BWI), an internationally acclaimed organisation working primarily on advocacy and campaign for workers’ rights in building and other sectors, has given consistent support to the BMS in executing some of its fieldbased activities through both trainings and project implementation. Markedly, wages in this sector, because of the initiatives of BMS under the leadership of Kulwant Singh Bawa, have always been higher than that as stipulated under the minimum wages as calculated by the Department of Labour. Apart from these interventions, setting up of child labour schools; workers’ access to Provident Fund and facilitation of registration processes under the Construction Workers’ Welfare Board are some commendable tools used for consistently organising under the BMS. Therefore the organising initiatives of the BMS could perhaps fit into the personal contact and welfare aid model given the leadership role of K. S. Bawa and the external support of international organisations like the BWI.

Primary achievements of the BMS and their tools for organising Wage negotiations Negotiations, here, are mainly bilateral, with the employers’ associations playing a central role in the case of the brick kiln industry. This industry, particularly in Punjab, is characterised by not just the workers as being organised but also the employers too are well organised that facilitate wage negotiations. In the year 1992, the BMS after negotiations under the Industrial Disputes Act 1947 with the Bricks Manufacturers Association, Amritsar, got the employers to agree to pay medical allowance to all the workers working in the brick kilns at the rate of 5 per cent of wages earned by them. From discussions with representatives of the BWI, Hind Mazdoor Sabha (HMS) and with the union organisers, wage negotiations were found to be highly effective in terms of a tangible wage increase. It is important to mention here that the HMS earlier was intensely involved in the activities of the BMS with significant contribution to efforts on gaining workers PF memberships. Now with respect to wages, Table 4.2 clearly elucidates that the percentage wage increase by the employers has been consistent to the annual increment from the government except for a remarkable increase during the year 2011 with an increase of 22.64 per cent by the employers, while it was only 8.55 per cent from the preceding year

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Table 4.2 Wages of brick kiln workers: government/negotiated by BMS Year

2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

Wages, Amritsar District, Punjab Government rates (minimum wages per 1,000 bricks) (in rupees)

Annual increase in government rate (in percent)

As negotiated with employers by BMS (in rupees)

Annual increase as negotiated with employers by BMS (in percent)

Percentage increase postnegotiation

169–03 178–78 185–41 192–82 238–95 258–27 280–35 313–01 442–55 500–00

– 5.77 3.71 3.10 23.92 8.09 8.55 11.65 41.39 12.98

198–61 210–10 217–85 226–60 278–37 300–88 369–00 440–00 599–33 665–00

– 5.79 3.69 4.01 22.85 8.09 22.64 19.24 36.21 10.96

17.50 17.52 17.50 17.52 16.50 16.50 31.62 40.57 35.43 33.00

Source: BMS office, Amritsar, compiled.

according to government rates. However, recently there has also been a drop in wages through negotiations (from 40.6 per cent in 2012 to 33 per cent in 2014) by the BMS since the past two years. Trade unions have ignored to a large extent other aspects of working conditions such as education and health in particular. Costs of healthcare have both direct and indirect financial bearings on workers that inevitably precipitate bondage. Precariousness of employment, dependency on contractors and attempts by employers to pay less than the minimum wages reiterate the fact that wages remain the central issue for collective bargaining. Primary studies have documented that workers in the brick kilns, especially as patherhars, are from the Scheduled Caste communities in Punjab and almost all are landless that reaffirms their vulnerabilities at work. They are not better than the migrant workers who in the case of Punjab, at present, are from the state of Chhattisgarh. These migrants are ready to work at extremely low wages with poor work conditions. This appears as a challenge to the trade union as the acceptability to work at low wages weakens workers’ struggle at large. However, according to the secretary, the BMS has been successful in convincing these workers not to work at low wages.14

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Child labour schools It is important to note that establishing schools did act as an entry point for the BMS in organising workers in the brick kilns. They gained immediate acceptance both by the workers’ community and by the employers. The employers preferred establishing such schools in order to evade labour inspection. Two schools were established in the year 1997 by the BMS; one at village Kulian in Amritsar district and the other in village Mankhera in Gurdaspur district. The school at Kulian village is at a primary level (grades I–V). The other is a preparatory centre (grade I–II) established in August 1997 which later got merged with a government school in the year 2006. Likewise four more preparatory centres got established. In village Umarpura in Gurdaspur district in July 1999, and by February 2000 two more preparatory schools were set up in Manochal village in Ferozpur district and in Dargabad village in Gurdaspur district. These schools later on got merged with the existing government schools. The children at these schools were monitored by a teacher-cum-mobiliser to ensure that there are no dropouts. According to BWI staff, the issue of sustainability of running such schools has resulted in its merger with the existing government schools in these districts. Another preparatory centre was set up in village Khosa Kotla in Moga district of Punjab in July 2010 to build a base for organising brick kiln workers especially among the Majbi Sikhs in this village. There are about 2,500 households predominated by the Majbi Sikhs who are engaged in work in either brick kilns or agriculture. As per the baseline survey by BWI the overall village literacy levels appear to be low with only ten to twelve families out of 250 households as educated. This village has a primary government school (up to class V). There are about 121 boys and 124 girls enrolled in this school out of approximately 300 boys and 200 girls under the age group of six to twelve living in the village.15 All these students were mainstreamed by 2013 to a government school. Such attempts are commendable on the part of BMS given the consistent support from international organisations. The extent of enrolment in such schools across gender in Kulian and Moga district of Punjab as per BMS official data of Amritsar reflects that between the years 2009 and 2014 there was a drop in male children enrolment from 67 to 54 and for female children from 57 to 56 respectively, with the total enrolment per year across gender reflecting a drop from 37 female children in 2010 to 23 in 2013 when the school was handed over to the government in April 2013. However, with an absence of

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overall data on the number of children (school-going) at the village level and a social economic profile of the area, it is difficult to interpret the effect of such schooling and specific reasons for drop in enrolment. Other strategies Some of the key organising efforts by the BMS which have gained accolade among the workers include establishing child labour schools, workers’ access to provident fund benefits and registration under the Construction Workers’ Welfare Board, GoI (Ramaswamy and Vyas 2010). Thus apart from wages, access to workers on provident fund coverage has been remarkably achieved by the BMS in Punjab with 22,175 male and 7,800 women workers who were covered under the provident fund scheme by 2014. As compared to the earlier reports of the Labour Bureau of the 1980s, implementation of the Provident Fund Act has been significant. According to the general secretary of the HMS; almost 90 per cent of the workers are covered under the Provident Fund and majority are local workers. On an average, almost thirty to forty workers in a brick kiln are covered under the Provident Fund. “Since there is a universal Provident Fund account number it is not that difficult”, he says. However the workers currently covered are largely local. As mentioned earlier the HMS has been an affiliate of the BMS. Registration activities under the Construction Workers’ Welfare Board Under some of the other key activities of the BMS, lately, registration under the Construction Workers’ Welfare Board has been considerably achieved. This appears as one of the unconventional modes of organising. Cadres from the BMS office, Amritsar, noted that about 1,500 men and 400 women brick kiln workers are registered under the Construction Workers’ Welfare Board, of which 25 per cent are migrant workers. The government of Punjab has also introduced a pension scheme for the registered workers under the Building and Other Construction Workers’ Welfare Board. There are very many schemes and benefits for workers in the brick kiln sectors. The need to work in tandem with stakeholders such as the Department of Labour, trade unions and the employers to execute these schemes and benefits is evident when these schemes do not reach out to workers as beneficiaries. This results in (a) government funds getting unutilised and (b) the employers

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are able to go scot-free given the existing regulatory mechanisms and labour relations. Workers’ representatives are crucial in such situation, as they enable to bridge such gaps and also help the industry to sustain and survive. Accessibility to provident fund An important challenge as confronted by owners is that the workers are not ready to deduct their provident fund contribution. This, however, was overcome through awareness programmes to brick kiln workers by the HMS, an affiliate of the BMS, along with BWI. Accessing provident fund and providing pension (in case of death of a worker) were some of the key areas of union intervention. The BMS has whole timers working area-wise, who are given incentives for extending membership. They also work with support from the BWI to organise the unorganised workers in Punjab. According to the staff at the BMS, the Labour Department has been co-operative enough with respect to providing access to workers on their provident fund. It was also found that employers were not reluctant to pay their contribution to the respective workers’ provident fund account. Towards this the BMS received tremendous support not just from the department of labour but also from the Office of the Provident Fund Commissioner along with one of the flag bearers of the HMS who facilitated the process with the government and trade union. The staff of the BMS, Amritsar, reported systematic recording of the provident fund accounts and ensuring fresh registration of workers under provident fund as their right. This remains one of the central activities of the BMS that has gained popularity among the workers and their families. The general Secretary of the HMS, however argues that there is no possibility of continuity of provident fund or ESCI when workers shift from one brick kiln to another. According to him the brick kiln owners do not contribute and it is the responsibility of the elected government to ensure compliance with rules. He reiterated that it is important to understand that the government is in favour of the capital. Importantly, with time he states that it is increasingly difficult to run the union and organise workers through gate meetings and so on and when employers are keen to cut the cost of production. Office bearers at the HMS feel that organising brick kiln workers is not an issue, but challenges and issues in organising activities may arise with improvement in technology. Mechanisation, as discussed earlier, and with the opening up of global market, is not only overthrowing labour but is also a threat to the small and medium entrepreneurs of

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the brick kiln industry. Two significant reasons for the industry’s survival have been (a) the availability of cheap labour and (b) continuous demand of the product in the construction sector. Amid these conflicting dialogues, the BMS has managed to gain popularity, and acceptability given its outreach in villages. As an organisation its credibility lies in its social rootedness of working with the marginalised sections of workers in the brick kiln sector and voicing their rights to dignity of labour. Participation of women Another crucial area of intervention has been to increase the participation of women workers in trade union activities in Punjab. It is a well-established fact that the opening up of the market economy has tremendously increased informalisation of labour clandestinely even in the organised sector. The participation of women in employment has been significant in the sector since its beginning. As evident from Table 4.3, women’s labour has acquired “attention” with a tangible increase in female membership from 2001 and a subsequent decline in male membership. It was BMS’s felt need to document women’s

Table 4.3 Membership of workers across gender in Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), 2000–13 Year

Male

Female

Total

2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

13,174 (77.6) 16,432 (70) 18,806 (66.6) 21,026 (64.4) 26,531 (61) 28,227 (60) 28,631 (60) 31,089 (59.1) 33,396 (58.4) 35,897 (57.7) 37,225 (42.6) 40,001 (57.4) 41,031 (57.2) 44,021 (56.6)

3,809 (22.4) 7,047 (30) 9,421 (33.4) 11,640 (35.6) 16,950 (39) 18,646 (40) 19,050 (40) 21,507 (40.9) 23,814 (41.6) 26,315 (42.3) 27,643 (57.4) 29,711 (42.6) 30,741 (42.8) 33,731 (43.4)

16,983 23,479 28,227 32,666 43,481 46,873 47,681 52,596 57,210 62,212 64,868 69,712 71,772 77,752

Source: BMS Office, Amritsar, 2014. Note: Figures in parentheses are percentages to total.

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participation in brick kiln work in order to avail social security benefits. This appears as one of the significant reasons for the increase in women’s membership. Recruiting members under this union is mainly done through the organising activities, as discussed earlier, by the local leaders of BMS. Although trade union membership among women has increased remarkably, the rate of renewal, however, has not been adequately documented by the union office given the fact that labour in the brick kilns is migratory in nature. Office bearers argue that the workers do ensure that they continue with their membership with the BMS despite moving to another brick kiln. This appears to be an important challenge for the trade union notwithstanding the fact that almost all the workers are supposedly organised. Such “declarations” on the part of the BMS were not well supported by affiliating organisations like the HMS and members of employers’ association. Nevertheless, the BMS appears to give consistent efforts in organising workers in spite of rising competition from other unions, especially CITU and AITUC. One of the major strengths of this organisation is the solidarity and cohesiveness among the cadres of this organisation and to revere Shri Balwant Bawa as their leader. The strike that was organised on wage revision was commended by the workers.16 Thus the organising strategies by BMS in Punjab with support from the HMS and the BWI in particular reflect their working with the framework of the personal contact and welfare aid model.

Challenges to the brick kiln sector and future roadmap for BMS At present, the macro challenge to the industry is twofold. One is the environmental regulation imposed under the Supreme Court order of the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) notification dated 14 September 2006 for environmental clearance and assessment (Environment Impact Assessment [EIA] notification 2006).17 For mining of minor minerals of which brick kilns are an important component, the regulations are severely flouted, at first by reducing the size of lease land, i.e. land less than five hectares to avoid maintaining the onekilometre radius of protecting the environment and ecology. The land area is usually fragmented as was pronounced to avoid clearance and regulation. It is considered to be common especially in medium and small mining. The inability to extract earth for the sustenance of this industry as per the MoEF notification has become a pressing challenge for the large segment of small- and medium-sized entrepreneurs as well

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as the workers and trade unions. This order pertaining to illegal mining has accelerated fear and discontentment among both the employers and the workers of this sector. Discussions with an ex-member of the employers’ association confirmed that this order of the Supreme Court on illegal mining with some degree of mechanisation, although sporadic, has resulted in some amount of strain on unionism and wage negotiations. The All India Bricks and Tiles Manufacturers Federation (AIBTMF) is a national federation with a strength of over 7,000 members actively engaging in lobbying with governments to protect the interests of entrepreneurs. Ex-official members, however, revealed that the order of the Supreme Court dated 27 February 2012 pertaining to illegal mining would change the landscape of this sector as thousands of workers would be jobless and would be a setback to the industry. They argue that this order is meant for mining of sand, chips, morum and other major minerals of the river, hills and mountain areas and not earth.18 And that they (entrepreneurs) are engaged in levelling the fields after extraction of the soil to be suitable for farming activities. The manufacturers, because of this Supreme Court regulation, are finding it difficult to protect their industry. This industry had also faced difficulty around 1997 with a government order that all forms of pollution or disposal have to be managed and utilised by the brick kiln industry. Given the limited technology used in this industry, according to an exofficial member of the employers’ association, most of the units were closed. It was during this period that both workers’ and employers’ association worked together to safeguard the industry. The opening up of FDI in this sector and the establishment of highly mechanised units from Europe, as has been explored in south India, is a threat for the otherwise labour-intensive industry. This has direct implications to both labour and trade union. The BMS thus in this regard would perhaps face tremendous challenges as the union does confront competition from among other conventional unions such as the CITU and the AITUC. The increasing migratory nature of workers especially from states such as Chhattisgarh and the precariousness of employment perhaps hinder workers from getting organised. Therefore sustainable and suitable inroads have to be made in order to strengthen the organising activities such as of BMS. The general secretary of the BMS stated that the union has a working cadre of thirty-five young workers including ten women across the districts of Amritsar, Taran Taran, Moga, Faridkot, Gurdaspur, Bhatinda and Ferozpur. It initially began in Amritsar and after 1995 expanded to the remaining districts. It is also not just

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geographical expansion per se, but also the need to include representation of the local-level organisers at varying capacities is necessary. The BMS must also keep mechanisms in place to ensure renewal of membership of trade unions. Involvement of women cadres in organising activities among women workers is vital. This would not just reflect on the membership output numerically, but also ensure through awareness-building programmes the importance of women having access to their earnings and other vital social security measures is reached. The organisation also needs to strengthen its leadership levels and work accordingly among its cadre for creating an able leadership. On discussing with the secretary, BMS, it sounds somewhat vague but apparent that the “boys” (ladke) would take up the movement. But it was strongly observed that unless the necessary groundwork is created among the existing organisers or staff, an acceptance of another leader to run an established trade union was unfathomable. Expansion of the activities of the BMS has to work in tandem with mechanisms for leadership trainings and providing opportunities for leadership. It was noted that most of the membership positions across various boards and committees were occupied by the secretary, BMS, himself,19 clearly reflecting an absence of representation from among the cadre. However, the organising activities and extent of negotiations particularly on minimum wages by the BMS with both the stakeholders – i.e. government and employers’ association – are commendable. However, the urgency for BMS is to strengthen its leadership rankings and expand mobilising and organising activities across Punjab. A systematic planning and execution process is required to streamline its grassroots-level activities and simultaneously build alliances with other networks and organisations. Awareness among both workers and cadres, leadership development and execution of strategies in the current changing economic relations of production in the brick kiln sector are imperative.

Concluding remarks The chapter highlights the possibilities and the need for organising the unorganised in particular wherein factors of production are intertwined with aspects of who control the resources thereby perpetuating bondage and system of institutionalised inequalities. In the present globalised era, this sector continues to be characterised by cheap labour to lower the cost of production. It is also important to note how state machineries devise mechanisms to ensure bondage through the system

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of wage payment and establishment of night schools for children of brick kiln workers who clandestinely work in these kilns under harsh working conditions to supplement family earnings. Interventions through workers’ organisations such as the BMS are required despite the changing capital-labour relations in addressing such multiple vulnerabilities of workers. At this juncture, the necessity of trade unionism and its organising activities is called for only to protect and provide the minimal possible social security measures as applicable constitutionally and legally. In this regard, the BMS has played a crucial role in sustaining the organised activities around the brick kiln workers. Their efforts to work with women and migrant labour are commendable, however sporadic in nature. What is also important to reiterate is that along with workers the employers are equally organised, thereby facilitating processes of collective bargaining rather than reducing it to individualised forms of negotiations. Stakeholders, including employers’ associations and state governments, have an important role to play in ensuring the viability of this industry and the sustainability of employment opportunities for workers. Another important question, which is central to the inhuman conditions of work and perpetuation of bond-like situations in the kilns, relates to its primitive production techniques. It is therefore equally important for the union to initiate discussions on possible new forms of production in the sector, which is not only less polluting and sustainable but frees the labourers from bondages as well. These bondages are complexly intertwined with caste, poverty and powerlessness that construct the brick kiln worker subjects at present.

Notes 1 Others include Miscellaneous Provisions Act 1925, Minimum Wages Act 1948, Employees State Insurance Act 1948, Inter-state Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act 1973, Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970, and Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act 1986; and respective rules across various states are applicable for the brick kiln workers. 2 For details, see Brick Kilns Performance Assessment (April 2012), Greentech Knowledge Solutions Pvt. Ltd, Delhi. (www.unep.org/ccac/portals/50162/ docs/brick_kilns_performance_assessment.pdf). 3 This categorisation is based on discussion with an ex-official of the Employers’ Federation of Brick kiln owners. Category A comprises of those who produce less than 30 lakh bricks per annum, category B includes those between 40 lakh and 1 crore bricks per annum and category C includes those kiln manufacturers that produce above 1 crore bricks per annum. All India there are about 65,000 brick kilns under Category A, 70,000– 72,000 under category B and about 200–250 brick kilns in category C.

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4 Based on telephonic interview with an ex-official of the employers’ association in the brick kiln sector. 5 Based on discussions with employers and members of employers’ association. Amritsar and Delhi. 6 The most common type of kiln in India is the “moving-fire continuous kiln” (Hoffman introduced in India in the 1860s) which was the use of the traditional technology of shaping bricks by hand, drying them in direct sunlight and then baking in kilns. This was commonly practiced in most of the rural areas, but due to higher investment costs it later got replaced by the Blum kiln. 7 Work in the brick kilns in Punjab is for approximately few months (March– June) with lean months from July till September followed by a lean season again during the winter months of January–February. It is during the lean five months that the workers are engaged in paddy cultivation and rickshaw pulling and take advances from contractors for sustenance during the lean season. 8 For details please see Dipankar Gupta (2005): Wither the Indian Village: Culture and Agriculture in Rural India in EPW, 19 February 2005, pp. 751–768. His paper highlights the nature of increase in non-farm employment in the rural agricultural sector in Punjab in particular and the changing nature of employment patterns by the lower caste especially among the Mazhabi Sikhs and the Adi-dharmis. 9 Raj Kumar Hans: Making Sense of a Dalit Sikh History, viewed at www.academia.edu/3183229/Making_sense_of_a_Dalit_Sikh_History (accessed on 3 September 2014). In this paper he points out experiences of harassment faced by this community from workers of the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabhandhak Committee (SGPC). 10 Personal interviews with workers, fieldwork, Amritsar, 2014. 11 They are AICCTU – All India Central Council of Trade Unions (Communist Party of India [Marxist–Leninist] Liberation); AITUC – All India Trade Union Congress (Communist Party of India), AIUTUC – All India United Trade Union Centre (Socialist Unity Centre of India [Communist], BMS – Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), INTUC – Indian National Trade Union Congress (Indian National Congress), NTUI – New Trade Union Initiative (Independent from political parties, but Left), CITU – Centre of Indian Trade Unions (Communist Party of India [Marxist]), HMS – Hind Mazdoor Sabha (socialists), LPD – Labour Progressive Federation (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam), SEWA – Self Employed Women’s Association, TUCC – Trade Union Coordination Committee (All India Forward Bloc), UTUC – United Trade Union Congress (Revolutionary Socialist Party). 12 For details, see http://labourbureau.nic.in/Trade_Unions_In_India_2010. pdf, p. 19 (accessed on 18 June 2016). 13 For further details please see Pong Sul Ahn and Yeonju Ahn (2012): Organising Experiences and Experiences among Indian Trade Unions: Concepts, Processes and Showcases, The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 55 (4): 573–594. 14 Discussions with secretary, BMS office, Amritsar. 15 Survey conducted by BMS on 7 April 2010. 16 This strike was called by the BMS on 30 May 2014 that continued for ten days. An FIR was lodged against the union committee members on

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3 June after altercations between workers and employers. This information is based on discussions with office bearers and workers at BMS office, Amritsar. 17 In the Supreme Court of India Civil Appellate Jurisdiction I.A. Nos 12–13 of 2011 in Special Leave Petition (C) No. 19629 of 2009 available at http:// envfor.nic.in/legis/eia/so1533.pdf, accessed on 18 February 2016. 18 All India Bricks and Tiles Manufacturers Federation (AIBTMF), Press Release – Bricks Are Going to Be History – Industrial Map of India Forecasts Elimination of Brick Industry. 19 The secretary is a member of all government committees such as Employees Provident Fund State Advisory Board, State Construction Workers Advisory Board, Employees State Insurance Cooperation (ESI), Central Board for Workers Education (CBWE) and also the General Secretary of State HMS, Punjab.

References Ahn, P. S. and Ahn, Y. 2012. “Organising Experiences and Experiments among Indian Trade Unions: Concepts, Processes and Showcases”, The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 55(4): 573–594. Bandyopadhyay, B. and Sen, D. 2014. “Occupational Stress among Women Moulders: A Study in Manual Brick Manufacturing Industry of West Bengal”, International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, 4: 1–7. Breman J. 2007. Labour Bondage in West India: From Past to Present. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Breman, J. 2010. “Neo-Bondage: A Fieldwork-Based Account”, International Labour and Working Class History, 78(Fall): 48–62. Brick Kilns Performance Assessment. 2012. A Roadmap for Cleaner Brick Production in India, www.gkspl.in/FinalBrick.11Aprl%20Print%20version. pdf (accessed on 4 August 2014). Development Alternatives. 2012. Status of Brick Sector in the State of Bihar – A Baseline Survey, http://www.ecobrick.in/%5C/resource_data/KBAS100124. pdf (accessed on 10th August 2014). Dutt, R. 2008. “Regional and Industrial Spread of Trade Unionism in India”, The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 51(4): 993–999, www.isleijle. org/ijle/IssuePdf/1ce750e9-38f3-498a-a3d7-a470b3bcba56.PDF (accessed on 7 August 2014). Ghosh, R. 2004. Brick Kiln Workers: A Study of Migration, Labour Process and Employment. NLI Research Studies Series No. 057/2004. Noida: V. V. Giri National Labour Institute. Gupta, J. 2003. “Informal Labour in Brick Kilns: Need for Regulation”, Economic and Political Weekly, 37(31): 3282–3292. Gupta D. 2005. “Wither the Indian Village: Culture and Agriculture in rural India”, Economy and Political Weekly, 40(8): 751–758. John, J. 2014. “Brick Kilns and Slave Labour: Observations from Punjab”, Labour File, 9(1&2): 15–26.

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John, J. and Ateeq, N. 1998. Migrant Labour in the Brick Kilns of Punjab, Working Paper, Center for Education and Communication (CEC), New Delhi, www.cec-india.org/archs/Migrant-Labour-in-the-Brick-Kiln-Labourin-Punjab-1998.pdf (accessed on 4 August 2014). Kainth, G. S. 2010. Push and Pull Factors of Migration: A Case Study of Brick Kiln Migrant Workers in Punjab, MPRA Paper No. 30036, posted 10. April 2011, http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/30036/1/MPRA_paper_30036.pdf (accessed on 4 August 2014). Labour Bureau. 1983. Survey of Working and Living Conditions of Workers in the Unorganised Sector of Industries – Brick Kiln Industry in Chandigarh Union Territory. Ministry of Labour and Employment, Government of India. Labour Bureau. 1984. Survey of Working and Living Conditions of Workers in the Unorganised Sector of Industries – Brick Kiln Industry in Punjab. Ministry of Labour and Employment, Government of India. Labour Bureau. 2002. Trade Unions in India. Chandigarh: Ministry of Labour and Employment, Government of India. Labour Bureau. 2010. Trade Unions in India. Chandigarh: Ministry of Labour and Employment, Government of India. Maithe, S. 2013. Evaluating Energy Conservation Potential of Brick Production in India: A Report Prepared for the SAARC Energy Centre, Islamabad, www.saarcenergy.org/Portals/1/India%20Report%20on%20Brick.pdf (accessed on 7 August 2014). Ramaswamy, E. A. and Vyas, M. 2010. External Evaluation of the Project on Child Labour and Union Organising in the Brick Kilns and Allied Industries in India, Draft report (unpublished). Report of the Second National Commission on Labour. 2002. Ministry of Labour and Employment. Government of India, http://www.prsindia.org/ uploads/media/1237548159/NLCII-report.pdf (accessed on 5 August 2014). Santha, R. and Athena, C. 2013. Socio-Economic Status of Brick Kiln Workers in Coimbatore, www.languageinindia.com/aug2013/athenabrickworkfinal. pdf (accessed on 5 August 2014). Second National Labour Inquiry Commission Report. 2002. Ministry of Labour and Employment. Government of India. Shah, A. 2006. “The Labour of Love: Seasonal Migration from Jharkhand to the Brick Kilns of Other States”, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 40(1): 91–118. SPARC. n.d. Child Labour in Brick Kilns Hyderabad, www.sparcpk.org/2015/ Publications/CL-Brick-Kiln-Hyderabad.pdf (accessed on 7 August 2014).

5

Safeguarding livelihoods in fisheries A complex organisational challenge Nalini Nayak

It is only over the past three decades that communities worldwide have mobilised to establish their customary rights over natural resources. Organising in the artisanal marine fishing community has been a gradual learning process that commenced in the early 1970s and what grew to be called the fishworkers’ movement in India spanned a few decades. This was a two-pronged process – one which commenced in the late 1960s in a little fishing village called Marianad just north of Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, and another which commenced in Goa at the end of the 1970s and spread all over the country. The former process had an intensive micro focus and built people’s organisations at the local level, while the latter had a macro and political focus. All through the 1980s and the 1990s, the fisher people and organisers of both these processes worked closely together until the fishworkers created their own international body in 2000. This chapter presents details of the efforts made by a group of people to help this fishing community to organise, develop their co-operative and other institutions and challenge the marginalisation they faced in the process. The learning was mutual – the organisers acquired all the knowledge about the fishery from the fishworkers, not only about fish and how they caught it but also about the ecosystem which generated this resource, about the markets and the trader chains, about the sexual division of labour in the sector, the vast traditional knowledge of this community, and how they sustained it, as also their beliefs and practices. However, what the entire process revealed lucidly was that the mantra of development and modernisation being chanted in the name of efficiency is actually a battle to dispossess people of their access to the resources. In return, the fishing community learnt from the co-operative how to organise, to obtain the right price for their fish and, most importantly, to gain visibility as workers at the national and international levels by deploying their own scientific acumen and

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skills. This is what the organised sector would call collective bargaining. Through their struggles they confronted the state – their owner/ regulator – and learnt how it operates, and how they could demand their social and political rights.

Understanding fisheries as a livelihood option The fisher people, living on the margins, were considered poor and ignorant, and because fish smelt, the fisherwomen and children particularly were marginalised in the larger society, in the markets, or in schools. Daring the wild oceans for a living was a risky job and required skills that had to be learnt from childhood. Hence, schooling was not a priority and with little or no support at home, there was a high dropout rate from school. Nevertheless, even in these communities, belonging to the Other Backward Classes (OBCs), and classified as the Mukkuvar caste, there was consciousness of class based on sub-caste divisions, as the kind of fishing distinguished one group from another, and the communities practised endogamy. Hence, the fishers who fished with hooks and lines and used the catamaran were considered to belong to lower social strata than those who used the shore seine with bigger wooden boats or vallams. Among the highly skilled catamaran fishers, who went out to sea and also used a variety of other nets, the operations were smaller, undertaken by two to four persons, generally from the same family, with the catch being divided equally and the owner of the craft and the gear retaining a share. All owners were workers. This fishery was very selective and was governed by traditional norms. The shore seines were also characterised by a sharing system but the boat and net were owned by one person and a large group of 30–60 workers, who laid and hauled in the net, got around 60 per cent of the catch earnings. The seasonality of the occupation ensured a kind of bondage in terms of labour relations. In the sphere of fishing, where the workers had to be secured for the season, they were given advances in cash, which were later deducted when catches were sold during that particular season. The flow of cash in this sector also followed a very intricate pattern. For the fishers, their entire wealth was the fish they caught. This was generally taken to the market and sold by the women, who brought money back to the family. There were variations in this pattern depending on the fishing area and the kind of nets used which determined the nature and size of the catch. Earlier, bulk landings were dried and stored while some varieties were also exported. Although this implied the presence of different players in the system, by and large,

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in most areas, traditional male merchants from within the community, offered advances to the fishers in order to guarantee that they would have access to the latter’s catch. The fishers used these advances to secure labour or create new nets, and, in return, allowed the merchant the right to auction the catch. The merchant decided the price, took his auction percentage from the sale amount and also made deductions for the amount he had advanced. When the group of organisers started work in the Marianad community, none of the fishers sold their fish directly barring a few small ones. All the women were forced to bid in the auction even for the fish caught by their husbands. They, however, managed to multiply the returns through their hard labour, walking seven to ten kilometres to and from the market, and bringing the money back home. It is for this reason that members of the community are referred to as fishworkers and not fishermen, as the fish they caught had to be converted into money through the joint effort of the husband and wife, signifying a collaborative sexual division of labour. Another unique characteristic of the fishing community was that it was matrilineal. The man came to live in the woman’s home after marriage and used the equipment belonging to his father-in-law. The equipment and the house remained in the name of the woman. Women also got a share of the catch. Things, however, changed when in the 1960s the government began to advance loans for craft and gear, and then recognised only the man as the rightful owner of the craft, thus cutting the woman off from her share to the productive assets, thereby the earnings from the catch as well.

Initial surprises and a plunge into the unknown It was clear from the start, that is around 1970, that as “educated” outsiders, the organisers had nothing to really offer these people. In fact, it was the former who had to work at ridding themselves of their prejudices and misconceptions about poverty. The young organisers were shocked to realise that the fishers had no control over their own catches and were heavily indebted to the moneylenders. They were poor not because they were unskilled and could not catch any fish but because they were exploited by the local merchants and moneylenders, and the church, in which they had implicit faith, was a silent collaborator in this exploitation.1 The church demanded a tithe equivalent to 5 per cent of the daily catch from each fisher, which was also collected by the highest bidder for tax collection, who was generally the fish merchant. Despite his crucial role in the entire enterprise, the common

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fisher had no say in the matters of the church, with the church committees comprising only the more educated and the merchants. Hence it was clear that fishers had first to be in control of their own catches and had to find a more transparent way of paying church taxes, if this is what they intended. Hence the organisers opined that the stumbling block, the merchant–moneylender combine, had to be ousted and that the best way to do this was to help the fishers create a co-operative. The village of Marianad was created by the bishop of Thiruvananthapuram, who invited volunteers to advance the “development of the fishing community”. Initially the volunteers were from abroad but in 1967, the author and one of the founders of the co-operative, a member of the fishing community, joined the group. Earlier, he had completed his studies in Antigonish where the creation of people’s cooperatives was advocated to keep the small sector alive and in control. Together with the author, having been exposed to liberation theology, a study of community organisation at the Tata Institute, and the methods of Paulo Freira,2 they were confident of helping the oppressed break out of their feudal and religious shackles, and create new social processes through participatory means. Later, others from the student movement became part of the group, including one who had studied management and still others from the fishing community. The manner in which the co-operatives first took root in the region entails a much longer story but suffice it to say that the fishers realised that they were being exploited and that there were other ways to organise and set up systems enabling them to not only establish their own identity but also to gain recognition before the government. However, what was totally unexpected was the way in which the powers that be united, at first very discreetly but later very aggressively to oppose any change in the status quo. It was a massive struggle but eventually the people prevailed and created their own co-operative. The co-operatives became the focus of collective economic organising and a means for people to know what they earned, and to challenge the government regarding their contribution to the fish earnings and production of the state. They had access to data pertaining to their craft and gear and hence could also challenge the government which did not have the same access. Consequently, they could also demand greater budget allocations for their development. Acknowledging the space of women in the community was by no means an easy task. Even though the women played such an important role in the local economy and in keeping the home fires burning, they had no decision-making right in the community affairs over which the church presided. Initially, at the time of creation of the co-operative,

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there was also no space for women as there was no feminist consciousness among the organisers. However, soon the women began to organise separately and created their own registered Mahila Samaj. One of the first big issues against which they took up cudgels was exploitation in the ration shop. They managed to get a ration shop sanctioned in their name and ran it according to the rules, but even here, they had to overcome several challenges. They realised that the entire system of public distribution was built on impractical rules that forced ration shop runners to cheat and be corrupt. Their complaints met with little success until one day the inspector took them to task for grain shortage and threatened to suspend the shop. The women immediately rang the church bell, which brought in the entire village folk and gheraoed the inspector until the higher authorities came to the spot and settled the problem after realising that the women had a rightful demand. The women let the inspector go only after they got the assurance from the officer that the shop would not be suspended and that corrective measures would be made in the system. This incident also brought the female collector to the village to meet these women. Gradually, the women started organising in neighbouring villages and took up other issues in a more collective manner. They organised against the emission of effluent from a titanium plant which was polluting the ocean. They also took up issues that they faced in the markets and other problems such as not being permitted to ride the public transport because they smelt. By 1978, they had created the Coastal Women’s Forum to fight for recognition and their rights, which was led by one of the young women activists trained in Marianad.

A macro picture of the fishery at the time The modernisation of the fishery commenced in Kerala with the IndoNorwegian Project (INP) in the early 1950s. Although the aim of this project was to improve the efficiency of the local craft, it introduced instead the trawl and purse seine gear onto small mechanised craft, goaded on by the success of shrimp exports. The INP provided infrastructural facilities like ice plants, freezing facilities and processing technology to cope with the increased production, thus helping in further developing the export industry. Data collected from Department of Fisheries and our own sources showed that within six years, the number of trawl boats increased to 700, and their share of the shrimp catch rose from nil to 90 per cent. During the period 1967–75, there was a marked rise in fish production and the peak output of 420,000 tonnes was reached in 1971, which was close to the maximum sustainable

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yield in Kerala. During this period, the share of the mechanised sector increased to 16 per cent of the state’s fish production, though 84 per cent of the fish landings were still from the traditional sector. Between 1976 and 1980, despite the continued rapid introduction of new trawlers and purse seiners, there was an all-round decline in fish production in Kerala, which fell to 332,000 tonnes (Department of Fisheries 1979). Nevertheless, the share accruing to the mechanised sector almost doubled to the disadvantage of the traditional sector. The cumulative deterioration in the socio-economic conditions of a majority of the fishermen became more apparent following an official census survey conducted by the Kerala Department of Fisheries in 1979. Only 2 per cent of the fisher folk population had reached the SSLC level in education, 48 per cent of them lived in shabby huts and very few of them had access to drinking water and sanitation (Department of Fisheries 1979). The traditional craft and gear used by the fishermen changed with time, especially in the mid-1980s, which marked the advent of motorisation and replacement of the catamaran with the plywood flat bottom boat. This again was a creative contribution of another fishworkers’ co-operative venture in Kanyakumari district, closely associated with the Marianad Cooperative Society. As the costs of fishing increased, changes took place in the gear, and fishing became more unselective. The shares to the craft and gear also increased in both the small and slightly larger artisanal sector while the share system continued. In 1981, when the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (CMFRI) made its first comprehensive census of six major fishing states in the country (CMFRI 1981), there were a total of 19,013 craft, of which 9,590 were trawlers. And the director of the CMFRI ended his report with the following words: The enormous number of fishermen engaged in actual fishing and the extent of crafts and gears employed by them indicates the magnitude of the fishing activities in the marine sector in the country. It is hoped that this enumeration will be helpful in viewing the activities of this sector in the proper perspective for future planning and development. Subsequently, although the state stopped subsidising the making of trawlers, there was still a diesel subsidy. The implementation of new subsidy policies for the small sector without any planning or monitoring also enabled this intermediate sector to grow in unsustainable ways. A cost and earnings study by the South Indian Federation of

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Fishermen’s Societies (SIFFS) and the Programme for Community Organisation (PCO and SIFFS 1991) indicated that 60 per cent of the fishermen’s earnings went to service capital investment while still over 200,000 traditional craft and about 20,000 mechanised craft depended on the fishery. In 2010, there were 118,937 fishermen families, 145,396 active fishermen and 98 per cent still artisanal fishermen in Kerala. Trawlers accounted for 47 per cent of the mechanised crafts owned by fisherfolk, followed by ring seiners (23%) and gillnetters (12%) (CMFRI 2011). However, 55 per cent of the community was still below the poverty line (BPL), even though literacy levels among them had increased to 73 per cent. Infrastructure facilities had largely improved with 85 per cent of the fishermen’s houses being pucca houses and all the villages inhabited by them being electrified, thanks to the decentralised planning in the state. The fish production, however, told a different story in terms of the growth of catches.

Organising strategies during the early phase Organising the fishworkers during the early phase involved a multipronged approach. Since the organisers lived in the community itself, they could engage in intensive work/interaction with people at the local level, while also ensuring generation of awareness among them and gradual institutional building. The outreach, which commenced in Marianad, soon enveloped the other fishing villages. The co-operative became the focus of organising of fishers around their productive activity and was virtually a daily school for democratic functioning, abiding by rules and regulations, understanding the roles of committees, keeping of accounts, taking collective decisions and understanding their role in relation to the state. The women’s organisation was also an educational base for women both for understanding how to function collectively and responsibly and for dealing with the issues they faced as mothers, wives and workers, including child care, nutrition, health and sanitation, managing their women’s group, writing reports and discussing their religious issues, among other things. The “team”, as the organisers called themselves, also conducted intensive training programmes of six months’ duration for young women to enable them to become village workers. They attained exposure in the activities of Marianad, where the community was running institutions like a crèche, a nursery school, a health programme and dispensary, a young women’s activity centre and boy’s club, along with the co-operative and women’s organisation.

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It was these women who eventually became the contact base in the outreach efforts, and some of them eventually grew to be leaders in the fishworkers’ movement. This process led to the coining of the concept of “people’s organisations”, which were essentially member-based organisations (MBOs), in which the members were both the decision makers and the beneficiaries. It was around the same time that the trade union leader and activist Ela Bhatt was organising women similarly in distant Gujarat under the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) and that Amul was growing as a milk producer’s co-operative. However, members of the fishworkers’ co-operative also later realised that the cooperative acts were slightly different in different states, and particularly so in Kerala, where the state apparatus and the political parties also held sway over these people’s organisations, manipulating them for their own benefit or stifling their activity altogether. Meanwhile, youth camps were also organised for young men and women in Marianad and the surrounding villages, to help the educated youngsters gain exposure to the broader social and economic issues of the community, and to give them a slightly more macro perspective. Several of these young people either got government jobs or committed themselves to the fishworkers’ movement and became its leaders. Thus, by 1977, Thiruvananthapuram district was characterised by the spread of different levels and kinds of activity in the fishing communities and a critical awareness of the government’s focus on development. The latter highlighted the contradictions of modernising the fishery through the import of new nets from Norway and the advent of mechanised technology. In fact, it was learnt that the Norwegian technology had been introduced in India despite being banned in the home country Norway because of its environmental impact. However, the focus of the government was on “increasing production” and augmenting export earnings through the export of shrimp that was caught by the bottom trawlers. The government, therefore, decided to replace the ostensibly “backward” artisanal fishery with modern techniques of fishing. The co-operative, however, pointed out the artisanal people had the right to be supported by the government as fishery was their only source of livelihood for which they were traditionally skilled. During the early stages of the movement, neither the co-operatives nor the fishworkers were fully aware of all the wider ecological implications of the development of fisheries. The women were already beginning to complain about competition from the arrival of fish in bulk from the bigger harbours. They found it difficult to reach the markets in time, as they were not allowed to

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use public transport because of the “offensive” smell of fish, and had to walk many miles to reach the market. They thus decided to take to the streets under the banner of the Coastal Women’s Forum, marching to the Secretariat with their baskets of fish. They were demanding the right to use public transport as they were human beings, earning a decent living and provided the fish that was such an integral part of the diet of the Keralite. This was the beginning of a long learning process for both the women and the government authorities. Never before had a minister been confronted by fisherwomen in his cabin. Nor had any fisheries officer thought about the women vendors and their rights. Although the transport authorities tried to cite the Transport Act, which stipulated that no perishable item would be allowed on public transport, the women argued that vegetables, milk and fruit were still allowed to be carried on the buses. The fact was that these were “meen karigal” and they were loud mouthed and smelt, so how could they travel on the busses? The fisherwomen’s protest thus became the beginning of a long journey which finally compelled the government to accept that these women were also workers and had to be included in government planning and budgeting. The beginning of the larger struggle In 1977, the news spread that the fishers were on strike in Goa. The shore seine fishers were up in arms against the trawlers because they were losing access to their catches and fish exports were leading to a rise in prices for the Goan consumers for whom fish was a major part of the diet. The peaceful city of Panjim for the first time saw hundreds of fishermen aggressively block the streets of the city for days, forcing the government to intervene. Their vibrant leader, a school teacher, managed to rally the support of the middle classes as well. Around this time, there were spontaneous clashes between these sectors in other parts of the country as well – in Chennai in 1977 (Nayak and Vijayan 2006), in Tuticorin in 1978, and subsequently also in Alleppey in Kerala. These protests highlighted the need for regulating fishing zones between the artisanal and the trawl sectors. This issue had already been addressed more from a national security perspective by the Majumdar Committee, which was appointed by the Central Government to look into this matter and in early 1978, the committee suggested the introduction of a consolidated regulatory mechanism called a Marine Fisheries Regulation. Unfortunately, however, this draft bill was sent to each state to allow the latter to enact its

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own legislation, which defeated the very purpose of a national regulatory mechanism. The states have jurisdiction only up to 22 km from the shore. From 22 to 200 miles is the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) over which the Central Government has jurisdiction. Hence, there was no legislation for the larger fishing area and this anomaly subsequently left the fishers battling among themselves. The leaders of the Goan movement who created the Goenchar Ramponkarancho Ekvott (GRE) recognised this anomaly and concluded that a national campaign to demand a national legislation was required. They moved around the coast to seek allies who were easily forthcoming and thus commenced the fishworkers movement in the country under the National Forum of Catamaran and Country Boat Fishermen’s Rights and Marine Wealth. Into a trade union mode Initially, with some support from the Left parties, eighteen parliamentarians were willing to support the cause. After a “sit-in” before the house of the minister for agriculture on 28 July 1978, the National Forum was assured that their demands for a marine regulation and some welfare measures for fishermen would be seriously examined. However, nothing transpired and the forum continued to struggle through different means each year. From 1980 onwards, some states began to formulate and pass marine regulation acts but with huge opposition from the boat owners who also had a strong lobby. The forum then realised that this would be a long and protracted struggle, and had to be more structured in order to be sustained. With the lead given by Kerala, the fishers registered as a trade union, thereby defying all earlier prejudices that the sector was disorganised and caught in the clutches of religious leaders. The union also faced opposition from the Labour Department, as registering a trade union of self-employed people was not yet common. Moreover, as it claimed to be an independent union not affiliated to any political party, and as it also included leaders who belonged to the religious communities of the church, this effort at unionisation was decried even by the political parties who until this time had absolutely no idea of the real issues facing this production sector. This was one of the sectors in which no real trade union activity had commenced, though the Left had a base among the artisanal fishers of the Alleppey region. This base had grown at the time of the independence struggle because of the bonded labour that existed in the fishing industry but which had subsequently not really taken up the issues pertaining to fisheries per

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se. Eventually the National Fishworkers Forum (NFF) was also registered as a union. The struggles of the fishworkers and how these grew have been documented elsewhere (Nayak and Vijayan 2006), but here the main aspects of the organising endeavours that kept such struggles alive through a very long process of litigation and state intervention have been highlighted. Following the initial experiences with regard to organising at the local level, creating a structure for the trade union was not difficult in Kerala. However, the main challenge lay in developing a trade union that would be different from the dominant kind. Hitherto, none of the unions had taken up issues of public property resources, or women’s issues as an integral part of the union agenda, or even the daily livelihood issues, and most of them were affiliated to a political party. The understanding of the informal production sector had not evolved at this time, although agricultural workers were unionised basically on wage issues. Nevertheless, it must be pointed out that though Kerala had a very well-advanced social infrastructure, the fishing communities were outliers to these developments, which made mobilising in these areas a political struggle. The local fishing community, however, also enjoyed certain advantages. It already had experience in collective and democratic functioning through the co-operatives and women’s organisations, while a certain level of leadership had also emerged from within the community through the leadership camps. Further, the fishworkers had the support of some committed individuals, religious people and local NGOs. In fact, long before the “NGO-isation” of “civil society”, a significant degree of data collection and analysis had been undertaken, especially by the Programme for Community Organisation (PCO), which had grown out of the Marianad initiative. Consequently, there was a clear vision that while fishworkers had to lead their own movement and the union had to grow as an autonomous structure, the NGOs would remain supportive and provide the requisite inputs to strengthen the union at both the community level and in the state and national struggles. The autonomy of the people’s movement was the focus. The PCO gave leadership on the common platform of supporters in Kerala. The feminist perspective in the movement In the 1980s, when the issue to ban trawl fishing was being intensely debated, there was a need for better understanding of environmental issues and innovative ways of communicating them to the fishers so

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that the latter could brave the challenges posed by fisheries scientists. In the meantime, some of the activists had already been exposed to feminism and began to apply feminist analysis to the fishery, which opened up a vast new area of concern and the realisation that the oceans had to be nurtured even as the fishing too had to be managed for sustaining the livelihood of the local population. The nurture perspective, besides focusing on making women’s work in the fisheries more visible and protecting their spaces, pushed the union to take up issues that related to the daily life in the community, such as providing access to potable water, healthcare, childcare and educational facilities. It also engendered thinking and action aimed at conserving the fish habitat, the mangrove vegetation and the estuarine niches, while establishing artificial reefs to recreate the habitat that had been destroyed. The feminist perspective also challenged the fact that technology and modern science are neutral. This paradigm of development is not life-centred and thus inherently disregards the labour of women and the labour of subsistence. It was imperative to oppose the export of food fish for the sole purpose of generating profits. However, generating this awareness among the community leaders was difficult for various reasons. On the one hand, it meant creating more space for women in the decision-making roles, while on the other, it also entailed taking decisions about the fisheries that would keep women in the fishery and promote the use of more selective fishing gear. Unfortunately, this perspective was rejected by the men and resulted in the marginalisation of women leaders in different states. Reorienting government policy As early as the mid-1980s itself, Kerala and other southern states had begun to take the small-scale fishery more seriously, but instead of putting management regulations in place, the Fisheries Departments began to reorient their plans and budgets to advance small-scale fisheries. In 1985, the Government of Kerala (GoK) passed the Welfare Fund Act. Later the GoK passed a bill to register all fishworkers and created the Matsyafed – a chain of fishing co-operatives based on the Marianad model. These were innovative structures that forced the Ministry of Agriculture to view fisheries with new eyes. The welfare measures offered to the community included insurances for the working fishers, recompense for disaster, housing grants, educational grants, pensions and later the famine-cum-relief scheme, which was a contributory insurance scheme for the period when there was a ban on fishing. This was two decades prior to the enactment of the Unorganised Sector

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Social Security Act, and in a way the schemes were far more radical and sector-focused. Hence, though the main demand of the fishworkers, that is the execution of strict management regulations was not met, some state governments, particularly the GoK, moved into a proactive mode to develop social security measures for the fishworkers along with developing fishing technologies.

Achieving visibility at the international level In the early 1980s, that is just prior to the globalisation phase, international regulations regarding ocean space were being negotiated. In 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) had been ratified, while in 1984, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) organised the World Conference on Fisheries Management and Development. However, even as it focused on the management of the 200-mile EEZ, this conference completely ignored the smallscale fishworkers. Hence, the supporters collectively created a larger international platform of fishworkers and supporters and managed to organise a parallel conference (with over 100 fishworkers and their supporters from 32 countries) and protest in Rome, thereby succeeding in making the small-scale fishworkers visible at the international level. As a follow-up to the 1984 Fishworkers’ Conference, the fishworkers began organising in their respective countries and pressurising their governments to recognise the work of small-scale fishworkers and allocate a budget for them. The fishworkers also requested their supporters to continue offering their co-operation and to enhance the visibility of small-scale fisheries at the international level. Hence, the supporters of fishworkers created the International Collective in Support of Fishworkers (ICSF) in 1986. This international network eventually took shape with the initiative of the Indian team in Thiruvananthapuram. Initially, it was a totally voluntary network comprising about two dozen individuals whose hearts were with the small-scale fishworkers. Some of these volunteers devoted time to travelling around the world in order to stimulate other small-scale fishing communities to build their own base and defend their rights. This provided the team of volunteers opportunities to interact with fishing communities in several countries and to understand better the deeper issues concerning these communities in each region. From thence forward, small-scale fisheries became an integral irritant in all global discourse. This kind of international protest at a UN event was the first of its kind and remarkably happened before the advent of the internet revolution.

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Building a national movement and growth of leadership Despite the awareness generation and support garnered both from governmental and non-governmental sources for the fishing community, carrying the struggle forward by developing a national agenda was a Herculean task. It was important to develop innovative mobilisation strategies. In 1989, the National Fish Workers’ Forum (NFF) organised the famous Kanyakumari March, starting from Gujarat in the west and West Bengal in the east, moving through all the coastal areas, with the aim of highlighting the importance of conserving the coastal zone and the livelihoods of the coastal communities. “Protect Water, Protect Life” was its slogan. Not only did the movement gain recognition at the national level but the coastal people who joined the march also succeeded in bringing a host of issues within the ambit of the movement, including the lack of access to potable drinking water, the pollution of the ocean by industrial areas, displacement resulting from industrial development and the environmental and humanitarian hazards of the proposed nuclear plant at Koodunkulam. A large number of people from the Koodunkulam village joined the marchers and arrived in Kanyakumari on 1 May 1989. However, even before the public meeting could commence, the protesters were dispersed by gunshots by the police, on the pretext of controlling a small squabble between the protesters, which wounded a few of them. The firing and dispersion of the mass meeting at Kanyakumari, however, did not deter the members, but only added to the fire and brought the larger environmental issue centre stage. Subsequently, the NFF joined the wider platform of trade unions on displacement and other environmental issues called the Platform for Militant Trade Unions and focused mainly on the unorganised sector workers. Thereafter, the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM), of which the NFF was a founding member, was also created, and in 1993, several trade unions in the unorganised sector decided to create a central trade union and the National Centre for Labour (NCL) was born. Unfortunately, this was short-lived as the secretariat of the NCL could not take the initiative forward and several of the large unions withdrew from the platform. After the Kanyakumari march, units of the union sprang up in Andhra Pradesh, Bengal and Maharashtra, thus marking a presence in all the coastal states, and new vibrancy was injected into the NFF. While the NFF then had to address a series of issues of national importance, the base had to be consolidated in the new areas of contact and a

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special effort made to build a women’s network in all these states. This coincided with the International Collective in Support of Fishworkers (ICSF) Women in Fisheries International Programme, and members of the NFF thus got connected to fishworker unions in other countries. This women’s network managed to procure data on women in fisheries all over the country and also conducted a public hearing on the issues of the migrant women in the fish processing plants, a majority of whom were from the fishing community in those days.

The struggle for territory In 1994, a Supreme Court judgement was passed in support of the Kerala Government’s ban on bottom trawling during the monsoon months, which nullified the earlier judgement of the High Court of Kerala that had been in favour of the Kerala Trawler Boat Operators Association. This was a pro-people and livelihood judgement in response to an appeal made by the NFF. However, ignoring the judgement, the Government of India (GoI) went ahead with a new Deep Sea Fishing Policy despite the fact that global marine fish catches had stagnated at around 85 million tonnes after 1989. In 1994, the NFF launched a nationwide struggle against the licensing of joint venture fishing vessels. The competition between different kinds of fisheries had intensified with craft and gear getting larger and more aggressive. Indian fishers were moving into deep sea waters and were confronting larger shipping vessels there, which they claimed were in competition for their fish, but these foreign fishing vessels had licenses from the GoI, and hence the GoI needed to be challenged. The National Fisheries Action Committee against Joint Ventures was created in May 1994, bringing together the mechanised and the artisanal sectors. It observed Black Day on 20 July 1994 and then launched the All India Fisheries Strike on 4 November 1994, which was joined by all the political parties. The issue was raised in the Parliament in December that year and the minister of food processing was forced to freeze the issuing of licences and created a Review Committee to look into the matter. This significant national mobilisation also drew the attention of the public. The large number of public hearings conducted by the Parliamentary Committee proved to be an interesting development and gave parliamentarians an understanding of issues that they had hitherto no understanding about. The participation of large numbers of women in the public hearings proved to be an eyeopener with regard to the livelihoods that were at stake. This struggle propelled the NFF into the public gaze and accorded it the stature of a national trade union, which also drew international attention.

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The growth of aquaculture and the attack on the coastal zone In the mid-1980s, after having obtained a loan of US$ 425 million from the World Bank, the Indian government decided to offer subsidies to business investors for setting up commercial shrimp farming geared primarily for export. The stated objectives were to boost the country’s export earnings, increase food production and generate employment. When modern intensive aquaculture was introduced in India, other Asian countries had already seen the boom and bust of this industry. In the early 1990s, the government announced its New Economic Policy, in accordance with its privatisation agenda, while the process of decentralisation too had commenced politically. This was immediately followed by the advent of the privatisation of water bodies. The first revolt to this move was the Chilika Bachao Andolan against the privatisation of the Chilika Lake and its takeover by the Tata Company. By 1992–93, the protests of the coastal people in Tamil Nadu against the growing menace of aquaculture along its coast also intensified. These struggles witnessed the coming together of small farmers, fishworkers and the environmental groups, which started demanding a ban on intensive aquaculture. Many of these struggles took place outside the confines of the NFF, and the issue was also taken to court by S. Jagannathan of the Gram Swaraj Movement,3 the Campaign against Shrimp Aquaculture and People against Shrimp Farming. The Supreme Court delivered its landmark judgement in 1996 banning all aquaculture operations within a distance of 500 metres of the high-tide zone, and invoking the “Polluter Pays Principle”, which made it obligatory for the industry to bear the cost of coastal environment rehabilitation. However, as usual, this marked only the beginning of the legal struggle. The NFF thereafter created the National Action Committee against Industrial Aquaculture and apprised both the court and the government regarding the anomalies of the Coastal Zone Regulation, which was actually notified in 1991. These developments were followed by the passage of the Aquaculture Authority Bill in 1997, which was more an aquaculture promotion bill than a conservation bill of the coastal zone. This was remedied in the report submitted by the Swaminathan Committee just after the tsunami hit the southern coast of India in December 2004, which highlighted all the violations of the coastal zone and also offered suggestions for its regulation even up to the territorial waters. When the Aquaculture Authority Act of 2005 was enacted, there was a countrywide debate on its implications and effectiveness, in which the NFF and other coastal organisations were active participants. Finally in 2011, the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) Notification was announced. Apart from codifying the twenty-five amendments that were made to the

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CRZ notifications between 1991 and 2009, this notification introduced several new features.4 Goaded on by international discussions at the Conference on Biodiversity (CBD) and the progressive Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers Act, 2006, the Ministry of Environment and Forests also promulgated the Traditional Coastal and Marine Fisherfolk (Protection of Rights) Act (2009). Interestingly, this act does not particularly address the issue of fisheries management. It seems to have inducted the concepts from the Forest Act and applied them to fisheries. Nevertheless, the coastal communities are now debating the issues at stake again and working out their own contents for such an act. This is an uphill task as the coastal communities straddle different geographical zones where not only do the community norms vary but the relation to the resource also differs.

Positive trends in the global discourse Several things also started changing gradually at the international level as fish stocks began to decline worldwide from the early 1990s onwards. There was a wider awakening among the people about the impact of modernisation and globalisation on production sectors all over the world. The Convention on Biodiversity that 194 countries have ratified was passed in 1992. This is a comprehensive binding agreement covering the access and use of biodiversity. With awareness of its provisions and suffering from the impact of ongoing development, indigenous people demanded the protection of their rights to resources and the recognition of their traditional knowledge. Within the FAO, a Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries was accepted in 2002. Small-scale fisheries became the subject of debate only as late as in 2011. Nevertheless, it is significant to note that post-1990, all the decisions being taken at the FAO are voluntary and not binding. The fishworkers’ struggle continued simultaneously at ILO fora, wherein fishworker representatives took the initiative of meeting the ILO Office functionaries and explaining the need for introducing standards for small-scale fishworkers in 1992. This effort finally bore fruit in 2007 when the Work in Fishing Convention 188 was voted in. Significantly, this convention for the first time not only includes all commercial fishing operations including persons who are paid on the basis of a share of the catch in the definition of “fisher” but also lays down standards related to occupational safety and health, and social security for fishers on all vessels. However, even this landmark legislation suffers from a major lacuna as it does not include the rights of shore-based workers, a majority of whom are women.

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Supportive factors at the international level With the creation of the ICSF, the concomitant creation of cross-border linkages of fishworker organisations brought to the fore the issues of bilateral fisheries agreements, and also exposed the actions of some countries that negotiated these agreements to the detriment of the fishery sector and the fishing communities in other countries, though they were based on international conventions. In the 1990s, when the southern countries became alert to their rights and started defending them in the agreements, trouble was brewing in Europe as some fishing grounds became out of bounds for the European fishing fleet. Hence, the fishing communities in Spain and France, especially the wives of the distant water fishermen, went on strike. It was at this point that the cross-border linkages brought communities from the North in contact with those from the South, and together they built bonds of solidarity rather than antagonism. This also gave the communities in the North an understanding of not only the conditions prevalent in post-colonial nations but also of how the international politics of food production operated to the detriment of small producers all over the world. Subsequently, through the creation of another facilitating forum called the Committee for Fair Fisheries Agreements (CFFA), the fisher organisations started pressurising the authorities for initiating more democratic and just fisheries agreements at the level of the European Parliament. Meanwhile, the ICSF’s Women in Fisheries Programme helped in fostering a more feminist thinking in fishworkers’ organisations around the globe. However, in this sphere, fisherwomen’s organisations in Europe were more successful than their counterparts in the southern world. In Europe, the women gradually got into major leadership roles, and collectively fought for the recognition of their work in the fishery sector, from which they had earlier been ousted in the process of the “professionalisation” of the fishery. In a couple of countries, they also won the strategic war being waged by them as they came to be recognised as “collaborative spouses”, thereby acquiring independent rights to social security. The impact of globalisation has, however, been felt in the northern countries as well. With all the fish processing plants moving to countries where the wages were lower post globalisation, the fishing communities lost their jobs in the North. Northern fisheries have also gradually become more privatised through a quota system and the battle of the small-scale fisheries has intensified there. While the smallscale fishworkers have grown in collective strength, larger confrontations pertaining to territory have been surfacing all over the world.

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Thus, as the small-scale fishing communities continue to struggle for survival, they are still being undermined, on one hand, by the environmentalists and conservationists, who consider fishing as a predatory activity, and, on the other hand, by the industry that now targets the oceans for its non-living resources.

The contemporary situation While the fishworkers ask for regulation of the big fisheries and a ban on monsoon trawling, the debate on regulating their own fishery that has grown very aggressive and unselective is very limited. Until about 1996, there was intensive collaboration between support organisations and the NFF, but these support organisations gradually withdrew from the scene after the NFF started emanating negative signals. Although it still welcomes assistance of all kinds, the leadership of the NFF has its own vision and ideas that leaves little or no room for debate. Hence, since about the year 2000, there remains only strategic contact between the NFF and the support groups. The ICSF continues to provide inputs on a variety of new issues that confront the fishery sector, particularly as environmental groups gain more space globally and challenge fishing in marine parks and reserved areas. The subject of the CRZ also remains a constant bone of contention as in the eyes of the government, the lobbies that target the zone for development command greater favour than the fishing community. Simultaneously, the NFF has also weakened. In fact, at the time the tsunami hit the Indian coast in 2004, the NFF was too weak to even provide leadership and inputs for reconstruction and rehabilitation to canalise the flood of support that emerged after the disaster. While unwittingly keeping its supporters at bay, the NFF could neither sustain the local action on its own nor ensure the constant building of the base which is so vital for keeping a movement alive. It is obvious that the synergy of the initial years has waned as the NFF attained greater political recognition. The organisation failed to realise that political recognition alone does not guarantee that an independent movement of this kind would be able to sustain the political clout needed for reorienting political decisions in favour of the people.

Creating an international organisation of fishworkers Despite all the constraints and challenges faced by it, the fishworkers’ movement has still been able to garner support at the international level. Under the leadership of the NFF and the Canadian Council of

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Fish Harvesters, an international alliance was forged in 1996 at the 50th anniversary celebrations of the FAO. This relationship among the fishworkers’ organisations commenced with a great deal of enthusiasm and optimism, exhibited through their efforts at globalising and organising. The first official interaction was held in New Delhi in November 1998, and a decision was taken to create an international body that would have its founding assembly in 2000. The French fisher organisations agreed to host this assembly, but the euphoria at this international success blinded the leadership of the NFF to the inherent dangers of linking up with a network of Western fisheries which they did not know too much about. Hence, the relationship soon soured and the assembly ended in a fiasco. French newspapers satirically reported the next day that “twins were born”. Two international bodies, one calling itself the World Federation Fisher People (WFFP), and the other, the World Forum of Fish Harvesters and Fish Workers (WFF), were created. This resulted in most of the Asian fishworker organisations standing with the WFFP under the leadership of the NFF, and a majority of the African and Latin American organisations standing with the WFF under the leadership of the Canadian Council of Fish Harvesters. This initial regional division also blurred the politics of the two federations, as through the early 2000s, each had to consolidate and build up its strength. Nevertheless, the decade that followed saw the creation of large peoples’ alliances at the international level in order to offset the impact of globalisation, the new trends in multilateral institutions, the climate change discourse and coastal development issues. Thankfully, this urged the “twins” to work together, while the ICSF, to its credit, refused to play partisan politics; a working relationship was thus gradually built up between them. Nevertheless, one must add with recalcitrance that neither of the twins seems to grow in strength and vision, though they do manage to speak in one voice at international fora. The work they did collectively on the draft of the Guidelines on Small-Scale Fisheries and the defence they collectively put up at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) when these guidelines were discussed in 2013 were heartening. This would hopefully lead both to acquire greater strength in the future.

Conclusion As stated at the outset, the organising process which evolved during the course of the fishworkers’ movement has been a very complicated one, resulting from the complex interactions among the social, technical, ecological and larger economic and political factors at play in the marine fisheries sector. Various factors, including the expanse of the

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coastline, the scattered nature of the communities, the language differences and issues compounded by the impact of globalisation policies, have made organising efforts very difficult in real life. Yet, the collective voice of the fishworkers has globally succeeded in establishing that the logic of the small-scale fishery is sustainable and should, therefore, be strengthened. Another area of success has been that both nationally and internationally, substantive legislation/conventions to safeguard the rights of the small-scale fishworkers have been achieved, despite the fact that a National Marine Regulation is yet to come into force. The resolution of governance issues between the Centre and the states in managing the fishery sector is a far cry. As modernity seems to have been achieved more in the technical terms of mechanised fishing operations rather than in the attainment of better local sanitary infrastructure and management mechanisms, the development of the fishery sector itself has ostensibly gone berserk. Caught between the fishers who need to chase the fish and its own need to build political clout, the movement seems to have lost its direction in trying to take advantage of the gains of its struggle and consolidating its base. The inability to convert its legal and political gains into organisational credits and institutional delivery mechanisms has inhibited the efforts of the movement in transforming the fishery sector in the sustainable manner that it initially dreamt about and promised to implement. At the level of the fishing households, some have gained and others have lost. Those who were able to use their skills and take advances to upgrade their craft and gear have survived and gained materially. Their children have profited from education and do not look back on fishing as a livelihood. Others have fallen into huge debts and continue to struggle. But in regions where the fishworkers movement was nonexistent and where development projects got the better of the coasts, the communities have resorted to large-scale migration. Large numbers of fishworkers from Andhra, for instance, are found in Gujarat, where they man the trawlers of the Kharwa community. Women also move to work in the fish plants in Maharashtra and Kerala. None of these workers are protected in any way. The fishworkers’ movement has today traversed a journey of around forty years – a journey characterised by admirable collaboration and learning, on the one hand, and the dynamics of power and frailty of movement building in the informal sector, on the other. As the fishers have gained visibility and articulated their right to resources and livelihood, they have simultaneously had to cope with the challenges of competitive economic and political forces. While these decades signify

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only a small patch on the linear scale of history, the fishworkers have succeeded in leaving their imprint on the international trajectory of food production and drawn the world’s attention to their way of life. For the organisers and supporters that have been closely associated with this process, it has been an incredible human and learning experience, and a deeply gratifying journey.

Notes 1 The fishing community in Marianad and a majority of the fishing communities in Thiruvananthapuram district belonged to the Catholic Church. 2 Paulo Freira, in Basil, had developed an organizing methodology which he called “conscientization” making people aware of the unjust social structures that left them oppressed and the awareness and understanding of which would help them organize against it, published in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 3 Judgement of the Honourable Supreme Court of India in the case related to aquaculture: Ref. Writ Petition (civil) No. 561/1994, S. Jaganathan versus Union of India, 11.12.1996. 4 It has special provisions for vulnerable coastal areas, and clear procedures for obtaining CRZ approval with timelines and enforcement mechanisms; water area up to twelve nautical miles in the sea is now included in the CRZ areas, without imposing any restrictions on fishing activities. Coastal Zone Management Plans (CZMP), to be prepared with the fullest involvement and participation of local communities, and the concept of a hazard line, have been introduced to protect the life and property of local communities and infrastructure along coastal areas. The CZMP has to be prepared in a timeline of five years.

References CMFRI. 1981. All India Census of Marine Fishermen, Craft and Gear, 1980. Kochi: Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute. CMFRI. 2011. Marine Fisheries Census. Kochi: Government of Kerala. Department of Fisheries. 1979. Report on Fishworkers. Trivandrum: Government of Kerala. Nayak, N. and Vijayan, A. J. 2006. The Coasts, the Fish Resources and the Fishworkers’ Movement. New Delhi: National Human Rights Commission (NHRC). Programme for Community Organisation and South Indian Federation of Fishermen’s Societies (PCO&SIFFS). 1991. Motorisation of Fishing Units; Benefits and Burdens. Trivandrum: Fisheries Research Cell, South Indian Federation of Fishermen Societies.

6

The struggle for space Organising street vendors in India Shalini Sinha

Organising is the key to empowerment for the working poor in the informal economy as it provides a pathway for them to be seen and heard by the dominant actors. Among the informal workers, street vendors, however, comprise a vocal and empowered group as compared to several other urban informal workers such as the relatively docile home-based workers who have very little visibility and voice. This is partially because vendors have been toughened by their lifelong daily struggles on the street and the constant harassment they are subjected to by the city authorities. Several small street vendor organisations exist in numerous Indian cities, as they do all over the world: street vendors coming together to deal with the “immediate issues” such as eviction from the street/market, confiscation of goods and/or police harassment. Vendors usually came together easily at the local level, but only to resolve immediate problems or to respond to a particular issue at a single point in time. However, they rarely form large and sustainable organisations and networks (barring a few examples such as SEWA). Singh (2000) identifies five paths for organising street vendors in India. The first is wherein vendors come together spontaneously to combat excessive exploitation and informal leaders among them take the initiative, by resorting to protests and dharnas, among other things. Such collective actions foster solidarity and help mould organisations, and when the struggle continues over a long period of time, as it does in some cases, the organisations get registered. However, most of them remain unregistered and gradually fizzle out. The second path to organising occurs when a mother organisation takes the initiative and acts as a catalyst in the formation of subsidiary vendors’ organisations. Such organisations systematically continue the struggle and place an emphasis on capacity building of the vendors themselves while successfully negotiating terms with the administration. The third instance

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is wherein the central trade unions either promote vendors’ unions or set up independent ones. While such unions exist in most cities, there may also be several small unions affiliated to a central trade union. In the fourth instance, a small group of vendors may join forces to collectively seek protection against harassment from the local representatives of political parties. These organisations are generally amorphous and have no regular membership or elected leaders, and are guided by certain leaders of political parties who liaise between the government, the political party concerned and members of the union. The fifth category of organised street vendors emerges from the endeavours made by individual leaders to establish organisations or organise the vendors, primarily in the main business centres of cities. Most vendors who join these organisations do so as they perceive them to be powerful organisations but ironically, the organisations themselves are transient and tend to depend far too much on individual leaders (Singh 2000). Regardless of the reason for their initiation, or the size, most such organisations play a dual role: while internally, they assist their members in securing a space on the street, externally, they help mediate in the relationship between vendors and local authorities to enable the former to earn their livelihood without harassment. Most of the street vendors’ associations function locally, organising the vendors in specific areas of the cities to help them counter any effort at evictions. Some vendors are organised according to the urban space in which they work, such as a particular street, block, market, or area while others are organised according to the product they sell. However, building large and sustainable organisations for protecting the rights of vendors still remains a huge challenge, as is obvious from the fact that currently, there are very few federations or national networks of street vendors. The National Association of Street Vendors of India (NASVI) is an attempt towards that objective – of building a vibrant network of organisations of street vendors at the national level. Taking NASVI as a case, this chapter aims to understand the role of street vendors’ network in India, especially how they engage with other workers, build alliances with supporting organisations and negotiate with authorities at the city, state and national levels. It examines the strategies adopted by the network to address the negative perceptions about vendors and build their collective voice at the national level. The chapter also highlights how NASVI’s struggle for vendor rights has shaped the policy arena in India in the context of urban planning and right to livelihood of vendors and, in turn, how the network structure and strategies have also been moulded by the changing external policy environment in the country.

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Street vendors in India Street vendors in India are estimated to account for 14 per cent of all informal urban employment, and 4 per cent of the urban workforce across India (Chen and Raveendran 2011). Another estimate suggests that around 2.5 per cent of the urban population is engaged in this occupation. Mumbai has the largest number of street vendors at about 250,000. The other cities with a significant number of street vendors are Kolkata, at 150,000; Ahmedabad and Patna at 80,000 each; and Indore, Bengaluru and Bhubaneshwar, at around 30,000 (Bhowmik 2014). The numbers would be larger if we were to look at the total quantum of employment created by the street vendors. There can be no disputing the fact that street vendors actually provide valuable services for the city and, more significantly, support the small-scale industries or home-based industries from which they procure their goods, such as clothes and hosiery, leather and moulded plastic goods, and some food items. In fact, the contributions of street vendors to urban life go much beyond their own self-employment as they generate demand for a wide range of services provided by other informal workers, including transport workers, tea sellers, market porters, security guards, recyclers and others. In addition, they help create a demand for services provided by public and private agencies in the formal sector including banks, schools, transportation systems and formal shops and suppliers from whom they source their goods. The Supreme Court of India has noted that, from a consumer’s point of view, street vendors “considerably add to the comfort and convenience of the general public, by making available ordinary articles of everyday use for a comparatively lesser price”, which is particularly important for the urban poor who cannot afford to shop at supermarkets (Sodan Singh v. New Delhi Municipal Corporation, 1989). Male street vendors outnumber their female counterparts in all the states of the country, with the percentage of female vendors dropping to particularly low levels in some states. The proportion of female street vendors is 30 per cent of the total number of vendors in Bengaluru and Delhi each, whereas it is 30.5 per cent in Jaipur, and approximately 27 per cent each in Mumbai and Indore. The proportions are much lower in Hyderabad and Patna, at 16 per cent and 19 per cent, respectively, while Lucknow at merely 3.5 per cent has the poorest sex ratio of street vendors (Bhowmik 2014). Among street vendors, the largest group comprises members of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs). While Patna has the highest number of OBC street vendors, at 62.5 per cent of the total, Lucknow

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at 53.5 per cent and Indore, at 50 per cent, are not far behind. The proportion of street vendors belonging to the general castes are high in only two cities, that is Bhubaneshwar (76.5%) and Imphal (97%), while it is just below the half mark at 47.5 per cent, in Mumbai. In contrast, the number of street vendors belonging to the Scheduled Castes (SCs) is very low in most cities, as they account for roughly 15 per cent of the total vendor population. Specifically, the proportion of SC street vendors to the total is 12 per cent in Mumbai, 15.5 per cent in Bengaluru, 11 per cent in Bhubaneshwar, 16.5 per cent in Lucknow and 17 per cent in Patna (Bhowmik 2014). The number of street vendors in most cities in the country has increased sharply during the past few years, which is generally attributed to the rise in the number of migrants into cities in search of livelihoods, the loss of formal jobs and the growth of informal employment, all of which have made street vending a viable option for a large number of poor due to the ease of entry it signifies as an occupation (Bhowmik 2014: 25). The mismatch between the rapid rise in the number of qualified employment seekers and the much lower number of job opportunities available in the formal sector has also made street vending an attractive employment option. Another reason, as Jhabvala (2000) also noted, is that street vending is a reasonably profitable as well as easily available job option for the poor in the cities. The new migrants who reach cities in search of livelihood also therefore tend to be in this sector. The life of street vendors is plagued by harassment and the constant threat of eviction. They are thus constantly faced with assaults and exploitation by the police and municipal functionaries and are denigrated as the bane in city life by the urban elite. They are accused of depriving pedestrians of their rightful space, causing traffic jams and having links with antisocial activities, while their right to livelihood remains largely unrecognised. Jhabvala (2010) explained it as follows: It is the most cruel in its competition for expensive urban space, marked by the vendors facing the wrath of the police and the city governments. Perhaps as no other citizen, the street vendor becomes the focus of interaction of almost all city pressure groups – the municipality, police, politician, consumer, real estate agent, shop owners, vehicle owners. The lack of recognition of the role of street vendors results in a multitude of problems: difficulty in obtaining licenses; insecure income; no fixed space in which to sell their wares; officials and musclemen who

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issue eviction threats; the imposition of fines and harassment by traffic police. All these foster illegal rent-seeking with the active connivance of the municipality, police and dalals. Vendors commonly report four main forms of stresses in their trading environment: low-level harassment, confiscation of goods, fines and eviction. The latter may be short-term removal from the trading site or a longer-term eviction (Mahadevia et al. 2014). The evidence also suggests that some sections of vendors such as food vendors are subject to particularly complex licensing regimes that can create openings for street-level bureaucrats to extract side payments. Mahadevia, for example, found that a license for a vegetable vendor in Ahmedabad specifies 21 restrictions on when, where and how she could sell (Mahadevia et al. 2014). Further, the challenges that street vendors face, even when they have obtained licenses, in terms of workplace insecurity, harassment by officials, confiscations of their products and evictions, have a significantly adverse impact on both their incomes and productivity (Roever 2016). The license regime for street vending is opaque and repressive (Chen et al. 2014). Many cities have inappropriate license ceilings: for instance, in Mumbai, where there are an estimated 250,000 street vendors, the municipal corporation arbitrarily fixed a ceiling of only 14,000 licenses, and even these were not issued for many years (Bhowmik 2001). In Kolkata, street vending without a license is a non-bailable offense (ibid.). In cities, the street vendors are also pitched against many strong opponents, including the urban planning departments, which often do not consider them as “legitimate” urban dwellers; the land mafia (which is the product of increasing urbanisation that is leading to an escalation in the value of land); the police and the municipality (who see vendors as encroachers on public space, causing traffic congestion and/or threat to public safety) and the local middle- and upper-class residents (who are happy to benefit from the goods that these vendors sell at convenient locations but are still hesitant to give them a space in their neighbourhood) (Jhabvala 2000).

Organising street vendors: The National Association of Street Vendors of India (NASVI) There are very few large organisations of vendors in this country, and even fewer member-based organisations, but a few like the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), which was founded in 1972 by Ela Bhatt, a union labour organiser and lawyer based in Ahmedabad, do exist and have been doing seminal work in this sphere. Street

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vendors have always been a major focus of SEWA’s work, accounting for 80,000 members of the union in the city of Ahmedabad alone (SEWA 2013). Some attempts in other parts of India have also been made to form a federation of unions at the city and state levels; as such federations have succeeded in taking the issue to a higher level and pitch. For example, in Mumbai, forty different unions have come together to form the Pheriwala Action Committee in early 2000. The Self Employed Vendors Association of Karnataka (SEVAK) is another example of a body that functions at the state level and provides a platform for vendors of Karnataka to struggle for their rights. In the 1980s, while an enabling external environment in favour of street vendors did not exist, champions of vendors’ movement had started highlighting the plight of vendors. Elaben (Bhatt) of SEWA was emerging as a crusader of the economic rights of women and marginalised groups like street vendors. Her advocacy was acclaimed at both the national and international levels, which accorded credibility and stature in the policy arena to SEWA. Concurrently, the judicial activism undertaken by several organisations had also started yielding results and several court judgements were passed in favour of the street vendors around this time. In 1985, the Supreme Court of India directed that each city should demarcate “hawking” and “no hawking” zones to enable vendors and hawkers to carry out their business (Bombay Hawkers’ Union vs. Bombay Municipal Corporation 1985, 3 SCC 525). In the 1989 case of Sodan Singh v. New Delhi Municipal Committee (NDMC), the Court again ruled that “the right to carry on trade or business mentioned in Article 19(1)(g) of the Constitution, on street pavements, if properly regulated, cannot be denied on the ground that the streets are meant exclusively for passing or re-passing and for no other use”. This judgement is particularly significant because it recognises that people are driven to engage in street vending as a means of livelihood because of the conditions of extreme poverty that prevail in India. The judgement also states that “there is no justification to deny the citizens of their right to earn livelihood by using the public streets for the purpose of trade and business”. The Court’s recognition of the positive contributions of street trade came at a time when issues related to the informal economy were being propelled centre stage in the national policy arena. Simultaneously, at the international level, street vendors had begun to organise in the 1990s when the phenomena of globalisation and urbanisation started exacerbating city-level conflicts between the vendors and local authorities. In November 1995, the Bellagio

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International Declaration of Street Vendors called on governments to establish national street vending policies. This international declaration was a landmark development in the vendors’ movement at the global level. In India too, activists began realizing the need to propel the vendors’ struggle onto the national stage. NASVI, which was registered in November 2003, is, in effect, a coalition of trade unions and voluntary organisations working for street vendors across the entire country. NASVI started the process of forming a nationwide network, in 1998 and was registered in 2003. The main objective behind establishing NASVI was to bring together the street vendor organisations in India so as to collectively struggle for macro-level changes which had become imminent to support the livelihood of around ten million vendors which stands severely threatened due to outdated laws and changing policies, practices and attitudes of the powers that be.1 Membership profile of NASVI2 NASVI is a national federation of street vendor organisations. The current strength of NASVI comprises 658,129 members belonging to 952 different organisations in the states of Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Delhi, Gujarat, Goa, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Manipur, Maharashtra, Odisha, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Tripura, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Punjab, Meghalaya, Telangana, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir. The constitution of the Association provides for membership to trade unions, community-based organisations (CBOs), nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) and professionals like lawyers, teachers and doctors, who support the cause of street vendors. It is also stipulated that every member organisation would contribute 50 paisa annually per vendor member of that organisation, whereas NGOs and individuals are required pay an annual sum of Rs 100 each. While a large number of the NASVI members are either NGOs or MBOs, there is a separate category for trade unions. The membership of NASVI has grown at a phenomenal rate since its inception, going up from merely 131 affiliates in 2003–04 to 952 presently.3 It is obvious that the implementation of the national policy for street vendors proved to be an impetus for organising among the vendors, and subsequently got reflected in the steep rise in the membership of the organisation in 2004–05. Similarly, the enactment of the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act in 2014 led to a huge boost in the membership of NASVI and its

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2003–4

2016

Individuals NGOs MBOs TUs Total

1 43 54 33 131

2 118 59 773 952

Source: NASVI documents.

affiliates across India. Table 6.1 depicts the growth of membership of NASVI, over a decade.

Strategies adopted by NASVI Building a network The need for a national network of street vendors emerged in the early 1990s, mostly triggered by the general discontent on the adverse effects of economic liberalisation on the poor. Following the Bellagio Conference, street vendors and allied organisations in India formed a national organisation to propel the vendors’ struggle onto the national stage. In September 1998, the National Association of Street Vendors of India (NASVI) was born. As Ela Bhatt, founder of SEWA and one of the key architects of the street vendors’ national movement, said: “If we are able to increase our organised strength, make strategic alliances and link up with other groups like planners and academicians, we will be in a better position to dialogue with the political structures. We must make politicians see us not just as vote banks, but as contributors to a new India” (as quoted in Sinha and Roever 2011). A similar sentiment was expressed by Arbind Singh, coordinator of NASVI. “Networking not only gives strength to each organisation but also through an exchange of information helps provide a larger perspective to the struggle. Above all, it helps identify spaces for intervention in policymaking” (Singh 2000). But it is not an easy road to travel: building robust networks of informal workers is a challenge. Organising informal workers is different from organising formal workers and has distinct challenges of several kinds, some of them are more pronounced for the street vendors. To begin with, street vendors are not considered workers: under the law, by policymakers, by trade unions, by other workers or even

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by themselves. The employment relationship between a recognized “employer and employee” has been the fulcrum around which legal protection, collective bargaining and collective action are played out. This very concept excludes self-employed street vendors who have no “employers”. Street vendors may at times be recognised as entrepreneurs but very rarely as workers. Also, street vendors do not work in a standard workplace: (i.e. the firm or factory of an employer) but work primarily in public spaces (streets, markets). They also deal with multiple points of control or multiple dominant players – municipality, police, urban planners and others, which means that they have to negotiate on several fronts. The third issue in the vendors’ struggle as it is with any self-employed person is that there is no immediate pay-off – no equivalent to the “wage dividend” enjoyed by many organised formal workers. “Often they have to negotiate and bargain to simply be allowed to pursue their livelihoods – without being harassed, having their goods confiscated, having to pay bribes and being evicted. In such situations, the hopedfor dividend of organising is usually a reduction in the risks and costs of operating informally, rather than an increase in earnings” (Chen et al. 2014). There are other issues too, many common to the other informal workers such as lack of time to organise and build strong and sustainable organisations, internal competition among members and affiliates. “A lack of time is just one factor. The conflict for space among vendors is another. . . . Street vendors are not a homogenous lot and deep rooted social and cultural divisions exist”. Previous experiences of foul play are common. Unscrupulous street-smart organisations have looted money through false promises. Sometimes their leaders have misappropriated funds or indulged in corrupt practices, thus creating an environment of mistrust amongst the vendors (Singh 2000).

Organisational dynamics and internal challenges Building and sustaining democratic, worker-led structures and governance is a challenge, particularly in a large country like India with the added barriers posed by differences in language, culture, politics and organising traditions. Resources are almost always scarce: national organising is expensive and electronic communication has not (yet) replaced the need for meetings, congresses and so on. What sets NASVI apart from other networks is its constant effort to be in touch with its affiliates and strengthen its linkages to the member organisations and to ensure they are relevant for and link to grassroots members that are facing the more immediate local and national struggles.

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Related to organisation strength are questions of structure, governance and accountability. Not only does NASVI have to foster these within its own network structures, but it needs to build it with the affiliates as well. In the initial years, NASVI supported its affiliates to register their organisation and develop and strengthen local leadership by giving training. Efforts were made to federate at the state level, and state-level steering committees were developed and strengthened in many states. But this is no easy task, as historically street vendors have a rivalry among themselves. The state committees are often bogged down on many issues – leadership being just one of them; others are correspondence, information sharing, etc. Also, street vendors are seen as “vote banks” and once they achieve visibility, they are often tempted by the local leaders of the political parties. Furthermore, issues like the individual domination, leadership struggle and factionalism, at times, come in the way in the organising efforts of vendors at the local level.4 Another important internal issue that the newly formed unions have been facing is capacity building of organisers and leaders. Both the networks and their member organisations need capacity building of various kinds: capacity to build democratic, representative structures; to educate, mobilise and serve their members; to engage in effective collective bargaining, negotiating and advocacy; and to manage the operations and finances of the organisations/networks. The network struggles to address these needs, given the resource crunch, the diverse and large geographical area that it covers (twenty-five states of India), and its own limitations of keeping up with the changing urban scenario and what it means for the vendors. One of the supports that NASVI has been providing is in the arena of judicial activism – encouraging and supporting smaller local vendors’ organisations in taking cases of harassment and eviction at the city level to court and also equipping the local lawyers with information about other court cases, and petitions and providing them the legal perspectives to strongly put across the vendors’ cases. NASVI has lined up some pro bono lawyers across states which are providing support to the vendors. The information flow between the member affiliates and the NASVI is continuous and strong, though uneven, across the states. NASVI supports the members in their daily struggles with the local authorities and municipalities, while the local partners support NASVI in their national advocacy. For example, a city-level vendor’s organisation may need the support of NASVI to fight their local battles. NASVI, as a repository of knowledge and experience from other states, has acted as a catalyst in this process. In these cases, NASVI advises and supports

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the local vendors’ organisation to push for full implementation of a transparent and participatory, citywide plan to incorporate street trade as a permanent feature of urban life.

NASVI and the new discourse on street vendors “Along with improving immediate conditions on the ground, a major goal of organising is to give informal workers, the ability to influence the forces that dictate the terms of work and to affect the policies that can regulate these forces” (Chen et al. 2005: 80). There is no doubt that the street vendors’ policy and subsequently the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014, drafted with the objective of providing legal protection to this group of workers, are strong policy documents addressing many of the constraints that the street vendors face, drafted with the objective of providing legal protection to this group of workers. They reflect a shift in the approach to the vendors and their issues, and NASVI’s contribution in shaping the discourse positively in favour of vendors needs to be acknowledged. This is one of the key achievements of the network. In order to do so, NASVI has constantly reinvented itself, adopting a host of strategies, and changing them as per the emerging external environment. In the initial years, when NASVI was formed, the efforts were to highlight the large number of vendors, present them as hard-working contributors to the city economy and remove the negativity associated with their livelihood. The objective was to influence “mindset” of influential stakeholders, and also of national and local policymakers. Negative perception towards street vendours was common in India, as in many parts of the world, towards the vendors. The middle class saw them as public nuisance, the police saw them as petty thieves and criminals and the city authority saw them as causing traffic congestion, encroaching on public land and creating an unhygienic environment. In the 1990s, and thereafter, many local government policymakers and built environment professionals subscribed to the view that removing street vendors is a sign of “progress” and the fast-emerging concept of a “world class city” saw no place for the street vendors, or indeed for the working poor in the city (Jhabvala 2010). One of NASVI’s first major activities after its formation in 1998 was to conduct a comprehensive study on street vendors in seven cities across India (see Bhowmik 2001). It dismantled common perceptions of street vendors by linking vendors to middle-class consumers, and by highlighting their contribution in subsidizing a section of the urban poor. The study also, importantly, presented street vendors as hard-working

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entrepreneurs and an essential part of city commerce, and as contributors to the city economy. The study also highlighted the large number of street vendors in the seven cities and their needs and challenges vis-à-vis other sections of the informal economy. In doing so, it gave visibility to the street vendors and their issues. The study also showcased the presence of a complex ecosystem of extortion by corrupt municipal corporation officials, policemen and private contractors. It [the study] was unique in that its focus was not street vendors in isolation, but rather street vendors as an integral part of the broader urban context. It concluded that “street vendors exist because of the high demand for their services, and called into question common perceptions of street vendors by linking vendors to consumers, and by highlighting their contribution in subsidizing a section of the urban poor” (Sinha and Roever 2011: 20). It is also important to mention that this research provided a baseline for developing long-term solutions to common problems associated with street trade. This enabled NASVI and its affiliates to shift their attention from short-term responses to threats, toward longer-term strategies for securing vendors’ livelihoods. For instance, learning about these power dynamics helped NASVI appreciate the depth of the issues, and develop a multipronged approach of local and nationallevel activities geared towards developing and implementing better policies and legal protection for street vendors. NASVI also used these insights into its advocacy efforts, using the study to demand for a policy for the street vendors in India (Jhabvala 2010: XIII). In May 2001, NASVI presented the findings of the study to the Government of India’s Ministry of Urban Development and increased pressure on the government to develop a national policy on street vending. The Government of India formed a National Task Force on Street Vendors in August 2001 to draw up that policy. These new discourses on vendors and their contribution to the city life were “legitimised” when they got included in the National Policy on Street Vendors – largely due to the efforts of NASVI which was a part of the policy drafting committee. The network had lobbied to get itself included in the process of drafting the policy by citing the need to establish a policy that was consistent with the Bellagio Declaration’s call for “appropriate, participatory, non-formal mechanisms with representation by street vendors and hawkers”. Eventually, NASVI was invited along with SEWA to be members of the National Task Force for drafting the National Policy on Street Vendors, set up by the Government of India. As a result, the policy on street vendors, in its writing, was a very progressive document and, in many ways, marked a paradigm shift in the government’s

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approach to street vending by emphasising “street vendors as an asset for urban economies”. The most significant achievement of the National Policy has been to successfully bring attention to street vendors, the issues they face and their positive contributions to urban life. The policy also prioritised inclusive urban planning processes, with a focus on giving a voice to street vending associations. The policy also aimed to make the street vendors’ participation in urban planning (via town vending committees), an institutional feature of local governance. The policy is also viewed as a landmark for the urban informal economy more generally, because it represents the first time the government has taken steps to regulate a significant portion of self-employed workers. Secondly, the National Policy places responsibility for protecting and promoting the urban poor and their livelihoods squarely with the state. While acknowledging the need for effective regulation, the policy also emphasises the importance of inclusive planning through democratic, consultative processes with street vending organisations. “In raising the visibility of street vendors and their positive contributions to cities, the National Policy has served as a counterweight to prevailing negative views of street vendors. This increased visibility has come at a critical historical moment for street vendors” (Sinha and Roever 2011: 11). As the external policy environment changed, NASVI too was shaped by the changing policy environment. It had to consolidate its position to implement the policy, and shift its focus from advocating for legal rights of vendors at the national level to assisting its affiliates in implementing the strategy at the city and the state levels – the “action” had shifted to the city! The strategy that emerged was multipronged and entailed active engagement with all the stakeholders. NASVI engaged with governments and urban bodies at all levels to help usher in a positive policy-legislative environment, while simultaneously strengthening the organisations of street vendors at both the city and state levels. This was done by accelerating the process of organisation and federalisation of vendors’ groups in the markets of the cities and states across the country. In addition, the strategy involved supporting vendors’ organisations in times of crises such as harassment and evictions, organising capacity development training programmes, offering legal support to vendors’ organisations in cases of violations of their rights and fostering solidarity among the street vendor organisations (Sinha and Roever 2011). Implementing the policy remained an uphill challenge, and not much success was achieved by NASVI. One of the key reasons for the failure

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of the implementation of the policy was because local governments are controlled by state governments and few state governments formulated their own state policies based on the national policy. But NASVI was able to use the National Policy and its implementation process to stimulate organising among street vendors, particularly in their efforts towards federating and building larger and more sustainable alliances and networks. By providing vendors with a long-term vision of how street trade could be regulated to provide sustainable livelihoods, the policy created a new incentive for vendors to strengthen their organisations and overcome existing divisions between organisations (Sinha and Roever 2011). By 2010, NASVI had realised that it was barking up the wrong tree – implementing a policy which had no legal and binding status for the states was not easy. Meanwhile, organisations of street vendors won several court cases which ruled in favour of street vendors, including a landmark Supreme Court judgement in October 2010 that directed the appropriate government authority to enact a national law by June 2011 to protect the fundamental rights of vendors and hawkers to carry on their business. Soon after the judgement, NASVI launched a campaign for a national law: both on the streets with the vendors and at advocacy level with the central government. The action had again shifted – from cities to the centre – and NASVI now adopted a more “activist” role in the struggle. In its advocacy for a national law, NASVI adopted an aggressive strategy, pitching a campaign both on the advocacy front, and, on the streets on a strident note. Vendors from the states were mobilised, and the organisational strategy included campaigns and memorandum, dharnas and protests across India. A post card campaign was organised in 2011 where more than one hundred thousand post cards were sent to the Union Cabinet Minister of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation (MHUPA) demanding a central law. In June 2011, vendor organisations across India posted a memorandum to the prime minister demanding early initiation of process for law making and in August 2011 thousands of vendors gheraoed the parliament demanding central law. The minister agreed that the problems of vendors could be solved only through a law and announced that the government would bring in central law for street vendors in the national convention organised by NASVI in November 2011. Even when the law was in the process of being drafted, NASVI and its allies kept an eye on the content of the bill. NASVI had provided vital inputs to the draft bill but the version of the bill when it was presented in the Lok Sabha in September 2012 had many loopholes. Due to the vigilant attitude

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of NASVI and allies, these were pointed out, and the vendors’ organisations kept up the pressure on the political parties; on 19 February 2014, the Rajya Sabha also passed the Street Vendors’ Bill. It is also interesting that NASVI has targeted the Ministry of Urban Development, not the Labour Ministry which the informal workers usually target for their advocacy efforts. It is not documented why this ministry was identified as a negotiating partner but can be linked to earlier years of SEWA organising street vendors in Delhi. And it is no doubt that the role of the ministry was catalytic and critical in taking the policy forward. Interestingly, when the demand for a law was made, the Ministry of Law opined that the “appropriate government authority” mentioned in the judgement was state or local governments and, therefore, a national law was not called for, NASVI continued to press for a national law, arguing that the issues of street vendors relate not only to urban planning but also to livelihood, labour, employment and social protection – all subjects under the purview of the national government, not state governments. In late 2011, thanks to the campaign and advocacy efforts of NASVI, SEWA and other organisations, the two ministries changed their position and decided to support a national law for street vendors. The Act of 2014 (the Act) specifies that town vending committees (TVCs) must be established to carry out surveys of vendors, ensure that all existing vendors are accommodated in vending zones, and issue certificates for vending. The Act also stipulates that the members of the TVCs should include at least 40 per cent of the representatives of street vendors, elected by the street vendors themselves, at least onethird of whom should be women (chapter VII). An additional 10 per cent representation has been allocated to non-governmental organisations (NGOs). With 50 per cent of the representation of TVCs coming from civil society, in principle, there is little scope for the existence of governance practices that ignore the protections of vendors outlined in the legislation. The 2014 Street Vendors Act mandates that municipalities cannot bypass TVCs. Committees are designed to be representative and include among their members: 40 per cent from street vendor organisations; 10 per cent from voluntary organisations/ NGOs and 50 per cent from the municipality, transport sector, police, health and sanitation units, and banking sector. Even with this legal mandate, local implementation requires ongoing activism. For example, in 2014, NASVI had to take the city of Delhi to court to seek full implementation. In addition, the Act recognises “natural” markets as “places where sellers and buyers have traditionally congregated” (Government of India 2014: 2). This would preclude the relocation of

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vendors to places which are inaccessible and have low levels of pedestrian footfalls, a common occurrence in street trader planning. After evictions, according to NASVI sources, the Delhi High Court “ordered municipal authorities to conduct a survey of the area mentioned in the petition as to how many vendors had been evicted and to reinstate them at their original vending sites because this was an outright violation of the Street Vending Act, 2014” as well as of court orders of several other courts. As of early 2016, the Act has strengthened the hand of NASVI and its Delhi members in their activities undertaken to protect markets, opposing the closing of the Qutub Road Market, the eviction of the Book Bazaar (200 vendors) and the extortion practices of fictitious “trade unions” in the Velodrome Road Market (12,000 vendors).

Follow-up of the national law The passing of a law for the protection of the street vendors’ livelihoods is by no means the end of their struggle. In fact, it is just the beginning of a new and perhaps more intensive struggle to ensure that the Act is enforced fully, and NASVI will have to reinvent itself again to take on the role of having the law implemented throughout the country. Meanwhile, the municipal authorities are clearly reluctant to implement the law in its true spirit. The TVCs have been formed in most of the large cities but they have been ineffective so far. None of the cities has conducted surveys for assessing the number of street vendors. The Act states that this is mandatory before any further step is taken. Moreover, the Act clearly states that no street vendor can be evicted till the survey is completed but evictions are still taking place. In Mumbai, for example, a survey was conducted in some parts of the city and photographs of the hawkers were taken for providing them licences but till January 2015, no licence had been issued, and evictions of the vendors continue to be conducted regularly in blatant violation of the law. The reluctance of the municipal authorities and the police in implementing the law can be understood in view of the huge amounts they derive as rents from the street vendors. Thus, by keeping the vendors as illegal entities, they can keep extorting rent from them. While the presence of a conducive policy environment for the street vendors cannot be attributed directly and solely to NASVI, it is worthwhile to acknowledge the NASVI struggle to bring better policies and laws for the street vendors in India has borne fruit. This is not in any way to relegate or diminish the role played by the other labour organisations, such as SEWA, or in any way not to acknowledge the external

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environment such as judicial activism; favourable bureaucrats and other individuals; and political opportunity that have provided impetus and direction to the struggle. While mindful of not falling into the trap of a simplistic and reductionist analysis of the complex and layered world of advocacy and claim making in India, the NASVI model may be able to provide us with some answers to questions such as when and how the state in India responds to workers claims. Again it is important to add that the Street Vendors Act is currently only on paper and no benefits have accrued to the street vendors as yet. The analysis of the relationship between vendors’ claims making and changing laws and policies in the sector, especially focusing on the issues around which mobilisations take place, the processes and strategies of claims making by the network, shows how a national-level advocacy and mobilisation can address “local” issues. It also illustrates the multipronged and multilevel approach that organisations of the informal sector devise. The processes through which the changes in laws and policies have occurred provide us with some insights into what makes successful networks of informal workers and in developing models for building a collective voice for the informal sector workers. Concluding remarks The National Association of Street Vendors of India (NASVI) is unique in many ways. First, it is one of the few large networks of street vendors anywhere in the world. Secondly, it represents a section of the self-employed informal workers who are perceived as being difficult to organise (in a traditional sense of the term) due to the absence of an employer and the street being their “workplace”. Third in the absence of an employer, NASVI, in a well-thought-of strategy, has targeted the state to demand recognition, benefits and rights of the vendors. And finally, in order to do so, it has steered clear of the labour department and, instead, has brought the issues of vendors’ rights and livelihood in the urban discourse, with city planners and city bureaucracy. The organisational strategy adopted by the network too has some very interesting and unique lessons. Due to its efforts, NASVI has been able to change the discourse on street vendors and brought them centre stage – highlighting not just their plight and challenges but has contributed towards a shift in perception where the vendor is seen in a more positive light of a hard-working “entrepreneur”, contributing to city economy. This effort to change the mindset of all the stakeholders, including middle-class consumers, and carefully integrating and legally institutionalising their participation in city decision making is

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a key contribution of the network, and is critical in building a strong movement of the street vendors in India. Finally, the network has not just shaped the external policy environment but also been, in turn, shaped by the changing policy arena in the country – reinventing itself time and time again to remain responsive to the needs of its constituency.

Notes 1 For more information, see www.nasvinet.org. 2 Information provided by NASVI. Personal communication, Anurag Shankar, May 2016, NASVI. 3 Information provided by NASVI. Personal communication, Anurag, dated 6 May 2016. 4 Personal communication, Arbind Singh, NASVI, New Delhi.

References Bhowmik, S. K. 2001. “Hawkers and the Urban Informal Sector: A Study of Street Vending in Seven Cities”, http://wiego.org/sites/wiego.org/files/ publications/files/Bhowmik–Hawkers–URBAN–INFORMAL–SECTOR. pdf (accessed on 5 January 2015). Bhowmik, S. K. 2005. “Street Vendors in Asia: A Review”, Economic and Political Weekly, 40(22&23): 2256–2264. Bhowmik, S. K. (ed.). 2010. Street Vendors in the Global Urban Economy. New Delhi: Routledge. Bhowmik, S. K. 2014. “Urban Responses to Street Trading”, http://wiego. org/sites/wiego.org/files/publications/files/Bhowmik_Urban_Responses_to_ Street_Trading_India.pdf, (accessed on 5 January 2015). Chen, M. A., Madhav, R. and Sankaran, K. 2014. “Legal Reforms for the SelfEmployed: Three Urban Cases”, The Indian Journal of Industrial Relations, 50(1): 133–150. Chen, M. A. and Raveendran, G. 2011. Urban Employment in India: Recent Trends and Patterns, WIEGO Working Paper (Statistics) No. 7, Table 7, http://wiego.org/sites/wiego.org/files/publications/files/Chen–Urban– Employment–India–WIEGO–WP7.pdf (accessed on 20 January 2015). Chen, M., Vanek, J., Lund, F. and Heintz, J. 2005. Progress of the World’s Women. New York: United Nations Development Fund for Women. GoI. 2014. The Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014, http://www.indiacode.nic.in/acts2014/7%20 of%202014.pdf (accessed on 15 January 2015). Jhabvala, R. 2000. “Roles and Perceptions”, Seminar, 491, www.india– seminar.com//2000/491.htm (accessed on 10 January 2015). Jhabvala, R. 2010. “Foreword”, in Bhowmik, S. K (ed.), Street Vendors in the Global Urban Economy, pp. X1–XVIV. New Delhi: Routledge.

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Mahadevia, D., Vyas, S. and Mishra, A. 2014. Informal Economy Monitoring Study: Street Vendors in Ahmedabad, India. Manchester, UK: WIEGO. Roever, S. 2014. Informal Economy Monitoring Study Sector Report: Street Vendors. Cambridge, MA: WIEGO, http://wiego.org/sites/wiego.org/files/ publications/files/IEMS–Sector–Full–Report–Street–Vendors.pdf (accessed on 15 January 2016). Roever, S. 2016. “Informal Trade Meets Informal Governance: Street Vendors and Legal Reform in India, South Africa, and Peru”, Cityscape, 18(1): 47–66. SEWA. 2013. “Annual Report”, www.sewa.org/pdf/Sewa_Annual_Report. pdf (accessed on 15 January 2016). Singh, A. 2000. “Organizing Street Vendors”, Seminar, 491, http://www. india-seminar.com/2000/491/491%20arbind%20singh.htm (accessed on 15 March 2016). Sinha, S. and Roever, S. 2011. India’s National Policy on Urban Street Vendors, WIEGO Policy Brief (Urban Policies) No. 2. Cambridge, MA: WIEGO, 12 pages, http://wiego.org/sites/wiego.org/files/publications/files/ Sinha_WIEGO_PB2.pdf (accessed on 15 January 2016).

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Domestic workers’ movement in Maharashtra Organising experiences of Pune City Domestic Workers’ Organisation Sujata Gothoskar

Women’s work, women’s sexuality and women’s autonomy have been important hallmarks of the current phase of the women’s movement that began in the 1960s and 1970s the world over. An important aspect of this was the critique of housework or domestic labour and the almost complete equation of women to domestic labour. Domestic labour, in a sense, is one of the links between the personal and the political in the lives of most women. With the entire phenomenon of globalisation of capital and, to a relatively less extent, globalisation of labour, the research and activism vis-à-vis domestic labour looked at the globalisation of care work and the global division of labour within care work. The women’s movement globally has raised the issue of domestic work at least from the 1960s, if not earlier. Attempts at organising domestic workers have been going on for several decades now. Several types of organisations are involved in these efforts. The main forms of organising efforts have been forming trade unions, co-operatives, employment and placement services, training and education, provision of legal services, provision of other support services, attempts at legislative provisions and rights, campaigns and several combinations of these functions. This chapter examines the contexts in which the Pune Shahar Molkarin1 Sanghatana, or the Pune City Domestic Workers’ Organisation, was formed and the strategies that the organisation adopted in effectively organising workers who are scattered over the city. While tracing the history, evolution and strategies, the chapter also highlights the vulnerability of domestic workers emanating from a complex matrix of caste, migration, poverty, patriarchy and work insecurities and ways by which the union addresses these issues.

Situating domestic work in the Indian context The service sector is said to be the fastest-growing sector in India contributing significantly to GDP, GDP growth, employment, trade and investment (Mukherjee 2013). One section of this service sector

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comprises of work that entails relatively higher levels of education and training or at least a class/caste background that enables access to the English language. The second set of jobs is in the fast-growing entertainment industry – tourism, bars and hotels, etc. Here, an almost blanket requirement is of young girls. This sector seems to be absorbing young girls who have just a few years ago sought employment in the small- and medium-scale industries. So again the residue sector is that of domestic workers, mostly poor, disadvantaged, often relatively elderly women from the lower castes and classes. Domestic work seems to be the last resort of this section of women, globally as well. Often younger women who have completed eight to ten years of schooling also get into domestic work. This is partly due to the relatively lower levels of pay in the small and tiny enterprises in the manufacturing sector due to the supply chain factors involved, whereby small and tiny enterprises are squeezed by the larger companies. The other reason is the relative flexibility of domestic work in terms of hours worked and the ability to determine timings at work to fit in with children’s school schedules or other household chores and responsibilities. This is a way of negotiating shifting roles in the family and labour market. A recent study by the ILO (2013) noted that there were 52.6 million domestic workers across the world in 2010 and more than 80 per cent of all domestic workers are women, account for 3.5 per cent of women’s employment in the world. The estimates provide evidence that this workforce had grown by more than 19 million since 1995, when the global count of domestic workers was 33.2 million. It should be noted that these figures do not include domestic workers below the age of fifteen years, which amounts to 7.4 million children (ILO 2013). In India, the NSSO surveys from 2004–05 till 2009–10 indicate that there is an increase in regular employment for urban women. This as Chandrasekhar and Ghosh (2011) noted “created much joy in official circles, until it was pointed out that the largest increase in urban regular employment of women was in the form of domestic service – as maids, cooks and cleaners, hardly the most desirable or dynamic forms of work. This accounted for 3 million more urban women workers in the period 1999–2000 to 2004–05, far exceeding the increase in ‘export-oriented’ sectors like garments, leather and IT-enabled activities”. According to the recently formed National Platform for Domestic Workers, “there is yet no exact data on our numbers and our estimated numbers vary from 4.75 million to over 90 million, according to some sources. While the former is a gross under estimation, the latter may be exaggerated. However, it can be safely estimated that we number anywhere between 40–50 million in our country”.2 Another source for recent data on domestic work is the Employment and Unemployment

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Survey 2009–10 by the Labour Bureau, which indicates that domestic workers constitute 2.7 per cent of total employed persons in India, amounting to more than ten million domestic workers (Eluri and Singh 2013). This number has been increasing over the years. Overall, however, there has been a feminisation of domestic work, particularly in the past few decades. The sector has shown a phenomenal increase in the number and proportion of women in paid domestic service. The number of women employed in the subcategories of the industrial category “private households with employed persons” as per the 2009–10 employment data (which itself is a huge underrepresentation due to definitional ambiguities and invisibility issues) shows more than fourfold increase over the ten-year period from 1999 to 2000. The share of female workers in this category has also remained as high as 68 per cent (Neetha 2013). It needs to be noted that the category domestic workers is not homogenous and there are different types of domestic workers and work arrangements. There are those who work full time for one employer or part time for one or more employers. Some perform only a single task or service for their employers, while others perform multiple tasks or services. In all cases, the employment relationship is informal – that is, unregulated and unprotected. Some domestic workers are hired through a “third-party” agency or contractor, which could be a public, private for-profit or private non-profit agency. Some domestic workers migrate to foreign countries and are forced to sign contracts, which include slavery conditions. A few are members of co-operatives of domestic workers who jointly negotiate contracts to provide domestic services to various private clients or households (Chen 2011).

Conditions of work: issues at the workplace Several common features of domestic work set it apart from other types of paid work. Lack of recognition as workers in the legal and administrative framework is the underlying condition of domestic work in most situations. Domestic workers are employed in private homes, thus making them invisible as workers and isolated from other workers. Also, most of the tasks involved in domestic work are seen as “women’s work”, so are considered of low status and value. Finally, enforcing labour laws and regulations is a challenge as inspection and regulation in private homes is difficult. The feminisation of domestic work further demeaned the value of domestic work. Their wages are fixed assuming that they are performing the “gendered responsibility”

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in a family, that is without locating them as workers or considering the kind of work they are engaged in (George 2013). Very few laws apply to domestic workers. At the central level, the most recent legislation that also covers domestic workers is the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013. Earlier the Unorganised Workers Social Security Act, 2008, had expressly included domestic workers. A few states like Karnataka have included domestic workers in their schedule to the Minimum Wages Act, 1948 (Sankaran 2013). There have been other measures like the extension of the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) to domestic workers, and Tamil Nadu has included domestic workers in their Manual Workers Act and created a separate board for them. However, there is no comprehensive national legislation for domestic workers. However, as far back as 1948, there had been various attempts to legislate for domestic workers in the country, as domestic workers were not within the scope of labour laws. Most of these initiatives took place outside mainstream trade unionism. According to the Trade Union Act of 1926, the home could not be considered a workplace or “industry” as referred to by the Act. A Domestic Workers (Conditions of Service) Bill, a private member’s bill introduced in the Rajya Sabha, was drafted as early as 1959 but was never enacted (George 2013). In 1959 itself, the All India Domestic Workers’ Union, Delhi, had made representation to the prime minister of India demanding protection for domestic workers under the Payment of Wages Act and the Minimum Wages Act. In 1972 and 1977, two additional private member bills (Domestic Workers (Conditions of Service) Bill, 1972, and the Domestic Workers (Conditions of Service) Bill, 1977, were introduced in the Lok Sabha, which aimed at extending the Industrial Disputes Act to domestic workers. These bills lapsed with the dissolution of the Lok Sabha. The House Workers (Conditions of Service) Bill of 1989 and a similar bill introduced in 1990 were not enacted either. The National Commission on Self Employed Women and Women in the Informal Sector in 1988 recommended a system of registration for domestic workers. It felt that in view of the existing trends of exploitation, it was extremely important to fix a minimum wage, and to enact a legislation to regulate conditions of employment, social security and security of employment (George 2013). None of these attempts achieved formal legal status for domestic workers and, despite repeated incidents of abuse of various types coming to public notice, a legislation ensuring legal protection to domestic workers has been scuttled for several decades.

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In the year 1994, several trade unions and NGOs in Maharashtra came together to campaign for and demand legislative protection for domestic workers. The organisations that were part of this campaign comprised a wide range. Some were trade unions with a Left orientation, some with a right-wing orientation, some were church-based groups and some were voluntary funded organisations. Some of these include the Pune Molkarin Sanghatana, YUVA, SETU, which is a project of Nirmala Niketan College of Social Work, Bombay Houseworkers’ Solidarity, National Domestic Workers’ Movement, the Gharelu Kamgar Sangh, etc. (Gothoskar 2005). In 1998, Maharashtra Government brought out a report on the problems faced by domestic workers. In the year 2000, a code of conduct for employers was issued by the State Government of Maharashtra (Gothoskar 2013). Extreme insecurity of employment is an important part of the experience of domestic workers, who may be asked to leave work at any time without any prior notice. Often, when domestic workers fall ill or are facing some crisis and cannot go to work for a few days, that is the time they are informed that they no longer have their jobs. This is precisely the time they need their work and the wages very badly. This insecurity is exacerbated by their generally insecure existence. Their work, their place of residence, proof of either work or place of residence is often all connected and that makes their very existence precarious and insecure. Multiplicity of employers is one of the strategies used by domestic workers to protect themselves from employment insecurity. Social security provisions like provident fund, healthcare, and pension are out of the purview of this work as there is no welldefined employer–employee relationship. In many cases it is either difficult to locate an employer as many work in multiple houses or employers are reluctant to identify these women as their workers. Another crucial problem that domestic workers have to face is abuse.3 This includes sexual harassment. It is often assumed that domestic work is safe work, especially for women as it involves work in the relatively safe space of a home and is not exposed to strangers.4 It can and has turned the exact opposite of that for many women, especially young girls. As Neetha N. puts it, domestic work spheres, the homes of employers, we now know, are not spaces of love and sympathy but locations of bargaining and negotiating (Neetha 2013). The workspace of the domestic worker is somebody’s home. It is in his/ her total control and free whim to do what he/she wants. There have been several instances when women and young girls have been beaten up, raped and even murdered. The abuse of domestic workers is wideranging. It varies from denial of dignity to beating to taunting, caste

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abuse, accusing of theft and so on. This has often taken very serious proportions, especially when the domestic workers are socially vulnerable too, as in the case of migrants of young or single women. The emotional and intimate bond that may develop between the employer and the worker also prevents such a worker from entering into a professional work relation. The space of unequal economic power, social status and at the same time the interpersonal intimacy and domestic isolation expose domestic workers to a multitude of exploitation (George 2013). The third very difficult area is that of very low wages, cuts in wages and deceit in wage calculations. By and large, the wages of domestic workers are far below minimum wages. There is a tendency to not increase wage levels for years together. Inflation eats into the wages of the women, effectively reducing their real wages. In the calculations of advances taken and wage cuts in lieu of advance, deceit is commonly reported. In the case of migrant domestic workers, deceit by agents who arrange work in other countries is also reported. Domestic workers are not entitled to retirement benefits either. Domestic workers have to continue to work till as late as they can manage. The wages are so low that savings are just not possible. And there is no provision for any benefits that they can access once they can no longer work. The Maharashtra Act of 2008 registers domestic workers from the age of fifteen to sixty. There is an assumption that after the age of sixty, women do not need to work for their living, without giving them a right to retirement benefits. This is simply not true. The fourth aspect is the work itself, which is often very heavy. Domestic work is looked at as something that comes naturally for women and more domestic work seems to be no problem for the giver. “They just love to make us work hard, real hard”, says Sumitra, one of the domestic workers whom the researcher interviewed. Besides, domestic work often involves long hours of work. For full-time domestic workers, who live at the employers’ home, there seems to be no limit to working hours. They are often on 24-hour duty. If there are unexpected guests in the middle of the night, if the employer is coming home late or is used to late nights, the domestic worker has to be on call till late. For half-time domestic workers, the wage rates are so low, that they have to work in several houses to make both ends meet. Either way long working hours is a common problem faced by domestic workers. The increasing use of machines and gadgets has different impacts on domestic workers in different situations. In some cases, domestic workers lose their jobs because new machines like washing machines

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or vacuum cleaners are brought into the households where they used to work. In some cases, women domestic workers have to learn to wield these machines and take extra care that they are not damaged. There are no provisions for paid leave for domestic workers. Leave is something that the best of employers grudgingly give domestic workers. Paid leave is a tougher proposition. This is also one work where even national holidays cannot be enjoyed. In fact, during festival season, when the rest of the world enjoys themselves, domestic workers have more work to do – helping with the cleaning and swabbing, special cleaning, etc. Another difficult issue is that of health and healthcare. According to the ILO (ILO 1983), “the types of work leading to domestic – work – accidents are: Manual and mechanical tasks, indoor and outdoor duties, taking care of persons, goods, household linen, furniture and other things, cleaning of premises and utensils, kitchen work and commuting in outdoor duties”. As much as 75 per cent of all fatal domestic accidents are caused by falls, fire and poisoning. Skin diseases, particularly eczema, are reported among cleaning women. Rheumatic complaints due to repeated immersion of hands in water or working in hot work areas, tenosynovitis such as housemaid’s knee, lumbago and backaches are relatively common. There is a possibility of infection from affected employers or their family members and visitors (Athavale 2004). Their health problems have to be dealt with by the domestic workers on their own as there are no medical or sickness benefits. This results in domestic workers paying a large part of their wages on health-related expenses or alternatively they tend to totally neglect their ailments, often resulting in major illness or even early onset of old age or even death. There are some seemingly strange issues that domestic workers have to face. One of them is that they are sandwiched between authorities at their workplace. In almost all the houses there are more than one centres of power. The brunt of these power relationships is often borne by the domestic workers as not only is she regarded as a channel of communication, but is also a medium to express anger against the other member(s) of the family. Another situational issue and one that has a relevance to the ability of domestic workers to organise is the contradictory relationship with their employers. As almost all domestic workers come from a caste and class where their peers – relatives, friends and colleagues – also share the same or similar vulnerability, there are often no backup mechanisms or structures when they are in crisis. When there is an emergency like an illness or a sudden death, there is only the employer she can borrow from, if she does not want

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to land up in the clutches of the exploitative moneylender. Access to non-wage benefits like emergency loans and other kinds of assistance from employers has often been cited as an important aspect of the relationship between domestic workers and their employers (Coelho et al. 2013; Sengupta and Sen 2013). Certain categories of domestic workers face specific working conditions that exacerbate the disadvantages. Live-in domestic workers experience greater isolation, less privacy and more limited mobility, work longer hours and receive a larger share of payments in kind (e.g. board). Migrant domestic workers often live in the employers’ home, facing not only the challenges of live-in domestics but also abuses within the recruitment system and from police and immigration authorities, including advance commission fees, withheld wages and passports, and verbal, physical or sexual harassment.5 So despite the tension in terms of the work relationship between the employer and the domestic worker, there is also a relationship of dependence at different levels. This often complicates the simple model of the employer– employee relationship.

The organising wave Most domestic workers are not organised into trade unions and have no representative voice. Although this is beginning to change, organising domestic workers is not easy because they are isolated and vulnerable. The nature of the worker–employer relationship makes it difficult to negotiate collective bargaining agreements with their employers. Despite these challenges, domestic workers have made great strides in organising in recent years in India. Attempts at organising domestic workers have been going on for several decades now. Several types of organisations have been involved in these efforts. The main forms of organising efforts have been forming trade unions, co-operatives, employment and placement services, training and education, provision of legal services, provision of other support services, attempts at legislative provisions and rights, campaigns and several combinations of these functions. One of the oldest types of effort in helping domestic workers has been by church-related organisations. In the Indian context, the church has worked with Dalits (the so-called lower castes and erstwhile untouchables) and Adivasis (indigenous people). In Indian society, where the most downtrodden sections are the Dalits and Adivasis, domestic workers have been found to belong precisely to these sections (Gothoskar 2005). Similarly, national-level trade unions, also called

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central trade unions, have organised domestic workers for several decades now. There are networks and federations emerging as well. On 3 February 2011 the Maharashtra Rajya GharKamgar Kriti Samiti (Maharashtra State Domestic Workers Committee) was formed. This Samiti is a joint platform of domestic workers’ unions affiliated to AITUC, BMS, CITU, HMS, INTUC, NTUI and Sarva Shramik Mahasangh. This Samiti aims to raise issues of wages, conditions of work and access to social security. On 16 March 2011, over 8,000 domestic workers marched under the banner of the Samiti demanding that they be recognised as workers (New Trade Union Initiatives 2011). Another important process has begun now with the ILO’s recognition of domestic workers’ rights. This is likely to give a boost to both debates on the issues related to domestic work and to further organising globally.

Current ongoing attempts In 2011, after many years of advocacy and struggle, the International Labour Conference adopted an international Convention (C189), which recognises the right of domestic workers to decent working conditions, including the right to daily and weekly rest periods; a minimum wage and minimum age consistent with that of other sectors in each member country; the right to choose where to spend their leave and where to live; and the right to clear terms of employment. After the ILO Convention, the National Platform for Domestic Workers was formed in India. The immediate focus of the Platform is to Campaign for a Comprehensive Legislation for domestic workers. Various states – Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Delhi and Orissa – conducted state-level meetings in 2013 to discuss the non-negotiable for the legislation. This platform is open to all member-based organisations of domestic workers – be they unions, associations, co-operatives or organisations. A signature campaign was launched and a memorandum was prepared addressed to the prime minister, the chairpersons of the Petitions Committee and the Standing Committee for Labour. A huge rally was organised on 31 July 2013 to submit the Memorandum with the non-negotiable that should be part of the Comprehensive Legislation. The National Platform is emphatic that the proposed legislation should form a Tripartite Board as the instrument for the implementation of the Act which has to regulate employment, conditions of work as well as provide social protection. The Board has to necessarily be

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autonomous and there has to be a mechanism for dispute resolution and grievance redress. The Platform visualised the Board to undertake the registration of workers, monitor their social security contributions and social protection, regulate the conditions of their work, oversee the registration of employers as well as monitor the payment of minimum wages. The Platform has proposed a helpline and complaints committee to look at the complaints like harassment and sexual harassment of the domestic workers. The Platform visualises that the Board has also to play the role of registering the Placement Agencies, of providing skill upgradation to domestic workers, of helping workers to form collectives and co-operatives. The other proposal that the Platform has is of providing workers with smart cards that are recognised anywhere in the country, which would make accessing benefits including retirement benefits even if the workers migrate to other states. In order to deepen our understanding of this process of organising of domestic workers, here we will look in depth at one such attempt, that of the Pune Shahar Molkarin Sanghatana (Pune City Domestic Workers’ Organisation) in the city of Pune in the state of Maharashtra.

Pune Shahar Molkarin Sanghatana (Pune City Domestic Workers’ Organisation) Maharashtra is an industrially advanced state in India, with a high degree of urbanisation. Pune is the second-largest city in the state and also a well-developed industrial city with engineering and automobile industries dominating the scene. It is a centre well known for its educational and cultural institutions, is a major trading centre as well and has recently emerged as a major information technology centre. These developments have an important bearing on the labour market for domestic work as well (Gothoskar 2005). The Pune Shahar Molkarin Sanghatana, or the Pune City Domestic Workers’ Organisation, has been in existence for over three decades now. The membership fee of the Sanghatana is Rs 60 per year. The direct membership of the Sanghatana is over 15,000, and it reaches to several more domestic workers indirectly. The Sanghatana works in over thirty-five residential areas of Pune. This has been a long trajectory, with several ups and downs. Most of these “downs” have been the product of the unorganised and unstable nature of work of the women who have organised themselves in this organisation. Most of the “ups”, however, show the initiative, the resilience and sheer determination of the women and their organisation.6

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The immediate reason for the birth of the Molkarin Sanghatana in Pune may look like an accident, but it was an accident waiting to happen. In 1980, in one of the main roads of the city, called Karve Road, the services of a long-time worker, Khandarebai, were terminated by her employer. The reason given was she did not report for duties due to illness and some domestic problems. Khandarebai decided to get all the domestic workers who worked on that road together and discuss the issue. There was a spontaneous gathering of workers. The details of this struggle have been discussed elsewhere (Gothoskar 2005). What we will try to do in the following section is to look at the Sanghatana, its history and its activities through the different strategies it deployed over the years.

Strategy of Organising The Sanghatana was born out of a massive strike and the domestic workers sought the help and guidance of a Left-oriented trade union, women’s organisation and a relatively open Left party. Thus the strategies of the Sanghatana were necessarily more militant and struggleoriented. The Sanghatana put a great deal of emphasis on building the organisation. In the first strike of 1980, when women domestic workers were not personally prepared for the struggle and organising, the activists used to have meetings every day. Over 500–600 women attended these meetings. They gradually learnt to speak and express themselves. The Sanghatana also organised residential-level meetings. The Sanghatana put forward demands that went beyond wages. These included issues like access to public health and right to decent housing. For workers who are completely unorganised and in the informal economy, these issues take on even serious proportions. Women domestic workers, like many other sections as well, are disadvantaged in terms of gender; class; caste; lack of political and other connections, lack of access to skills, capital, positions of power and so on. Hence they live in very difficult conditions, have less access to education, medical and other healthcare facilities and this reinforces their low status as workers and as citizens. Their vulnerabilities get compounded and reinforced. It is necessary to break this vicious cycle of vulnerability by attacking several of them at the same time. And that is what seems to be an important strategy of the Sanghatana. The other issues that the Sanghatana has been active around include: evictions from houses, sexual harassment and sexual deceit of girls and women, police brutality, malpractices of ration shops, illicit brewing of liquor and liquor dens, etc. Marches and rallies were organised in several places where the domestic workers live.

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As part of the struggle strategy, the Sanghatana addressed the state that had refused to recognise the domestic workers as workers. The Sanghatana organised marches and rallies on the office of the Pune District Collector as well as the Labour Commissioner. The Sanghatana also demanded of the state government that it enact legislation that recognised domestic workers’ rights. This was in co-operation with a much wider network of organisations working with domestic workers. Strikes were an important part of this strategy. These were organised almost every few years in different parts of the city, depending on the issues in different areas. Demonstrations were organised when individual women domestic workers were unfairly charged with theft and arrested by the local police even before conducting investigations or searches. The extent of this problem and the importance it has for the domestic workers and the Sanghatana may be gauged by the number of demonstrations the Sanghatana organised on this issue. In a short period of a month – from December 2003 to January 2004 – there were eleven demonstrations on this issue. On some days, there were several demonstrations in a single day. Often there were around 100 women participating in the demonstrations. Negotiation strategy: individual and collective An important strategy of the Sanghatana, which is a very crucial felt need to domestic workers, is that of accessing courts. Women domestic workers are often accused of theft. The Sanghatana has active lawyers who not only help the women when so accused but also demand explanations from the police for such treatment. An aggressive, rather than defensive, stance is more likely to curtail, if not prevent, harassment from employers and the police. This was in addition to and together with the strategy of struggle mentioned earlier, when false complaints of theft were dealt with by organising rallies and demonstrations in front of police stations. During the strikes, there were instances of employers behaving in a very bad manner. In one case, an employer threatened a domestic worker with a gun. In another instance, dogs were set upon the domestic worker. In many cases the union refused to take this lying low. The domestic worker actually went and lodged a police complaint against the employer. This is very important in the context of the class and caste hierarchy in society. It is only the employers who have the connections and the confidence to go to the police station against the domestic workers, often with false complaints of theft, etc. The police too are known to share this bias and often refuse to even entertain

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genuine complaints from poor people, especially women. In the meetings women spoke about the loss of dignity – about being made to feel low and also grateful for the stale food that the employer gave them, the different and often broken cups they were served tea in, etc. Another area where domestic workers asserted their rights was vis-àvis the local goons, who used to terrorise women in their residential areas. The women fought against the goons collectively. Harnessing community support Earlier, quite a few employers had resisted the unionisation of the domestic workers and opposed their strike. The Sanghatana attempted to reach out to employers and dialogue with them. The result was that in the January 1984 strike, several women employers came forward to support the strike. The Sanghatana also organised awareness raising marches early morning and went through different residential areas making people aware of the situation and demands of domestic workers. In several areas of the city, domestic workers arranged for walls to be painted with slogans about their demands, especially about bonus and gratuity. In some cases, the domestic workers too have helped their employers in dealing with their issues, whether they are personal issues or even issues relating to their residential colonies and the struggles there. The union enlisted the support of the media right from its inception in 1980. The Sanghatana was in touch with several newspapers in Pune and Bombay. They covered the strikes widely, including an editorial by one of the workers’ newspaper. A documentary as well as a film was also prepared on the strike. These were broadcast on the national television that reaches almost every nook and corner of the country and were widely disseminated. Federating As the Sanghatana was part of a wider organisation that spoke for all unorganised and manual workers, they were able to build stronger linkages with other sections of workers in the informal economy. The demands of the Federation were also wide-ranging (Gothoskar 2005). Networking has been a very important strategy, for the simple reason that the issues of domestic workers are so grave and their neglect in legislation and policy framework so total that only a very massive organising and networking effort may result in some positive results. The Sanghatana has been active in the Maharashtra network to demand legislative changes and recognition for domestic workers

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as workers. This network comprises trade unions and NGOs from different cities in Maharashtra – Aurangabad, Nagpur, Pune, Nasik, Mumbai, etc. The network has organised several demonstrations and rallies to press for legal changes in favour of domestic workers. Advocacy and lobbying Together with organising domestic workers, the Sanghatana has tried in various ways to lobby with the government, at both the centre and especially at the state level to enact legislation in order to legally protect domestic workers. This has been a consistent activity of the Sanghatana, right from the beginning. In the year of its inception itself, in 1980 the Sanghatana worked towards bringing up the issue of domestic workers for discussion in the session of the Maharashtra government. In the year 1990, the Sanghatana prepared a bill to protect the domestic workers. In the 1990s, the Sanghatana worked actively with other organisations to pressurise the Maharashtra government to pass a law for domestic workers. They petitioned the government in different forums, participated in meetings called by different bodies, including the National Commission for Women. The Sanghatana consistently demanded the institution of autonomous workers’ boards on the lines of the transport, electricity and, more specifically, the head loaders. They pointed out that like the domestic workers, the head loaders also work with more than one employer and the boards have worked well in their case. The Sanghatana has made this an important plank of lobbying, of advocacy and of organising. The immense experience of several decades of unionising in a more holistic manner, the connection with the other unorganised sector workers like the Mathadi workers as well as with domestic workers’ organisations and trade unions across the country and beyond has strengthened the Sanghatana as well as the organisations that network and federate with it. All these efforts by several unions and organisations over the decades as well as the ground-level voices ultimately forced the state labour department to draft a law. This legislation was more addressing workers’ “welfare” rather than the rights of domestic workers or any improvement in their conditions of work. Although all the unions called for a rights-based framework, the Maharashtra Domestic Workers Welfare Board Act that was passed in December 2008 is a weak law. It has a restricted provision to create a tripartite welfare board for domestic workers vested with powers to frame and implement welfare schemes for the benefit of domestic workers. There is no clear source of its funds (unlike beedi workers whose welfare funds are generated

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by a sale-based cess, or construction workers who get a fraction of the value of the works). It is, therefore, entirely dependent on financial support from the state government. Its biggest flaw is that it has no provisions to regulate the working conditions of paid domestic workers (Moghe 2013). This is entirely consistent with the history of the manner in which the state has treated domestic workers. However, the saving grace is it accepts and accords domestic workers the status of a “worker” with “rights”. As a result, there is an interface with the labour department, an implicit recognition of the right of trade unions to represent domestic workers and engage on their behalf for the betterment of their working conditions. This, however, has been the outcome of consistent and intense struggles of several unions and organisations like the Sanghatana. This included direct street action, rallies and protest marches. The rules of the Maharashtra Domestic Workers Welfare Board Act were notified in August 2010 and it took another year for the state to constitute the State Domestic Labour Welfare Board. It is still an uphill task as there are serious flaws in the entire conceptualisation as well as the implementation of the Act. Most of the people on the Board have very little to do with the domestic workers’ movement. The budgetary allocation has been completely insufficient for its effective functioning, including lack of independent staff and even basic infrastructure (Moghe 2013). The Act provides for registration of domestic workers and the provision of some benefits, including an identity card. While there has been a great deal of awareness and interest among the domestic workers regarding this Act and its provision, there has been a lack of motivation and resources from the state. The Sanghatana as well as the other unions and organisations has been persistent and consistent in its efforts to see that the meagre provisions of the Act reach as many women workers as is possible. Meanwhile attempts to get legislation at the National level continue. Connecting with larger women’s movement There is recognition in the Sanghatana of the very close relationship of between the women’s movement and the domestic workers’ issues, given the linkage that domestic work has with women and with domestic workers. The women’s movement globally has been very engaged on the issue of domestic work and its valuation since at least the 1970s. The campaign by domestic workers and trade unions for legislative coverage of domestic work and for a working life of dignity is in many ways closely linked to the demand by the women’s movement for

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recognition of unpaid household and care work performed by women within the household. There has been a long struggle for recognising and assigning value to the unpaid labour done by women within the household (Sankaran 2013). The domestic workers in the Sanghatana have been active in the women’s movement from the early 1980s. In 1987 the Stree Mukti Manch (Women’s Liberation Forum) was formed, which later took the form of the Shramik Mahila Morcha (Toiling Women’s Front). The domestic workers have been the backbone of this front. The perspective of the Morcha as well as of the Sanghatana has been that of organising as a community in different senses of the term “community”. The fact that the domestic workers’ households come from a certain class and often caste background and their manner of living is more community-based than nuclear units has been a conscious element of their strategy. The Shramik Mahila Morcha deals with the issues that domestic workers and their family members face as women. If a husband or inlaws beat up a woman or she is forced to take her own life, or her life is threatened, or if a woman is fed up with her husband and wants a divorce or wants to sue him for maintenance, these issues are brought to the Morcha by the domestic workers. Domestic worker women activists used to get organised and go to houses in the city or even in villages where women had reported that they were ill-treated. These activists negotiate with the husband or in-laws and, if the woman wanted to leave, they would help her to get her things back to her parents’ house if she so wanted. The Morcha activists also run a family counselling centre. Over 1,000 women come to the centre every year. This also means that the contacts between the organisations and women in the slums began to get even closer. The Morcha and the Sanghatana work very closely and in turn strengthen both the labour movement and the women’s movement. There is also a conscious attempt to not relate to personal or individual issues in an isolated manner; to not look at them as mere personal issues, but relate them to larger structures of the community and the collective. The Morcha regularly organised training sessions and meetings so that women workers who were more active in the trade union would feel more confident to deal with the new issues facing the organisation. Besides the intensive work in Pune, the Morcha also initiated or supported work in other villages, towns and cities of Maharashtra. Similarly, the Morcha also actively took up the issue of women who work in the childcare centres in Maharashtra. They have begun to

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network with childcare women workers in different centres of the state and have guided the struggles of these women workers. The Sanghatana, together with the All India Progressive Women’s Association, has assisted in organising domestic workers in other states of the country as well. These include Delhi, West Bengal and Punjab. Some of the successes of the Sanghatana and the Morcha have been their struggle against arbitrary dismissals from employment. These dismissals have almost stopped over the years. According to the Molkarin Sanghatana, Pune, they have believed in and practiced a strategy of holistic intervention and change. The principles have been evolved over time in terms of the integral nature of the linkages between different issues faced by domestic workers as informal sector workers, as women, as residents of unstable housing and many more. However, the actual strategies and tactics are evolved on the ground by the women activists who have the experience as well as by those who are directly affected by them. When issues come up or when there is a struggle that is being planned or is ongoing, the Working Committee members discuss among themselves. Attempts are made to evolve a consensus on the activities as well as strategies and tactics. Apart from the general secretary, president and working president who may not be domestic workers themselves, all the other members of the Working Committee are domestic workers. The main problem has been that while the work is huge, activists are relatively few as there is no outside funding and all the work is done totally on a voluntary basis. The canvas of the work is large and all-encompassing as it is not just “work-related” issues that are the focus of the Sanghatana, as discussed earlier. Dealing with domestic issues of women domestic workers and others in the slums as well as issues relating to housing takes a major chunk of the time of the activists. The Sanghatana realises this and wants to be more proactive. For example, the Sanghatana has not been able to leverage the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) to the extent they would have wanted to. The RSBY is a health insurance scheme that was introduced in April 1988 and has been implemented by the Ministry of Labour and Employment. The scheme provides for smart card-based cashless health insurance cover of Rs 30,000 per annum to BPL families (a unit of five persons) in the unorganised sector. In the year 2012, the scheme included the occupational category of domestic workers. However, the Sanghatana has not been able to be proactive on this issue and enrol domestic workers in the scheme. Responding to the new challenges and innovating strategies is an important priority of the Sanghatana and it is seeking ways of being able to do that. However, there are severe limitations at the

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ground level itself. As Medha Thatte, an office bearer as well as one of the founder members of the Sanghatana, explained in a meeting in February 2015: It is very difficult for domestic workers’ unions to be entirely self – sufficient. There is so much work that is involved, so much travelling, demonstrations and rallies. Also, in the Indian context there is a general reluctance to increase trade union membership fee. The Molkarin Sanghatana for example is helped by the small fee we charge people who come to the counselling centre. We cannot afford to have full-timers. We give a small honorarium to the women activists, like Rs. 500/ – . So they work as domestic workers and then help in the work of the union. But at another level, Medha is very positive about the ongoing developments too. At the February 2015 meeting Medha spoke about the fact that there is hardly any city or even a small town where domestic workers are not organising. To quote her words: The small noises that the Government is making, the little gestures of giving schemes and some rights go a long way in propelling domestic workers to come forward and demand their rights. Also political parties of all hues are looking at women domestic workers as their constituency.

Concluding remarks Most workers in the informal sector do not necessarily have a fixed work identity. Some may have a broad identity as informal workers; others may see themselves as domestic workers or construction workers. However, the identity vis-à-vis a particular employer is not often fixed. Similarly, for many workers in the informal economy, even their occupational identity may be more fluid and may depend upon their life cycle. Several studies have shown that seasonal employment is common to women in the informal economy. Similarly, work is often so taxing and demanding that women leave one type of work and enter another that is comparatively less strenuous from their point of view, also depending on their life cycle and the needs of the household at particular instances. However, the identity of women working in the informal economy is something that is almost fixed. This implies all the living and working conditions and life situation that it implies. This means a particular

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type of housing – that is shanty housing that is insecure and precarious. This implies possible harassment from the local landlord or local mafia. This also means that access to basic amenities like water and electricity is equally tenuous. This implies a whole lot of life situations, including problems within the home with spouses and children, which are present no matter where and how the women work. Similarly, the problems women domestic workers face due to their social positioning in the class and caste hierarchy in society are almost constantly experienced and dealing with these often is a life-and-death matter. These range from the attitudes and behaviour of the police, the administration, the employers as a class and so on. Neglect of these issues cannot give rise to an organisation that is lasting and sustainable for women workers in informal sectors like domestic work. Hence an organisational structure that is sensitive to these aspects of women’s lives and provides the space for articulation of these issues and organising around them is all the more crucial. This also gives the much-needed respite to organisations to rethink their strategies in one area of their work, while working and evolving other aspects. This is all easier said than done. It is indeed very tough work and requires the resources and space to constantly re-evaluate one’s own strategies and evolve further. This has to be done together with continuing to struggle for survival of the members and of the organisation. There are a great many more lessons that may be drawn from this entire rich history of a quarter of the century of organising and struggle strategy combined with a whole wide range of strategies that seem to have galvanised domestic workers, workers that now exist in every nook and corner of the globalised world, organising and demanding justice, freedom and dignity.

Notes 1 The word “molkarin” is a Marathi word for domestic worker. It is actually a combination of “mol” or “mol – majuri” (toil) and “karin” (the one who does), and would mean “the one who toils”, but is used exclusively for domestic women workers. It is less and less used now and the word “ghar kamgar” is more commonly used. The Sanghatana was formed in 1980, when there was much less criticality in the use of terminology than there is now. 2 Please refer to the Memorandum by the NPfDW to the PM of India, 31 July 2013, www.nirmana.org/pdf/DW’s%20Petition%20to%20Parliament%20 English.pdf (accessed on 17 July 2015). 3 For details, see http://wiego.org/informal_economy_law/domestic–workers– india, www.equaltimes.org/on–domestic–worker–day–millions–of#.VrMl50 PmKIU (accessed on 12 July 2016).

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4 I have often had conversations with parents of young domestic workers who have held these assumptions. 5 For details, see http://wiego.org/informal_economy_law/domestic – workers – and – law (accessed on 18 June 2015). 6 This entire section of the chapter is based on discussions and conversations with the activists of the Molkarin Sanghatana and telephonic conversations with the leadership in 2012, 2013 and 2015 as well as the documents of the Sanghatana.

References Athavale, R. 2004. Women Domestic Workers. Bangkok: Committee for Asian Women. Chandrasekhar, C. P. and Ghosh, J. 2011. “Women’s Work in India: Has Anything Changed?”, The Business Line, August 9, 2011, www.macroscan.org/ fet/aug11/fet090811Women.htm (accessed on 30 February 2016). Chen, M. A. 2011. “Recognizing Domestic Workers, Regulating Domestic Work: Conceptual, Measurement, and Regulatory Challenges”, Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, 23(1): 167–184. Coelho, K., Venkar, T. and Chandrika, R. 2013. “Housing, Homes and Domestic Work: A Study of Paid Domestic Workers from a Resettlement Colony in Chennai”, Economic and Political Weekly, 48(43): 39–46. Eluri, S. and Singh, A. 2013. Unionizing Domestic Workers. Geneva: ILO, www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/–asia/–ro–bangkok/–sro–new_delhi/ documents/publication/wcms_218933.pdf (accessed on 12 September 2016). George, S. 2013. “Towards Recognition through Professionalisation: Organising Domestic Workers in Kerala”, Economic and Political Weekly, 48(43): 69–76. Gothoskar, S. 2005. New Initiatives in Organising Strategy in the Informal Economy – Case Study of Domestic Workers’ Organising. Bangkok: Committee for Asian Women. Gothoskar, S. 2013. “The Plight of Domestic Workers”, Economic and Political Weekly, 48(22): 63–75. ILO. 1983. Encyclopaedia of Occupational Health and Safety. Geneva, www. ilo.org/safework/info/publications/WCMS_113329/lang– en/index.htm (accessed on 12 September 2015). ILO. 2013. Domestic Workers across the World: Global and Regional Statistics and the Extent of Legal Protection. Geneva, www.ilo.org/global/ publications/books/WCMS_173363/lang–en/index.htm (accessed on 18 June 2016). Moghe, K. 2013. “Organising Domestic Workers in Pune City”, Economic and Political Weekly, 48(43): 63–68. Mukherjee, Arpita. 2013. The Services Sector in India, Asian Development Bank. ADB Working Paper Series, No. 352, Philippines.

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Neetha, N. 2013. “Paid Domestic Work Making Sense of the Jigsaw Puzzle”, Economic and Political Weekly, 48(43): 35–38. New Trade Union Initiatives. 2011. Domestic Workers in Mumbai. New Delhi: NTUI, www.ntui.org.in/what–we–do/womens–day/domestic–workers– march–in–mumbai/ (accessed on 17 June 2015). Sankaran, K. 2013. “Domestic Work, Unpaid Work and Wage Rates”, Economic and Political Weekly, 48(43): 85–89. Sengupta, N. and Sen, S. 2013. “Bargaining over Wages: Part-Time Domestic Workers in Kolkata”, Economic and Political Weekly, 48(43): 55–62.

Part III

New articulations

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New identities require new strategies Union formation in the Indian IT/ITES sector Ernesto Noronha and Premilla D’Cruz

Over the years, Indian trade unions have acquired an unfavourable perception of behaving irresponsibly, catering to vested interests, adopting disruptive tactics, neglecting the concerns of members and ignoring the welfare of society at large. Unions have been accused of neither looking after their member interest nor espousing organisational interest. Their oligarchic leadership is blamed for selling peace and co-operation in return for concessions and special favours for themselves and their friends often at the expense of workers. Besides this, union leaders are faulted for inciting faction fights, gang wars, corruption, opportunism and undemocratic practices. Thus, unions suffer from a lack of credibility in the public eye. They invoke negative pictures plagued by militancy, political and social rivalries, and absence of commitment to work, irresponsible behaviour and unreasonable demands on employers. The replacement of early missionary leaders by ideologically neutral professionals who provide organisational service for a fee have also opened the doors to lumpen elements to take up leadership roles. Thus, there is a perception that unions are an instrument to please, oblige, humiliate, coerce or blackmail different people according to the need or convenience of its leaders (Sheth 1993). Not surprisingly, National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), an IT industry trade association, has ably used this perception to sell the idea that unions are irrelevant to the IT/ ITES sector while simultaneously applauding the industry for replacing the hegemonic traditional management practices that are overly paternalistic and hierarchical with HR system that resemble those in the West (see Russell and Thite 2009; D’Mello and Eriksen 2010; D’Cruz and Noronha 2012a; Noronha and D’Cruz 2016b). In fact, some researchers have argued that well-being and job satisfaction form the pivot of HR practices implemented in Indian IT/ITES organisations

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which are supposed to be highly innovative, professional, formal, structured and world class (Budhwar et al. 2009; Thite and Russell 2010). This enabled the IT/ITES employers to cultivate the notion of professionalism in employees by emphasising non-hierarchical structures, informal culture, meritocracy, transparency, high salaries, career growth and workplace ambience through induction training, ongoing socialisation, performance evaluation mechanisms and other elements of organisational design to gain their compliance and commitment to the organisation’s agenda (D’Cruz and Noronha 2012a). It is in this context that we examine union formation among the IT/ITES sector employees. In the first section (“Invoking professional identity”), we outline how the IT/ITES organisation invoke the notion of professionalism, in the second section (“Professional identity and union formation”), we detail how this notion of professionalism impacts union formation, following which we examine whether the functioning of the union took into account issues such as non-hierarchical structures, informal culture, transparency and performance evaluation that IT/ITES employees valued. And finally, we trace the recent developments. The data presented here are based on the field work undertaken over a period of ten years. All the interviews were recorded and transcribed, after which the transcripts were analysed.

Invoking professional identity As mentioned earlier, the IT/ITES sector is often applauded for challenging the hegemonic traditional management practices which were both overly paternalistic and hierarchical, often employing caste in their working (D’Mello and Eriksen 2010). Managers in the IT/ITES industry state that their organisations adopted high-commitment management practices. Most importantly, managers stated that they were equal employment opportunity (EEO)-compliant organisations, thereby claiming that their human resource management (HRM) structures were “identity-blind” unlike those in old economy industries. The rationale underlying these assertions was that the organisation eliminated discrimination and judged an individual on the basis of his/her achievements, during both recruitment and promotion (D’Cruz and Noronha 2012b). With regard to promotions, claims were made about internal job postings (IJPs) being circulated every quarter and communication about promotion opportunities being shared. Organisational declarations that merit and objectivity influenced promotion decisions were interpreted by managers as the organisation’s testimony

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of its professional orientation. Organisations emphasised that career growth was determined by performance and not by sociodemographic factors, seniority or intra-organisational social networks. Moreover, the possible pace of movement added to this perception, with employees being told that, for top performers, the transition from an entrylevel post to a junior-level supervisory post occurred rapidly. The professional approach adopted by organisations extended to employee redressal opportunities. Indeed, organisations prided themselves on the number and nature of grievance avenues they provided their employees with. In keeping with a professional style of management, openness of communication in terms of content, form, style and route were valued. Therefore, in addition to periodic employee satisfaction surveys, skip-level meetings and open fora with superiors, employees with grievances could approach anyone in the organisation whether the chief executive officer (CEO), the team leader (TL) or someone in between via email, letters, telephone conversations or faceto-face meetings. That the professional atmosphere in the organisation precluded the complainant’s victimisation was strongly emphasised. Activities such as team outings, team parties and office gatherings (including picnics, treks, family days, etc.) held during weekly offs (timetabled days off during the week) and public holidays blurred hierarchical boundaries. Managers confirmed that the portrayal of “work as fun” and “workplace as yet another campus” was the central logic through which potential employees were attracted (Ramesh 2004; Pal and Buzzanell 2008). Further, creating an atmosphere of congeniality and camaraderie testified to an organisation’s professional orientation. Employers in communications to employees downplayed bureaucratic structures and processes and emphasised integration. The informal nature of workplace relationships, particularly between superiors and subordinates, helped to highlight the contours of professionalism. That is, it is common practice to address everyone, including one’s superiors, by first name in an IT/ITES organisation, thereby downplaying hierarchy and promoting integration. Indeed, employees reported instances where they were reprimanded for using prefixes such as “sir” or “madam” when interacting with superiors (Noronha and D’Cruz 2009a). Under such circumstances, any third-party intervention including legal protection and collectivist groups such as trade unions were seen as redundant by the management. In other words, with their employers taking such great care of the employees’ interests, alternative mechanisms were not required. These managerial preferences reflected attempts to promote the appearance of “professional” service work

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which encouraged employee allegiance to a job and firm rather than to the collective interests of employees Further, managers emphasised that retaining employees is one of the most significant challenges faced by the ITO-BPO-KPO industry. The explosive growth of the industry gives these professionals the ability to negotiate aggressively and demand high concessions in terms of compensation and career advancement from companies. These problems have prompted firms in the ITOBPO-KPO industry to explicitly introduce human capital management strategies such as high salaries, opportunities to work abroad, quick promotions, flexitime, parental leave, provide more congenial and satisfying work environments, transport facilities, telecommuting from home, stock option plans, on-site childcare and health facilities comparable to those of their strongest competitors in the United States and elsewhere (see Arora and Athreye 2002; D’Cruz and Noronha 2006; Noronha and D’Cruz 2009a; Noronha and D’Cruz 2016a). Moreover, employer organisations were located in ultra-modern buildings, offering state-of-the-art infrastructure and facilities, as also reported by Ramesh (2004) and Mirchandani (2004). Concrete and glass were aesthetically combined in constructing the outer structure of the buildings, while elevators, air-conditioning and artistic interiors characterised by wooden/marble/granite bases, bright lighting, elegant but comfortable furniture, decorative artefacts and electronic gadgets installed for security purposes completed the internal environment. Facilities within the office premises included individual lockers; cafeterias with wide-ranging menus at reasonable prices; recreation and de-stress rooms with beanbags; computers with Internet access; music systems; televisions; indoor games such as carrom, table tennis, chess and pool, video games and reading spaces. Gymnasiums, badminton courts and sleep facilities were also provided by a few organisations. Thus, professional identity is greatly valued as a symbol of social status and upward mobility in the Indian context facilitated the process with employees abhorring nomenclatures such as “cyber coolies” and “slaves on Roman ships” (see Ramesh 2004), often used to describe them. On the other hand, designations in the IT/ITES industry invoke images of white-collared, professional work and upward mobility, enhancing employees’ self-esteem (Noronha and D’Cruz 2009a). Indian IT/ITES organisations cultivated this notion of professionalism in employees through induction training, ongoing socialisation, performance evaluation mechanisms and other elements of organisational design, with a view to gain their compliance and commitment to the realisation of the organisation’s agenda (D’Cruz and Noronha 2009b).

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Though, in reality, organisations did not fully deliver on their claims (see D’Cruz and Noronha 2012b), we refrain from discussing the same here. We instead try and understand how this professional identity impacted union formation and how substantive issues like nonhierarchical structures, meritocracy and transparency are relevant to union organising.

Professional identity and union formation Overall, it was difficult to convince the employees about the need for a union. They saw no relevance for unions which they associated with blue-collared workers. Slogan shouting on the streets and picketing organisations were seen as detrimental to their professional image. In their view, intelligent, qualified, motivated, responsible and upwardly mobile professionals like themselves, whose jobs provided good returns, whose work environments were modern and chic and whose employers looked after their well-being, were not in the same category as factory workers. Sophisticated human resource management (HRM) strategies had a significant potential to take care of the interests of educated “executives” who have a voice of their own. In employees’ views, unions were relevant in workplaces where employees’ interests were being compromised and basic facilities including redressal mechanisms were not in place or not functional (Noronha and D’Cruz 2006; Noronha and D’Cruz 2009b). In contrast, IT/ITES organisations had developed an elaborate email system for conflict resolution allowing access to top management. Believing in the relevance of merit as the means of career progress, employees feared that the presence of unions would reverse these trends by introducing a levelling effect through attempts to protect the less capable (Noronha and D’Cruz 2006; Noronha and D’Cruz 2009b). The highly individualised wages linked to performance system and the lack of time and space hampered the development of long-term relationships and collective mobilisation (Rothboeck et al. 2001). In fact, perceiving themselves as professionals was the primary reason why employees did not wish to associate with trade unions (Noronha and D’Cruz 2006; Noronha and D’Cruz 2009b). Employees also harboured the view that a collectivist agenda is at odds with business interests, and pursuing such a path would unleash conflict. Indeed, management’s subtle references to conflict that the presence of unions creates tension, anxiety and disruption because of the use of strike and job action paid off. Employees also propagated that the formation of unions would only threaten the flow of foreign direct

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investments into India, spelling disaster for the industry in the country. By juxtaposing the unsavoury picture of union-related conflict and its consequences with the attractive image of peace, co-operation in the absence of unions, employers tried to avert union formation. Undoubtedly, the very nature of capital being able to shift to low-cost destinations enabled employer organisations to propagate this view among employees. It is not surprising, then, that employees in this sector came to believe that union formation would only precipitate problems for employer organisations, clients and employees themselves, threatening the continuity of the industry and, in turn, of their own employment (Noronha and D’Cruz 2006; Noronha and D’Cruz 2009b). Staying away from unions and avoiding conflict, even in instances where their rights were violated, was the preferred option, and hence it was not uncommon to find employees quitting their current jobs and seeking fresh appointments within India’s booming sector rather than engaging third-party intervention to redress their grievances (Noronha and D’Cruz 2009a; Penfold 2009). Besides being influenced by the anti-union position espoused by their employers, employees feared adverse reactions, including dismissal, should their employers learn about their links with a union. Employees expressed reluctance to be publicly associated with unions and those who attended union meetings strove to maintain the secrecy of their association with the union (Noronha and D’Cruz 2009a, 2009b).

The beginnings Nonetheless, the initial attempts to collectivise Indian IT employees began in the 1990s. One such effort was made by the International Federation of Commercial, Clerical, Professional and Technical Employees (FIET) – a founding member of Union Network International (UNI) – that tried to organise IT professionals through existing affiliates in India such as bank officers but did not succeed. In November 2000, the IT Professionals Forum (ITPF) was formed at Hyderabad and Bengaluru with trade unionists from the telecom industry taking the lead. By the end of 2001, ITPF offices were formally opened by members of a UNI delegation to India. ITPF portrayed itself as a professional association rather than a union. However, the anti-union public stand of ITPF–India led to a rift between the leaders some of whom formed Center for Call Center and BPO Professionals (CBPOP) under the aegis of the UNI–Asia Pacific Regional Organisation (UNI–APRO) to organise ITES employees. They argued that issues related to pressure of work, working hours, payment of overtime, work–life balance, night shifts,

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mental and physical illness, job security and social protection were camouflaged by invoking the professional identity and required redressal. The CBPOP project was launched in July 2004 with the establishment of two service centres – one in Hyderabad and the other in Bengaluru to facilitate union formation. CBPOP was especially geared to organise and develop a free and democratic trade union. Nonetheless, CBPOP activists found it extremely difficult to mobilise ITES professionals. The organisers tried furiously to muster the numbers for the meetings; as a result often there were substantial numbers of employees from only two or three organisations attending, reflecting difficulties to organise a workforce perpetually on the move. Such was the apathy of employees towards unions that local organisers of some chapters often had to coax or entice employees by providing lavish drinks and dinners post discussions. CBPOP also took the initiative to register a trade union by the end of July 2005 but due to the changes in the rules of registration (objection to register a national union for IT/ITES Professionals) it found it difficult to register at the national level. This was seen as an effort to prevent the unionisation and expected more resistance in the future. However, UNI–APRO and CBPOP continued with their efforts to organise ITES employees. In fact, the different CBPOP chapters were instrumental in the setting up of UNITES, the first union in the ITES space in India (see Noronha and D’Cruz 2009a for details). To begin, UNITES relied heavily on UNI credentials and often used the rhetoric of global organisation to attract its constituency of ITES employees who it sought to represent. We were banking quite heavily on UNI’s credential because of the kind of people that we are trying to organise. So for it we had to build a UNI brand. For UNITES we have to say that there is a global union and we are working in a global company. In all our press release UNI takes central space because when we talk about UNITES many of them would not know but when you talk about UNI because they have travelled abroad they have heard that the union in the parent company is affiliated to UNI. (UNITES office bearer, Bengaluru) Responding to these circumstances, unionists acknowledged the need to move away from the conventional protest and grievance handling functions of unions to engage in partnership with management. We are advocating the change in the role of the union. The union is more than a grievance handler. It has a constructive role in organ-

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Ernesto Noronha and Premilla D’Cruz isations. Therefore, union leaders have to remember that they have an obligation to the employer and to the membership. They need to strike a balance to deliver on membership expectations and meet employers interest. Partnership is the best way forward. (UNI–APRO Regional Secretary, Singapore)

They foresaw unions as having a much larger role to play in solving a wide variety of workplace problems including attrition. UNITES was to operate from the standpoint of co-operation and responsibility, rather than militancy and aggression, so that “mutual gains” were secured for all the stakeholders. The interest of the industry and the workers went hand in hand, and employees had to be flexible and accommodating of employers needs for the industry to survive. Accordingly, productivity was emphasised and extreme Leftist leanings were denounced. UNITES did not want to be confrontationist like Left unions but wanted to partner management so that employment could be protected. This strategy was expected to rebuild the credibility of Indian unions as respectable, credible, dignified and responsible groups which employees would be proud to be a part of (Noronha and D’Cruz 2009a, 2009b). The professional orientation and emphasis on social dialogue, rather than protest as means to resolve disputes, formed a significant part of UNITES’s agenda. The main goal of social dialogue was to promote consensus building and democratic involvement among the main stakeholders in the world of work. Successful social dialogue structures and processes had the potential to resolve important economic and social issues, encourage good governance, advance social and industrial peace and stability and boost economic progress. UNITES further believed that dialoguing with NASSCOM was required to make India’s IT/ITES industry more sustainable (Noronha and D’Cruz 2009a, 2009b). At the organisational level in the true democratic spirit, the employees were exhorted to be architects of establishing a new union and to reform the institution if they were dissatisfied with its functioning. Towards this end, structures and mechanisms would be in place that would force union leaders to perform, advocating, in some sense a bottom-up approach. Members of the union would be empowered to influence and dictate every aspect of the union’s functioning including election of leadership, determination of policies and strategies, etc. It was clear that the UNITES leadership could not “rule” like the older union leadership did; rather, they had to govern with involvement.

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Democracy had to be infused right in the beginning or else it would not happen especially when one was dealing with IT employees who want a say in decision making and would not be attracted to the organisation if they were not involved. The new approach you need to have democratic structures in place right in the beginning otherwise it won’t happen. Everything has to be revamped and you know there has to be a new way of doing things. Democracy is the best way to do it because of the implicit checks and balances. One, it involves people in the IT/ITES sector, second, it introduces accountability, third, it is less hierarchical and more equitable, fourth, it can curb corruption and induce performance and fifth, correct mistakes. Therefore, leaders should be open to be shunted out for non-performance or being ineffective. Leaders should be elected by members rather than tightly clinging on to their positions. Basically, there has to be transparency and participation in the decision making process . . . UNITES will work depending on the strength, the participation of the people actually working in the industry – it is your organisation, you make it. . . . The union is independent and strong, when you carry the whole membership with you. Membership must be involved in this union. They serve as checks and balance to make sure that the leadership conduct themselves according to the objective of the union. (UNI–APRO regional secretary, Singapore) Breaking away from the past, senior leaders guiding UNITES made a decision that the leadership should be from within the industry given their education and knowledge of the industry. Honorary members should only act as advisers, consultants or expert committees’ members. We are firm that the people should emerge from within the industry . . . because they are the better people to lead the union. Outsiders will have vested interest. They don’t understand the in and out of the industry or know its problems. (Senior union leader, telecom sector, Bengaluru) Providing a long-term vision to the union it was argued that with technological innovations and restructuring of work organisations more and more employment would be on contract basis requiring

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the union to employ the strategy of social movement unionism while maintaining the membership among regular employees. Today, with the technological innovation, globalisation and restructuring of the work organisation, we will see more and more contract employees. So a union to be relevant to all workers has to be more than just a collective bargaining and grievance handling body and involve itself in social movement unionism. It has to provide services which are socially relevant. If people do not find jobs they need to be provided with some entrepreneurial skill so that with the micro credit they can make a living; may be as an electrician or a plumber, etc. It is a social movement servicing workers and at the same time doing social work. So we see this as inevitable. For UNITES this may be more relevant than collective bargaining. (UNI–APRO regional secretary, Singapore) This emphasis of social movement unionism was to be enmeshed with the servicing model while organising workers. This also provided a role for ITPF (of which UNITES was an offshoot – see Noronha and D’Cruz 2009a, 2009b). Theoretically it was seen as beneficial for ITPF and UNITES to co-operate while maintaining their respective identities. Many people because of their bad experience and impression about unions never wants to join a union. So they need an alternative whereby their interest can still be represented. So ITPF initially started to organise IT professionals, whereas UNI has come forward and created UNITES, exclusively to organise for BPO and call center employees. These two organisations can work together, supplement each other and go ahead. There is no confusion as their domain is IT and ours is ITES. I think ITPF would become more and more of a service organisation focusing on professional interests of IT/ITES. I think in the long run the ITPF and the UNITES can complement each other. (UNI–APRO regional secretary, Singapore) There was care taken to see to it that women and people from different states got proper representation in the union. It was also suggested that the president should be a woman since many women are employed in this sector. Further, senior union leaders were not averse to having managers take up union leadership; in fact, they believed that managers could influence their subordinates to join a union. It was expected

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that those who had come forward required to stand up, target, consolidate and reinforce the trade union organisation. Another issue that confronted UNITES was affiliation to political parties. Again breaking from the past it was decided that the UNITES should be apolitical and to differentiate itself from the traditional unions it should not be affiliated to federations having political links. UNITES did not want to affiliate to Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC which is linked to the Congress party) because the corporate organisations were very powerful and political parties did not want to be on their wrong side. The idea is that at present we don’t want to have any political affiliation. The members will not accept. Moreover, today the CPI(M) has come out with a statement that they have passed a resolution in their Centre for Indian Trade Unions (CITU) conference that they are going to organise the IT/ITES sector. To attract members we want to take advantage that we are not politically affiliated. (UNI–APRO regional secretary, Singapore) The constituents did not accept because wherever I have tried to get INTUC leaders, people feel really uncomfortable. Further, I am not sure whether affiliation to INTUC or Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) helps because our constituents are very conscious about their being professionals. Moreover, politicians back out when big names are involved. I won’t blame them because these companies wield enormous influence and the politicians want to be in their good books. (UNITES office bearer, Bengaluru) From the previous discussion it is clear that UNITES was set up to foster partnership between employers and employees; it wanted to encourage democracy and transparency and in the process enable non-hierarchical structures that were apolitical which were to be operated by employees from within the industry. All this would change the image of unionism in India and herald a new beginning of workers’ movement.

The functioning of UNITES As mentioned earlier, for the IT/ITES employees the issue of identifying with a union was intertwined with the question of the professional identity. The employees did not perceive themselves as “workman”,

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as defined by the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, but as professionals. They were ambivalent towards unions, maintaining that unions are better suited to blue-collar occupations and low-wage service work. As a result, the name of the organisation was fiercely debated. The ITES employees of all the chapters in unison suggested that the word “association” rather than the word “union” be used to describe their collective. In the midst of this discussion a senior leader suggested the name UNITES (union for ITES employees which included acronyms such as UNI and ITES which related to unionising the ITES sector) which was reluctantly accepted by the IT/ITES employees (Noronha and D’Cruz 2009a). Some senior trade union leaders seemed to be keen to get over with the task instead of carrying on with long, unending discussions. They were caught between providing a structure to the organisation and enabling the process by which such a structure was formed. In making their choice, senior leaders, while advocating democracy, preferred to dictate in order to put in place a structure, assuming that democracy would take over from there on. There was some keenness to have a seven-member office bearers group (as required by the Trade Union Act, 1926) in place before the end of the founding convention. A beginning had to be made rather than wait endlessly for consolidation of membership which was a perpetual process that one had to continuously strive to achieve. (UNI–APRO regional secretary, Singapore) Senior leaders were of the opinion that the opportunity had to be seized so that leadership, inspiration and guidance could be provided in whatever way possible. Moreover, the CBPOP experience made them realise that the turnover rate of those attending union meetings was high. Every meeting had new faces and keeping track of all of them would require an organisation in place. Thus the senior union leadership grappled with issues of putting a structure in place, assigning responsibilities to individuals and somehow getting those attending the meeting to take responsibility. The draft constitution of the union was prepared in advance by senior leaders of CBPOP with the view that it would be adopted lock, stock and barrel, with only a few contentious issues debated. Subsequently, the constitution was read and put to vote. The union office bearers were then quickly nominated. Those employees nominated were apprehensive of accepting the role of office bearers offered to them. They divulged that they were not prepared for the role, and had no idea of how unions operated and pleaded for training before they took up this responsibility in

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right earnest, while others nominated in absentia were taken by surprise. This set-up where office bearers were nominated was described as controlled/guided democracy and people were expected to perform. For us to elect a leader democratically, we should have numbers. Currently, we have nominated an ad hoc committee, and once we have sufficient number, we will have a full convention and election as per the constitution. If you are capable, and want to become a leader, you have to mobilise your own people and let them recognise and elect you. As of now, it is a controlled democracy. Today whoever is nominated has to perform. Otherwise, they will be pulled down. Non-performers will have to give way to performers. (Senior union leader, telecom sector, Bengaluru) Thus, the principles enunciated in the preceding section did not percolate down to the organisational functioning of UNITES. Part of the problem lay in its inception where office bearers were nominated to an ad hoc committee rather than being elected. Office bearers were not only removed and/or replaced but also exchanged positions between themselves. Such changes took place arbitrarily without member consultation because even though UNITES wanted to be democratic it did not have the numbers. The internal functioning of UNITES’s committee impacted its effectiveness, apart from meetings not being held regularly, ad hocism characterised the composition of the committee whose operations remained concentrated in the office bearers at Bengaluru. Nominating office bearers led to the concentration of power in the hands of a few without the corresponding accountability. People nominated did not have any knowledge of union functioning or belief in the cause; rather, it was just another job for them. Nomination also resulted in the selection of wrong people for leadership positions who as union organisers expected permanent jobs and high salaries and were attracted by unrealistic promises such as foreign travel. They were unwilling to prod along without funding and had no desire to volunteer after work hours. If I have the attachment myself with some organization . . . why I am not doing something for that, because I am not getting any salary for this? Why it is like that – I am working for the organisation and getting my salary so that I work till 8 pm. Here I am not getting anything. . . . This is my mind set. Moreover, I do not get time. (UNITES office bearer, regional chapter)

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Given this, leaders particularly from Bengaluru were often despised by those in other chapters as they made several trips abroad leaving out the rest. Others alleged that these trips were not useful as it did not enrich the organisation. Office bearers were also critical of spending on lavish dinners in fancy restaurants. She has visited abroad, what is the outcome, nil. Why are we spending that much of money on these kind of people? One should learn something from those trips and share with others and organise something here. (UNITES office bearer, Bengaluru) While the Bengaluru office was perceived to be quite active the other chapters admitted to doing nothing substantial due to the lack of infrastructure and office space due to poor finances. Despite this, there was no effort to expand the membership and charge a subscription fee to those registering on the UNITES website. The chapters surmised that to begin with they required funds and only once successful fee could be charged from members. Initially, we were told not to charge money because it would be a deterrent. As and when the word spread about UNITES we could start demanding a subscription. I don’t think it would have worked if we would have taken money initially. Finally, it’s good that we did not take money because if we would have taken money it would be like cheating people because it would seem that we took money, closed down and disappeared suddenly. (UNITES office bearer, Bengaluru) In fact some argued that UNITES was not able to demonstrate a major win; as a result they were not able to charge a subscription and got labelled as talkers without action. We couldn’t demonstrate any substantial win especially with HSBC. So somewhere down the line the people started feeling are these people only talking? They talk about this global agreement, they talk about employee rights but none of the Indian managers even allow these people access. What was more appalling was that top people from UNI have been insulted by small managers. They put their foot down and said ‘I won’t meet you’ so they could do nothing. So people feel that these are talkers as far as the big

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companies are concerned. We have hit the mark with Pratibhas case1 otherwise we have not shown anything. (UNITES office bearer, regional chapter) As a result, UNITES lacked finances and its edifice collapsed when the flow of foreign funds stopped in May 2011. There was never an attempt of being free or independent of foreign aid; rather, the dependence could be termed as being parasitic since projects got renewed year after year starting in 2005 and organisers did little to expand membership. Naturally, till the time of closure no elections were held and it seemed UNI had nominated people for life. Some questioned the continuance of the committee without election for years as a union has work for its members rather than for UNI. Without democracy how can you call it a union? How many years can you avoid an election? You should be the general secretary on behalf of your members not UNI. (Senior union leader, telecom sector, Bengaluru) Part of this problem was due to the fact that member mobilisation did not go beyond speaking to the press and TV channels; maintaining a website and conducting print and electronic campaigns neither generated a large-scale and popular image among the general public nor struck a chord to catalyse ITES–BPO employees. As Taylor and Bain (2008) argue, publicity is a prerequisite for growth but cannot substitute a mobilised membership which is a union’s key resource in its quest for effectiveness. In UNITES’s case, given that publicity campaigns did not contribute to creating a public recognition, leave alone building a membership base, there is a need for further reflection on how to reach out to and connect with ITES–BPO employees (Noronha and D’Cruz 2013). Thus, UNITES was “pomp and show” without a strong membership base. In their defence, organisers felt that the strict monitoring in technology parks did not allow them access beyond a point and therefore a web-based campaign was the only way out. Entering a technology park is a big challenge. You are constantly under surveillance. What you are doing? Whom you are meeting? Why are you meeting? Why are you discussing? I think you should try next 2–3 days to go to the IT park and see if you can get in. (UNITES office bearer, Bengaluru)

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Further, union leaders on their part said that the poor membership record was due to the fact that while employees wanted action they were not committed to forming a union. Even those members who provided initial union support did not respond later. They wouldn’t mind signing anonymous online petitions but wanted others to act for them. Moreover, some argued that not only was the effort fragmented as UNITES organisers in Bengaluru got involved in several other projects that were not related to the IT industry but also centralised the activity at the cost of transparency. Since most of the activity took place in Bengaluru it seemed that UNITES was run from Bengaluru, but it was unclear to others whether Bengaluru was a chapter of UNITES or it represented/ controlled other chapters spread all over India. Nonetheless, given that it was the hub of activity it acquired centrality and leaders from Bengaluru passed on directions to other chapters. Chapters wanted better co-ordination between themselves and more information sharing. Accusations of opaque functioning reached its hilt when closure became a reality with office bearers not knowing what was going on. They called for independence, decentralisation, professionalism and performance monitoring. We were not aware of what was actually happening. What their future plans were. Even in Bengaluru one said that he doesn’t know what the other is doing. That sounds so funny when they are all in the same office. If we call X (a Bengaluru office bearer) we don’t get any proper response. So it is difficult to continue conversation since he just tries to cut off like ok fine. X has not called us or says nothing when we call so communication between X and all of us is stalled. After a lot of hard work, this is not right. At a national level I feel there could have been a bit more clarity, probably more decentralisation and more accountability. Each state should be independent having its own policies. We should show our results, this is what we are doing and this is what we achieved. It should be run very professionally with a bit more monitoring about what is happening. We should have checks and balances in place. We should have targets to be attained in terms of membership and everything. . . . Nobody monitored. No meetings took place. There was no idea of who was going where, Geneva, Singapore or Malaysia or anywhere. (UNITES office bearer, regional chapter) Besides this, as opposed to the decision not to affiliate with federations attached to political parties, the decision to affiliate to the INTUC was taken without consultation with the constituency that UNITES sought to represent. Further, some office bearers and mentors

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not only questioned the numbers but also raised the question about the much-touted collective bargaining agreements (CBA). The agreements according to them were with shell companies and did not exist for real. Prior to bargaining you have to form the union and the members need to consent for check-off. If you have members you must say how many people are paying their dues. If they are not paying their dues they can’t be called members. I can’t show membership of those who have filled up the online form without paying dues. These are only potential members. Only once they pay they can become members as per Trade Union Act, 1926. Without their commitment how can they be called your union members? UNITES claimed CBA, was there any check – off? I am unable to understand what kind of CBA it is. Normally, for bargaining union should have 50–51% membership, otherwise, majority union bargains. I am not criticising I am only analysing. (Senior union leader, telecom sector, Bengaluru) With regard to gender it was constantly stated that women should get adequate representation and UNITES tried to include women among the office bearers, but over a period of time women went missing from the set-up. Basically, we started with the intention having women on the trade union bodies – as office bearers. Our president was woman. That did not work. For that matter the General Secretary in Delhi is a woman; we are giving equal opportunity. If you don’t perform you cannot be a decorative piece, it applies to men and women. After coming to the post, if they feel, the post itself is vague? or because they are in the post, they don’t have to work, we will not accept. In future, if there is an election and if they are elected, we have no say. (Senior union leader, telecom sector, Bengaluru) Internal dynamics took a turn for the worse in early 2011, resulting in a rift between the president and the secretary, affecting organisational functioning. Since 2011, quite unfortunately there was a lot of internal conflict within the office bearers bringing UNITES activities to a virtual standstill. With UNITES’s failure there was a despondency among the senior leaders that both ITPF and UNITES were dysfunctional with some lamenting that at least earlier ITPF worked steadily. Such was the mistrust in the office that stoppage of funds due to nonrenewal of Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) account led

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to accusations that it was somebody from within who was sabotaging UNITES which later was found to be untrue. To summarise, the UNITES experience though began well with the promise to address issues that confront Indian unions such as hierarchy, transparency, gender bias and apolitical affiliation it failed to live up to expectations primarily because of a poor membership base. However, recently Forum for IT Employees (FITE) provides a glimmer of hope that a strong trade union movement may emerge in the IT/ITES sector which is democratic, gender-sensitive, transparent and non-hierarchical driven by employees themselves.

Encouraging developments On Monday, 29 December 2014, the Forum for IT Employees (FITE) was launched in Chennai. FITE emerged from within the Young Tamil Nadu Movement (Ilanthamizhagam Iyakkam), formerly known as Save Tamils Movement, an independent political movement comprising IT professionals and youths. The movement was formed in November 2008 in the backdrop of Sri Lanka’s genocidal war against Eezham Tamils that proclaimed “Stop the war, Save Tamils” (FITE 2014a). However, the trigger for FITE came in December 2014, when the business newspapers announced that TCS planned “restructuring” and “workforce optimisation” affecting some 25,000 senior employees. These trepidations were confirmed when those who were de-allocated from projects received the termination letters with no valid reasons (FITE 2015i). FITE exhorted IT employees to unite as the fish did in the film Finding Nemo (FITE 2015m, 2015n). As a result, even those who were not impacted and belonged to different IT firms decided to stand up for fellow employees. It was highlighted that if powerful corporations could have an organisation, NASSCOM, why were IT employees forced to be “individualistic” and criminalised for union activity. IT employees endured extra hours of work and worked on weekends, national holidays and festival days only to receive unjust ratings. Now, with their jobs at stake, FITE wanted the IT employees to realise that it was not about individuals or TCS employees but an issue of all IT employees (FITE 2014b). Other issues that needed attention were gender bias, frequent recruitments and dismissals – under the guise of non-performance – partisan grievances redressal mechanism, job insecurity, blacklisting of employees who disagree with management, dense compensation policies, denial of the right to form trade unions, adoption of a discriminatory rating systems, irregular work hours and cases of sexual harassment (FITE 2015d, 2015i, 2015p; Noronha

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and D’Cruz 2016b). Their posturing seemed more aggressive as compared to that of UNITES. They confidently proclaimed that “Given our contribution to this global eco system, even a small unified stir can send out a strong message to any big IT/ITES giant and bring out a positive change”. They argued that the IT/ITES global production networks could be impacted if employees refuse to monitor the transactions of a banking software or write/test code or delay a project delivery or refuse to answer calls from customers of various countries just for a day (FITE 2015o, 2015l, 2015p). The process of organising was participative with FITE coordinators travelling to various cities across the country to discuss the impact of TCS’s retrenchment and to identify the state-wise coordinators for the forum. The chapters were to work independently but in line with the other chapters functioning across India. The important thing about this movement was that employees of not just TCS but other IT companies attended meetings. Besides this, fellow members of FITE contributed towards expenses required for these activities (FITE 2015j, 2015h, 2015k), accounts of which were available publicly on the website. An online petition to the PMO to stop the layoffs was initiated. The social media campaign and the up-running FITE website with posts, e-posters and articles were combined with street demonstrations (FITE 2015i). While gatherings were held in cities like Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Kochi, Chennai, Pune, Mumbai and New Delhi to protest the termination of TCS employees and demand the central and state governments’ intervention (FITE 2015a), the affected employees were urged to act through Facebook, phone and email (FITE 2015c). Further, testimonials and recordings of retrenched TCS employees were released to break the silence of mass media, trade unions and political parties. The Facebook page got 10,000 followers with viewership of about three lakhs and the petition got signed by over 8,000 (FITE 2015i). FITE coordinators simultaneously met legal advisors, retired judges, journalist, rights activists and academics to mobilise support (FITE 2015c) and to discuss the legal support available to employees under the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947 (FITE 2015g). Further, a factfinding team which included leading lawyers, academics and journalists was constituted to collect testimonials from terminated workers, current IT employees, Labour Department and industry analysts, IT leads and managers as well as talk to TCS management (FITE 2015f). The report generated was to be submitted to the government. A panel of legal advisors and/or retired judge, journalists and retired IAS officials from all over India was to be formed to challenge the exemption from labour laws enjoyed by the IT companies and recommend

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solutions so that the current situation faced by TCS employees could be avoided later (FITE 2015g). While seeking support from wider civil society, initially they steadfastly refused an official tie–up with Left leaning unions who had come forward to support them but later developed ties with New Democratic Labour Front. On the basis of the discussion, FITE decided to submit a petition to the Labour Commissioners at various cities across India restraining TCS from carrying out further retrenchment (FITE 2015g). In the meanwhile, on 13 January 2015, the Madras High Court issued an ad interim injunction order restraining TCS from terminating its woman employee for four weeks (FITE 2015b). The Court also directed the Labour Officer to commence conciliation proceedings forthwith in respect of the industrial dispute raised by the petitioner (FITE 2015c, 2015e). This interim order according to FITE would reduce the fear instilled in the employees by the IT organisations. It would prod employees to not only invoke their constitutional and labour rights but to also stand together cutting across domains, technologies, delivery centres, companies and locations to break the chains of individualism in the spirit of collectivism (FITE 2015e). The impact of the court order resulted in TCS revoking the employees’ relieving letter (Subramani 2015). However, FITE was well aware that legal means alone will not resolve all the issues and hardships faced by the IT/ITES employees. FITE endeavoured to bring the IT/ITES employees under one network and take forward the struggle for the rights and welfare of the IT/ITES employees (FITE 2015e). FITE also planned to launch awareness workshops on the “Rights of IT and ITES employees” in future aiming at empowering them. While FITE leaders interviewed (like in the case of UNITES) once again wanted to avoid the word “union” in the name of the organisation, at the same time the TCS case propelled employees to seek protection under Section 2(s) of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, by invoking the definition of “workman” and claiming that their main duties and responsibilities are technical and clerical in nature. Those seeking protection were only people at the consultant level but also project managers (Vaitheesvaran 2015). Employees acted as their selfrespect was at stake given that they were labelled as non-performers (FITE 2015e). Nonetheless, the TCS case provided hope to several IT employees who till recently had believed that labour laws were not applicable to their industry and unions were meant to protect nonperformers. Buoyed by the court intervention, FITE in one of their communications exhorted IT employees: “We call upon all the affected employees to come forward. The FITE Chapters all around the country will stand in union with you. Join Us Let’s FITE together for our

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welfare and rights” (FITE 2015e). FITE expected these court orders would help employees to overcome the fear of joining unions and reverse the managements’ “profit-based retrenchment”. As a result, several cases have been filed against TCS by its employees in various courts in the country which has significant implications for industrial relations in the IT/ITES industry in the near future. The impact of all this activity was recently evident when a Hyderabad court ruled against the dismissal of an IT professional at HCL Technologies Limited, stating that a software engineer is a workman as his job involves technical knowledge. Such judgements indicate that hiring and firing of IT/ITES employees could become increasingly difficult in the future. While it can’t be denied that the sector has provided its employees good salaries and working conditions, thereby creating a professional identify that is averse to unions, defining such professionals as “workman” as per the Industrial Disputes Act 1947 may not indicate a shift in identity. Nonetheless, unless employees see themselves as belonging to a class afflicted by similar circumstances, any group formation is still a far cry (Noronha and D’Cruz 2016b).

Capturing the change The two cases of union organising, namely UNITES and FITE (see Table 8.1) even though ten years apart, continue to be confronted by similar issues professional identity, individualism, transparency, Table 8.1 UNITES and FITE: a comparison Employee aspirations

UNITES (Professional) FITE

Established

2005

2014–15

Name

Avoided the word “union” and did not spell out the acronym UNITES Mainly ITES but often forayed into IT Professional. Did not see themselves as workers

The word “union” not used in the name

Coverage Employee identity

Both IT and all the facets of the ITES Professional, did not see themselves as workers, though office bearers believe the term “workman” under the Industrial Disputes Act 1947 was applicable to the IT/ITES industry (Continued)

Table 8.1 (Continued) Employee aspirations

UNITES (Professional) FITE

Reason for formation Leadership

Outside intervention

Emerged from the need to respond to TCS layoffs Imposed from outside Emerged from within the IT/ITES employees Not politicised Highly politicised emerging from the Professionals who provide organisational protest against Sri Lankan genocide Motivated by the cause service for a fee Initially gender-sensitive Convened by a woman leader but disappears later Trade union None but guided by None but guided by civil society wellexperience of union leaders affiliated wishers such as judges, academics, leadership to INTUC and journalists, lawyers in strategising academics Internal Lack of autonomy to Still in its initial days. However, democracy chapters, no elections endeavoured to be more participative held over a five- to FITE coordinators travelled to six-year period and various cities across the country office bearers were to discuss the impact of TCS’s nominated retrenchment and to identify the state-wise coordinators for the forum Transparency At the time of closure So far no issues about functioning of leadership issues raised about the Endeavoured to be financially functioning transparent with the statement of expenses displayed on the website Membership figures accounting for every rupee vague Accepts that membership still an issue Electronic and face-to-face Organising Initially through getinteractions togethers but later mainly electronic communication was used Finance Supported by UNI and Funded by donations its associates Plans membership fees No membership fees Legal Often approached the Invoked the Industrial Disputes Act recourse labour commissioner 1947 approaching the labour courts Initially refused to affiliate but Political Resisted affiliation recently attached to the New affiliation but later allied with Democratic Labour Front INTUC Spread Though centralised in Still to emerge but mobilisation across the country Bengaluru, chapters spread across the country Source: Compiled by authors from the field study.

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political affiliations, internal democracy and gender neutrality. Office bearers of both the unions avoided using the word “union” in their name. FITE completely ignored the word, while UNITES did not spell out its acronym. The other similarities were that both were confronted with apathy on part of IT/ITES employees to join unions and which got accentuated by lack of experienced leadership. One indicator of this was that though both UNITES and FITE put in a considerable amount of effort to mobilise employees, they were unable to charge a membership fee. This worked for UNITES largely because of the financial support from UNI affiliates but once the source of these funds dried up the organisation collapsed. In the case of FITE, there was no such financial backing and its long-term viability would come into question sooner rather than later. Further, both were concerned about affiliating to union federations that were in turn allied to political parties but finally succumbing to pressure UNITES got affiliated to INTUC and FITE connected with New Democratic Labour Front. However, in spite of these similarities there has been a perceptible change over the past ten years. UNITES was initiated and supported by those not part of the industry, but FITE emerged from the IT/ITES employees working within the industry. While UNITES office bearers seemed to be less politicised and had joined UNITES to render a service rather than work for a cause, FITE coordinators were politically active and were aware of the injustices meted out to the IT/ITES employees; for this they even contributed from their own personal funds to enable initial organising. For FITE coordinators, the cause was important and the injustices that the IT industry imposed on its employees required to be addressed. UNITES seemed reluctant to invoke the Industrial Disputes Act 1947 or the time was not ripe to do so in 2005, but by the time FITE was formed the application of the Industrial Disputes Act 1947 became relevant given the large-scale dismissals. They argued that the definition of “workman” as defined by the Industrial Disputes Act 1947 was applicable to them and therefore invoked the existing labour laws and approached labour courts. The other major difference was FITE used a more participative approach to organise and believed that each chapter operates as per its needs, while UNITES centralised power with leaders working from Bengaluru. Accordingly, FITE mobilised IT/ITES employees by using a combination of offline and online methods but UNITES relied mainly on e-mobilising. Lastly, the UNITES membership figures were shrouded in mystery but the FITE was not apologetic about its numbers given the difficulty in organising employees.

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Conclusion The IT/ITES employers cultivated the notion of professionalism in employees by emphasising non-hierarchical structures, informal culture, meritocracy, transparency, high salaries, career growth and workplace ambience through induction training, ongoing socialisation, performance evaluation mechanisms and other elements of organisational design to gain their compliance and commitment to the organisation’s agenda. This play with identity certainly had implications for union formation. Not only did employees view employers in a positive light and display greater commitment to them, but also they considered any third-party intervention including legal protection and collectivisation as redundant (Noronha and D’Cruz 2009a, 2009b). Thus, unionists and activists realised that the fulcrum of their strategy should revolve around employees’ professional identity. Accordingly, UNITES envisaged partnership and social dialogue with employers and good governance for its members through democratic functioning of the organisation. However, the main reason for its failure has been its inability to unshackle itself from the features that inhibit traditional unions making it defunct (Noronha and D’Cruz 2013). The recent renewed interest of organising IT/ITES employees by FITE emphasises involvement through democratic and non-hierarchical structures that cohere with the notion of professionalism. FITE faces a similar situation that UNITES faced in its initial days, but the appeal to a broader pool of employees from across companies, the participative process that FITE coordinators employed and transparent and democratic functioning promise a bright future; however, it is too early to say whether it will succeed. Lastly, it may be important to bear in mind that though IT/ITES employees are approaching courts to invoke the definition of “workman” under the Industrial Disputes Act 1947, this may merely be for purposes of job security and does not necessarily mean a change in their professional identity.

Note 1 Pratibha Srikantamurthy was a 25-year-old call centre employee who was raped and murdered on 12 December 2005 in Bangalore. See “Death Call”, available at http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/it-professional-rapedmurdered-in-bangalore-by-call-centre-driver/1/192157.html.

References Arora, A. and Athreye, S. 2002. “The Software Industry and India’s Economic Development”, Information Economics and Policy, 14(2): 253–273.

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Budhwar, P., Malhotra, N. and Singh, V. 2009. “Work Processes and Emerging Problems in Indian Call Centres”, in Thite, M. and Russell, B. (eds.), The Next Available Operator: Managing Human Resources in the Indian Business Process Outsourcing Industry, pp. 59–82. New Delhi: Sage. D’Cruz, P. and Noronha, E. 2006. “Being Professional: Organizational Control in Indian Call Centers”, Social Science and Computer Review, 24(3): 342–361. D’Cruz, P. and Noronha, E. 2012a. “High Commitment Management Practices Re-Examined: The Case of Indian Call Centres”, Economic and Industrial Democracy, 33(2): 185–205. D’Mello, M. and Eriksen, T. H. 2010. “Software, Sports and Sheera: Culture and Identity Processes within a Global Software Organization in India”, Information and Organization, 20(2): 81–110. FITE. 2014a. “Minutes of Meeting: Hyderabad 30 Dec 2014”, http://fite.org. in/2014/12/31/minutes-of-meeting-hyderabad-30-dec-2014/ (accessed on 31 August 2016). FITE. 2014b. “Minutes of Meeting: Chennai 27 Dec 2014”, http://fite.org. in/2014/12/27/minutes-of-meeting-chennai-27-dec-2014/ (accessed on 31 August 2016). FITE. 2015a. “FITE Spreads Its Wings in New Delhi”, http://fite.org.in/2015/ 01/17/fite-spreads-its-wings-in-new-delhi/ (accessed on 31 August 2016). FITE. 2015b. “Bombay HC to Hear the Writ Petitions of Five Pune FITE Members Terminated by TCS Today”, http://fite.org.in/2015/01/19/bombay-hcto-hear-the-writ-petitions-of-five-pune-fite-members-terminated-by-tcstoday/ (accessed on 31 August 2016). FITE. 2015c. “Madras HC Interim Stay Order: A Hot Shot to TCS by FITE”, http://fite.org.in/2015/01/15/madras-hc-interim-stay-order-a-hot-shot-totcs-by-fite/ (accessed on 31 August 2016). FITE. 2015d. “IT Employees Being Individuals and Murmuring on Their Issues Will Not Continue for Ever and It Is Nearing to an End!”, http://fite. org.in/2015/01/14/fite-bengaluru-chapter-update-12-jan-2015/ (accessed on 31 August 2016). FITE. 2015e. “Madras HC Stays (Interim) TCS to Terminate a Women Employee (a FITE Member): A Ray of Hope for Many”, http://fite.org. in/2015/01/13/madras-hc-stays-tcs-to-terminate-a-women-employee-a-rayof-hope-for-many/ (accessed on 31 August 2016). FITE. 2015f. “Fact Finding on Termination of Employment in TCS and Broader Labour Implications”, http://fite.org.in/2015/01/12/fact-findingon-termination-of-employment-in-tcs-13-jan-2015-at-chennai/ (accessed on 31 August 2016). FITE. 2015g. “Pune Chapter Update: 10 Jan 2015-Part 2”, http://fite.org. in/2015/01/12/pune-chapter-update-10-jan-2015-part-2/ (accessed on 31 August 2016). FITE. 2015h. “Minutes of Meeting: Kolkata 09 Jan 2015”, http://fite.org. in/2015/01/10/minutes-of-meeting-kolkata-09-jan-2015/ (accessed on 31 August 2016).

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FITE. 2015i. “It’s a Success So Far, Let’s Make It BIG Together!”, http://fite. org.in/2015/01/09/its-a-success-so-far-lets-make-it-big-together/ (accessed on 31 August 2016). FITE. 2015j. “Kolkata Chapter Update: 08 Jan 2015”, http://fite.org. in/2015/01/08/kolkata-chapter-update-08-jan-2015/ (accessed on 31 August 2016). FITE. 2015k. “An Open Letter to Mr. Ajoy Mukherjee, EVP and Head, Global HR, TCS!”, http://fite.org.in/2015/01/06/a-letter-to-ajoy-mukherjee-fromfite/ (accessed on 31 August 2016). FITE. 2015l. “Minutes of Meeting: Kochi 04 Jan 2015”, http://fite.org. in/2015/01/04/minutes-of-meeting-kochi-04-jan-2015/ (accessed on 31 August 2016). FITE. 2015m. “Black Gag Protest at Shollinganallur Junction, Chennai-Just a Beginning Not an End!”, http://fite.org.in/2015/01/03/black-gag-protest-atchennai-just-a-beginning/ (accessed on 31 August 2016). FITE. 2015n. “FITE’s New Year Message to all IT/ITES Employees!”, http:// fite.org.in/2015/01/01/new-year-message-to-all-it-ites-employees/ (accessed on 31 August 2016). FITE. 2015o. “Wishing You and Your Families, ‘A Happy and Successful New Year’! Let’s Unite and Make Things Happen”, http://fite.org.in/2015/01/01/ new-year-message-to-all-it-ites-employees/ (accessed on 31 August 2016). FITE. 2015p. “We, IT/ITES Employees Are Part of the International Society!”, http://fite.org.in/2015/01/01/it-employees-are-part-of-international-society/ (accessed on 31 August 2016). Mirchandani, K. 2004. “Practices of Global Capital: Gaps, Cracks and Ironies in Transnational Call Centres in India”, Global Networks, 4(4): 355–373. Noronha, E. and D’Cruz, P. 2006. “Organising Call Centre Agents: Emerging Issues”, Economic and Political Weekly, 41(21): 2115–2121. Noronha, E. and D’Cruz, P. 2009a. Employee Identity in Indian Call Centres: The Notion of Professionalism. New Delhi: Sage. Noronha, E. and D’Cruz, P. 2009b. “Engaging the Professional: Organising Call Centre Agents in India”, Industrial Relations Journal, 40(3): 215–234. Noronha, E. and D’Cruz, P. 2013. “Hope to Despair: The Experience of Organizing Indian Call Centre Employees”, Indian Journal of Industrial Relations, 48(3): 471–486. Noronha, E. and D’Cruz, P. 2016a. “Still a Distance to Go: Social Upgrading in the Indian ITO-BPO-KPO Sector”, in Nathan, D., Tewari, M. and Sarkar, S. (eds.), Labour in Global Value Chains in Asia, pp. 423–449. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Noronha, E. and D’Cruz, P. 2016b. “IT Industry Unionisation: Don’t Panic – Unions Don’t Mean Strikes, They Offer a Collective Voice”, Scroll.in, July 17, http://scroll.in/article/811635/it-industry-unionisation-dont-panic-unionsdont-mean-strikes-they-offer-a-collective-voice (accessed on 31 August 2016). Pal, M. and Buzzanell, P. 2008. “The Indian Call Centre Experience: A Case Study in Changing Discourses of Identity, Identification, and Career in a Global Context”, Journal of Business Communication, 45(1): 31–60.

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Penfold, C. 2009. “Off-Shored Services Workers: Labour Law and Practice in India”, The Economic and Labour Relations Review, 19(2): 91–106. Ramesh, B. P. 2004. “ ‘Cyber Coolies’ in BPO: Insecurities and Vulnerabilities of Non–Standard Work”, Economic and Political Weekly, 39(5): 492–497. Rothboeck, S., Vijaybhaskar, M. and Gayatri, V. 2001. Labor in the Indian Economy: The Case of the Indian Software Labor Market. New Delhi: ILO. Russell, B. and Thite, M. 2009. “Managing Work and Employment in Australian and Indian Call Centres”, in Thite, M. and Russell, B. (eds.), The Next Available Operator: Managing Human Resources in the Indian Business Process Outsourcing Industry, pp. 253–278. New Delhi: Sage. Sheth, N. R. 1993. “Our Trade Unions: An Overview”, Economic and Political Weekly, 28(6): 231–236. Subramani, A. 2015. “TCS Revokes Termination of Woman Employee”, The Times of India, January 20, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/jobs/ TCS-revokes-termination-of-woman-employee/articleshow/45953919.cms (accessed on 31 August 2016). Taylor, P. and Bain, P. 2008. “United by a Common Language? Trade Union Responses in the UK and India to Call Centre Offshoring”, Antipode, 40(1): 131–154. Thite, M. and Russel, B. 2010. “Work Organization, Human Resource Practices and Employee Retention in Indian Call Centers”, Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources, 48(3): 356–374. Vaitheesvaran, B. 2015. “Court Stays Termination of Another Fired TCS Employee”, The Economics Times, January 21, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ites/court-stays-termination-of-another-fired-tcs-employee/ articleshow/45967812.cms (accessed on 31 August 2016).

9

The SEWA Lok Swasthya Mandali A dual experiment in organising and service provision in Gujarat Sapna Desai and Mirai Chatterjee

The path-breaking achievements of the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) – as a trade union for women workers with no formal employer–employee relationship, a microfinance bank (SEWA Bank) and movement to improve women’s economic and employment security – have been well documented. With a current membership of over 1.5 million women spread across thirteen states, SEWA has organised agricultural workers, home-based workers, vendors and other self-employed women for better wages, employment security, legal protection and towards financial and social security. SEWA has also promoted 106 co-operatives that are used, owned and run by women workers themselves. Concurrently, SEWA established women-owned financial services to support individual empowerment through enabling often insecure women to save, access formal finance and expand their employment potential. Beyond these critical areas, however, two aspects of SEWA’s strategies set it apart from most movements to organise informal sector workers. First, in response to women’s articulated needs, SEWA initiated a range of direct social services in its early years to address root causes of insecurity: health, housing and education in particular. Second, it has promoted service co-operatives for long-term sustainability of healthcare, child care and insurance, among other developmental programmes and activities. Though established as a trade union, it is equally committed to establishing co-operatives as a means of organising workers and promoting overall economic development. Accordingly, SEWA provided alternatives to prevailing economic structures through women-owned enterprises in occupations that are not typically organised, such as fisherwomen, vendors and artisans. Indeed, founder Elaben Bhatt has characterised SEWA as the confluence of three movements: the labour, co-operative and women’s movements converge to drive SEWA’s core activities. This chapter explores and analyses a compelling example of SEWA’s approach that catalysed

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new ways of approaching service delivery and collective organising: by combining them. Lok Swasthya Mandali (LSM), a SEWA-supported co-operative founded in 1990, was developed to provide health services to SEWA members who are informal workers and economic security for community health workers who provided these services at women’s doorsteps. LSM is unique both within the world of co-operatives – wherein activities traditionally rely on market-based production – and within public health, wherein most non-governmental health work in India is subsidised by grants or voluntary. LSM’s ambition to traverse SEWA’s twin goals of full employment and self-reliance within health services also provides an opportunity to explore how health is inextricably linked to labour security. The chapter is organised as follows: the first section (“The genesis of Lok Swasthya Mandali”) traces the genesis of LSM, its activities and trajectory over the past twenty-five years. The second section (“Establishing a co-operative”) analyses the nature of the relationship between service provision in health and sustainability of provision through a co-operative and whether and how a co-operative model can provide health security for women workers. We conclude with an analysis of lessons and challenges learned from LSM’s continuing experiments.

The genesis of Lok Swasthya Mandali Early on in SEWA’s history, members articulated the central role of health in livelihoods. “We are all daily wage workers, all working women. Our health is our only wealth. If we are healthy, then we can work and earn” (Chatterjee 2015). The importance of this linkage was emphasised even further when, in 1977, SEWA Bank analysed the reasons for members’ loan defaults: the majority stemmed from health crises within the household (Bhatt 2005). SEWA addressed this linkage at two levels: prevention and protection. Prevention entailed organising simple interventions to improve women’s health status, such as distribution of ghee to pregnant women, health education and provision of safer tools for workers to prevent occupational injuries. SEWA Bank also spent several years designing a financial protection tool to insure women from the risk of illness-induced catastrophic expenditure, a contributory health insurance tool that later emerged as VimoSEWA (Ranson, Sinha et al. 2006). Initially, health-related activities were directly grounded within the organisation’s “core” activities of unionising and microfinance. As members responded eagerly to services, however, SEWA realised that

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health – in of itself a core component of labour security – deserved its own organisational commitment and structures (Chatterjee 2015). Funded by the Ford Foundation, SEWA initiated a community health programme in Ahmedabad city and district in the early 1980s. Run by arogya sevikas (health workers), SEWA members were recruited and trained to serve their communities with health education and linkages to government services. Arogya sevikas travelled door to door in their villages or slums, providing women with preventive health information and support in seeking services such as immunisation, antenatal care and tuberculosis medicines. Building on activities as they learned, in response to members’ needs, SEWA Health emerged as a full-fledged programme run by grassroots community health workers who provided health education and referral linkages to free government services such as maternal healthcare and tuberculosis drugs. In its developmental phase, the programme was premised on memberdriven, community-based healthcare provision, much in line with how non-governmental primary health initiatives were being developed in other parts of rural India by dedicated doctors and social activists. Today, its core activities have expanded widely in response to members’ needs (Figure 9.1).

SEWA Health Activity

Participants/beneficiaries

Health education

Adult women and adolescent girls

Occupational health

Adult women workers

Know-your-body sessions

Adult women and adolescent girls

Referrals – support and accompaniment

Adult women SEWA members

Door-to-door medicine sales

All households in sevika community

Tuberculosis – DOTS programme

All individuals linked to a DOTS centre

Maternal and child health tracking

Eligible mothers and children

Low-cost drugs retail (allopathic + ayurvedic)

Entire community

Ayurvedic medicine production

Entire community

Figure 9.1 SEWA Health’s core activities

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Establishing a co-operative Given SEWA’s roots as a trade union and Gandhian movement for co-operatives, however, maintaining a traditional community health model subsidised by donor support did not go in hand with the principles of sustainability and collective ownership of the organisation. This led to the thinking behind the establishment of a co-operative society when SEWA Health had identified key activities and a core team of health workers. While unions of formal healthcare workers (doctors and allied professionals) have existed in many countries, an economic co-operative of women who provide health services was first not only in Gujarat but in other parts of the country as well at the point of time. A co-operative model suggested that health work could be financially sustainable, while providing critical services to women workers. At the same time, members would have the benefits of trade union membership in SEWA. With the support of Dr Ramesh Bhatt, SEWA established a cooperative with a membership of both arogya sevikas and dais (traditional midwives). Women members contributed Rs 100 as share capital. Over two years, they worked to convince officers in the co-operative department that health work could be sustainable and that the organisation fit the criteria of a member-owned enterprise. Eventually Shri Mahila Lok Swasthya SEWA Sahkari Mandali was registered in May 1990. Its jurisdiction was initially restricted to Ahmedabad district, with later permission granted to work in all of Gujarat. Its initial mission was stated to: enable women workers and their families to have access to life-saving health information, prevent illness, obtain services when required and ultimately lead healthy and productive lives. As of 2016, the co-operative had 1,795 member shareholders, with a board of fifteen directors elected by the general membership.

LSM’s activities This section outlines LSM’s major activities as a co-operative, separated into income-generating initiatives and community health services for the purposes of understanding the co-operative. However, we emphasise that this categorisation is not mutually exclusive. As the following descriptions illustrate, there is considerable, intentional crossover between services and income generation. While the latter offsets the cost of the former, income sources themselves constitute health services. Indeed, this dual nature of LSM’s activities – providing

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community health services that generate income and revenue streams that improve health – is at the core of understanding the functioning of the co-operative. Income-generating activities LSM recognised that to be financially sustainable, the co-operative would need to generate revenue through health-related activities. Its first initiative was to establish three low-cost medicine shops in areas populated by SEWA members in Ahmedabad city and within two large hospitals. Using members’ share capital, LSM purchased medicines from the wholesale market which were sold from shops as well as by arogya sevika in a door-to-door approach. Sevikas earned a commission per direct sale, which helped contribute to their incomes. In its first year, LSM had established a clear revenue stream and the cooperative turned a profit. Members received a dividend, leading to greater confidence in the sustainability of services. The medical shops established at the rural areas faced several obstacles including the competition from other retailers who are better connected with the public health delivery systems and higher running cost. Currently, four shops cater to over 225,000 people with a turnover of about Rs 25.4 million (AccessHealth 2010). As the low-cost medicine business grew, LSM also explored other businesses and income sources. For example, the co-operative began to produce its own Ayurvedic products under license from the state government. Based on member demand, a range of medicinal, food and beauty products are manufactured and sold by sevikas to SEWA members and the wider community. LSM’s aim is to develop this business further as an employment source for women along the supply chain: growers of herbs, processers and promoters under the auspices of an independent brand, Lok Swasthya Ayurved. Another important source of income emerged in the form of partnerships. In 1999, LSM entered into an important government partnership under the national tuberculosis programme, facilitated by the World Health Organization. When the DOTS (Directly Observed Treatment, Short-term) method – ensuring patients complete a treatment course with the supervision of a health worker – was initiated, LSM was identified as a partner in the state of Gujarat. The program provided an incentive to each worker per treated patient. Further, the government funded a diagnostic centre, operated by LSM for a fee, in areas where SEWA members live in Ahmedabad.

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Similarly, LSM has earned a service fee from its sister organisation, VimoSEWA, for marketing insurance products. SEWA’s national federation and other non-organisations have contracted LSM to train community health workers and provide technical support to their programs. Community health programme Importantly, LSM continued to expand aspects of its community health programme that did not generate income but were equally critical to its mission (see Table 9.1). Arogya sevikas, covering a population across three to five villages or a slum settlement, provide health education to SEWA members in their communities through organised group sessions around a range of themes: reproductive health, primary healthcare and prevention, child health and common infectious diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis. Arogya sevikas also provide referral linkages to secondary and tertiary care, wherein health workers accompany women to hospitals, navigating the typically complex systems involved in hospital-based care for surgeries, cancer treatment or other major procedures. Further, a team of over 400 village health workers, known as Swasthya Sathins, was trained to provide specific services with compensation from LSM. LSM has also built up a network of doctors, hospitals and administrators to help negotiate lower cost or free services, while helping to ensure that members do not undergo unnecessary testing or procedures. Given SEWA’s membership and Elaben’s early efforts to address the specific work-related health needs of women, LSM has naturally addressed occupational health through health education and direct

Table 9.1 LSM’s dual activity base: the crossover between revenue streams and health service Income-generating activities

Community health services

Low-cost medicine shops Ayurvedic product business Tuberculosis centre + DOTS incentives Technical support to other organisations

Health education for women and men Occupational health Referral linkages

Source: Primary study.

Dai training and school

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interventions. It has worked with partners such as the National Institute of Design and National Institute of Occupational Health to devise low-cost tools to improve women’s work environments and reduce hazards. Through such partnerships, LSM has promoted tables to reduce back strain for home-based agarbatti rollers, distributed safety goggles and developed new prototypes for farming equipment such as sickles. Lastly, a large proportion of LSM’s members have been dais, midwives who have performed deliveries at home and helped women through ante- and post-natal care. In order to support their work and help upgrade skills, LSM initiated a Dai Training School led by an experienced gynaecologist (Sinha 2003). Known as the Dai Shala, the school provides hands-on training and support to midwives in safe delivery, pregnancy care and postnatal/neonatal health. An evaluation in 2006 indicated that women with access to SEWAtrained dais were more likely to receive visits and basic prenatal care (Visaria 2009). Further, a higher proportion of women in SEWA areas reported registering their pregnancy, particularly in the first trimester, compared to women who did not have a SEWA-trained dai available. The presence of trained dais appeared to contribute to higher referrals to healthcare facilities, in line with the government’s changing priorities to promote institutional delivery. The Dai School also brought many more women into LSM’s fold, eventually leading to the formation of a Dai Sangathan¸ a member-based network of dais formed across Gujarat in partnership with other organisations to advocate for midwives’ role and recognition as workers within public health programmes. Equally important, SEWA’s training school and organising efforts ensured that women who opted for home delivery had trained dais available, with support from both SEWA and the public health system.

Policy advocacy In addition to direct interventions, LSM has engaged in policy advocacy since its inception. Grounded in SEWA’s approach to bring grassroots experience to policymakers, LSM has worked consistently on several policy-level issues: (i) advocating for a holistic approach to women’s health. Counter to government and donor focus on maternal and child health, LSM has promoted a needs-based, holistic approach to women’s needs through the life cycle. (ii) the role of dais: LSM played a key role in highlighting the role of midwives in the reality of childbirth through government consultations, research and organising

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dais across the state. Although the government’s position on promoting institutional delivery has been a consistent obstacle to LSM’s efforts to integrate dais into the formal health system, LSM’s efforts helped gain recognition for these women health workers and support skill upgradation. (iii) social determinants of health: An integrated approach – recognising that women’s health requires action in finance, water and sanitation, employment and nutrition for example – has been a hallmark of SEWA and LSM’s approach.1 LSM’s experience has been influential in the workings and report of a global Commission on Social Determinants of Health as well as supported policy advocacy within India for convergence of programs. (iv) universal healthcare: LSM, through representation and sharing experience, provided key inputs into the government’s vision for universal healthcare. The organisation continues to advocate for effective implementation of primary healthcare and assurance of health services for all, especially the poor.

Balancing dual roles Unlike a traditional NGO-led community health program, LSM chose not to rely solely on donor grants or contributions to sustain its program. Yet also unlike a traditional co-operative, its activities are not aimed primarily at revenue generation to ensure dividends; each income stream also has a clear mission to improve the health of women workers. The co-operative model has engendered women-led ownership, leadership and control over their key asset – the collective ability to deliver health services to women workers. SEWA members who joined LSM became skilled in running a co-operative and understanding the nuances of operating a range of businesses. Health workers who are members recognise that their services are not charity; they are owners of their shared labour and skills in providing health education, referrals and services. The following sections examine two key concerns: (i) the balance between income-generating activities aimed at sustainability and service provision and (ii) how LSM’s dual role helps women workers attain health security. Sustainability with service provision Sustainability is the primary aim of a co-operative, in this case specifically to ensure that health workers could provide services without reliance on external funds. Since its inception, LSM has been able to deliver dividends to its members. Profits largely derive from the

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low-cost medicine shops. Of the pharmacies, two performed consistently with profitable margins, while two others struggled. LSM also adhered to government guidelines and rules for staffing, salaries and procurement, unlike many its competitors. Alongside these profits (estimated at 10%), the Ayurveda business continues to stabilise and now generates modest profits. Income from technical support, while high in some years, has not emerged as a consistent revenue stream each year, as demand fluctuates. While health workers earn incentives from various government programs, these are not major or consistent sources of income. At present, income streams cover expenses required to run existing businesses and core staff salaries in the businesses such as pharmacy and Ayurvedic production staff. The co-operative supports salaries of some, but not all, arogya sevikas or community health-related staff at SEWA. Donor inputs have supported specific projects that require communication materials, while an existing corpus at SEWA has helped to offset a proportion of salaries for sevikas, organisers and health team management. Accordingly, service provision has not grown necessarily based on the level of profit in the co-operative – SEWA’s health work has expanded well beyond the profit achieved by the co-operative. For example, LSM has organised camps for reproductive and child health, mobile eye camps and HIV/AIDS communication campaigns in partnership with a range of health providers, both public and private, with donor support. Concurrently, LSM has planned to scale up its pharmacies in order to increase overall profits. An analysis conducted in 2010 suggested that scaling up will require investment in a professional management team and more infrastructure. Financing options, such as debt financing or equity investment through social investors, require considerable changes to its approach and potentially reducing profit margins. Further, involvement of external investors may affect LSM’s nonprofit management principles and willingness to invest profits into non-income-generating activities. The challenge to LSM, therefore, is to consider how to increase efforts towards sustainability through increased profits while retaining its core mission of improving health. This challenge underscores the questions within LSM’s model: how does a co-operative, which is intended to serve women workers, also grow as a successful business? Thus far, LSM has generated increasing profits through its pharmacies and other sales while offsetting specific health service activities within Gujarat. For instance, the data from LSM annual reports for various years showed that the sales turnover increased from Rs 0.5 million in 1994–94 to more than Rs 40 million

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in 2015. Another path towards sustainability may be to expand the co-operative itself to other states, through adding shareholders from SEWA’s existing membership in other states of India. Such an expansion could facilitate new revenue streams as well, although additional staff costs would be incurred. Further, LSM may be able to enhance its income through providing additional technical services to government and other non-governmental organisations. Whatever its chosen path to scaling up, and thus increasing sustainability, consideration of both the type of investment and potential changes to its core mission will be required. A co-operative model to achieve health security The co-operative model itself highlights how LSM has stayed dedicated to self-reliance and sustainability while working to improve the health of women workers. Organising – the core mission of SEWA – women health workers has offered a unique model to public health service delivery. In most settings, health workers remain individual “employees” or link workers of an organisation or government program. They rarely have power over their agendas, priorities or tasks in a democratic model. LSM, through regular shareholder meetings and organising activities, has created an important, new culture of community health workers, one of collective action. Co-operative meetings do not solely review profit and loss statement or revenue activities; they jointly discuss and decide upon the overall health mission and how best to serve women workers. A collective approach is visible through specific health activities based on advocacy, such as organising midwives into a Dai Sangathan. However, the imprint is also evident in LSM’s overall approach to health. Rather than provide parallel services, LSM maintained that its role would be to help women reach critical, free public health services due to them by the government, while filling gaps in health education and primary care. The contrast of this approach with many NGOs is significant: most community health programmes in India have included direct service delivery through independent clinics and hospitals. LSM, on the other hand, has used collective action to ensure, for example, that (i) public health staff are available as per guidelines, (ii) free services are provided when guaranteed and (iii) quality of care is appropriate. This path is certainly a longer and more arduous struggle – it requires years of activism without necessarily seeing immediate results in terms of health outcomes. Nonetheless, LSM has maintained this approach, one that is both amenable to scale and sustainable in the long term.

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Understanding impact Measuring the impact of LSM underscores the importance of examining the co-operative in its multiple goals to: (i) empower health workers, (ii) provide health services and (iii) organise for improved health. As a co-operative, indicators of achievement must include sustainability of the organisation and employment/financial security of its members as community health workers. As a health service organisation, the impact of LSM’s work can be assessed through changes in health indicators such as awareness, preventive behaviour and health outcomes among the communities it serves. As part of a union, LSM’s achievements are reflected through policy changes, improvement in health services and women’s strengthened capacity to access their entitlements. Given its multilayered goals, LSM has employed a range of approaches towards evaluating its achievements. Empowerment of health workers LSM’s sustainability and progress in securing the employment of women health workers is regularly reviewed by the Executive Committee. The co-operative’s profit, loss and member dividends are evaluated financially and presented to the membership annually. Employment security of health workers is also assessed beyond income. Similar to other women in the informal economy, the role and need for remuneration of health workers have not been fully recognised by the health sector. Accordingly, another indicator of LSM’s impact on lives of health workers is expansion of employment opportunities. For example, sevikaben and dais have been recognised and employed as government-supported Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs), tuberculosis DOTS workers and immunisation promoters. Many of these improvements have been documented through qualitative studies of either the specific program or the co-operative as a whole (Sinha 2003, 2007). In addition, qualitative research and case studies have documented how, after joining the co-operative, health workers have gained respect and improved their own capacity: key components of SEWA’s foundational goal, self-reliance. The story of Chanchiben illustrates how they have achieved it: Chanchiben is from Vicchhiya village of Ahmedabad district. Physically – challenged and poor, she is also from the Dalit community. When SEWA organizers identified her for the health education sessions in her village, people laughed: “What will such a girl do? She is useless!” When she was chosen by the village women for training

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as a health worker, some of the village leaders (all men) were outraged. We will not accept medicines and health services from such a woman!” they fumed. Today, Chanchiben is a leader. She was asked to stand for election to the village panchayat. She serves 5 villages, bringing life-saving health information and low cost medicines, even Ayurvedic ones, to her village community. The same upper castes who shunned her once now invite her into their homes, offer her tea and readily take her health services! She was invited as a speaker in Mumbai at the International Presidents’ Organisation, an association of corporate leaders. She spoke movingly, but with quiet confidence: “I was born with this physical deformity. I was considered useless by my community. Only SEWA welcomed me with open arms. I learned that I too could contribute to society. There was hope even for me. Once I joined SEWA, my world changed forever. Being with my sisters opened my eyes – – I saw the world, so much to do, so much to learn. I moved from being in despair to full of hope. I owe everything to SEWA and to my cooperative, Lok Swasthya. I was surprised to be elected to the Board and served for 6 years. My whole life has changed . . . there is no going back”. While similar stories are common across SEWA’s membership, individual, personal empowerment of health workers is typically not the focus of health service organisations. This emphasis likely results from LSM’s roots as a co-operative, rather than an NGO that employs health workers. Health outcomes Evaluations of the impact of LSM’s health services have typically focused on a specific program area, such as maternal health or HIV/ AIDS. Given the co-operative’s focus on health education, improvement in health awareness, preventive behaviour and treatmentseeking have been examined in most studies. In 2006, a study that compared areas where LSM operated a maternal health intervention with control areas found that antenatal care visits, early pregnancy registration and referral to institutions were higher among women in program villages (Visaria 2009). The study did not detect a difference in preventive behaviour such as iron supplementation. In 2007, a pre-post evaluation of an HIV/AIDS communication intervention indicated that women’s awareness and message recall improved when they were exposed to multiple modes of communication delivered by sevikas (MICA 2007).

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In 2010, a cluster randomised trial of a sevika-delivered health education program on diarrhoea, malaria and hysterectomy indicated that women’s awareness, but not preventive behaviour, improved as a result of the intervention (Desai 2015). Changes in treatment-seeking and health outcomes, measured by reported morbidity, hospital admission and insurance utilisation, were not detected. Qualitative research revealed that where arogya sevikas were active, women depended on them to make informed treatment decisions: sevikas were defined as critical, 24-hour support systems for healthcare. While awareness tends to improve with health education programs, improvements in behaviour and outcomes have been difficult to identify, perhaps due to the nature of LSM’s health program itself. Unlike donor-driven, disease-focused programs that typically provide parallel services to a community, LSM’s focus on holistic health education and improving existing government services may not be amenable to attributable changes in morbidity and mortality. Further, the health services provided through low-cost medicine shops, ayurvedic medicines and referrals, although valuable health services, are likely better captured through decreased expenditure on health rather than health status. While some studies have collected data on health expenditure among women, the geographical dispersion of the medicine shops prevents a more rigorous, comparative evaluation of expenditure. Organising A common finding across evaluations has been the overarching need for health system changes such as improved access and affordability of quality health services. An evaluation of how effectively three LSM services – health education, reproductive health camps and tuberculosis detection – assessed whether services reached the poorest third of the population (Ranson, Joshi et al. 2004). The study found that LSM reached the poorest in urban areas, while those in rural areas faced continued barriers to access. LSM’s success in urban areas was attributed to, among other reasons, its organising efforts through grassroots promotion and delivery by sevikaben. In addition to improving equity through an organising approach, LSM has contributed to policy change at the state and national levels. Measures of LSM’s policy impact have largely been through tracking policy changes and qualitative assessments such as interviews with women, policymakers and other key informants (Sinha 2007; Visaria 2009). While no evaluation has specifically focused on policy change yet, LSM continues to document local changes such as

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recognition of dais as well as contribution to national policy such as the National Rural Health Mission and Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana. Assessing LSM’s impact on both program delivery and policy through its organising approach is a potential area for future evaluation. Balancing priorities Most models of community health programmes that have demonstrated health impact have been resource-intensive, donor-supported projects aimed at a specific health goal such as reducing maternal mortality. For LSM, sustainability – in terms of both the co-operative and ensuring it does not replicate government services – has defined its agenda as much as ensuring health security. This is a balance that LSM has been learning to tread, that between trying to balance external demands to measure outcomes versus ensuring it stays true to an approach grounded in sustainability. For example, the time arogya sevikas spend on income-generating activities compared to health education or in follow-ups to referrals compared to marketing insurance directly affects how its impact can be measured. Assessing LSM solely in terms of health outcomes, therefore, overlooks the key role of sustainability. Health security – defined in terms of the organisation, health workers, health of their communities and the transformation of social norms and individual lives – is a more appropriate framework to drive evaluation approaches. Use of both quantitative and qualitative methods is essential to capture organisation-, individual- and community-level changes. Learning from previous studies, indicator areas to measure should include: organisational sustainability, employment security of members, health awareness among community members, health expenditure, health outcomes, health service access and quality, and policy changes.

Lessons from LSM’s model Lessons and challenges learned from LSM are relevant for both cooperative structures and health programs, while raising key questions about scale and replication of such models. Self-reliance As the Indian public health scenario changes, both systemically and epidemiologically, the priorities of both governments and donors tend to shift at least once or twice a decade. For example, a focus on reproductive health

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in the 1990s has slowly given way to programs solely targeting maternal and child health. Or, previous efforts to eradicate common infectious diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis are being challenged by the increasing burden of non-communicable diseases. Accordingly, donors to SEWA’s health program have often worked to reshape its activities. While some of these shifts have affected SEWA members, such as an increasing burden of non-communicable diseases, LSM’s holistic approach to health would have been diluted by changing priorities or focusing on vertical disease-based interventions. For most NGOs, changing programs along with donor priorities is an inevitable, imperative strategy for financial survival. In LSM’s case, its revenue-generating streams allow for relatively more flexibility to ensure that key programs are sustained regardless of external support. Throughout the past twenty-five years, health education on all aspects of women’s health has remained a mainstay of its program, largely funded by LSM’s income. Collective action Although a co-operative technically only binds members together in sharing investments and profits, the nature of LSM’s business – health and health services – has resulted in collective action well beyond financial sustainability. The notion of collective ownership has extended to joint action, in areas such as policy advocacy and activism to ensure access to quality care. Unlike traditional co-operatives, LSM members are also union members of SEWA. Thus, being a part of SEWA itself already established a culture of collective action, while the co-operative cemented women’s commitment to working together, rather than as individual agents. Further, democratic structures of governance and priority setting allow the co-operative to stay close to its members and their health needs. For example, voting – a critical part of co-operative functioning – was extended to determining priorities of the health program as well.

Challenges The primary challenge to maintaining a co-operative model appears to be balancing the pulls of revenue generation with a mission to address the health needs of women workers in the informal economy. By nature of their membership in a co-operative, arogya sevikaben have a dual role of promoting medicines and ayurvedic products while providing health education and referral services. At the managerial level, SEWA and LSM’s leadership face a similar tension between

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expanding income-generating activities while maintaining priority for non-revenue-generating initiatives. The addition of donor funds, though a helpful source of support, further stresses this balance. As LSM contemplates future growth, both in terms of business and health services, it will be faced with difficult decisions. Financial scalability will require either focusing on successful ventures such as pharmacies but investing in professional management or partnering with financial investors. On the other hand, if LSM partners with more donors its priorities will naturally shift towards ensuring that its health services can be measured with traditional health outcomes. While the latter is clearly possible, targeted health programs require intense focus that would likely threaten time spent on income-generating activities.

Conclusion The Lok Swasthya Mandali model has remained unique in India, with virtually no known replicas or similar models. Its ability to survive twenty-five years is undoubtedly linked to its roots within SEWA. Firmly grounded within principles of sustainability and self-reliance – and supported by far-reaching experience with co-operatives across SEWA – LSM has endured as a collective of health workers who both earn an income and provide essential services. Several factors have made this possible: grounding and membership in a trade union, the security of a trust that can accept donor funding to offset expenses not covered by the co-operative, early success with pharmacies and a strong system of internal accountability rather than managing external expectations. These may be the same reasons that similar models have not emerged among health workers in other settings, however. At present, the role of a co-operative in organising health workers is one that is particularly relevant across India. The Indian government has trained over one million community health workers, known as ASHAs, to link communities to public health services and provide doorstep services. While some ASHAs have formed unions, by and large they function as independent agents without supportive structures or collective activism or action. In many states, ASHAs do not earn fixed stipends – they survive on commissions and incentive payments. Thus, there is a ripe opportunity to meld learning from principles of organising and co-operatives to help ensure the sustainability of this vital community health worker force across India. Like LSM, the benefits of organising are likely to extend far beyond shared finances; working together will serve the best interests of both health workers and the community at large.

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Note 1 Through working in partnership with SEWA sister organisations, LSM has adopted an integrated, holistic approach to health that addresses both the underlying determinants and direct effects of ill health. As highlighted by the World Health Organization Commission on the Social Determinants of Health, SEWA’s integrated approach has been highlighted as a model for low-income settings (WHO 2011). Housing and sanitation, banking, employment, legal rights, education and training are addressed independently by SEWA sister organisations – and combined through locationspecific project efforts in Ahmedabad, Surat and South Gujarat. An analysis of Parivartan, a slum-upgrading initiative that combined housing and sanitation, banking and health efforts in Ahmedabad city, indicated evidence for decreased incidence of illness as compared to non-intervention areas (Butala et al. 2010). Although organisations in the SEWA family function as independent cooperatives like LSM, a trust for housing and financial institutions, their shared membership, mission and geographical working areas facilitate joint action on the social determinants of health.

References Access Health. 2010. Case Study of Lok Swasthya Mandali Pharmaceuticals. Hyderabad Access Health International and Centre for Emerging Market Solutions. Bhatt, E. R. 2005. We Are Poor but So Many: The Story of Self-Employed Women in India: The Story of Self-Employed Women in India. Oxford, USA: Oxford University Press. Butala, N. M., VanRooyen, M. J. and Patel, R. B. 2010. “Improved Health Outcomes in Urban Slums through Infrastructure Upgrading”, Social Science & Medicine, 71(5): 935–940. Chatterjee, M. 2015. Lok Swasthya SEWA Mandli’s Journey towards Health for All. Ahmedabad: SEWA Social Security. Desai, S. 2015. The Effect of Health Education on Women’s Treatment-Seeking Behaviour: Findings from a Cluster Randomised Trial and an In-depth Investigation of Hysterectomy in Gujarat, India. PhD thesis submitted to London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Unpublished. MICA. 2007. Impact of Swasthya Sanchar. Ahmedabad: Mudra Institute of Communication. Ranson, M. K., Joshi, P., Shah, M. and Shaikh, Y. 2004. “India: Assessing the Reach of Three SEWA Health Services among the Poor”, in HNP Discussion Paper: Reaching the Poor with Health, Nutrition, and Population Services, pp. 163–187. Washington, DC: World Bank. Ranson, M. K., Sinha, T., Chatterjee, M., Acharya, A., Bhavsar, A., Morris, S. S. and Mills, A. J. 2006. “Making Health Insurance Work for the Poor: Learning from the Self–Employed Women’s Association’s (SEWA) Community-Based Health Insurance Scheme in India”, Social Science & Medicine, 62(3): 707–720.

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Sinha, S. 2007. “Social Security for Women Workers in the Informal Economy”, in Social Security as a Human Right, pp. 117–128. Springer. Sinha, T. 2003. Promoting Health Security: SEWA’s Dai Programme. Ahmedabad: SEWA Social Security. Visaria, L. 2009. Impact of SEWA’s Maternal Health Programme. Ahmedabad: Gujarat Institute of Development Research. WHO. 2011. Closing the Gap: Policy into Practice on Social Determinants of Health: Discussion Paper. Geneva: World Health Organization.

10 “As human beings and as workers” Sex worker unionisation in Karnataka, India Gowri Vijayakumar, Shubha Chacko and Subadra Panchanadeswaran1 Introduction Sex workers are most often perceived by the state as victims to be assisted, criminals to be arrested or targets for HIV-related public health interventions. However, sex worker activists have worked to position sex work as a form of reproductive labour (McClintock 1993; Pheterson 1993; Fortunati 1995; Chapkis 1997; Leigh 1997; Delacoste and Alexander 1998; Kempadoo and Doezema 1998), especially in response to regulatory regimes that criminalise sex work, and feminist “abolitionists” who see sex work as intrinsically immoral and a form of gender-based violence (Barry 1984; Dworkin 1993; MacKinnon 1993; Barry 1996; Farley 2003; MacKinnon 2011). “Sex work is work” is thus a central claim in sex workers’ activism (Gall 2007; Gall 2012; Chateauvert 2014; Grant 2014). This chapter considers how this labour framework has been put into practice in sex workers’ organising. What are the prospects for sex worker collective action in trade union–inspired structures that seek to organise within the labour movement, especially in the Global South (Sukthankar 2012)? How might sex worker unions offer lessons for the redefinition of work within labour organising (Shah 2003)? What practical challenges emerge as sex workers attempt to unionise? We examine the synergies and tensions involved in sex workers’ labour organising through critical reflection on the Karnataka Sex Workers’ Union (KSWU), based in Bengaluru, India.2 As a key site of large-scale sex worker activism in the Global South, India offers a unique example of sex workers’ collective struggles. While estimates of the numbers of sex workers are unstable and politically polarised (Sahni and Shankar 2013: 12), AIDS surveillance suggests there are at least 868,000 women in sex work in India (NACO 2012: 8). Sex worker mobilisation in India has taken shape at the

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confluence of a long interplay between evolving sex work practices and colonial and post-colonial regulation; large-scale HIV prevention programs run by the state and funded partly by Northern donors; and ongoing dialogues between independent sex worker collectives and feminist, labour, Dalit, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) movements. However, the relationship between sex worker movements and labour movements in India has always been fraught (Sukthankar 2012), with sex workers running up against the moral discomfort of potential movement allies as well as the challenges of the partially criminalised status of sex work. While its surrounding social taboos suggest that sex work is exceptional, sex workers attempting to organise in trade unions face many of the same challenges other types of informal sector workers face: the stigma of doing “dirty work” particularly for waste-pickers or those who work with dead animals or clean toilets; lack of a single target such as an employer for organising; lack of social and legal recognition as workers; and engagement in multiple economic activities and/ or employment statuses. Added to these is the dispersed positioning of workers often divided along class, gender, sexuality or caste lines and operating in secret. Like other forms of informal sector work, sex work is feminised, and workers face exploitation along multiple axes of power. Sex workers also face a uniquely contradictory relationship to the state: they are both partially criminalised and involved in largescale state-led HIV prevention programs that rely on them to prevent an epidemic in the “general population”. Organising strategies for sex workers thus demand a rethinking of the sites and subjects of labour and the possibilities for transformation. This chapter will reflect on sex workers’ organising as an emerging site of informal labour organising, and its relationship to broader shifts in the nature of “worker” identity in India. We draw on a set of eight discussions (see Panchanadeswaran et al. forthcoming for a more detailed discussion) with focus groups of KSWU leaders, members and outside allies, but, more centrally, on our own experiences of working with and studying KSWU as researchers and activist supporters. After summarising the arguments for positioning sex work as labour in the first half of the chapter, in the second half we discuss the experiences of the KSWU and its alliance-based, social movement–inspired approach to unionisation. KSWU’s approach points to ways in which the category of the “worker” in India is being redefined to include new relationships between state and workers, and new articulations of gender, sexuality and class.

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Labour perspectives on sex work Debates about sex work’s status as work have direct implications for the possibilities for sex workers’ collective action globally. The rift between an “oppression” paradigm, which sees sex work as inherently exploitative, and an “empowerment” paradigm, which sees it as work that can be empowering and even pleasurable (Weitzer 2009), has long shaped legal battles over the criminalisation of sex work. Placing sex work within the labour realm allows sex workers to demand basic labour rights and safe working conditions, as well as linking the concerns of sex workers to broader struggles for class and gender justice (Bindman and Doezema 1997). Meanwhile, a burgeoning “rescue industry” (Agustín 2007) draws ideological support from the arguments of feminist sex work abolitionists and has sought to rescue and rehabilitate women from prostitution on moral and sometimes religious grounds (Doezema 2001; Sharma 2005; Soderlund 2005; Weitzer 2007). In the Global South, anti-sex-work advocacy has often drawn not only on cultural nationalism and moral conservatism but also on ideological and monetary resources from the North. The image of the victimised Southern prostitute, incapable of choice, has been central to Northern “abolitionist” proposals since the nineteenth century (Doezema 2001), and organisations like the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), Christian evangelical groups and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under the George Bush administration have all attempted to oppose the growth of sex worker groups promoting a work or labour perspective in India. These abolitionist groups have also promoted legal reforms that further criminalise sex work. In their colonial and post-colonial iterations, such abolitionist organisations have supported law enforcement in conducting irresponsible raid and rescue operations. In the wreckage of the raid, the lives and livelihoods of these ostensibly rescued women become collateral damage and the self-satisfied press releases of the rescuers never make mention of their fates. Abolitionist groups have strongly opposed characterisations of sex work as work as “dangerously misleading”, preferring terms such as “prostitution” and “sexual exploitation” and arguing that sex work cannot be considered work because it is propelled by “poverty, violence, and inequality” (Leidholdt 2000). Of course, poverty, violence and inequality affect many sectors of labour markets: this is not peculiar to sex work alone. These conceptualisations of sex work as work vary: arguments range from positioning sex work as empowering, pleasurable work; aligning

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sex workers with medical caregivers or therapists, to low-status, informal and sometimes exploitative labour; aligning sex workers with the working class. Meanwhile, sex workers have long organised to assert their position as workers (Gall 2012; Chateauvert 2014; Grant 2014), and scholars have increasingly analysed sex work as a form of labour (Dewey 2012). Sex worker activists in Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE), founded in San Francisco in 1972, focused on civil rights and human rights, not always labour rights (Jenness 1990; Jenness 1993; Bernstein 2007; Bernstein 2010).3 Southern sex worker movements have often taken the relationship between sex work and the working class more seriously, seeking to undo the boundary between sex work and other types of low-status informal sector work (Bindman and Doezema 1997). Compared to 1970s sex worker movements in the United States and Europe, reference to the Global South has added nuance to the concept of sex work as work by situating it in the context of simultaneous choice and exploitation (O’Connell Davidson 2002; Boris et al. 2010), as a labour process that contains within it both forms of oppression and the basis for collective action and selfdetermination. Such an approach better represents the ways in which sex workers often describe what they do – as labour comparable to other forms of informal sector labour (Sahni and Shankar 2013). Since the 1990s, more and more sex worker organisations globally explicitly saw themselves in line with a trade union model. Organisations of sex workers have lobbied for sex workers’ rights in Ecuador, Malaysia, Thailand, South Africa, Uruguay and India. Several, including the International Union of Sex Workers in the United Kingdom, Red Thread in the Netherlands, and Asociación de Mujeres Meretrices de la Argentina in Argentina, have formal affiliations with trade union “umbrella” organisations (Hardy 2010). Though sex worker organisations vary widely in their concrete relationships to labour movements, organising formally and informally as unions can play an important symbolic role in affirming sex work’s position as labour. Adopting a labour approach allows for an interrogating of the possible injustice of the conditions of work using international instruments, such as the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) four pillars of decent work for all, and the International Covenant on Economic Social Cultural Rights, which recognises the right to work, and places on the state the responsibility to ensure that the work is under “just and favorable conditions”, with the right to form and join trade unions (Articles 6, 7 and 8). In India, several groups of sex workers have mobilised around the identity of the “worker”. Of the many collectives of sex workers

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around the country, the oldest and most well studied is the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), based in Kolkata (DMSC 1997; Jana et al. 2004; Ghosh 2004; Sukthankar 2012; Restakis 2013). First formed as an HIV prevention project in 1992, built around the principles of occupational health, DMSC eventually began to position itself as a trade union of sex workers. Partly inspired by DMSC and facilitated by national government and international donor funding for HIV prevention programs, sex worker collectives formed throughout India in the 1990s and 2000s, notably Veshya Anyay Mukti Parishad (VAMP) in Sangli in Maharashtra and other collectives in the southern states of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. These groups vary widely in structure and ideology, and form two national networks, the National Network of Sex Workers (NNSW) and the All India Network of Sex Workers (AINSW). Many argue to some extent that sex work is a form of work. Of these groups, the KSWU, discussed in this chapter, is the only group we know of to consider itself a trade union alone, without any public health programs. Studies of sex work in the Global South point to the ways in which the concept of “work” must be reformulated to accommodate the complex intersections of intimacy and money and the shifting, variable work patterns that characterise sex work. With reference to India, Shah (2003: 75) argues that “the label ‘work’ may not be adequate to accommodate the social and political complexities of exchanging sex for money”, and suggests placing sex work more squarely within the context of poverty, migration and broader shifts toward informalisation in labour regimes globally. Kotiswaran (2011: xiv) suggests that “it is at the intersections where sex becomes work and work demands sex that sex work needs to be understood, rather than by fetishising sex as necessarily reciprocal and pleasurable and work as always dignified”. Hernandez-Truyol and Larsen (2005: 406) note that the opposition between a right to work and human rights is a “false dichotomy”: conflating a legitimate critique of the conditions under which prostitution operates with the refusal to recognise prostitution as a form of labour “means that . . . complex social [realities] cannot engage the underlying human rights principles invoked, preventing human rights understandings from deepening and expanding”. Sex work is feminised labour both in its content and embodiment. Sex work offers one of the few opportunities for certain women, men and transgender women to ensure survival or economic mobility. The low wages that women and sexual minorities are paid, the failure of markets and governments to provide structures that allow them to work and the manner in which work is organised are all factors that

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impinge on sex work and those engaging in it (Maher et al. 2012). A labour perspective towards sex work also draws on accounts of gendered labour that include emotional work and therapeutic services (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003; Hochschild 2003). The sex worker does not sell “her body”. Rather, the sex worker sells her physical labour by providing sexual services. Sexual labour is affective labour in that it includes emotional, physical and mental activities and demands abilities to satisfy client’s desire to be liked, sexually desired and entertained. Constructing the work that sex workers do as merely being at the receiving end of penetrative sex strips it of its complexity and masks the actual labour and skills involved in sex work besides a range of other survival strategies that sex workers learn and evolve over time to avoid brushes with the state, goons and vigilante groups. This tendency to devalue and reduce the complexity of the sex workers’ working lives is in keeping with the dismissal of the workers in the informal sector as unskilled.

Sex workers and their work conditions in India The limited academic research on sex work in India suggests the fluidity of sex work with other forms of informal, feminised labour. In general, data on scales and patterns of sex work remain scarce. Largescale data tend to come from state agencies devoted to HIV prevention. Public health studies have used various criteria to distinguish between types of sex workers: practice, mode of operation, mode of organisation, nature of the sex work network, place of sex and primary place of solicitation (Buzdugan et al. 2009, 2010). However, these categorisations often fail to note that typologies of female sex workers are fluid, in response to economic and other environmental pressures. A recent survey of female, transgender and male sex workers attempts to correct this pattern. In a report on the female survey respondents, the authors note, “it is not easy to demarcate women’s work into neatly segregated compartments. Sex work and other work come together in ways that challenge the differentiation of sex work as an unusual or isolated activity” (Sahni and Shankar 2013: 2). A minority of women surveyed had entered sex work directly: most (60%) had prior or concurrent experience of other labour markets (Sahni and Shankar 2013: 22). Other occupations combined with sex work included daily wage labour in construction or agriculture, vending, domestic work, sales or tailoring, flower selling or garment factory work. Women with prior labour market experience came to sex work

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for economic reasons (28%) or because of bad working conditions (7%) or harassment (8%), and others because of family (16%) or migration (2%) (ibid: 35). Sex work also offers flexible timing and quick availability of cash. Ethnographic accounts highlight the relationship between sex work and other forms of informal exchange poor urban women pursue to earn their livelihoods – sometimes openly and sometimes in secret (Shah 2014). Data on Indian sex workers suggest they come from marginalised social backgrounds similar to those of other informal sector workers. Researchers found relatively low levels of schooling among female sex workers, though more than 30 per cent had completed some secondary schooling (Sahni and Shankar 2013: 18). Those who entered directly into sex work had relatively higher levels of schooling (ibid: 38). The majority (60%) came from poor rural family backgrounds and 35 per cent from urban backgrounds. About 26 per cent of female respondents were Dalits, a proportion roughly similar to that of the general population (Census of India 2001). Other studies suggest that among sex workers, there is an over-representation of Dalit women. Sex workers in Andhra Pradesh, for example, comprise an over-representation of widows and women separated from their partners or husbands, often contending with major financial issues (e.g. debt, health issues in the family, lack of any other breadwinner) when they enter into sex work (Dandona et al. 2006). Sex workers work under extremely exploitative and stigmatised conditions, abused by police, goondas (thugs/goons), landlords, neighbours, lodge owners, brothel owners, agents, clients, husbands/partners, government officials and even strangers who see them at work. Within the system sex workers are routinely denied basic entitlements such as ration cards or access to health facilities. Their children also face discrimination in schools, hostels and society in general. Access to public places – parks, bus stops, places of worship, restaurants, etc. – is often unpleasant, difficult or downright traumatic. While many of the challenges Indian sex workers face resemble those facing other poor and marginalised people, these forms of violence are exacerbated by the criminalisation and stigmatisation of sex work.

A contradictory state: criminalisation and HIV prevention A major barrier to sex workers’ claim to being workers in India is their legal status. While sex work is not technically illegal in India, existing legislation pertaining to sex workers defines prostitution as sexual

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exploitation or abuse, not as work, and criminalises several aspects of sex work. Ambiguities in the law often lead to harassment of sex workers by law enforcement officials. Indian laws pertaining to sex work have their roots in the colonial period. The Indian Penal Code, introduced in 1860, prohibited prostitution, or the exchange of women for the purposes of prostitution, for those under the age of eighteen. While the sections of the Indian Penal Code pertaining to sex work remain in force, more recent struggles over sex work and the law trace their roots to the Suppression of Immoral Traffic Acts (SITA) of 1923, originally a series of provincial acts and amended in 1956 after India signed the International Convention for the Suppression of Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others in 1950. SITA was amended in 1966 and 1986 and renamed the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act (ITPA). The act, after the 1986 amendment, defines prostitution as “sexual exploitation or abuse of persons for commercial purposes or for consideration in money or in any other kind”. While it does not directly penalise prostitution, it penalises various activities associated with it. The 1986 version of ITPA also criminalises the soliciting of clients at a distance of 200 metres from a public place. An offender can be held in a corrective institution or rehabilitation home indefinitely. In May 2006, a controversial amendment to the ITPA was introduced in Parliament, drafted by the Ministry of Women and Child Development (MWCD). The bill deleted provisions of the ITPA that penalised soliciting in a public place. Instead, it penalised the clients of sex workers; in reference to the “Swedish model”; it considered all sex workers were victims of sexual exploitation. The threat of the amendment offered an opportunity for emerging sex worker groups across India to unite around a common cause. After a series of protests, the bill was suspended. In February 2013, the ministry again proposed similar amendments to the ITPA, and yet again faced protest from sex worker groups. More recent legal developments have suggested a shift in approach to sex workers in some branches of government, but trafficking frameworks continue to predominate in others, leading to continuous debate. In February 2011, the Supreme Court, in response to a case regarding the brutal murder of a sex worker in Kolkata, initiated an exercise that included a panel of organisations working with sex workers to examine the concerns of sex workers in India. While the bench did not position sex work as work, it offered a sincerer attempt at “rehabilitation” than the existing token efforts. The aftermath of the Delhi rape and murder in 2012 (The Nirbhaya Case), and the subsequent protests

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pushing for legal reforms around sexual violence, resulted in further developments in laws around sex work. The Union Cabinet’s rushed ordinance, which toughened laws around sexual violence, included prostitution in the definition of “exploitation”, thus effectively criminalising prostitution as a form of trafficking. After another round of protests from the National Network of Sex Workers, the bill passed in March 2013, the Criminal Law Amendment Act, omitted the word “prostitution” from the definition of exploitation. In August 2015, the Supreme Court asked the Centre to produce an action plan to prevent trafficking for sexual exploitation, based on the recommendations of the National Legal Services Authority (NALSA) (PTI 2015). The recommendations distinguished trafficking from voluntary sex workers (NALSA 2015). International legal frameworks vary widely in their approach to sex work. Increasingly, however, UN agencies and international NGOs have moved towards an understanding of sex work as an occupation. The UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children, known as the Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Protocol, does not conflate prostitution with trafficking, but does consider trafficking to include “the exploitation of the prostitution of others”, a slightly ambiguous compromise between sex worker activists and abolitionists (Kotiswaran 2011). UNAIDS, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the World Health Organization (WHO) all recommend the decriminalisation of sex work. The ILO, in a 1998 report, called for official recognition of the sex sector, including the right to proper working conditions where sex work is not criminalised (Lim 1998). In a 2011 report focusing on Cambodia (ILO 2011), the ILO suggested the expanding of unions to include indirect sex workers, bringing a workplace perspective to prevention care and health strategies. Particularly in the context of HIV, the ILO has affirmed its inclusion of sex workers in the category of workers but has been reluctant to make recommendations to member states. In August 2015, after years of deliberation, Amnesty International’s International Council voted to adopt a policy that “seeks attainment of the highest possible protection of the human rights of sex workers, through measures that include the decriminalisation of sex work” (International Council 2015), leading to fierce debate. Particularly in India, there is another dynamic in sex workers’ relationship to the state that cannot be ignored: sexually transmitted infections (STI) and HIV prevention programming. Since the nineteenth century, criminal laws restricting sex work have coexisted with state efforts to regulate and extend medical surveillance over sex workers.

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Early in the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the national response positioned sex workers as key vectors of disease, but also involved them as foot soldiers in disease prevention. Sex worker groups proliferated in part to protect sex workers against the very real threat of disease and in part to protest a state response to the epidemic that reinforced the stigma against them. Some groups, though not all, actively promoted a labour or human rights approach to sex work. Whether or not in an antagonistic way, association with HIV/AIDS prevention offered these groups a platform for visibility and an avenue of support. For example, many HIV/AIDS NGOs and even the National AIDS Control Organisation stated opposition to the proposed amendments to the ITPA in 2006. State HIV/AIDS programs have thus simultaneously offered sex workers a claim to citizenship and opened them up to increasing surveillance (Ghosh 2005; Lakkimsetti 2011). Internationally, the HIV/AIDS epidemic has channelled new resources into sex worker organising and networking, and many Indian sex worker activists have participated in international movement-building as a result of these resources.

Organising as labourers: the case of the Karnataka sex workers’ union The Karnataka Sex Workers Union (KSWU) is a trade union of women, men and transgender sex workers, living in the southern state of Karnataka, India. KSWU’s approximately 2,500 members pay a joining fee and then a monthly subscription in order to register. The union formed with a rally on 1 May 2006. Subsequently, it was a series of events in June 2007 in Channapatna, Karnataka, that forcefully brought home the need for a union for sex workers and galvanised sex workers. The events commenced with the arrest on 2 June 2007 of four women under the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act and the consequent media exposure of the women. A public protest, held to condemn the police complicity in converting a routine process into a sensational trial by media, was disrupted, and the protesters were beaten up in the presence of the police by hired goons. In the wake of this attack, KSWU reached out to other supporters and the People’s Union for Civil Liberties– Karnataka (PUCL–K) constituted a fact-finding team to enquire into the incidents (PUCL 2007). This document, which condemned the police, along with other public actions, succeeded in sending a message to the local police that sex workers were able to leverage some support from mainstream organisations. These incidents and their fallout prompted many sex workers to approach KSWU. KSWU distinguished itself from existing HIV prevention NGOs by emphasising the human

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rights of sex workers. Geeta, the first general secretary of KSWU and one of the most outspoken leaders from among the sex workers of Karnataka, said, “I do not want sympathy. We do not want sympathy. What we want is our rights – as human beings and as workers”.4 KSWU emerged as a response to two trends. One was the growing organising effort of workers in the informal economy, which inspired both sex workers and some of their NGO contacts. This meant that KSWU was positioned not as an organisation of professionals who are specialists, but as workers in the unorganised sector. Rather than positing sex workers’ rights within the ambit of sexual pleasure or radical sexual choices, this placed them within the labour rights framework – with strong dimensions of gender and class and to some extent caste. The other was the perceived need to respond to the narrow existing community-based organisation (CBO) models of HIV prevention intervention. The union emerged as a way to address the issue of sex worker rights, including as workers within state HIV prevention programs. Thus, KSWU conducted a flash protest at the World AIDS Day observation of the Karnataka State AIDS Prevention Society to focus attention on the issues around compromising privacy and confidentiality and forced HIV testing of sex workers and sexual minorities. KSWU was intent on creating a space where sex workers could feel a sense of ownership and independence – a space of their own, separate from HIV prevention goals. KSWU follows a basic democratic structure. Since 2007, KSWU has been holding formal regular elections and through secret ballot has democratically elected the members of its Executive Committee (EC). Major policy decisions are discussed at the Annual General Meeting (AGM), as are broad contours of the plans for the coming year. The EC is composed mainly of sex workers, along with one non-sex worker. There is a healthy rotation of leadership, with senior leaders often having to make way for emerging ones. To ensure that the EC reflects the diversity of its members there are inbuilt provisions for representation of male and transgender sex workers who are much smaller in number and from the various districts where KSWU is active. A practice of a sex worker who is living with HIV being a member of the EC has also been instituted. The EC meetings are held with some regularity. Discussions of differences and disagreements as well as consensus building, planning, and reflecting on larger strategies take place at these meetings. The meetings of the Union member meetings as well as EC meetings. have incorporated elements from Dalit and feminist movements. If a song on the emancipation of Dalits is sung at the beginning of

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proceedings and the members move on to plan a program for International Women’s Day, it is a fairly typical meeting. While seeing itself as an organisation that champions the rights of sex workers, KSWU works closely with a range of progressive groups and organisations. The feminist and sexual minority movements are seen as natural allies given their “revolutionising perspectives on sexuality and labour” (Murthy and Seshu 2013). KSWU has been affiliated with New Trade Union Initiative (NTUI), a national federation of independent trade unions in India. This affiliation intended to draw from the efforts of other independent unions in terms of organising strategies as well as to benefit from being under a larger umbrella and signal KSWU’s solidarity with informal workers. However, collaborations have not been easy given the “discomforts around sexuality that characterised the Gandhian, Marxist, or religious philosophies” of some organisations’ leadership (Sukthankar 2012: 257). Some Ambedkarite groups are also uncomfortable with the idea of sex work as it is viewed as a means of subjugation of Dalit women by dominant castes seeking to enforce their social status and economic superiority (Rozario 2000). Local domestic worker groups, too, have seen KSWU as a challenge to their respectable image. Some feminist critics argue that sex work is an instantiation of patriarchal domination and poverty and must be abolished; on the other hand, they argue that the sex worker makes “easy money” rather than choosing difficult, low-paying and exploitative work in the informal sector. KSWU has worked steadily to forge these links. Members of KSWU therefore have made a trip to Chhattisgarh to support human rights activist Binayak Sen when he was in jail; have travelled to Koodankulam in Tamil Nadu to express solidarity with those protesting against the nuclear power plant there and have had animated conversations with the waste-pickers’ union in Pune (Aneka et al. 2013). They have lent their energies to a forum called forgenderjustice and have participated in large numbers in a rally pressing for land for Dalits. The issue of pensions for all touched a deep chord in them and they wholeheartedly supported the Pension Parishad, a national campaign for a universal basic pension. KSWU’s constant efforts to link with a range of other groups are informed by many different considerations. Without doubt it is a strategy to increase support base and visibility – but the driving impulse is to forge bonds of empathy and solidarity. It stems from an understanding that the process of social transformation requires different marginalised sections of society to come together and work together. KSWU also keeps alive the strong elements of fun and laughter, which most activists abandon somewhere along the way.

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Besides links to other movements, KSWU is also an active member of the National Network of Sex Workers (NNSW) and currently a less active member of the Asia-Pacific Network of Sex Workers (APNSW). An important, and evolving, aspect of KSWU’s activism has been its relationship to NGOs. Given their criminalised status and the unwillingness of many sex workers to come forward and identify as sex workers, as well as the backgrounds of many leaders in the NGO world, KSWU initially looked to NGOs for basic support. NGOs working on sexuality, human rights and HIV/AIDS played a facilitative role, assisting in mobilisation, supporting in the articulation of interests, creating dialogue and providing space and basic resources. This relationship with the NGOs and supporters has evolved over time, with a gradual shift in power relations. Without doubt the first phase of the relationship was characterised by the supporters and NGOs setting the structure and emphasising some values and approaches. The sex workers quickly started to assert themselves and partner with the supporters in shaping KSWU. The relationship, however, is not without tensions. KSWU leaders sometimes have felt that the NGO heads have been negligent, indifferent or disrespectful. At other times, NGO supporters have argued that leaders of KSWU were inadequately accountable to their constituencies. These tensions are productive and have strengthened KSWU to assert its identity and gain greater credibility. Work conditions for sex workers are fundamentally dependent on their relationships with the state and the dynamic intersections of class, caste and gender inequality that shape their lives. Thus, while rooted in a clear understanding of the importance of coming together and organising to ensure better quality of work life for ordinary sex workers, KSWU’s main activities blur the boundaries between work activities and other aspects of a sex worker’s life, going beyond the areas that are traditionally considered the work of a union. As Baldwin (1992: 81) observes, “a woman’s claim on justice . . . crucially depends on her success in proving that she is not, and never has been, a prostitute”. KSWU thus often seeks to promote sex workers’ full access to civil and human rights of every kind, and legal reform around sex work is one of its major long-term advocacy goals. More immediately, Union members and leaders support each other in multiple ways, addressing violence, supporting civil rights and providing emotional support. Leaders and members might visit homes of sex workers or areas where sex workers frequently solicit to gather and disseminate information about KSWU activities. One of the most consistent interventions of KSWU has been responding to calls seeking support through a 24×7 helpline. The sex worker may be harassed

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or facing violence or the threat of violence from the police, goons, at public spaces or at home. Sometimes she is distressed and may be battling with personal issues including feeling emotionally overwhelmed or even suicidal. The full-timers, KSWU members, EC members and/ or supporters reach the person as soon as possible. Besides immediate intervention, the issue, if warranted, is followed up for further action – if need be with the help of lawyers, human rights activists, people from the media and/or counsellors depending on the situation. This includes politicising the issue by sending out petitions, using the media to create greater pressure on the perpetrators and holding protests and demonstrations. It also involves providing support material and emotional to the sex workers who require them. For example, in December 2009, KSWU forwarded a formal complaint regarding a woman sex worker who had been sexually harassed by a doctor to several government agencies and human rights organisations; the doctor was suspended and eventually dismissed. KSWU has also intervened to prevent human trafficking. It has responded to violations of confidentiality by the TV media, once pressuring a major television channel to issue an apology for its secretly filmed and sensationalised story about sex workers. Informal worker movements in India often direct their claims to the state rather than to their employers (Agarwala 2013). Similarly, KSWU has often worked to expand sex workers’ access to social citizenship. For example, many sex workers do not possess ration cards or voter identity cards because of difficulties in providing proof of address or harassment by government agencies. Government health facilities, too, often discriminate against sex workers. KSWU therefore seeks to address some of these immediate concerns of its members, and has provided over 500 sex workers with voter identification cards and 200 with ration cards, a hundred with subsided bank loans, as well as supported sex workers in settling property and land issues, and helped them access old age and widow pensions. KSWU has also supported the children of sex workers in obtaining admission to schools, buying books or being placed in hostels. KSWU has also intervened in instances of abuse of sex workers within their families at home, for example, in the case of a sex worker whose family refused to give her a share in the family property and subjected her to tremendous abuse. Eventually, she built her own house just opposite her family house. KSWU’s activities also extend beyond formal mechanisms. Members offer each other emotional and social support, spending time with each other, sharing food and housing with each other, assisting each other with childcare or in accessing healthcare, or advising each other on clients. This emotional support assumes special significance for sex

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workers as they often lack other support systems. KSWU serves as a supportive, non-judgemental space, where, as Sheetal, a transgender member, put it, “we can talk and be ourselves”. These bonds offer members a space to develop new values and experiment and undertake acts of resistance, whether in their everyday lives or in the form of public protest. The participants in a review of KSWU underlined the gradual development of vigorous modes of open communication and democratic decision-making processes that fostered equality, trust and mutual respect among members (Panchanadeswaran et al. 2016). One participant explained, When it comes to the group, people feel that it is [theirs] . . . the strength of the organisation counts and people know that there is this union . . . [a] sex workers union with a labour concept and considering me as a labour[er]. The members feel that they have a union, [that] there is space. . . . The space creation is the main thing for me, because that was not there before, and I now have a forum to speak. Sex workers reiterated their individual journeys towards greater courage to speak out against violations they face on a day-to-day basis through their work with KSWU. Often access to an identity card and formal identification as a worker is cited as a key benefit of KSWU membership, and members often repeat that “we are not criminals, we are workers and therefore deserve our rights”. Sex workers use their KSWU identity cards to negotiate with police and officials, or even within relationships with partners or clients. Symbolic status as a worker has real effects for sex workers, and, as Agarwala (2013) has found for other informal workers in India, holds deep emotional significance. Though KSWU differs greatly from a traditional trade union, its positioning as a union helps sex workers claim “worker” identity, while suggesting how the structure of a union might accommodate new forms and strategies.

The struggle to articulate “worker” identity In contrast to characterisations of sex workers as vectors of HIV or criminals, or victims to be rescued, the category of “worker” provides an important alternative and resonates with many sex workers’ articulations of their lives. However, social stigma, everyday violence on the job and precarious legal status make sex workers’ organising

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efforts as “workers” particularly difficult. At the most basic level, sex workers are not legally recognised as workers, and their organisations are not legally recognised as unions. Collectives in India can be registered under various acts – as public charitable trusts, as societies, as section 25 companies (non-profit companies), as co-operatives or as producer companies. However, for formal recognition as a labour organisation, the organisation has to be registered under the Trade Union Act.5 Trade unions traditionally have greater social legitimacy and are able to negotiate a seat at the table in policymaking processes. They also have access to additional benefits such as the Employees’ State Insurance Act, 1948, or representation in bodies such as the ILO. In 2008, KSWU applied to the Trade Union Registrar (Karnataka) to be registered as a trade union. However the application was rejected on the grounds that sex work is illegal and sex workers have no “employer”. KSWU is challenging this ruling in the high court. For KSWU, then, the claim that “sex work is work” has both symbolic and legal implications. In addition to the legal hurdles of trade union registration, KSWU has faced challenges in maintaining its membership base. For one thing, sex workers are scattered and hidden. Sex workers are diverse along caste, class and gender lines, and uniting as a single occupational group does not always come naturally. The structure of sex work can also hinder organising. In Karnataka, as in many parts of South India, sex work is primarily home-based or street-based. Work takes place through one-on-one arrangements with clients picked up on the street, or through networks of phone contacts that do not lend themselves to traditional labour organising. When invisibility and ability to “blend in” is of paramount importance, seeking a “worker” status may seem counterproductive to potential members. Often, sex workers in Karnataka operate in secret and are uncomfortable talking about sex work in public forums. Loss of anonymity may endanger them, or lead to harassment by authorities and the public, loss of housing and increased threat of arrest. This has meant sex worker groups often rely on a few particularly vocal leaders responsible for representing a broad-based and diverse constituency. In a context where identifying as a sex worker itself is risky, attracting members to an organisation that explicitly states that it is a sex worker organisation in its name – unlike other sex worker groups, which often call themselves “mahila sanghas” or women’s groups – is challenging. Further, unlike formal sector unions that might offer tangible and immediate benefits, sex worker unions can provide some benefits, such as identity cards, but their work often hinges on long-term advocacy

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work to claim labour status without immediate rewards, making it difficult to retain new members. A dispersed and sometimes transient membership means that KSWU cannot yet operate solely on the basis of membership fees. As a result, the union must draw on external sources of both financial and technical support. While relationships to NGOs mean a source of legitimacy, access to activist networks and meaningful solidarity, they can also draw ownership away from the rank and file. An additional threat to KSWU is the fact that the HIV/AIDS epidemic has meant a proliferation of organisations all vying for large numbers of sex worker members and a sizable, but shrinking, pool of public health funding. HIV prevention organisations thus present competition to unions with broader aims but fewer resources: they provide free health services and employ many sex workers as peer educators. KSWU, starkly different in mandate and approach, is often asked to distinguish itself from other sex worker organisations. One response has been to challenge HIV prevention interventions themselves from a labour perspective, for example demanding full-time pay for peer educators and forcing the closure of NGOs where sex workers were subject to abuse. As a result, some of the NGO/CBO leaders strongly discourage their members from joining the Union. Sex workers, both criminalised and vital to urban economies, face new challenges as the aesthetics of city redevelopment (Ghertner 2010; Ellis 2012) push them further into the margins. The current urban development strategies have aimed to make Bengaluru, KSWU’s base, a “world-class city” attractive to corporate investors. This has necessarily meant that the city is being imagined as an exclusive one that is increasing hostile to the urban poor as it clears space for “new affluent citizens and their consumption driven lifestyles” (Birkinshaw and Harris 2009: 4). In the name of creating “good investment climate”, the focus has been on the infrastructure needs of elite classes such as flyovers (highway overpasses) and swanky airports and privatisation of public assets, basic services and urban commons. In effect, this has further edged out other citizen concerns. Sex workers are driven out, and sites that supported sex work are increasingly raided. KSWU leaders have pointed out that the building of flyovers has meant chopping down of trees, some of which had served as working sites for them. The public parks now have increased security to ensure that people “behave”, preventing sex workers from “loitering”. Similarly, increased security has resulted in transgender sex workers being shooed away from pay and use public toilets, where transgender and male sex workers often pick up and/or service clients. This lack of a

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secure defensible public space within the city has serious implications for sex workers’ livelihoods and lives.

Sex worker unionisation and the informal labour movement in India Many of the challenges in sex workers’ path resemble the challenges facing other informal sector workers – especially in feminised sectors considered outside the realm of recognizable economic activity. These challenges require hybrid institutional and legal approaches. For undocumented workers in the United States, for example, organisations have drawn on women’s rights, workers’ rights and international human rights frameworks where domestic legal protections are lacking (Ontiveros 2007). Globally, informal workers’ movements have used organisational forms that combine NGO, co-operative, feminist or membership-based models alongside affiliating with trade unions (Jhabvala 1998; Bhowmik 2006; Vosko 2007; Bhowmik 2008; Chen et al. 2014), and posed their demands within demands for social security and welfare in addition to traditional workplace protections (Jhabvala 1998; Agarwala 2013). What lies ahead for sex worker unions like KSWU that seek labour union status, but work so differently from formal trade unions? Unionising has required sex workers to appeal to the idea of the trade union while also re-imagining it to accommodate issues of identity, stigma, sexuality, gender, patriarchy and caste. One way to realise this approach and avoid it being reduced to superficial slogans has been a politics of alliance: many sex worker unions have connections to umbrella labour federations of progressive unions. But at least in KSWU’s case, these links are not always easy to sustain as deeper, lasting partnerships, and KSWU has relied on a broad coalition of supporters from feminist, LGBTI, Dalit and labour activist backgrounds. Nevertheless, even if their similarities to other unions and links to the labour movement are somewhat precarious, sex worker unions have the potential to both invigorate the labour movement and benefit from affiliation with informal labour movements (Hardy 2010). Perhaps even more clearly than other informal workers, sex workers suggest the need for informal worker unions to turn their attention to the state. Sex workers’ relationship to the state is one of multiple forms of violence, from forcible HIV testing to police rape to indefinite detention in rehabilitation centres, but it is also to the state that sex worker unions often direct their claims for decriminalisation, social services and basic protections. In the context of sex work, the state

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is the clearest target for demanding basic social services and human rights. Further, sex worker unions must be able to provide certain services to members in order to meet immediate needs and provide a basic safety net where no other safety net exists. With a multitude of day-to-day challenges, it can be difficult to participate in the work of labour organising. Sex worker unions like KSWU may also begin to consider demands around legal protections for sexual violence on the job, housing, the regulation of working conditions or the institution of welfare boards like those available to other informal workers. Sex worker unions require unique and creative strategies for maintaining contact with workers who are spread out and often working in secret, rather than sharing the same factory floor. They also require a democratic process that actively counters and heals the social divides between male, female and transgender members, or staff member or NGO community hierarchies, divides that have sometimes been reinforced by HIV prevention programs. Finally, as HIV funding is less and less available for reaching sex workers, unions require a sustainable financial model. Funding for sex workers’ labour rights is not easy to find in comparison to the massive funds once available for HIV prevention. How can unions operate and grow while retaining independence from donors, state agencies and NGOs that have traditionally been major sources of support? Despite the challenges of implementing a labour union framework, KSWU members found that positioning themselves as workers allowed them to address immediate concerns as well as the structural inequalities and modes of violence they faced every day. By avoiding unhelpful binaries between victims and criminals, coercion and choice, trafficking and unconstrained sexual freedom, a labour framework allows sex workers to work collectively to solve the problems they perceive as the most important. Sex workers’ creative strategies in adapting a labour framework suggest important considerations for the labour movement in India. First, as with other informal workers in India (Agarwala 2013), their organising focuses on access to state welfare, not to employer concessions – a focus that becomes particularly important in the context of the contradictory state impulses to criminalise sex workers and monitor their sexual health. The targeting of the state suggests the importance of considerations of criminalisation and policing in labour organising in order to engage diverse kinds of “workers”, as well as the possibilities and pitfalls of state welfare protections for informal workers. Second, their organising, as with other criminalised and dispersed or flexible groups of workers, has required new strategies for implementing workplace

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protections – such as peer-to-peer hotlines, demands for police reform and emotional and social support within the union – that allow for anonymity and draw on hybrid organisational forms. Finally, sex workers’ natural affinity and overlap with other groups facing violence and economic marginalisation along gender, class, sexuality and caste lines, as well as elite-focused urban redevelopment projects, has pushed KSWU to pursue alliances with social movements just as much or more than with labour unions – even as they insist on their status as labourers. These alliances demand an approach to the “union” with a broad analysis of social injustice in a liberalising state. At the same time, for KSWU, the demands for organising are both global and immediate. From the perspective of women and sexual minorities, especially the poorest among them, their labour leading to their livelihood and sense of dignity is of great value. Unionisation is an effort to redefine work and wrest a modicum of dignity for an occupation that is socially and legally degraded in both “traditional” and “globalised” economies, while simultaneously seeking to build sustainable collective structures that can support their long-term livelihoods and well-being.

Notes 1 This chapter is a reprint of the article that appeared in Global Labour Journal, 6(1), 2015, pp. 79–96. Reproduced with permission. 2 While the main focus of the chapter is KSWU, we also make reference to the Indian sex worker movement more generally. 3 Weitzer (1991) is pessimistic about these movements, arguing that they were unable to overcome their stigmatized status enough to achieve lasting change. 4 See www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqmVFcrUL8c (accessed on 14 June 2014). 5 According to the Trade Union Act, 1926, a trade union can raise or sponsor a trade dispute and represent on behalf of its members in legal proceedings arising out of a trade dispute. Section 13 specifies that upon registration, a trade union gets a legal entity status, due to which it has perpetual succession and a common seal, can acquire and hold movable as well as immovable properties, can contract through agents, and can sue and can be sued.

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Jhabvala, R. 1998. “Social Security for Unorganised Sector”, Economic and Political Weekly, 33(22): L7–L11. Kempadoo, K. and Doezema, J. 1998. Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition. Psychology Press. Kotiswaran, P. 2011. Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labour: Sex Work and the Law in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lakkimsetti, C. 2011. Governing Sexualities: Globalization, Biopower, and Citizenship in Postcolonial India. Madison: University of Wisconsin– Madison. Leidholdt, D. 2000. “Presentation to UN Special Seminar on Trafficking, Prostitution and the Global Sex Industry”, [Online] www.catwinternational.org/ Content/Images/Article/261/attachment.pdf (accessed on 15 June 2014). Leigh, C. 1997. “Inventing Sex Work”, in Nagle, J. (ed.), Whores and Other Feminists, pp. 223–231. New York: Routledge. Lim, L. L. 1998. The Sex Sector: The Economic and Social Bases of Prostitution in Southeast Asia. Geneva: International Labour Organization. MacKinnon, C. 1993. “Prostitution and Civil Rights”, Michigan Journal of Gender & Law, 1: 13–31. MacKinnon, C. 2011. “Trafficking, Prostitution, and Inequality”, Harvard Civil Rights – Civil Liberties Law Review, 46: 271–309. Maher, J. M., Pickering, S. and Gerard, A. 2012. Sex Work: Labour, Mobility, and Sexual Services. London: Routledge. McClintock, A. 1993. “Sex Work and Sex Workers: Introduction”, Social Text, 37: 1–10. Murthy, L. and Seshu, M. 2013. The Business of Sex. New Delhi: Zubaan. NACO. 2012. Annual Report 2011–12. New Delhi: National AIDS Control Organisation, Department of AIDS Control, & Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. NALSA. 2015. Report of National Legal Services Authority. Submitted to the Honorable Supreme Court of India in the Writ Petition © No. 56/2004 titled Prajwala v. Union of India and Others (accessed on 15 June 2014). O’Connell Davidson, J. 2002. “The Rights and Wrongs of Prostitution”, Hypatia, 17(2): 84–98. Ontiveros, M. L. 2007. “Female Immigrant Workers and the Law: Limits and Opportunities”, in Cobble, D. S. (ed.), The Sex of Class: Women Transforming American Labour, pp. 235–252. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Panchanadeswaran, S., Vijayakumar, G., Chacko, S. and Bhanot, A. 2016. “Unionizing Sex Workers: The Karnataka Experience”, Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, 71: 139–156. Pheterson, G. 1993. “The Whore Stigma: Female Dishonor and Male Unworthiness”, Social Text 37: 39–64. PTI. 2015. “SC Asks Centre to Prepare Action Plan on Girl Trafficking”, The New Indian Express, 25 August, www.newindianexpress.com/nation/SC– Asks–Centre–to–Prepare–Action–Plan–on–Girl–Trafficking/2015/08/25/ article2992981.ece (accessed on 15 June 2014).

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PUCL. 2007. Policing Morality in Channapatna. Bangalore: People’s Union for Civil Liberties. Restakis, J. 2013. Humanizing the Economy: Co-Operatives in the Age of Capital. New Society Publishers. Rozario, R. 2000. Broken Lives: Dalit Women and Girls in Prostitution in India. Tumkur: Ambedkar Resource Centre, Rural Education for Development Society. Sahni, R. and Shankar, V. K. 2013. Sex Work and Its Linkages with Informal Labour Markets in India: Findings from the First Pan–India Survey of Female Sex Workers, IDS Working Paper No. 416, [Online] http://opendocs. ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/123456789/2369 (accessed on 20 September 2013). Shah, S. 2003. “Sex Work in the Global Economy”, New Labour Forum, 12: 74–81. Shah, S. 2014. Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work, and Migration in the City of Mumbai. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sharma, N. 2005. “Anti-Trafficking Rhetoric and the Making of a Global Apartheid”, NWSA Journal, 17(3): 88–111. Soderlund, G. 2005. “Running from the Rescuers: New US Crusades against Sex Trafficking and the Rhetoric of Abolition”, NWSA Journal, 17(3): 64–87. Sukthankar, A. 2012. “Queering Approaches to Sex, Gender, and Labour in India: Examining Paths to Sex Worker Unionism”, in Loomba, A. and Lukose, R. A. (eds.), South Asian Feminisms, pp. 306–332. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Vosko, L. F. 2007. “Representing Informal Economy Workers: Emerging Global Strategies and Their Lessons for North American Unions”, in Cobble, D. C. (ed.), The Sex of Class: Women Transforming American Labour, pp. 272–291. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Weitzer, R. 1991. “Prostitutes’ Rights in the United States: Failure of a Movement”, The Sociological Quarterly, 32(1): 23–41. Weitzer, R. 2007. “The Social Construction of Sex Trafficking: Ideology and Institutionalization of a Moral Crusade”, Politics & Society, 35(3): 447–475. Weitzer, R. (ed.). 2009. Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry. London and New York: Routledge.

11 Organising the unorganised Academic and activist insights from shipbreaking yards in Mumbai Yanick Noiseux and V. V. Rane In India, as elsewhere, “labour flexibilisation” cannot be considered as mere conjuncture. The new economic model has methodically structured the rise of informal and precarious work. Drawing on empirical data collected from interviews with nine union activists of the Mumbai Port Trust Dock and General Employees’ Union (MPTDGEU), two representatives of the International Metalworkers’ Federation (IMF)1 and twenty-four workers,2 this chapter presents a case study conducted between 2011 and 2013 in Darukhana’s shipbreaking yards in Mumbai. It is divided into three parts. In the first part, we will take a brief look at India’s liberalisation shift at the turn of the 1990s and its impact on the transformation of its labour markets, as well as present an overview of the literature by emphasising the importance of bridging the gap between union theory and the informal economy. In the second part, using the conceptual framework developed by Sousa Santos (2004) around the “sociology of absences, the sociology of emergences and the work of translation” and the analytical tool developed by Comeau (2005) to study collective struggles, we will briefly3 look at elements of contextualisation regarding the development of shipbreaking activities. In turn, we will examine the struggle’s chronology and discuss practices, strategies and demands put forwards by the union. Seven issues, which are related to the difficulties facing traditionally organised labour unions engaged in a transformation of their practices in order to adapt to the growth of the informal economy, will then be presented. Those issues will be further debated from a field perspective in the third and last part of this chapter.

The job centrifugation dynamic and the need to rethink trade unionism in India The “race” towards greater labour flexibility in India, engineered through a realignment of the country’s economic policies, can be traced back to the early 1990s, when it opted out of the “Licence Raj” and

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embraced the liberalisation agenda. After pursuing an inward-looking development strategy, where the state assumed an all-important role, the country embarked on a comprehensive reform of its economy in which the market would be given the prime role in the allocation of resources (Kapila and Kapila 2002). When assessing the results of this transformation twenty years later, even though the labour market reforms have failed to provoke much change in the official labour laws, it is clear that a changed scenario has emerged and is characterised by rampant contractualisation and casualisation, with erosions in labour security and voice representation (Sen and Dasgupta 2009: 188). Despite the country never having completed the integration of its labour force into the société salariale (the society of the wage earners), there has been a gradual shrinkage in the organised sector’s share of the economy. According to numbers provided by the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS), the unorganised sector employed 86 per cent of workers in 1999–2000 (NCEUS 2009: 13) and now accounts for more than 93 per cent of the workforce (NCEUS 2007).4 As Bhowmik puts it, “in short, since liberalization, although the formal sector has remained stagnant, the informal sector has mushroomed” (Bhowmik 2009: 127). A second important phenomenon can also be observed: casualisation and contractualisation of employment in the formal sector are “officially endorsed in the recommendation of the Indian National Commission of Labour, which recommended the use of contract work in view of uncertain demand from global markets” (Sen and Dasgupta 2009: xiv).5 To take stock of the deepening fragmentation of labour markets in these new circumstances, rather than turning to the classic dichotomies between the primary and secondary markets, and between formal and informal work, the concept of “job centrifugation towards peripheral labour markets”, developed by Durand (2004, see Appendix 1), is thought-provoking. Inspired by research on the “flexible firm”, the sociologist showed how this dynamic tends to become hegemonic. In brief, recent developments in the job system would imply that the centreperiphery paradigm now works on several levels, such that “the issue of outsourcing, temporary work . . ., the self-employed . . ., that had traditionally been attributed to the periphery, is now harboured in the heart of the production systems. The general model appears to resemble an infinite multiplication of the centrifugation principle between molecules, which are themselves hierarchised between and within each other” (Durand 2004: 186, our translation). For the author, the job centrifugation dynamic towards peripheral labour markets results in a breakdown in the working conditions. Lower wages, restricted access to social protection and fringe benefits are associated with working

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conditions that are incrementally butchered by the proliferation of different employment statuses. By enhancing the competition between workers and directly targeting group solidarities, the labour transformation enacts a “methodical destruction of the collective” (Bourdieu 1998). This new dynamic cannot be considered as mere conjuncture and should rather be considered as a hallmark of the model of labour austerity in the neoliberal era. Furthermore, labour transformation poses a number of challenges to trade unionism. In order to be able to also defend workers propelled towards peripheral labour markets, it must update union theories, which have been largely built around the figure of the male breadwinner working full time, on a permanent basis, in a factory at the core of the productive system. Without going into details about classical conceptions of trade unionism, it is clear that most of theoretical frameworks are forged around the idea of an industrial worker and imply a fraternity transcending the entire working class. The tendency not to sufficiently take into account the differences between various workers’ communities is also an element that emerged from the review of the theoretical contributions during the post-war period. Thus, the “Industrial Relations approach” developed by Dunlop (1948) also tended to look at workers en bloc and focused on trade unions already established, often within large industrial enterprises. This criticism of union theory cannot be extended to Latin American labour theorists, who rapidly engaged research outside the “primary labour market” as soon as they emancipated themselves from research traditions coming from the “First World”. By integrating “blurred, occasional and twilight labour” to their analysis, they quickly sought to investigate work arrangements that the assumed dominant discourse had disappeared (de la Garza 2000: 19, our translation). As early as the 1970s, this “sociology of heterogeneous work” (Lautier 1998) criticised those predicting the eventual standardisation towards a labour market. Drawing on gender and cultural studies, they attached particular importance to the fragmentation of labour collectives (Abramo 1999). In the early 1980s, the Nuevos Estudios Laborales studied the links between productive restructuring, labour market segmentation and union responses (Bensusan Areous 2003: 393), thereby bringing to the foreground that “flexibilisation” of labour relations would be the next “central problem” to be studied (de la Garza and Pries 1997). Rather than giving up, they also tried to identify and reclaim the potential for constructing collective subjects arising out of these processes, in order to rethink labour’s capacity for mobilisation, intervention and negotiation in the new context (Abramo 1999).

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Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about Indian labour sociology. According to Bhowmik, “though industrialization took off [in India] after the First World War leading to the expansion of the working class, there were hardly any contemporary studies of these segments of the population” (2009: 133). Furthermore, even though the awareness about the importance of organising workers in the informal sector was “revealed” in Hart’s ILO report on Ghana in the early 1970s, which was put into practice by organisations such as the Self Employed Women’s Association in India as early as the 1980s, “it was only after workers in the formal sector felt the adverse effects of the 1991 economic liberalization policy that the debate actually started” (2009: 138). Since then, the studies that have focused on informal labour are mostly statistical analyses and case studies. As such, these studies either target a subsector of the informal economy and labour or cover large, national-level questions. A great amount of literature exists, for example, on the beedi workers (see Saravanan in Naidu 2003: 27). This literature covers and describes informal sector socio-economic conditions. Such conditions include poor stability of marginal revenues, long workdays, lack of credit, marginal access to educational and medical facilities, and minimal or no social security. Other studies have focused on the construction sector, private security, lacquerware, cashew processing industries, hawkers, etc. (Bhowmik 1998; Kumar 2009). Alongside the literature with a focus on informal work, there are studies focusing on labour promotion and employment creation programmes. For example, Khera’s (2011) study covers informal labour, particularly the enactment and implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005. Meanwhile, Shyam Sundar’s Labour Reforms and Decent Work in India (2010) studied labour inspection and shed light on the causes of the informal sector’s working conditions. These commendable studies mostly focus on the conditions and solutions to provide relief to workers. However, they very rarely include an analysis of union actions and renewed strategies when attempting to investigate the unorganised sector.

A case study in Mumbai’s shipbreaking yards: the MPTDGEU initiative6 Since the groundbreaking and Pulitzer Prize–winning article from Will Englund and Gary Cohn, written in 1997, and the classic piece penned by William Langewiesche for The Atlantic Monthly (2000), the shipbreaking industry has emerged from invisibility and attracted the attention of scholars around the world. Both articles exposed the

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horrible conditions in which shipbreakers in Alang–Sosiya were earning a living. Surprisingly, however, much of the subsequent research focused on the environmental hazard (Sinha 1998; Stairs 2004; Joshi et al. 2006; Reddy et al. 2006; Demaria 2010) or legal battles (Cohen 2005; Pelsy 2008; Puthucherril 2010) related to the industry. In the end, very few academic studies have extensively described workers’ socio-economic background and union activities in the industry. Nevertheless, the shipbreaking industry is an ideal case to ground research on collective organising within peripheral labour markets in the new Indian context. The industry is almost an ideal illustration of Durand’s “job centrifugation dynamic model”. At the heart of the industry, we have shipbuilding facilities predominantly located in the “developed world”, which employ qualified workers in decreasing, but still relatively good, conditions. Handling the ever-increasing transport of goods in a globalised world (Puthucherril 2010: 13), the cargo industry is well known for using flags of convenience and relies heavily on a labour force recruited in the “developing world” and employed under very bad conditions. Shipbreaking is at the lower end of the spectrum. Its full emergence as an industry dates back to the end of the Second World War in the United States and in Japan (Demaria 2010: 252). In the 1960s, it moved to less industrialised countries in Europe, such as Spain and Turkey (Demaria 2010: 252). Since then, it has been transferred to South East Asia because of “cheap labour, low union density, scant respect for environmental laws and negligible regulation of labour legislation” (Mansoor et al. 2011: 9). Furthermore, the shipbreaking industry is not a direct enterprise and reflects the fragmentation of business activities in advanced capitalism. Most shipowners sell their ships to intermediaries (brokers), who in turn sell them for the best price offered by recycling facilities. This practice relies heavily on “contract work” performed by workers, who change plots on a regular basis, labouring on peripheral labour markets and recruited on a “monthly basis or for a specific task on the ship with no written contract” by subcontractors (IMF 2007: 7; Mansoor et al. 2011: 13). Drawing on our previous research on collective organisation and non-standard work (Noiseux 2016), this case study is part of a vast research programme inspired by the work of Sousa Santos (2004) around the proposition of a “sociology of absences, a sociology of emergences and a work of translation”. Our aim is to gather research material, which allows us to present mutually intelligible practices, strategies and claims conveyed by the collective organisation of workers, who are entangled in peripheral labour markets, in order to nourish a renewed “union language”, organisational matrices and new

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directories of action. More modest in its ambitions, this case study focuses mostly on the second “sociological procedure”, the “sociology of emergences”, which is first and foremost an effort towards symbolic amplification, which seeks to identify new alternatives located in the field of “practical possibilities”. Its central idea is “to radicalise the expectations based on actual capabilities and opportunities, here and now” (Sousa Santos 2004: 30), in order to counter the proleptic7 reason that leads to fatalism by suggesting that there is no alternative. By applying reason to the creative collective practices, set up by unions and community organisers close to workers, which had for a long time been forgotten by the state and traditional unions, this approach lays the groundwork for a better understanding of the new dynamics, which will hopefully nourish union renewal and adaptation to flexible capitalism in the twenty-first century.

Element of contextualisation In India, shipbreaking was mainly confined to small barges until the turn of the 1980s, when the industry grew extensively to become the most important in the world.8 Nowadays, most of the shipbreaking industry is conducted in Alang–Sosiya’s 173 plots on the western coast of Gujarat. Since 1982, more than 5,000 ships have been demolished at Alang, whose yards now directly employ more than 60,000 workers, whereas the “downstream” industry employs around 500,000 more. Mumbai’s Darukhana area, the second biggest shipbreaking yard in India, provides direct employment to 6,000 workers at its nineteen plots, while more than 20,000 others work in the downstream industry (UN 2010: 10). According to the IMF survey, 98 per cent of the shipbreakers are migrant workers from Uttar Pradesh (32.5%), Orissa (33%) and Bihar (20%), whose movement was accelerated by the liberalisation process in India (2007: 1). It is a largely uneducated workforce, relatively young (19– 45 years old) and almost exclusively male (IMF 2007: 4). Most come without their families, send money back home and often go back to their villages for three to four months a year to work in agriculture (UN 2010: 10). The working conditions in the shipbreaking industry, one of “most hazardous in the world” (UN 2010: 9), are extremely difficult. Not surprisingly, 97 per cent of workers are contracted through informal employment arrangements, which do not provide job security and deprive workers of statutory social security benefits, as well as benefits in case of work-related injuries, diseases or fatal accidents (Mansoor et al. 2011: 13). Wages are very low, varying between less than 100 rupees for most of the helpers, loaders, un-loaders and scavengers and 320

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rupees (for a gas cutter) for a twelve-hour shift (including compulsory overtime). These wage levels have failed to progress much in recent years when compared to inflation (W1–W22). Their invisibility – there is no work log – makes them extremely vulnerable to crooked contractors, who are unwilling to pay their dues, and prone to overnight dismissal (IMF 2007: 7). Moreover, “large numbers of workers are deprived of basic amenities such as first aid kits, drinking water, toilets, rest shelter, canteen and personal protection equipment (PPE)” (Mansoor et al. 2011: 11). Many of them do not receive adequate training regarding their tasks, hazards and work-related risks to health and safety (Mansoor et al. 2011: 11). As the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Shipbreaking Okechukwu Ibeanu asserted: “They live in makeshift facilities lacking basic sanitation facilities, electricity and even safe drinking water”.9 Overcrowded in “hutment with weak tin roofing without any ventilation”, they are vulnerable to “skin disease, ringworm, dysentery and anemia” (IMF 2007: 4). As per official estimates, which are clearly underestimated, between 1998 and 2010, at least 348 workers lost their life in Alang alone, while more than 141 were seriously injured (Mansoor et al. 2011: 11).10

The chronology of a struggle The origin of the MPTDGEU initiatives to collectively organise the shipbreakers of Darukhana and Alang dates back to 2003, when its leader came back from a Hind Mazdoor Sabha national meeting, where a decision had been made to train workers to organise the unorganised (I1). Prompted by this decision, the leader then decided that the MPTDGEU would be doing its part by trying to foster collective action, which aimed to strengthen the working conditions of the shipbreakers in Mumbai because “[they] were the most unorganised” (I2). As a first step, the union changed its constitution in order to be able to operate outside its traditional constituency, the dockworkers,11 made sure it was “not stepping on anyone’s toes” (I2) and created a small committee in charge of carrying out a first assessment of the needs and hopes of shipbreakers. The initial reaction was one of fear. As one of them recalls: We visited the yard for the first time, I saw the difference between organised like port and dock and unorganised workers like shipbreaking. . . . They were not getting potable drinking water, even in Mumbai, which is the financial capital of the country. (I2)

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The union reacted quickly with a strategy: it would finance and provide the distribution of potable water on worksites. Later on, it pressured the port and dock authority and the employers to take over this responsibility, which they did after one year (I2).12 The union chose purposefully not to try to involve workers in this initial stage, preferring instead to slowly build a relationship of trust with the workers, given that some of them had been scared by dubious organisers in the past (LW1). Pursuing its initial assessment of the situation by regular visits to the yards and by holding meetings with national leaders and the government, the union quickly realised that the workers were “off the books”. The MPTDGEU thus coordinated, with St. John’s Ambulance, an initiative to provide these workers with some form of identity card (I2). It also supported the creation of a committee of workers and union activists, who contacted the local police station to inform it of the initiative. Overall, it was helpful on two fronts. First and foremost, “the workers were happy; when they were showing the card to the police, the police officers said: ‘oh, it’s union, ok’ ” (I2). Moreover, it helped the union build momentum in its organising campaign (I2, I3). Shipbreakers’ occupational health and safety were also targeted as a priority. On this issue, the union worked on two fronts. First, it has launched awareness campaigns on occupation hazards, such as the manipulation of asbestos. In Gujarat, it was able to lobby for the installation of a training centre. On a second front, the union has been providing legal counselling for workers who have suffered from work accidents, as well as for families of the deceased workers. Over the course of time, the union has also been largely solicited by workers in cases of the non-payment of salary by different subcontractors involved in the shipbreaking processes. In some cases, the distress of the workers has been tremendous. As one worker related: “it’s like trying to catch a frog . . . it’s a tough job to organise the unorganised sector . . . sometimes, this man [employer] will come and then he will go, come back and he will go [again]” (LW1). Finally, in recent years, the union has enlarged its actions outside the working environment and is now trying to enhance the living conditions of workers by engaging in their daily life. Hence, it has collaborated with the Rotary Club to provide workers with access to some kind of medical aid and is also trying to make some arrangement to enable the few families, who are living in quarters, to send their children to school (I4). Once the most important work-related local issues were addressed (if not resolved), research, judiciary activism and political lobbying complemented the initial actions. One of the major concerns of the union was – and still is – the non-application of the Factory Act13 in

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the shipbreaking yards, because the contractors argued that “to be a factory, there should be electricity lines” (I2). It also pressured the government of Gujarat and Maharashtra to include coverage for the shipbreakers in the Minimum Wage Act14 (I2). But the struggle is far from over. As one of the union activists said: [In] both places, employer and government, both agree the Factory Act is applicable. That’s why, whatever the benefits under this act are supposed to extend, should extend. But, in fact, it is not fully implemented. For example, the workers are working over eight hours . . . but they’re not being paid at double the wage. . . . We are pursuing this with the employers. They are not saying no, but they are passing the buck [from one to the other and are not doing anything]. (I9) More recently, after being sidelined, the MPTDGEU has finally been included, at the behest of the Steel Ministry, in an inter-ministerial committee mandate to elaborate a framework concerning the duties and responsibilities of different stakeholders, who are involved in shipbreaking activity. On the international front, in coalition with the IMF,15 the union represented the shipbreakers in different discussions, which will lead to ILO, IMO and European Commission guidelines on shipbreaking and transportation of hazardous waste (I2). Another landmark achievement reached by the union is certainly the establishment of an international coalition of shipbreaking unions from Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, with whom it has been agreed to develop a global strategy. In sum, ten years after the union first launched its initiative to collectively organise the shipbreakers of Mumbai, the MPTDGEU has been able to reach out, through its direct actions, to more than 10,000 workers (3,000 members in Darukhana and 7,000 in Alang) (I2). As we have tried to demonstrate, its successes largely build on fieldwork directly provided by union activists in order to build close relationships with the workers. Over time, its involvement exceeded this very local engagement towards broader activities, such as lobbying and judicial activism at the state, national and international levels. The principal union demand today is for the establishment of a register of workers in shipbreaking yards. For the union, this is very important given that “when a worker has a problem, the employers or the contractors are saying: ‘well, he was not working for me’ ” (I2). It is the basis from which it could be possible to effect the implementation of the Supreme Court ruling guaranteeing shipbreakers’ access to the

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protection provided by the Factory Act and the Minimum Wage Act, which would entitle them to a minimum wage, double payments for overtime, medical insurances and, probably, even more importantly, protection in case of work accidents and occupational illnesses (I1).

Raising issues and the field view From the MPTDGEU’s standpoint, it is clear that shipbreaking, by itself, is a dangerous occupation for the workers employed in this capacity, due to the unsafe and hazardous conditions that they work in. The working environment is so inhumane and the absence of safety control represents elements of risk, which can cause bodily harm and injuries. Manual, low-paid unskilled workers are allowed to dismantle the ships and undertake the reprocessing/recycling operations without the provision of personal protective or safety equipment. Indeed, there is generally no systematic training of the workforce. Noise, inadequate sanitary facilities and continuous exposure to hazardous gases from the site result in irreparable damage to the health of the workers. Consequently, injuries and deaths are commonplace. The activists also wanted to stress that the workforce had no union representation until 2005. The workers were made to work for twelve hours, and there were many instances of workers being abused in the form of breach of contract, non-payment of wages, etc. Moreover, there is a constant threat of being unemployed due to a shortage of work during slack periods. This enables the employer and the contractors to exploit the workers at will in a surplus labour market. In this context, union involvement within this scope of activity has met numerous challenges as described in the previous section. In the following paragraphs, we will comment on these challenges from an activist standpoint. That said, if we look beyond the movement’s specific gains and failures, this case study shares many similarities with our previous research (Noiseux 2016) on union challenges in casualised labour markets. It also provides new insights (see item numbers 2 and 4, in particular). The following section discusses seven lessons from which the union movement can learn in relation to the MPTDGEU’s experience. In turn, this will inform the “work of translation” that Sousa Santos’s approach is calling for. It also addresses the pitfalls and challenges for the years to come. In each section, we first present the results identified by Noiseux (2016). Those results are then discussed from the activist’s standpoint. Therefore, one of the objectives of this chapter is to engage in a scholar-activist dialogue to further enhance the comprehension of union challenges when engaging with the informal sector.

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1. Recognition and visibility To quote Ion, it is clear that shipbreaking workers “are demanding not only rights, but respect and dignity” (Ion 2006: 41, our translation). In this context, the labour movement has led to the construction of a new kind of activism, which is able to “represent, with a singular voice, those who have long been excluded from the public space” (Ion 2006: 41, our translation). First, as we were able to observe, self-recognition of the shipbreakers and the legitimacy of their position as workers in the labour market are not pre-given, as demonstrated by their continuous usage of the terms “masters” and “servants” (W1–22). Second, recognition is also the recognition of “informal workers” by trade unions. The case study has also shown that unions have long been reluctant to try to recruit from among peripheral labour markets. It took over twenty years, after a warning from the central federation, difficulties recruiting members from its traditional constituency16 and the leadership of one local leader, before the MPTDGEU started to organise shipbreakers in the early 2000s. Third, the recognition of the struggles and claims made by the shipbreakers by the state and employers is a tenuous and longterm process, as reflected in the difficulties that the unions had – and still have – when trying to be included in the various consultation processes, as well as ensuring that the different labour laws are applied and implemented in the shipbreaking industry. The importance of the identity card issue at the beginning of the collective action is very revealing in terms of the importance of bringing shipbreaking workers out of invisibility. Acknowledging this initial finding, the activists at the MPTDGEU insisted that when SMEFI and its affiliates began to organise the shipbreaking workers in Mumbai, the first and main objective was to build awareness on rights. The main activities that were carried out centred on improving the daily working conditions in the yards as well as building trust and self-confidence among the workers. When looking back ten years later, they can see that this intervention centred on the recognition and visibility of the shipbreakers and their families. In sum, our greatest achievement, they say, is certainly to have helped the shipbreakers to gain a sense of identity and dignity, while demonstrating great courage in terms of struggling for their rights and strengthening their unions. 2. Developing tools and means to internally resolve conflicts between workers A second observation clearly highlighted by the case study is the union’s necessity to develop the means and tools to solve, in a fair manner, internal conflicts between different categories of workers

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within the shipbreaking industry. Shipbreaking involves different kinds of worker (e.g. gas cutters, loaders, helpers), each of whom is placed differently in the workplace hierarchy. This phenomenon is heightened by two other factors: first, most workers are brought into the industry from their local village by a Muqaddam, who is also a member of the union; and, second, they are subjected to a hierarchy, which is imposed by caste divisions and often local provenance (I3). The solutions are not easy to identify, but the need to establish mechanisms to help resolve conflicts within the trade union is well understood by the union leaders (I3, I9). This being said, the establishment and recognition of unions for “informal workers” reflect the institutionalisation of precariousness, which tends to bring out tensions between the different categories of workers. To resolve this paradox, as pointed out by Murray, the new unionism should not only seek to “reduce the differences in status between the most stable workers and casual workers . . . but must necessarily go beyond the framework of the single enterprise to reach a wider labour market and often the political arena [as well]” (Murray 2004). This case study, which has shown the necessity for unions to engage in political lobbying over time, reflects this necessity within the twenty-first-century capitalism. On this second issue, the activists comment on the fact that, in order to resolve conflicts between workers, the union conducted a survey, which revealed that the issues related to migration and language barriers were the core issues. This was because workers migrate from various states and speak different languages, making it very difficult for them to communicate with each other. To address these challenges, the union formed a “mohalla committee” (a street/village committee), which engages with workers who are leaders within their communities who work together with the local police station. This type of union action has been very helpful in resolving internal conflicts between workers, as well as putting shipbreaking workers on better terms with local authorities. Of course, this is a constant challenge. In the long run, the MPTDGEU’s objective should be to bring the shipbreakers and the dockworkers together under the same umbrella (but with a separate wages board) when negotiating with the authorities. This is, however, a hard task, given that ports and docks represent a formal sector under the direct control of the Ministry of Shipping, with a long tradition of bilateral/tripartite systems of negotiation, which come under the Major Port Trust Act. Shipbreaking workers, on the other hand, are working in the informal sector and employed through various contractors. Nevertheless, the union is demanding that shipbreaking workers are covered in wage negotiations with ports and docks.

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3. Union democracy, transparency and engaging with leadership from below The challenge of building capacity in order to manage the tensions within the trade union movement also involves union democracy and workers’ direct involvement in the movement. As shown by the conditions in which the collective organisation of shipbreakers originated, the case study clearly shows that the movement is directed from above. Furthermore, the conditions in which the 2009 strike in Alang was resolved to show the preponderance of the union leadership in conducting and directing the movement, as well as a lack of transparency. At this still early stage of the movement, the difficulty in engaging the workers in the movement is also raised during our interviews with the workers, who often admit that they came to see the union only when they had personal work issues to resolve (W4, W7, I10). Others have also been afraid due to unscrupulous so-called activists who “took their money and went away” on previous occasions (W10, W9). The interviews that we conducted with the union leaders indicated that this issue was well understood. The union attempted to empower the workers and encourage them to break away from a strictly union service consumption pattern. However, this was a hard task: “There have so many problems in their lives. Many shipbreakers, if they are having a problem, will only then ask to become a member of the union” (LW1). Moreover, the study also shows this challenge is made difficult by the important turnover (LW1). With regard to the question of union democracy and transparency, the activists insist firstly and firmly that the MPTDGEU is a democratic union, which is not under any control from the government, employers or political parties. Under the constitution of the MPTDGEU, the shipbreaking workers are free to contest the elections for any of the office bearer or managing committee roles. The union activists, however, recognise that it is extremely difficult for migrant, overworked and often illiterate workers in a survival mode to engage the leadership. In order to foster meaningful involvement and leadership, the MPTDGEU has identified key persons and trained plot committee members who regularly attended union meetings, as well as participated in gate meetings and rallies, delivered awareness campaigns and provided the opportunity to participate in workshops, seminars and conferences at state, national and international levels. Shipbreaking workers are also running different committees of the

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MPTDGEU, while managing committee meetings are held periodically to discuss issues related to employment and planning activities. Union failures and successes are also addressed at those meetings. Regarding the perceived lack of transparency during the 2009 strike in Alang, the activists wanted to state that, even though they can they understand the grievance, the specific situation that occurred during this period should also be taken into account. The strike was unilaterally decided and started to vent the anger towards the employer for its action reducing the rate of declared rate of wages without any valid reason. While all 25,000 workers were not union members (membership at the time was 8,000), they felt, in the back of their mind that the union was still there to protect them in the case of job losses. Influenced by employers and information given by the police, the district magistrate passed an order stating that the general secretary of the union could not visit the workplace. Although this order was against the law and created much confusion among the workers, the union understood both the pros and the cons of the situation. It had to be careful and make sure it disseminated the facts to workers from time to time by leafleting, making announcements, conducting gate meetings, etc. In the end, the workers themselves have come to appreciate the strategy taken by the union during this difficult situation as the strike ended successfully. 4. Taking a 360-degree approach adapted to the differentiated characteristics of “informal workers” The case study illustrates that the capacity of trade unions to reach new groups of workers is significantly based on the adaptation of its values and methods to the differentiated needs of workers at the rough end of the labour market. At the height of Fordism, the thrust of trade unionism often revolved around the negotiation of wages according to seniority. The case study shows that even though wage negotiation is an important issue, the shipbreakers’ claims often pointed upstream towards issues such as payment of wage, access to potable drinking water, PPE and better housing conditions. In turn, this has encouraged the movement to adopt a 360-degree framework in order to adapt to the different needs of the workers in all aspects of their lives. In short, the case study shows that a more fluid and comprehensive union action is an action that can adapt to the values and requirements of these new membership cohorts by foregrounding issues related to training, healthcare,

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education, family reunification and viable conditions of living, which are usually at the margins of the core scope of the union movement. From the union standpoint, when trying to address the issues that shipbreakers are confronted with, it is clear that its activities must link work and daily life issues. As business activities in this sector involve so many operators and subcontractors, this configuration is lowering the leverage that a union can have by directly addressing their claims to “capital”. Even though the employers and contractors now see the value in recognising the rights of their workers and their unions to some extent, such that there is now dialogue between the parties, with certain labour issues resolved on the spot, bridging the gap between work and daily life issues is certainly a priority that the MPTDGEU has tried to address. For them, the study rightly highlights the importance of these issues, although the union is well aware that this only represents the “tip of the iceberg”. In these circumstances, its commitment to improving living conditions is a long-term process. Indeed, in the near future, we plan to build a collective voice to advocate for decent living and housing conditions in the Darukhana vicinity. 5. Building international coalitions and solidarities In the globalisation era, capital is free to move from one country to another. One of the pitfalls of the recent success in the organising campaign in India is the fact that the more Indian workers become organised, the more the industry is tempted to switch its activities to Bangladesh and Pakistan. As one of the union leaders said: “What I am afraid of is [what happens] after we organise those workers. But, on the other hand, maybe those kinds of industry will move to Pakistan or Bangladesh, where cheaper labour is available” (I5). On this issue, the union wanted to insist that it has attempted to create a conducive environment for social dialogue to take place. Yet, the issue of co-operation between workers in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan has been discussed at regional platforms for workers employed in the shipbreaking industry. These issues will be further discussed in order to foster mutual co-operation and the exchange of information and knowledge. The hope is that it will help to maintain a level playing field in the industry. To this end, IndustriALL and its affiliates in the South Asia region, including the MPTDGEU, campaign for the ratification of the 2009 Hong Kong International Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships, which includes measures to protect the environment and promote better working conditions for shipbreaking workers.

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6. Building coalitions with other social movements, especially the environmentalist movement In the mid-2000s, the MPTDGEU was able to build on the momentum gained by the different NGOs in relation to the Clemenceau, Blue Lady and Riky cases. At the local level, it was able to build coalitions with NGOs such as St. John’s Ambulance and the Rotary Club by convincing them to work alongside its campaigns for the enhancement of shipbreakers’ living conditions. Creating solidarities between the labour movement and the “greens”, however, is often problematic. As one interlocutor said: “We are working with the workers and then, you know, they are focusing on the environmental issues . . . sometimes we feel they want to close down the industry from their comfortable offices in Europe” (I1). As for the issue of building coalitions with like-minded NGOs and the environmentalist movement, the union has committed itself to supporting dialogue. In this spirit, the Red Cross Society’s Bhavnagar Blood Bank is now extending its co-operation with regard to issues of occupational health and safety. The union is also engaged in dialogue with environmentalist organisations in order to make them understand the importance of the industry, thus encouraging them to share their views at appropriate levels, while keeping in mind the livelihood of the workers. This dialogue helps the union to appreciate that, sometimes, these organisations can also speak a language that the union cannot speak, which can be helpful to the industry from a larger perspective. 7. Enabling the union to finance its activity Last but not least in terms of importance, the union faced difficulty in financing activity that was geared towards workers with a very low salary and thus were unable to fund the union. Almost all the interlocutors have acknowledged this challenge. Even though international organisations are strongly pushing local unions to find ways to bridge this financial gap, they are well aware that this kind of campaigning requires international support. So far, European unions have largely supported this effort. Another challenge, therefore, would be to involve North American unions (I5). Moreover, from the union’s perspective, it has to be stated that, with a few exceptions, trade unionism in India is not strong enough as far as finance is concerned. Within the tradition of collecting membership subscriptions from the workers who are union members, workers’ contributions have been kept at very low levels. As such, many trade unions would like to extend support to informal sector workers, but it is not always possible due to lack of funds. To this extent, international solidarity is extremely important.

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Conclusion This case study, which documents the collective organisation of workers within peripheral labour markets, is part of a larger research project that was launched in 2008. It clearly shows that the growing requirement for labour flexibility is not confined to the so-called First World. The shipbreaking industry is noticeably part of the job centrifugation dynamic, as evoked by Durand, and pushes trade unions to go beyond their traditional methods. As emphasised by Haiven, Le Queux, Lévesque and Murray: “it is by first taking note of such a context that unions will be able (or not) to meet the challenges posed by the present restructuring and thereby be able to sustain or even to renew representation and collective action” (2005: 37). Some of the issues discussed in this chapter intersect with our previous results; namely: the necessity for action aiming to shed light on invisible workers and encourage the labour movement, employers and government to recognise them; the necessity for unions to develop tools and means to fairly and internally resolve conflict between differentiated workers; the necessity to engage in a reflection on union democracy, transparency and the ways to better engage union activism from below; and the necessity to build local and international coalitions with other actors in social movements. It also reveals some important challenges that were not assessed by our previous research, particularly the necessity to build a 360-degree approach, which is adapted to the differentiated characteristics of “informal workers” and targets the living condition of the workers, as well as work-related issues. Overall, as already noted by Hoxie (1914), in the early twentieth century, the case study foregrounds the necessity to understand the labouring class as a plural object in order to meet the challenge in terms of organising solidarity in the context of diversity, as well as shed light on important questions for future research. How is it possible to transcend service unionism when addressing extremely poor workers who are engaged in survival strategies, along with encouraging collective action to be taken by workers who are told to think that “exploitation is better than starvation” (I9)? How is it possible to bring together the claims of the “green movement”, which is first and foremost engaged in conservation strategies, with a labour movement that mainly focuses on improving workers’ conditions, often at the cost of environmental protection? That leaves us with one particularly difficult final question. Does the organisation of precarious workers, who are often at the limits of bounded labour, somehow lead

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to participation in the institutionalisation of this kind of very dubious work? One way to answer this question and better understand the implications of union activities would be to more meaningfully assess the local dynamics in the villages from where the workers are recruited by muqaddams to join the shipbreaking yards. This is one blind spot that should be addressed by further research: an innovation that could help us bring forward our study of collective action in the context of the twenty-first-century capitalism, as well as update the studies conducted by Breman (2012) on the role of “circulation” and “informality” as a recipe for the entrapment of nowhere workers” within peripheral labour markets, where working conditions are intolerable. The scholar–activist dialogue, which has been engaged in this chapter, enables us to acknowledge that, from the activist perspective, the union’s involvement in lobbying and representing shipbreakers on governing bodies is one of the aspects downplayed in this study. This part of the union’s action has been increasing over time and it is important to stress the gains achieved in this regard. The union leadership has consistently liaised with government authorities, drawing their attention to the plight of the shipbreakers and seeking their co-operation in mitigating their hardship. In turn, the union has been applying pressure to local and national governmental authorities in order that they implement the existing legal provisions on health, safety, welfare and the environment. There have been genuine responses from these statutory bodies, even though many problems still have to be resolved to the union’s satisfaction. One example of success in this area, however, is that the Office of the Regional Provident Fund Commissioner has taken into account the complaints made by the union in relation to the non-payment of provident fund contributions by employers, as well as the fact that large numbers of workers were not covered under the schemes in relation to legal provisions regarding provident funds, pensions and other benefits. The employers have now been forced to comply and pay the amount of compensation due to the families of shipbreaking workers who met with fatal accidents. Moreover, in Gujarat, the union now enjoys an important legal recognition in relation to the shipbreaking industry, such that this industry has now been included in the list of “scheduled employments” contained in the 1948 Minimum Wages Act, thereby ensuring that workers now have the right to claim the statutory minimum wage. Unfortunately, this is yet to happen in the case of Maharashtra.

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Notes 1 The interviews lasted between forty minutes and two hours. Different union activists participated in the study. According to our ethics protocol, the interviews are identified as I1, I2 and I3, thereby preventing the reader from identifying “who said what”. 2 Twenty-two short interviews and two in-depth interviews were conducted with shipbreaking workers. They are listed as W1, W2, etc., as well as LW1 and LW2. These interviews, conducted in Marathi, Hindi and Urdu, have been translated to English. 3 For a longer review and discussion of this struggle, see Noiseux (2016). This chapter summarised the first part of the article and develops more extensively the second part by adding a dialogue between the researcher and the activist. 4 The workers in the informal economy, except for a stratum at the top, “suffer from various forms of insecurities and vulnerabilities. . . . [They] generally do not enjoy employment security (no protection against arbitrary dismissal), work security (no protection against accident and illness at the workplace) and social security (maternity and health care benefits, pension, etc.)” (NCEUS 2009: 19, 12–13). 5 See also Sundar (2010). 6 Given that it is mainly based on interviews with union officers and shipbreakers working in Mumbai, the case study is centred on the MPTDGEU initiative in Darukhana. 7 A proleptic reason is “a kind of reason that does not exert itself in thinking the future because it believes it knows all about the future and conceives it as linear, automatic and infinite overcoming of the present” (Sousa Santos 2004: 5). 8 According to the Basel Convention of 2003, it is estimated that 38 per cent of shipbreaking activities take place in India (IMF 2007: iv). 9 Ibeanu quoted in “Safety situation in shipbreaking yards critical”, Press Trust of India, 21 January 2010. (Online, http://imowatch.blogspot. ca/2010_01_01_archive.html, consulted 2 July 2012.) 10 To our knowledge, there is no such estimation for Darukhana. 11 The then Mumbai Port Trust Dockworkers’ Union (MPTDU), which was founded in 1920, is one of the oldest unions in India. It subsequently become the MPTDGEU. 12 However, it is often workers that have to provide their own drinking water (IMF 2007: 4, 10, 17–18). For instance, in January 2010, there was an increase in ships, which led to a greater demand for workers, resulting in a shortage of water (Rob Johnston, IMF Executive Director. “IMF News on Shipbreaking Workers”, 29 January 2010). 13 Under this act, a factory is a premise where a manufacturing process is carried out by employing ten or more workers with the aid of power, or twenty or more workers if the process is carried on without the aid of power (Puthucherril 2010: 55). 14 The Minimum Wage Act is an important piece of legislation, which can benefit unorganised labour. It requires the government to fix minimum wages for certain employment types, as stated in Parts I and II of the Schedule appended to it. The government can add any employment type to this list (Puthucherril 2010: 55).

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15 Since 2004, the IMF is providing support to the Indian shipbreaking unions (I5). 16 India’s large dockworkers’ union movement is nowadays threatened by the privatisation of the port industry and the proliferation of casual work in this field (I1, I2, I7).

References Abramo, L. 1999. “Desafiosatuais da sociologia do trabalhona América Latina: algumashipóteses para a discussão”, in E. De la Garza (ed.), Los Retos Teóricos de los Estudios del Trabajo Hacia el Siglo XXI, pp. 11–24. Aguascalientes: FLACSO – UAA. Bensusan Areous, G. 2003. “Sindicalismo y sistema de relaciones industriales”, in de la Garza, E. (ed.), Tratado Latinoamericano de Sociología de Trabajo, pp. 392–421. México: Colegio de México – FLACSO. Bhowmik, S. K. 1998. “The Labour Movement in India: Present Problems and Future Perspectives”, The Indian Journal of Social Work, 59(1): 147–166. Bhowmik, S. K. 2009. “India: Labor Sociology Searching for a Direction”, Work and Occupation, 38(2): 126–144. Breman, J. 2012. Outcast Labour in India: Circulation and Informalisation of the Workforce at the Bottom of the Economy. Delhi: Oxford Collected Essays. Bourdieu, P. M. 1998. “L’essence du néolibéralisme”, Le Monde Diplomatique, 48(530): 3–4. Cohen, M. 2005. “U.S. Shipbreaking Exports: Balancing Safe Disposal with Economic Realities”, Environs: Environmental Law and Policy Journal, 28(2): 237–268. Comeau, Y. 2005. Grille pour la réalisation de monographies portant sur des luttes collectives (no MS0501). Montreal: Centre de recherche sur les innovations sociales, Université du Québec à Montréal. De la Garza, E. (ed.). 2000. Tratado Latinoamericano de Sociología del Trabajo. México: Colegio de México – FLACSO. De la Garza, E. and Pries, L. 1997. “Work, Workers and Social Change in Latin America”, Current Sociology, 45(1): 91–107. Demaria, F. 2010. “Shipbreaking at Alang–Sosiya: An Ecological Distribution Conflict”, Ecological Economics, 70(2): 250–260. Dunlop, J. T. 1948. Insights into Labor Issues. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. Durand, J.–P. 2004. La chaîne invisible. travailleur aujourd’hui: Flux tendu et servitude volontaire. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Englund, W. and Cohn, G. 1997. “Scrapping Ships, Sacrificing Men”, The Baltimore Sun, December 7, http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/ history/bal-pulitzer-shipbreakers-story-5-story.html (accessed on 27 March 2016) Haiven, L., Le Queux, S., Lévesque, C. and Murray, G. 2005. “Le renouveau syndical et la restructuration du travail”, Just Labour, 6(3): 37–42.

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Hoxie, R. F. 1914. “Trade Unionism in the United States: General Character and Types”, Journal of Political Economy, 22(3): 201–217. International Metalworkers’ Federation (IMF). 2007. Status of Shipbreaking Workers in India: A Survey, IMF–FNV Project in India 2004–2007. New Delhi: IMF Press. Ion, Jacques. Juin 2006. “La dignité, nouvel enjeu de mobilization”, Revue Sciences Humaines, 172: 41–43 Joshi, T. K., Bhuva, U. B. and Katoch, P. 2006. “Asbestos Ban in India”, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1076: 292–308. Kapila, R. & Kapila, U. (Eds.). 2002. A Decade of Economic Reforms in India: A Collection of Select Articles. Delhi: Academic Foundation. Kapila, R. and Kapila, U. (eds.). The Battle for Employment Guarantee. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kumar, A. S. 2009. Status of Unorganised Labour. New Delhi: Discovery. Langewiesche, W. 2000. “The Shipbreakers”, The Atlantic Monthly, 286(2): 31–49. Lautier, B. 1998. “Pour une sociologie de l’hétérogénéité du travail”, Revue Tiers – monde, 39(154): 251–279. Mansoor, N., Muhammad, S., Sultan Uddin Ahmmed, S., Rane, V. V. and Manicandam, G. 2011. “Shipbreaking in South Asia: Long Way to Break the Chain”, Metal Asia – Pacific, 1(1): 8–14. Murray, G. 2004. “Forum: Reorganising Unions: Union Myths, Enigmas, and Other Tales: Five Challenges for Union Renewal”, Studies in Political Economy, 74(1): 157–169. Naidu, K. M. 2003. Social Security of Labour in India and Economic Reforms. New Delhi: Serials Publications. National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS). 2009. The Challenge of Employment in India: An Informal Economy Perspective, Volume 1 – Main Report. New Delhi: NCEUS. NCEUS. 2007. Report on Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganised Sector. New Delhi: National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector, http://dcmsme.gov.in/Condition_of_workers_sep_2007.pdf (accessed on 19 April 2015). Noiseux, Y. 2016. “Organising in the Informal Sector: A Case Study in Mumbai’s Shipbreaking Yards”, International Critical Thought, 6(1): 245–266. Pelsy, F. 2008. “The Blue Lady and the International Issue of Ship Dismantling”, Law, Environment and Development Journal, 4(2): 137–148. Puthucherril, T. G. 2010. From Shipbreaking to Sustainable Ship Recycling: Evolution of a Legal Regime. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Reddy, M. S., Basha, S., Adimurthy, S. and Ramachandraiah, G. 2006. “Description of the Small Plastics Fragments in Marine Sediments along Alang–Sosiya Shipbreaking Yard, India”, Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science, 68(3&4): 656–660. Sen, S. S. and Dasgupta, B. 2009. Unfreedom and Waged Work. New Delhi: Sage Publications.

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Sinha, S. 1998. “Ship Scrapping and the Environment: The Buck Should Stop”, Maritime Policy and Management, 25(4): 397–403. Sousa Santos, B. 2004. “A Critique of Lazy Reason: Against the Waste of Experience”, in Wallerstein, I. (ed.), The Modern World – System in the Longue Durée, pp. 157–198. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Stairs, K. 2004. “Shipbreaking and E-Waste: The International Trade in Hazardous Waste Continues”, Industry and Environment, 27(2&3): 7–11. Sundar, K. R. S. 2010. Labour Reforms and Decent Work in India: A Study of Labour Inspection in India. New Delhi: Bookwell. United Nations. 2010. Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Adverse Effects of the Movement and Dumping of Toxic and Dangerous Products and Wastes on the Enjoyment of Human Rights. New York: United Nations Human Right Council.

Appendix

HEART Primary lab. Market Functional flexibility

Second peripheral group Part Temporary time work Job Workfare Sharing Seasonal schemes work

Figure 11.1A Jean-Pierre Durand’s job centrifugation dynamic Source: Durand (2004: 185, authors’ translation).

Subcontracting SE

Interim work

First peripheral group Secondary labour market Numerical flexibility

Part IV

The new waves Myths and realities

12 Mistaken identities in information technology sector in India Implications for unionisation Sobin George* While the information technology (IT) and related sectors in India have been in the limelight for their role in the growth of the service sector, what is more interesting for a student of social movements is the contribution of these sectors in adding a new layer to the urban middle classes. This new middle class is defined more by the identity of its constituents in terms of the nature of employment, employer, work culture and lifestyle rather than conventional class divisions of status, power, income and consumption. Despite the internal occupational differences, employees in the sector tend to identify themselves as professionals, largely by the way the industry has constructed the identity. Although such a positioning of the workforce could create a “different” class consciousness, most importantly, it has helped the industry to discipline the labour space and drive its business unfettered by any labour unrest and external interventions from the state or any other wage-negotiating agencies. There is a rich literature available on how such processes by the industry creates docile, loyal and disciplined workers, in general, and for the IT sector, in particular (Fournier 1999; Taylor et al. 2002; Saini 2007; D’Cruz and Noronha 2012; Fuchs 2014). It was, therefore, generally believed that the chances of translating any discontent among workers into resistance by them are less due to the (given) values of professionalism and their “dependency and obligations with the employers” (Gabriel 1999). However, with the growth of the industry, this constructed identity started fluidifying in countries like India, which attracts business based on labour cost advantages. While the instances of closure, retrenchment, victimisation and non-payment of wages are common at the lower rung of the information technology-enabled sectors (ITES), incidents of layoffs and retrenchments began to get reported frequently from the upper strata of the sector, consisting of multinational corporations (MNCs). One of the explanations for this

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development, as Radice (2015: 275) has argued, could be the overall shifts in production and cost minimisation strategies of the capitalists “to routinise the low and middle level technical, professional and managerial jobs” and take away the perks and privileges that these employees enjoyed. What is interesting here is that while these workers attach importance to the advantages given and professional identity associated with their employment when everything is in their favour at work, they tend to associate with working-class movements and labour organisations in times of crises. One of the striking instances when such obscure class behaviour of IT sector professionals and managers became evident was during the developments connected with the layoffs at Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. (TCS) in 2015. The IT professionals, who otherwise identified themselves with the upper middle class, started looking towards working class–based trade unions to solve their problem. For instance, the affected IT professionals attended in large numbers the meetings called by mainstream trade unions in the cities of Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad once they faced layoffs.1 The class fragmentation and formation accompanying the growth and expansion of jobs in the IT and ITES sectors in urban India is indeed an important question. This chapter, however, does not propose to address this question directly. Rather, it is concerned more about the implications of such obscure class formation that completely underplays the existence of other multiple conflicting identities such as occupational differences based on class and hierarchy, for the labour rights of the workers. Although there was less scope of collectivisation of employees in the IT and ITES sectors, the formation of a collective of business process outsourcing (BPO) and call centre employees in the name of “UNITES” in 2005 led to some movements for mobilising workers engaged in the sector. It was considered as a successful new wave of organising among the professional class in line with the professional organisations of white-collar employees in the West. The mobilisation of employees by UNITES led to one of the important discourses of new trade unionism related to the identity of workers, emanating from their new class consciousness as professionals. The union, subscribing to the dominant view in the sector, also invoked the professional identity of ITES employees in order to attract them towards their collective. While such mobilisations could bring a section of workers together in the sector on certain issues, the question of whether they could effectively mobilise the workers politically against the anti-worker policies remains unaddressed.

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The chapter attempts to understand the way in which the dominant professional identity of IT and ITES employees worked to impact UNITES’s strategies and activities, and their implications for the growth and political mobilisation of the union in the current changed contexts. It specifically examines the following questions: Is the perceived professional identity in the sector, which the union also invoked, real, and what is happening to the constructed identity in the sector with the larger changes in the labour practices after the end of its boom period? What are its implications for mobilising workers across different occupations in the sector? And finally, does class continue to be a question in such new generation mobilisations?

Identity construction: past and present Several studies have discussed the process of identity construction in the Indian IT and associated sectors. One of the ways in which this was achieved, as explained by Upadhya and Vasavi (2006), was through its distinct work culture in terms of “minimising hierarchies, flexibilising work, and inculcating the importance of employee training and empowerment”, which are also part of the larger processes of transformation of the work culture globally. The education, age and the middle-class background of employees also worked in favour of developing and internalising the professional image that the industry tried to cultivate. Various studies have clearly highlighted the processes through which professional identity is constructed in the initial years and how it helped the employers to tune in favour of their growth. For instance, D’Cruz and Noronha (2009) noted that employers managed this through processes such as “induction training, on-going socialization, performance evaluation mechanisms and other elements of organizational design”, and management systems to facilitate identity formations in their interest of work organisation. It is true that several national and international IT and ITES employers offered excellent conditions of work, which matched the best ones across the globe during the initial years of the boom in the IT sector. The works of Ramesh (2004) and Mirchandani (2004) gave a detailed account of the facilities for recreation, dining, networking, mobility, fashion and healthcare, among others, which were extended even to the lower rung of the ITES employees, and matched the professional identity constructed around such jobs. The new work culture thus created also tended to reproduce the consumption patterns and leisure activities of an urban middle class to attract workforce; though with an additional element of employee pride associated with the employer. However,

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such facilities given to employees did not last long due to several reasons and the firms started either cutting down or completely stopping such facilities at least in the ITES sector, which largely included call centres and other BPO enterprises (D’Cruz and Noronha 2012). What is interesting to note here is that irrespective of these changes, the “professional” identity remains as the dominant discourse that continues to inform the popular imagination about the sector. Certain labour market phenomena contributed significantly to such popular imaginations. First of all, it was a boom period for BPOs and call centres, and several MNCs started their back-end and voice processing operations in the Indian cities. These companies have projected a highly professional image for themselves. The working environments in the newly established BPOs and call centres also created and propagated impressions comparable to those of professionals in the corporate sector. Moreover, the workforce in the sector comprised very young and fresh employees, who could be easily conditioned around such temporary and superficial images. Secondly, the market was mostly demand-driven initially, enabling the employees to change jobs easily, which also increased their demand in the labour market. To some extent, this led to labour-friendly investments by the companies. The situation has, however, started reversing now with an abundant supply of skilled labour, which has enabled employers to reduce their investment on labour. Several studies have revealed the informal labour relations and conditions of work in these sectors, which are equivalent to that of typical factory informal employment. For instance, employment in the IT and ITES sectors in India is associated with work intensification, job insecurity and other contingencies such as routinisation, labour control, extensive surveillance, harassment, stress, role conflicts, health hazards and layoffs (Mirchandani 2004; Ramesh 2004; Pradhan and Abraham 2005; McMillan 2006; Poster 2007; Taylor and Bain 2008; Noronha and D’Cruz 2009a; Golpelwar 2016). The data as extracted from NSSO (2011–12) on employment and unemployment2 showed that as many as 46.8 per cent of the BPO-related workers and 48.5 per cent of the call centre and related workers work without any social security benefit (see Table 12.1). Furthermore, only 10 per cent in the BPO and 14 per cent in the other IT-related sectors have bare minimum social security entitlements. Employees without any social security entitlement in the occupational categories of computer programming, consultancy and related services sector (read IT sector) comprise nearly 19 per cent of the total workforce. Similarly, 44 per cent of the IT sector employees, 47 per cent of

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Table 12.1 Social security benefits available for IT and ITES employees (%) Social security

PF/pension Only gratuity Only healthcare and maternity benefit PF/pension and gratuity PF/pension and healthcare and maternity benefit Gratuity and healthcare and maternity benefit PF/pension and gratuity and healthcare and maternity benefit Not eligible Don’t know Total

Computer programming, consultancy and related activities

Data processing, hosting and related activities

Telephonebased information service activities

Total

12.0 4.4 8.3

15.7 2.1 7.4

9.3

12.4 3.7 7.5

5.4

1.6

6.2

4.9

11.2

7.1

16.5

11.0

10.6

3.0

5.5

9.0

27.0

9.9

13.9

23.4

18.9 2.3 100.0

46.8 6.4 100.0

48.5

25.3 2.7 100.0

100.0

Source: NSSO 68th Round, Employment and Unemployment (2011–12), estimate from unit-level data.

the BPO sector employees and 57 per cent of the call centre and related sector employees do not have a written job contract (see Table 12.2). The employment conditions in the once-better-off upper strata of the IT sector, which mostly consists of IT services such as software production and development in terms of salary and conditions of work, have also deteriorated. For instance, reports of layoffs in Indian IT firms have been appearing frequently in all the major Indian newspapers since 2009 onwards (The Times of India, 14 and 17 January 2015; The New Indian Express, 9 January 2015; The Hindu, 12 February 2015). As reported by these newspapers, IT firms like IBM, Dell, Cisco, HP, TCS, Wipro, Infosys, Microsoft, ITC and Reliance together terminated services of around 25,000 professionals in 2015 alone in order to minimise costs due to various reasons, including the general economic recession.

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Table 12.2 Type of job contract for IT and ITES employees (%) Sub-sector

Contract not written

Computer programming, consultancy and related activities Data processing, hosting and related activities Telephone-based information service activities Total

44.3

Written for 1 year or less

1–3 years

>3 years

Total

9.8

7.8

38.2

100.0

47.4

17.4

7.0

28.1

100.0

56.7

12.1

7.0

24.1

100.0

45.7

11.1

7.6

35.6

100.0

Source: NSSO 68th Round, Employment and Unemployment (2011–12), estimated from unit-level data.

Although there is a process of fluidification of the constructed professional identity taking place in the IT and ITES sectors, as it is mentioned elsewhere, it continues to inform the identity of employees in the IT sector in one way or another. As a result, one can see a general tendency to “normalise” the labour problems in IT and ITES as something inevitable and therefore should be acceptable to the employees. It is important to highlight here some of the new narratives of professionalism attached with IT sector jobs that have emerged with the changes occurring in the sector pertaining to work organisation and labour relations. For instance, IT professionals who think that they are secure, irrespective of any practice by the employer on organisation of work, tend to justify and accept the new labour management, disciplining, cost minimisation and other anti-worker practices. These narratives of professionalism highlight harmony and non-conflict with employers, discipline among employees and being sensitive to the new rules and policies of employers as its attributes. What is interesting is that these are very firm-specific narratives, which can vary across firms depending on the relations and everyday interactions of the employees with their managements. Their views come from a strong conviction about the growing prospect of the industry and the knowledge, skills and social capital that they possess, which make them virtually indispensable in the sector, irrespective of any adverse externality. It also indicates that the professionalism once associated with the identity

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of the employer is shifting more towards individuals and is especially defined by their authority emanating from knowledge about the trade, abilities and other individualistic attributes as observed in any other traditional professional practices such as law and medicine. The following narrative of a software engineer from Kochi reflects this strand of professionalism in the IT industry. We all understand that [the] IT business is temporary and even companies like TCS and Infosys are not built to last a generation. Small companies may last few years only. It’s not a place to ask for job security. It’s a place to make maximum money as a salaried person and it’s our responsibility to save and invest that money for our future. We accept that reality and we bargain with our employers for maximum benefits, if not given, we will go to another employer. If the business is a loss, companies will lay off people to save others’ jobs. We accept the risk, that’s why we are paid 3 or 10 times than other employees in other industries with same skills! IT people may not have job security. But they have professional security and anybody [with] above average knowledge will get job in any company, place, country any time – whatever be the recession. In other words, IT people depend on their knowledge and experience for their security and not on a company. (Interview with a Kochi-based software engineer on 5 February 2015) IT professionals who face layoffs and employees at the lower strata of ITES in domestic and multinational firms, however, tend to reject attributes such as employee care, autonomy, freedom, career advancement, class and recreation, among others, which were once associated with professionalism in the IT sector. Their narratives now focus more on mundane issues such as job security, social protection, overwork, harassment and inadequate compensation, which are also the issues confronting any worker in the Indian informal sector. It implies that, though slowly, the working-class identity of employees appears to be emerging from all segments of the sector (at least from the affected people) with the changes in the production and labour relations. The internal differences of employees in the sector in terms of education, skill, employer affiliations, class and caste backgrounds, which have so far been hidden, could also come out strongly with the loosening of the single professional class identity. Hitherto, the popular imagination, including that of the employees themselves, about the IT sector was that the professional identity of employees cuts across all other markers

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Table 12.3 Educational backgrounds of IT and ITES employees in India (%) Education

Higher secondary Diploma/certificate course Graduate Postgraduate and above Other Total

Computer programming, consultancy and related activities

Data processing, hosting and related activities

Telephonebased information service activities

Total

2.6 3.9

19.0 4.6

29.2 4.7

7.2 4.1

64.4 24.1

59.3 13.9

44.8 16.7

62.0 22.0

5 100.0

3.2 100.0

4.6 100.0

4.7 100.0

Source: NSSO 68th round, employment and unemployment (2011–12), unit-level data.

of differences. But were such assumptions real? The data on the educational backgrounds of the IT and ITES employees, derived from NSSO data, which are presented in Table 12.3, show that nearly 55 per cent of the employees in all these three sectors together are graduates and above. However, while the employees in the IT sector are mostly engineering graduates, the BPO, call centre and other related sectors do not require their employees to have technical degrees. Besides, 19 per cent of the employees in the BPO sector and 29 per cent in the call centre and other related sectors have acquired education only up to the higher secondary level. These facts imply that there is a graded difference in education across the sectors. This could also change the aspirations of these employees. Another general assumption is that employees in the IT sector belong to the upper- and middle-level caste groups. It is true that a majority of the employees in the upper strata of the sector, which includes computer programming, consultancy and related activities, are from the upper- and middle-level castes. The available data show that as many as 56 per cent of employees in this group belong to the upper castes and 33 per cent to the Other Backward Class (OBC) groups (see Table 12.4). The share of Dalits (read Scheduled Castes or SCs) in this category comprises nearly 10 per cent of the total. However, the caste configuration is slightly different in the lower-level jobs like those of data processing, telephone-based information services, call centres and cyber cafes, wherein the presence of upper caste employees is not as

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Table 12.4 Caste background of employees in the IT and ITES sectors in India (%) Scheduled Tribe Computer programming, consultancy and related activities Data processing, hosting and related activities; web portals Other information service activities Total

Scheduled Caste

Other Backward Class

Others

Total

1.2

9.6

32.9

56.3

100.0

0.0

10.5

50.7

38.8

100.0

0.0

11.0

54.0

35.1

100.0

0.9

9.9

37.3

52.0

100.0

Source: NSSO 68th round, employment and unemployment (2011–12), unit-level data.

high as in the upper strata of the IT sector whereas the share of OBCs and SCs is relatively higher in such occupations too. In short, there are layers of multiple identities, sometimes conflicting ones, such as education, occupation, caste and status beneath the projected identity of professionalism in the Indian IT sector. The repositioning of professionalism in the sector by a group of employees and the strong counter narratives on the implanted “professionalism” from the employees who face layoffs are presently important questions of identity construction in the sector. This has significant implications for unionisation in the IT and ITES sectors, which will be discussed in the later part of the chapter through a focus on the organising efforts of UNITES over the past fifteen years.

Identity and employee mobilisation by UNITES in the IT and ITES sectors Unlike the other sectors, organising employees in the IT and ITES sectors has been a difficult task, mainly because of the protections that these sectors enjoy with regard to capital investment and the flexibility of certain provisions of the labour laws along with the professional identity allied to this sector. These sectors are considered as important contributors in the economic growth trajectory of the country due to several reasons. The first reason is that the sector has shown a persistent trend of growth.

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As per the data of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the sector’s share in export of all services stood at 45.84 per cent in 2013–14, while its share in the total exports from India stood at 14.77 per cent, both of which figures are quite significant. Second, the sector has also grown as a significant contributor to foreign exchange. The RBI data show that the exports from the sector increased to a value of US$ 69,439 million in 2013–14 from 1,760 million in 1997–98 with an annual compound growth rate of 21.62 per cent (RBI Monthly Bulletin 2005–13). Third, its contribution to the GDP, though less in absolute terms than that of the other major industrial sectors, has been on an upward trajectory. For instance, the data of Central Statistical Organisation (CSO) shows that the sector’s share in the GDP increased to 3.5 per cent in 2013 from 1.3 per cent in 2001 (CSO 2013). Fourth, the sector has emerged as a contributor to employment, especially for the aspiring Indian middle class. The estimates of the Government of India show that as many as 2.9 million people were working in the sector as of 2014. Finally, as has already been discussed, the major challenge for collectivisation in the Indian IT sector concerns the identity question. The constructed and perceived identity of the workers as “professionals” with a distinct class positioning tends to work against any form of mobilisation even in the most exploitative segment of call centre jobs in the sector. Amid all these obstacles, UNITES was successfully formed and registered as a trade union on 23 November 2006 in the Indian state of Karnataka. The union covered only call centre and BPO employees during the initial years and gradually reached out to other IT professionals later as part of a strategy to expand. It received knowledge and financial support of international trade unions and organisations such as UNI Global Union, the Asia Pacific body, UNI APRO, Trade Union Service Union United (PAM) and the Finnish Trade Union Solidarity Centre of Finland (SASK). The union is now registered in seven states including Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Kerala, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, and has formed an apex body of the National Confederation of UNITES. The experience of UNITES has been a focus of academic research, mainly because of the above-mentioned challenges of organising and the approach it has adopted to organise workers.3 The thrust of the discussion in the following section of the chapter is whether the union can address the internal differences and the issues emerging from the recent changes in the sector with the adoption of its professional identity alone. Most importantly, what are its implications for mobilising workers across different occupations in the sector and for addressing the rights violations?

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The underlying philosophies of UNITES, which have guided all its activities, pertained to the non-traditional methods of organising and harbouring a non-confrontational relationship with employers, professional development of employees and ensuring justice, rights and fairness for the employees. The unionisation process began on the basis of these principles with the assumption that the conventional methods of organising employees into a trade union would not be appropriate for the IT and ITES sector in India. This strategy was adopted to gain the confidence of both the employers and employees to enable UNITES to occupy a space that would link these two groups in the industry and also represent workers on various issues. The main reason for this was the perception of a professional identity for the employees in the sector along with the growing antipathy of the Indian middle class towards trade unionism. The earlier experience of the Information Technology Professional Forum (ITPF) and the Centre for BPO Professionals (CBPOP), which form the foundations on which the present union has been built, was also instrumental in the adoption of the idea for creating a professional organisation of employees (UNI 2005). The concept of a community for professionals instead of a trade union had also been shaped by the strong views of the people who have been working in the sector for a long time such as the ones given here, on the roles of UNITES and on unionisation in the IT sector. I would love to see UNITES evolve into a neutral, business – friendly on par with employee-friendly, not just an employeerights oriented organization. It is about time, organizations like UNITES should become aware of the issues businesses/companies face because of lack of ethics, integrity, respectable employee– business relationship without preconceived comparisons/notions stemming from other industries – this is specifically true for IT, the s-called high-paying white-collar sector. More importantly, UNITES should also focus on improving [the] value system in the employee’s mindset like integrity, commitment among many others to make a win–win relationship. There are substantial issues that affect companies survival and sustenance that could also be factored in the UNITES agenda, never need to be one-sided. At the end of the day, it goes both ways – the company and employees must exist and perform to form a full-act. (Interview with a Bengaluru-based IT service professional, who was also a member of UNITES, on 2 March 2015)

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Sobin George Trade unions will ensure complete closure of a company; they cannot secure our job as well! Most of the companies are working in rented buildings and they don’t have any machinery in their premises. If trade unions try to get their demands met by the use of collective forces – which is illegal – these big companies can easily switch operations to another state or country in a few days! And only the people who are not willing to work or who are anyway afraid to raise their voices will be supporting a trade union. Whoever knows his worth can easily get his demands met by just showing a resignation letter to the company – thus making a trade union meaningless. (Interview with an IT professional from Kochi on 6 February 2015)

Some of the expected roles of UNITES from its members at the upper end of the sector also include establishing good relationships with employers, inculcating discipline among employees, promoting skill development of employees, assisting companies in recruitments and helping workers to adjust to the new rules and policies of employers. The question that needs to be considered is whether the union has been able to mobilise and sustain its workers in the movement by assuming such roles and invoking the possibilities of a professional identity. The activities undertaken by the union, its focus, coverage and contribution for increasing membership, and its relevance for the different sections of employees in the sector provide some directions for seeking a response to this question. An examination of the activities undertaken by UNITES shows that the union focused more towards satisfying the professional aspirations of its members and taking employers into confidence by helping in their manpower recruitment, and employee training, among other things. For instance, the organising activities of the union during the initial phase were centred around attracting the IT and ITES workers into the union through professional development initiatives, which involve online counselling, career advancement and skill development programmes.4 Another set of activities was based on popular campaigns, which the union believed would appeal to its urban middle-class constituency. It, therefore, organised several important campaigns on issues of women’s safety, anti-corruption, women’s rights and reduction of stress, among others. It also organised programmes on special occasions such as May Day, Women’s Day, Christmas and Environment Day. Such campaigns helped UNITES attract public attention and contributed towards building its image as a professional organisation for workers in the IT and ITES sectors.

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The union also organised activities to spread awareness on critical issues, including living wages, regulation of working hours and prevention of harassment of female employees at call centres, besides making efforts to attract the workers at the lower-level IT-based call centre jobs. However, the union did not prioritise the conversion of such activities into a political agenda which would help them negotiate with the state on behalf of the affected employees. It is argued that though UNITES addressed labour rights violations, it did not mobilise the workers politically due to their philosophy of “non-confrontation”. For instance, UNITES extended support to victims in the cases of sexual harassment, non-payment of wages and other fraudulent practices of employers. However, these were not taken up with institutions such as police, labour commissioners/officers or labour courts. In fact the union did not invoke possibilities of any statutory and designated state institution for addressing such grievances of workers because of their strong conviction, which is again informed by the dominant middleclass interpretations, that these institutions are corrupt. Conversely, UNITES adopted a strategy to take up directly with employers, which did not always work in favour of the affected, though it produced favourable results for workers in some isolated cases.5 In short, though UNITES did try to highlight issues of labour rights, an overemphasis on the “modern and professional” image stopped them from being proactive in addressing the real issues concerning workers at appropriate levels, which have more to do with the latter’s rights and less with their professional attributes. This image of UNITES, which has been deliberately cultivated, turned out to be the identity of the union that is built around the antipathy of the Indian middle class towards trade unionism. UNITES organised most of its core activities on an informal platform called the New Generation Network (NGN). The purpose of NGN was to sensitise the employees to trade unionism and also to identify potential organisers and volunteers for union activities. However, the experience of UNITES showed that their strategy had become a replication of an approach adopted for organising service sector workers in the West. For instance, platforms like NGN were developed for professional and managerial workers in the post-industrial societies, where the workplace problems largely relate to issues such as autonomy, freedom, career advancements and work-related health problems emanating from stress and anxieties. Though significant, whether these problems are immediate priorities for employees in the entire IT and ITES sectors in India is a question worth exploring. Such problems may be more relevant for a small section of the professionals

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(up to 10–15%) who are at the upper strata of the IT service sector. The remaining employees in the sector still grapple with basic issues of job security, social protection, overwork, harassment and inadequate compensation in varying degrees in accordance with their positions in the work hierarchy and the nature of their jobs. The diverse interests of employees participating in the NGN meeting further point to its internal contradictions. Three groups of employees could be identified in the NGNs, who are completely different from each other in terms of their occupations, needs, aspirations and working conditions. Some of them, for instance, attend such meetings out of the expectation that UNITES is a recreational club and these meetings would provide them avenues to meet and talk to other professionals. They largely belong to the occupational group of IT professionals and high-end employees in the ITES sector. Another group comprises ITES workers who attend these meetings in search of assistance for professional and personal development such as career counselling and job placement. Some others expect that UNITES would help solve the problems they face at the workplace. Have these strategies helped the union to achieve its core goals of increasing membership and promoting decent work in the IT and ITES sectors in India? Our field study shows that though the union could mobilise workers and increase its membership, most of the members were not very active and the rate of membership renewal was very low till recently. One of the views emerged from UNITES is that though the NGN and other non-traditional approaches like online registration and the professional development programme attracted people, these could not sustain the momentum initially created by the movement.6 The IT service sector workers continue their antipathy towards trade unions, though they recognise the problems in the sector. Most importantly, the union could not effectively engage in wage negotiations or tripartite negotiations during the initial years of its existence. In short, it appears that the complex blend of professional association and trade unionism that the union evolved to reach out to employees in the entire IT and ITES sector during its early phases diluted both the purposes. This approach did not work adequately due to its obvious internal contradictions stemming from the differences in the identity of the employees, conditions of their work, nature of employment, aspirations and expectations, and most significantly the diverse nature of the problems they face. For instance, one of the research studies conducted by Strathclyde Business School, Glasgow, and Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, on UNITES

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showed that 75 per cent of the members who joined UNITES from the BPO sector expected that it would help improve their pay scales and work conditions of work.7 The IT service professionals, on the other hand, were comfortable with the image of UNITES as a professional organisation. Their participation in blood donation camps, environmental issues, charity works, training and counselling and stress reduction programmes substantiates this view. However, such activities could not build a momentum to bind them together or progress into a movement that would be capable of becoming a pressure group, which was one of the ways of strengthening the organisation. Most importantly, it conflicted with the interests of IT professionals when UNITES tended to operate in a trade union mode. UNITES thus turned out to be a loose network of IT and ITES employees during the first two phases.

New questions of class and identity: UNITES in the new phase It emerges from the previous discussions that the union confronted several questions arising out of its internal differences, especially on the nature, scope and activities. Even though the union identified several serious labour rights violations, it continued to subscribe to the dominant view, which was deliberately propounded by the industry, that these are highly professional jobs. The professional image of UNITES could attract IT sector employees; however, the employees at the lower strata of the sector require proactive interventions from an organisation which claims to represent them, especially when they face human and labour rights violations in the spheres of work and life. As has already been highlighted, such contradictions were reflected in the growth and momentum of the union. Consequently, the union reached a stage of stagnation, with a decline in its active and paid memberships. It was during this period that UNITES changed its strategy of mobilisation through collective bargaining agreements (CBAs). Our fieldwork shows that UNITES could achieve considerable success in reaching out to employers through CBAs. This is mainly because of the shift of focus from large IT and ITES firms to small and medium domestic firms, which include placement agencies, call centre support services, small back office operations, network services units and other back-end operations, where IT-based services are required. The CBAs have been designed in such a way as to benefit small firms also in several ways. This strategy has probably attracted these firms to

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UNITES. The firms which entered into CBAs with UNITES expect to receive support on labour management, minimisation of attrition and patronage due to its affiliation with UNI Global. The main objective behind the CBAs is, therefore, to first attract employers towards UNITES and increase the membership of UNITES subsequently. Here, we can see a reverse strategy from the conventional CBA process, as the CBAs are designed and agreed upon after the workers are organised. It appears to be a new experiment from UNITES for increasing membership. Such reverse appropriation is again based on the values of non-confrontation and establishing a friendly relationship with employers, propagated by UNITES. It should be mentioned that the CBAs that UNITES signed are very basic guidelines and do not have the potential for perusing the agenda of decent work at present. Nevertheless, what is interesting here is that membership mobilisation through CBAs noticeably changed the membership base of the union due to the shift of focus to lower-level workers in the ITES sector. The chapter argues that this was a natural process of class formation within the union, though UNITES still identifies with the values of professionalism. There are some important reasons behind this process. The strategy of creating CBAs was adopted to increase the membership base of the union by attracting large firms. This, however, did not work. Small domestic ITES firms, on the other hand, responded positively to the idea of CBAs since they found that it helped them manage their workers without an HR department. The employees in such firms also differ in class characteristics due to their lower-middle-class background, which in a way opened a space for the union to represent them. In short, even though UNITES continued with its professional philosophy, its base of active membership evolved from the lower rung of the ITES sector. This natural class formation within UNITES seriously contests its positioning as a professional organisation based on the carefully crafted “professional” identity by the industry to discipline and appropriate labour. Although UNITES continues to invoke its professional identity, what has prevented the union to be dormant is its working-class base derived from the ITES sector.

Conclusions The recent incidents of layoffs have shown that the IT industries are highly susceptible to externalities such as recessions and changes in the global division of production and labour, which can lead to various labour cost minimisation practices such as retrenchments, lowering

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of salaries and cuts in perks, like in any other industry. The natural evolution of UNITES from a professional association to a trade union of ITES workers also contributes to the understanding of such labour problems in the highly paid and professionally oriented jobs in the IT sector. The most important outcome is the realisation that the identity of employees in this sector also can boil down to a workman and that professionalism in the Indian IT sector is only a “disciplinary logic” (Fournier 1999), attached with the production and labour practices of advanced capitalism. Reinforcing the workman identity, there were also verdicts from labour courts that IT employees very well come under the purview of the Industrial Disputes Act (IDA).8 However, in some instances, the professional identity attached with such employment leads to ambiguous employment contracts, which even handicaps the terminated employees from seeking relief under the provisions of IDA. All these indicate the loosening of the perception regarding the distinct class nature of employees in the sector, which, to some extent, explains their isolated mobilisations in formal trade union platforms and other informal forums. For instance, it even led to street protests in cities of Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad when Tata Consultancy Services announced layoffs in early 2015. These developments have implications for the ongoing efforts of unionisation even in the lower end of the IT sector, wherein the attributed professional identity of the workers has camouflaged the real employee consciousness. The case of UNITES also brings out two important issues that concern the contemporary alternative labour mobilisations. First is whether such associations, being non-confrontational and politically neutral, can address the disciplinary logics of advanced capitalism, which works in both active and subtle ways to manage labour relations. The UNITES case showed that such an approach would only supplement its new management logics of labour control. The experience of UNITES and the emergence of recent labour issues in the IT sector hence make it essential to re-articulate and address the questions of classes in new trade unionism in India and underlines the importance of adopting labour rights framework in such mobilisations, which could enable them politically engage with the state and employers. The second issue is the heavy external financial dependency of new-generation collective organisations. Most of the alternative mobilisations in the non-conventional and informal sectors in India have been initiated (at least for a period of time) with the knowledge and financial support of international civil society organisations. It must be noted here that UNITES has managed to organise most of its activities through the aid

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received from international funding agencies for the past fifteen years, though the members of the union are relatively better off than other sectors. The chapter argues that UNITES could not make a sense of ownership, which we call “collective consciousness”, among its members by being a non-membership-based organisation and due to the amorphous identity and structure it cultivated, positioning itself as a professional association and most importantly lack of internal democratic structures for consultative decision-making processes. The case of UNITES hence also sheds light on the question of sustainability of externally funded new-generation trade unionism and the apolitical space that it might create.

Notes * The primary information presented in this chapter has been taken from an evaluation study conducted on the organising experience of UNITES with the support of the Finnish Trade Union Solidarity Centre of Finland (SASK). The author would like to thank Seppo Karppinen, programme officer, SASK; Christopher Ng, regional secretary, UNI APRO; JSR Prasad, president, NCU; and Karthik Sekhar, general secretary, UNITES, for their valuable inputs and comments. 1 The author attended the meeting called by the Indian Trade Union Congress (INTUC) for IT professionals in Hyderabad on 4 March 2015. 2 The NIC classification codes from 62011 to 62099 provide information on computer programming, consultancy and related activities; 63111 to 63122 on data processing, hosting and related activities and web portals, which include BPO jobs; and 63991 to 63999 on other related IT-based services such as call centres. The detailed sub-classification as given in NIC are as follows: Computer programming, consultancy and related services include writing, modifying and testing of computer programmes to meet the needs of a particular client, webpage designing, providing software support and maintenance to the clients, computer consultancy and computer facilities management activities, software installation, and planning and designing of computer systems that integrate computer hardware, software and communication technologies. Information service activities include data processing, hosting and related activities; web portals and data entry services. Other information services activities include telephone-based information services, call centres, cyber cafes, etc. Out of the entire IT and related employees 76 per cent are engaged in computer programming, consultancy and related activities; 15 per cent in data processing, hosting and related activities; and 8 per cent in other information service activities including call centres. 3 The major academic works on the organising initiatives by UNITES include Taylor et al. (2008), Noronha and D’Cruz (2009b), James and Vira (2009), D’Cruz and Noronha (2012), Stevens (2014) and Xavier Labour Relations Institute (n.d.). 4 Interview with Karthik Sekhar, general secretary, UNITES, Bangalore on 22 February 2015.

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5 It should be highlighted that there were successes in some cases. For instance, UNITES could successfully negotiate and settle issues in favour of workers with the firms such as 24×7 Ltd, Geospatial Private Ltd and CRANES Ltd. 6 Based on the interview with Christopher Ng, regional secretary, UNIAPRO, Singapore, on 16 February 2015. 7 For details, see the report “Union Formation in Indian Call Centres/ BPO – The Attitudes and Experiences of UNITES Members”, available at www.researchgate.net/ . . . Union_Formation_in_Indian_Call_CentresBPO (accessed on 12 January 2016). 8 Please refer to the verdict of the Additional Labour Court, Chennai, on 10 May 2016 on the case filed by Mr. K. Ramesha against his removal by HCL technologies. The court directed HCL to reinstate his employment and pay all salaries and other benefits due for him. For more details, please see www.mathrubhumi.com/print–edition/india/ chennai–malayalam–news–1.1052465.

References Central Statistical Organisation. 2013. National Accounts Statistics 2013. New Delhi: Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. D’Cruz, P. and Noronha, E. 2009. “Redefining Professionals: The Case of India’s Call Centre Agents”, in Jemielniak, D. and Kociatkiewicz, J. (eds.), Handbook of Research on Knowledge Intensive Organisations, pp. 529–551. Pennsylvania: IGI Global. D’Cruz, P. and Noronha, E. 2012. “High Commitment Management Practices Re-Examined: The Case of Indian Call Centres”, Economic and Industrial Democracy, 3(2): 185–205. Fournier, V. 1999. “The Appeal to ‘Professionalism’ as a Disciplinary Mechanis”, The Sociological Review, 47(2): 280–307. Fuchs, C. 2014. Digital Labour and Carl Marx. New York: Routledge. Gabriel, Y. 1999. “Beyond Happy Families: A Critical Re-Evaluation of the Control – Resistance – Identity Triangle”, Human Relations, 52: 179–203. Golpelwar, M. K. 2016. Global Call Center Employees in India: Work and Life between Globalization and Tradition. Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. The Hindu, February 12. 2015. “Lay off in TCS Condemned”. 2015. www. thehindu.com/news/cities/Hyderabad/layoff– in– tcs– condemned/article 6885044.ece (accessed on 16 July 2015). James, A. and Vira, B. 2009. “Unionising’ the New Spaces of the New Economy? Alternative Labour Organising in India’s IT-Enabled Services – Business Process Outsourcing Industry”, Geoforum, 41: 364–376. Labour Relations Institute. n.d. Collectivisation in the IT Industry: An Indian Perspective. Jamshedpur: XLRI – Xavier School of Management. McMillan, D. 2006. “Outsourcing Identities: Call Centres and Cultural Transformations in India”, Economic and Political Weekly, 41(3): 235–241. Mirchandani, K. 2004. “Practices of Global Capital: Gaps, Cracks and Ironies in Transnational Call Centres in India”, Global Networks, 4(4): 355–373.

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National Sample Survey Organisation. 2012. Employment and Unemployment in India 2011–12. New Delhi: Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government of India. The New Indian Express, January 9. 2015. “TCS Lay-off: Minister Seeks Report”. 2015. (Anilkumar T), www.newindianexpress.com/states/kerala/ TCS– Lay– off– Minister– Seeks– Report/2015/01/09/article2610864.ece (accessed on 16 July 2015). Noronha, E. and D’Cruz, P. 2009a. Employee Identity in Indian Call Centres: The Notion of Professionalism. New Delhi: Response Books. Noronha, E. and D’Cruz, P. 2009b. “Engaging the Professional: Organising Call Centre Agents in India”, Industrial Relations Journal, 40(3): 215–234. Poster, W. P. 2007. “Who’s on the Line? Indian Call Centre Agents Pose as Americans for US-Outsourced Firms”, Industrial Relations, 46(2): 271–304. Pradhan, J. P. and Abraham, V. 2005. “Social and Cultural Impact of Outsourcing: Emerging Issues from Indian Call Centres”, Harvard Asia Quarterly, 9(3): 22–30. Radice, H. 2015. “Class Theory and Class Politics Today”, Socialist Register, 51: 270–292. Ramesh, B. 2004. “Cybercoolies in BPOs”, Economic and Political Weekly, 39(5): 492–497. Reserve Bank of India Monthly Bulletin. “Survey on Computer Software and Information Technology Services Exports (2005–13)”, https://rbidocs.rbi. org.in/rdocs/PressRelease/PDFs/PR135223E9BC2394204C1EB944047DD6 CC4FC2.PDF (accessed on 12 July 2015). Saini, D. S. 2007. “Declining Labour Power and Challenges before Trade Unions: Some Lessons from a Case Study on Private Sector Unionism”, Indian Journal of Industrial Relations, 42(4): 652–677. Stevens, A. J. R. 2014. Call Centres and the Global Division of Labour: A Political Economy of Post-Industrial Employment and Union Organising. New York: Routledge. Taylor, P. and Bain, P. 2008. “Reflections on the Call Centre – A Reply to Gucksmann”, Work, Employment and Society, 21(2): 349–362. Taylor, P., Mulvey, G., Hyman, J. and Bain, P. 2002. “Work Organization, Control and the Experience of Work in Call Centres”, Work Employment and Society, 16(1): 133–150. Taylor, P., Scholarios, D., Noronha, E. and D’Cruz, P. 2008. Union Formation in Indian Call Centres/BPO – The Attitudes and Experiences of UNITES Members. Glasgow: University of Strathclyde Business School and Ahmedabad: Indian Institute of Management (IIM). The Times of India, January 14. 2015. “TCS Layoffs May Exceed 3,000 in FY 2015”, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/jobs/TCS–layoffs–may– exceed–3000–in–FY2015/articleshow/45884644.cms (accessed on 16 July 2015). The Times of India, January 17. 2015. “15,000 “Pink Slips in the Tech Corridor and Still Counting”, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/jobs/15000–

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pink–slips–in–the–tech–corridor–and–still–counting/articleshow/45923202. cms (accessed on 16 July 2015). UNI. 2005. Conditions of Work and Attitude toward Trade Union. Switzerland: UNI APRO Survey on Indian BPO Professionals. Upadhya, C. and Vasavi, A. R. 2006. Work, Culture and Sociality in the Indian IT Industry: A Sociological Study. Bangalore: National Institute of Advanced Studies.

13 Possibilities and barriers of workers’ co-operative Lessons from failed takeover experience of a closed mine in Jharkhand Santanu Sarkar Workforce around the world faced with the odds of closure of their workplace have limited choice where they can either silently endure joblessness or bargain with management for wage–employment tradeoff, or work towards taking over the plant by forming workers’ cooperative (Browning 1987; Ranis 2005; Atzeni and Ghigliani 2007). The significance of the third alternative (namely co-operative) has grown dramatically in the recent years (George 1982; Stephen 1984; Atzeni and Ghigliani 2007; Fields 2008; Navarra 2011; Hammer 2012). It has emerged as an alternative to (i) an inequitable capitalist firm (Edwards 1979), (ii) authoritarian hierarchy of a modern corporation (Vanek 1975; Horvat 1976, 1980) and (iii) the shareholderbased capitalism (Hammer 2012). Co-operative is also perceived as a substitute to both unemployment and working-class impoverishment (Ranis 2005). The success of plywood industry co-operative in the Pacific North–West in the United States (Berman 1967), co-operatives in reviving British sick industries (Bhowmik 1989), the Yugoslavian system of self-management (Horvat 1976), the Mondragon group of co-operatives in Spain (Ellerman 1984; Greenwood 1992; Forcadell 2005), the development initiative in running sugar and cotton cooperatives in western India (Attwood and Baviskar 1987; Ebrahim 2000) and the emergence of reclaimed enterprises in Argentina (Ranis 2005; Atzeni and Ghigliani 2007; Fields 2008), and similar other experiments, confirm that this form of enterprise is economically successful under certain circumstances (George 1982). But, how far the third alternative is practicable and workable is less known to many. On ruminating over takeover option, the first apprehension is whether the option will appeal to the risk-averse workers to acquire a firm that generates negative expected profits (see Browning 1987). Second, the financial feasibility of proposed buying or takeover may not appeal

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equally to all stakeholders including the erstwhile employer, especially in cases where the erstwhile employer’s strategic support is critical to the co-operative’s success. Third, the co-operatives in capital-intensive industrial sectors such as mining are more likely to struggle financially because of the large capital investment that is necessary for them to compete with the traditional firms. Finally, the significance of co-operative itself is contested time and again, as the debate between the proponents and sceptics of co-operative has remained at a high level of abstraction (Hammer 2012). Though a great deal of evidence is descriptive and anecdotal, yet there are enough examples of conspicuous failure to indicate that workers’ co-operative is not a panacea for all ills (Fusfeld 1983) of industrial closure. The key questions therefore revolve around their alternative potential as an emancipatory organisational form, their sustainability in a hostile market-oriented environment where they need to generate counter-institutional support (Hammer 2012). Existing literature has time and again argued against as well as in favour of worker-managed enterprises. Varied interpretations were derived from the difference between a traditional capitalist and a labour-managed firm. Nevertheless, we hardly know the factors that have caused the cooperatives’ failure. Evidence discussed in the bulk of literature on workermanaged firms has usually referred to cases of successful co-operatives. There are several cases of layoffs, closure and subsequent reopening of mines in India (Bhowmik 1994). However, what makes the case of Novel Minerals Ex-Workers Co-operative Society in Jharkhand, which is a case for study here, unique was that it was not formed with the help of a process driven by ex-workers or its union alone, but with the support extended by the government and former employer. Among the many reasons to be optimistic about the proposed takeover of Novel Mineral Project (NM Project) of Novel Minerals Ltd. (NML) by Novel Minerals Ex-Workers Co-operative Society (or Co-operative) is the fact that one out of the first lot of files, which the newly appointed chief minister of Jharkhand studied after taking oath of his office, was the Co-operative’s proposal. This happened within a month of registration of the Co-operative and subsequent submission of a memorandum by the Co-operative to the Ministry of Mines and Geology, Government of India. Erstwhile employers’ optimism to defend the Co-operative was spontaneous too. In spite of an extremely promising profile, which the Co-operative maintained at the initial stage of its formation, the Co-operative has hitherto not witnessed any formal operations. This chapter, drawing from a field study, analyses a range of plausible factors that have worked against the functioning of NM Project Co-operative and to which the eventual failure of the Co-operative

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can be attributed to. They pertain largely to the external conditions, organisational issues and the participants. The only external condition studied was the extent to which the legal ownership vis-à-vis liability is divided between the separated workers who formed the Cooperative and the erstwhile employer who promised to make certain concessionary offers to the Co-operative. The organisational factors studied were the fiscal compatibility of workers’ proposal of takeover and the distribution relations, namely how the revenue generated by the Co-operative shall get distributed among its members. Finally the members’ appetite for risk and the Co-operative’s approach towards boosting members’ risk appetite, plus the human resource at the disposal of the co-operative, were the two critical participant dispositions examined.

Workers’ co-operative in India According to the International Co-operative Alliance a co-operative is “an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs, and aspirations through a jointly – owned and democratically – controlled enterprise” (ICA 2011). Such co-operative is indeed fairly recent in India (Bhowmik and Sarker 2002). Workers’ co-operatives are appealing in many ways, but they are rare over the years in India (Gulati et al. 2002). There are examples of workers’ co-operatives in industries such as textile, plantation, small and a few large-scale industrial units (see Sen 1986; Attwood and Baviskar 1987; Banaji 1987; Bhowmik 1989, 1991; Kannan 1992; Rajaram 1999; Ebrahim 2000; Gulati et al. 2002; Mayya 2002; Shah 2007), but there are large areas where results have been more mixed (Hammer 2012). According to Srinivas (1993) and Fields (2008), the worker takeover under a co-operative set-up is a “pragmatic response” to industrial closure rather than an ideological reaction for establishing selfmanagement. Mayya (2002: 2056) appropriately pointed out the deficiency of a developing economy in providing alternative employment to workers affected by closure. Against this backdrop, the Sick Industrial Companies Act (SICA) of 19851 in India has a provision stating that the Bureau of Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR), Government of India, may hand over a sick company to its workers when they form a co-operative for managing it. Nevertheless, takeover as a “rescue” attempt has always been fraught with more obstacles in comparison to an enterprise with a new beginning (Srinivas 1993). The current literature draws attention to the fact that there are certain key

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aspects on which a co-operative could be examined and these include the governance structure, level of control and delegation, nature and extent of management of capital and labour, and the role of state and/ or erstwhile company in influencing the nature and trajectory of the co-operative (Attwood and Baviskar 1987; Ebrahim 2000; Bhowmik and Sarker 2002; Hammer 2012).

The case of Novel Mineral Project The Novel Mineral Project (NM Project) is an erstwhile project of Novel Minerals Limited (NML), which is a public sector undertaking. The project is situated in Jharkhand. Besides an underground mine, the NM Project includes a concentrator plant and infrastructural facilities for the family of workers like school for workers’ children, quarters, community centre, club house, post office, etc. The NM Project was treated as a healthy project of NML until late 1990s, when there was an intense decline in the mineral (the one which NML produces) prices in London Metal Exchange (LME). Price of the mineral in LME is critical to Indian business since the exchange regulates the price in the Indian market. The prices did not stop plummeting until early 2000 by when the domestic Indian market was also occupied by a couple of private players who started giving a tough competition to NML. Besides, the project in Jharkhand began underperforming, as a result of which both production capacity and cost got affected. While the former dipped, the latter soared.2 These in general made production operation in NM Project economically unviable causing unremitting losses for nine long years. Finally, NML succumbed to the losses and bit the bullet by taking a very hard way to close down the operations of NM Project. This action was echoed by the National Committee constituted by the Government of India to study the economics of nonferrous metal industry in the country. In its report submitted in 1994, the committee reported that NML should take further measure to improve its cost effectiveness by closing down the uneconomical underground mines in the Eastern Sector. The company, following the legal provisions, declared closure of its Eastern Project Site. In order to avoid retrenchment of employees on account of closure, the company launched a voluntary retirement scheme (VRS). The employee separation scheme promised to deliver a sizeable compensation, which was almost three times the closure compensation payable under law, namely fifteen days of average pay for every completed year of service. Since the majority of employees working in the NM Project were nearing retirement, it made the VRS extra attractive to them. They got enticed by the hefty

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sum payable under VRS over and above the regular pension, provident fund and gratuity as per the labour laws applicable in mines. The company could reach a favourable conclusion. All 36 executives and 594 workmen opted for the VRS, and with the release of 630 employees, the company shut down its operations in the NM Project. This was conceivably the state, which seemed to have provided necessary conditions for the kind of study that the authors were planning to conduct. Launching of the workers’ co-operative Usually, an enterprise which is on the verge of closure faces a strong resistance from its trade unions against closing the unit. While the company tries closing down by paying a minimum severance pay to its workers, the workers or their union, on the other hand, make desperate attempts to pressurise employer not to shut down the operations by going on strike or filing litigation or insisting on rehabilitating or modernising the unit by even applying to the government, or at worse make management withhold back closure decision at the cost of downsizing the unit. Neither recognised unions nor two other unions, which were not recognised by the company, surprisingly, have tried out any of the means discussed earlier. Rather they negotiated for VRS compensation with management. Such an indifferent attitude could be largely attributed to the VRS compensation that was then managed by the company’s Employee Assistance Scheme (EAS), which guaranteed a monthly return from the annuity almost equivalent to their monthly wage. However, the salvage operations relating to the underground equipment could not be carried out due to the resistance from ex-workers. These ex-workers though were subsequently released after opting for VRS, but it was the first incidence of resistance from them. Close to six months post closure, the recognised union, which was affiliated to a Marxist central (national) labour federation, mooted a proposal for workers’ co-operative to reopen the closed mine. The general secretary of the recognised union got a boost after meeting the company’s managing director. This was met with enthusiasm by the separated workers of NM Project who without any delay formed a co-operative society under the name of Novel Mines Ex-Workers Welfare Independent Co-operative Society (or Co-operative). The union now had to ensure that the Co-operative is registered. In the next few weeks the Co-operative got registered under the State Act. And it submitted a memorandum to the Ministry of Mines and Geology, Government of India. In order to get their plan of reopening the closed mine and concentrator plant materialised, the

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group of separated workers worked out a proposal that contained some favourable deals on offer. With the closure of the mine and the concentrator plant, not only the entire workforce got terminated but the ex-workers’ unions had no concrete agenda to remain active. However, the former recognised union’s office bearers, who were instrumental in setting up the Co-operative, were passionate in steering the movement. Officials of the Co-operative were nominated by the former recognised union. The union offered external support to the newly formed Co-operative. The Co-operative officials had somewhat mustered the ability to lead a movement by remaining close to the former recognised union. Therefore, all through the process of cooperative formation and its functioning, the former recognised union was actively supporting the Co-operative’s members and espousing their cause. As per the proposed plan, the Co-operative would generate a share capital of around Rs 17.5 million (Indian rupee) as seed money through individual contribution. The contribution from the Co-operative’s together with support from the State Government would take care of the initial cost of Rs 45 million. The proposal also suggested a reduction in manpower by around 45 per cent and a wage freeze with proposed labour cost equal to 25 per cent of the wage paid by NML before closure. This was not new, as in the past, we have seen successful workers’ co-operatives were very scrupulous in utilising loans and grants by which in a short span they were able to achieve production figures that were higher than those of private sector. Supplementing the aforementioned, the Co-operative, however, made specific assumptions about power subsidy, royalty and tax exemptions, which are discussed later in the chapter. Although the Co-operative’s proposal to run the closed mine is in itself a laudable initiative echoing the courage and an unpretentious concern of exworkers to endure the pain of joblessness and at the same time remain buoyant in the prevalent raging atmosphere, nevertheless there were a number of mistakes made by the Co-operative in the direction of reopening the closed mine. We will discuss these at a later point in time in this chapter. Nevertheless, the Co-operative at the end has not received any assurance and commitment from any quarter and the scheme has failed to set off, and the voices of 360 ex-workers of NM Project were unheard. Though far from conclusive, yet the case of takeover of NM Project is evocative enough to merit further study. In the following sections the author has tried to detect the reasons behind the Co-operative’s failure by going over a series of plausible factors, which they have identified at the beginning of the chapter.

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Apportionment of ownership and liability between separated workers and company At the onset, the authors intend to ascertain the extent to which the company’s proposal to the Co-operative has demoralised and discouraged the members especially when they gauge their legal ownership over the means of production vis-à-vis their liabilities towards the company while possessing the property. Before getting to the lease agreement, the author initially suspected if mining lease in India as per law can be transferred by a central PSU to a co-operative. Per Sec 5 of the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act/ MMDRA, in case of an association of individuals, all members of the association need to be citizens of India. A co-operative society being an association of individuals first of all is a person within the meaning of the said Act and hence mining lease can be granted. However, Section 5 of MMDRA when read along with Rule 37 and Rule 46 suggests that NML being a central PSU would require an approval of both central and state governments before transferring the lease and, in case the mining lease is transferred, it will be the obligation of the transferee (or leasee) to adhere to the norms of mine safety and comply with various formalities for operation of the mine under the Mines Act and Rules. It will also be the obligation of the Cooperative to pay the Royalty and Dead Rent under Sec 9 and Sec 9(A) of the MMDRA. So, allowing the separated workers to run the mine through a co-operative set up shall not create a legal right. Therefore, one can gather that even if in an average lease agreement, all members of a co-operative usually obtain the status of legal owners (or effective controllers of the means of production), or, as argued by Bapuji (1997), majority of them shall be the legal owners nominally while the effective control of means of production shall be vested in the hands of few, in the given case it was way far different. The company retained control over the value of assets and means of production, and the Co-operative was expected to perform multiple obligations like the ones discussed before. This inadvertently helped the company to retain its power to keep a check on the quality of minerals produced by the Co-operative starting from planning to supply of concentrate to the smelter plant of NML in the neighbourhood (namely performing indirect supervision). The majority of separated workers were not at ease with the obligations enforced on their Co-operative, especially the clauses like furnishing indemnity bond towards safe custody of NML property, which otherwise meant a direct inspection right that NML can exercise over the Co-operative’s operations. In the words of

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the ex-workers, the most perilous part in the company’s lease agreement was the clause that read as: In the event of dissolution of the Co–operative or winding up of the operation by the Co–operative, all equipment, structures, buildings, etc., to be handed over by NML to the Co–operative for its use will have to be returned by the Co–operative to NML in good and un–tampered condition. (per draft lease agreement) As suggested before (e.g. Attwood and Baviskar 1987), success of producers’ co-operatives, in particular, depends on the interest alliance among producers of establishments of different sizes, and such coalitions work since they are made necessary by limitations in the production as found in the case of sugar factories in Maharashtra, where a large number of small and medium farmers stopped supplying (sugar) cane to factories in Maharashtra resulting in a crisis. So, the large and small enterprises normally form alliances to meet common economic interests. Considering this argument, when authors tried to find out if the NML’s demand for low-cost mineral in concentrate (MiC) would pave the way to coalition formation between the large enterprise (NML) and the small Co-operative, the scenario presented by the case facts was quite disappointing. NML at the time of data collection was importing 9,000 tonnes of the MiC per annum to supplement the indigenous production from its plants at other locations in neighbouring states. It would be therefore desirable for the company to explore other possible sources for indigenous production of the MiC to reduce dependence on costly imports. So, why NML failed in leveraging from the Co-operative’s supply of low priced MiC? One has to understand that being a central PSU, NML is overprotected by the state’s patronage (Vachani 1997: 171) and hence is less troubled by the financial difficulties (see Bhagwati and Desai 1970; Ahluwalia 1988; Vachani 1997: 171–172). They benefited from political protection and favours in the forms of subsidies (Vachani 1997: 171), exclusive reservation that virtually eliminated competition (Vachani 1997), restrictions on FDI (Vachani 1997: 170) and restriction on import and capacity licensing (Bhagwati and Desai 1970; Ahluwalia 1988; Vachani 1997: 172) that resulted in scale-related cost advantages. In addition, owing to the vast resources put at their disposal by the government and because of its tolerance for loss-making operation (Rao and Madhavi 1990; Jalan 1991; Vachani 1997), PSUs were

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able to create asset-based entry barriers. At the same time, the administrative control of the central government makes NML more bureaucratic with their hands tightened. For even a small process innovation, PSUs have to seek required approval from ministries, leave alone for a major strategic decision making like sourcing raw materials. While PSUs benefit from their relationship with the government, that relationship (can also) reduce their strategic flexibility (Vachani 1997: 171). Hence, NML could not evolve with an attractive proposal on property relation for the Co-operative, which a large enterprise of Attwood and Baviskar (where convergence of shareholders’ interest with the objective of co-operative stands out as the sole concern of both the parties [see Gillis et al. 1982; Vachani 1997]) would usually offer to small producers’ co-operative. Commercials of the takeover proposal as worked out by the co-operative As discussed elsewhere in the chapter, the NML’s demand for lowpriced raw materials would have led to a win–win situation for both the company and the Co-operative where procuring MiC from its own site would have been highly competitive for NML with lesser transportation and re-handling costs. But the proposition, as we found in the previous section, has not worked in favour of both the parties. During the field study, the authors collected several documentary evidence. Using them, they conducted sensitivity analyses3 of profitability at varying levels of the selling price of MiC by the Co-operative to the company and the feasibility of their operation that offered insight in how far the takeover proposal is financially compatible. The results confirmed that it would have been logically viable for NML to support the separated workers in reopening the closed mine with the help of Co-operative. In the analyses, the authors have modestly treated certain factors like sale price of MiC by the Co-operative to NML, cost of production, landed cost of imported MiC to NML and annual estimated production of MiC by the Co-operative as constants, and then found that both the parties (NML and Co-operative) at the end of the day would attain significant profit margins. The authors arrived at this finding even without considering the reduced cost of production of MiC by the Co-operative owing to the moderated wage level of the Co-operative in comparison to that of NML. Interestingly, however, discounting the likelihood of increased profitability for the Co-operative hasn’t affected authors’ analyses much as compared to authors’ failure to notice the extravagant assumptions,

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which the Co-operative made at the start. These are assumptions that the Co-operative made with respect to subsidy that they hope to obtain from the state government, which authors deciphered during the second round of analyses of the data. The Co-operative assumed in its proposal that the Jharkhand State Electricity Board would give a power subsidy to the tune of 50 per cent, thereby expecting a substantial reduction in the cost of power from Rs 3 million (under NML) to Rs 1.1 million (under Co-operative). The Co-operative’s members have also assumed that the Co-operative would get a 70 per cent subsidy on royalty at Rs 2,000 per ton of mineral, thereby reducing the royalty from Rs 0.27 million (under NML) to Rs 0.09 million (under Co-operative). In its proposal it has also mentioned that the Co-operative would be able to reduce general overheads from Rs 0.105 million (under NML) to Rs 0.06 million (under Co-operative) with tax exemption being given by the state government for a period of five years. However, as there was no assurance or confirmation from any authority including the state machinery, the authors believe that most of these have remained only in the realm an “assumption”. In addition, with dewatering and maintenance of shafts and levels, the mine could be revived, which indirectly hints towards an additional requirement of certain repair, maintenance and replacements in order to make the mine and concentrator plant operational. The proposed capital cost for revival was found to be approximately Rs 165.5 million, which includes cost of reviving mine (namely Rs 51 million) and repairing the concentrator plant (namely Rs 114.5 million). With the estimated staggering cost of reviving, the assessment so far done (using sensitivity analysis) all at once got lopsided towards cost, more so, as there would be a requirement for capacity enhancement to improve productivity with modernisation in future, which would require additional cash. So, financial feasibility of the project and fiscal compatibility leave the Co-operative in the lurch. Unable to meet up with the projected cost for revival and that of future operation the Co-operative had no choice but to hold the operation until someone lends a helping hand. The ex-workers understood that it would require a constant flow of investments, which need to be lined up, but none of the members interviewed had a clue of the source of these funds. In this connection, it has been learnt that the representatives of ex-workers held a meeting with the Secretary, Mines and Geology, state government. However, no concrete proposal has been received from the Co-operative either by the state government or by the Ministry of Mines, Government of India, till the time of data collection. In a situation, where the government

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has indirectly expressed its inability and the company besides their support (as explained in the previous section) have nothing to offer, the question is all about what best can the Co-operative orchestrate to sustain. So, will the market borrowing be the last option to explore apart from the members’ contribution? When the separated workers got the Co-operative registered, their initial plan was to collect Rs 48,600, each from 360 willing members, making it to a total of Rs 17.5 million preserved as a corpus fund. However we must note that the contribution expected from the members was a substantial portion of the VRS compensation that they received on their cessation from service. Besides, under no circumstance financial capital hold by separated workers can be compared with the one held by investors in traditional firms. Nevertheless, compared to market borrowings the initial plan appears more pragmatist, especially if we consider the bleak chances of external funding sources getting convinced with the Co-operative’s proposal. As noted by Ben–ner (1988) and Gulati et al. (2002: 12), in conditions where worker-managed firms are rare, the financial institutions usually turn reluctant to lend money, primarily on account of intensified moral hazard and high transaction costs. From the members’ point of view too, having a huge loan from an external financial institution might leave the members of the Co-operative at the mercy of the banks. As one ex-worker during interview revealed: We know it is difficult to come to terms with the harsh reality that tomorrow if we don’t perform as per bank’s expectations, they might start exerting de facto influence and exercise final control on our operation as it happened in other cases of failed co-operative movement in the country. He was right as in the case of Kamani, there were only two representatives of the co-operative against two nominees of government, one representative each of bank and IDBI and three professional experts in the interim committee constituted by the Board of Industrial and Financial Restructuring (Bhowmik 1989). In the worst case where the Co-operative fails to meet the expectations of the lenders, the individual members theoretically having ownership over the profit earned by the Co-operative may find them into a legal quagmire where the lenders could sue the Co-operative to recover the amount lent. Overall, we found that financial difficulties did contribute in jeopardizing the Co-operative’s plan to kick-start its operation.

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Sharing of revenue Among the several faraway expectations, which pathfinders of the movement had from the members, the one with regard to the wages payable to members was quite critical. As per their proposal workers would agree for 25 per cent of their last drawn wages (namely approximately Rs 4,320 per month). So, in examining the distribution relations, the authors’ main idea was to figure out if “division of labour vis-à-vis the principle of co-operation” posed any major threat to the Co-operative’s operation. At the outset, it is necessary to inform our readers that countries such as Argentina, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Yugoslavia have specific national laws on co-operatives that helped in setting principles of internal organisation to decide on the distribution of profit among members of co-operatives. The Indian judiciary, however, is silent on the matter of distribution relations in worker-managed enterprise. The authors decided to take up the matter of distribution relation primarily to understand how the co-operative borrowed ideas to perform its liabilities. This was done after finding that the pipeline that would bring in expertise (technical and managerial) to the Co-operative was dry due to low levels of pay on offer by the Co-operative to managers and engineers. Navarra (2011) highlighted the capacity of a co-operative to provide collective goods for the community. These include social insurance mechanisms such as internal pension funds, activities for elderly and holidays for the members’ children. On the contrary the authors found that the Co-operative’s proposal post finalising the median pay has paid no heed to the grade and pay levels, leave alone the fringe benefits. Members of the Co-operative voted to decide on wage, largely echoing the interest of an average member of the Co-operative. The concern here is that over a period of time, this pattern could result in a wage structure that transfers from a highly productive to less productive, which is an egalitarian compensation structure (Kremer 1997). There is likely to be an adverse selection effect with the result that the less productive and lazier workers flock to the Co-operative. Provisions to take care of members’ priorities were ignored too. The proposal excludes even bare social security/insurance measures like accident insurance, medical (hospitalisation) coverage under the “Universal Health Insurance Scheme” of the central government under which not only the regular but even the contract labours engaged by the erstwhile employer used to get covered. Normally, in a condition where increasing economic crisis has led to workers’ takeover of closed factory, workers were found to have

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helped in building up the viability of a firm by deferring a large portion of wages to run the closed unit. But does the argument fit well in the given case? Perhaps no, since the closure of the NM Project, was neither a consequence of a great financial fiasco, nor a situation that fosters wage freeze as a justification for operational sustenance. So much so, the majority ex-workers were willing and eager to look out for employment in the adjacent factories and mines, no matter whether the terms of employment are contractual, casual or temporary. Jensen and Meckling’s (1979) argument is in favour of capitalist firm in comparison to the worker-managed enterprise when they suggested that the level of production of the former would be more than that of the latter, primarily because of the decline in “marginal product of labour” (which is the change in output that results from employing an added unit of labour). The decline is a result of an increase in firm output on account of capital endowment available in large capitalist enterprises. As a result, the workers will be reluctant to accept reduced wage. In addition, the firm output stops at some point on the declining segment of the average cost curve. Although scholars such as Ranis (2005), Atzeni and Ghigliani (2007) and Fields (2008) argue in favour of co-operative suggesting that the motive of maintaining or increasing the number of jobs prevails over wage maximisation as a prominent motive of co-operative, yet for Fusfeld (1983) the optimum level of output need not be the one at which “profits” get maximised. Except in a small number of production enterprises in China during the Cultural Revolution, in every single other workers’ co-operative, there has been a hierarchical division of labour in terms of administrative versus performance tasks and mental versus manual labour. Taking cues from the work done by Forcadell (2005), Lampel et al. (2010) and Erdal (2011) one may argue that as seen in both Mondragon and other cases of workers’ co-operatives, if infrastructural and financial support is extended on time, worker-managed enterprises can produce more than the conventional capitalist firms. Unfortunately in the given case, the infrastructure needed to restart the mining operation was available only from the erstwhile employer provided the Co-operative agrees to follow the “conditions”, most of which were discussed in the previous section. Hence, for all practical purpose, the supporting infrastructure was not available to the Co-operative. There was also no trace of backing from any financial institution including the state government, who was expected by the Co-operative to offer a number of subsidies. Therefore, not paying heed to external, internal or employee equity and a hierarchical division of labour in terms of mental versus manual labour were proven to be detrimental to the entrepreneurial

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characteristics of the Co-operative. Cornforth (1995), however, suggests that certain co-operatives in the United Kingdom continued to thrive even with the practice of equal pay for all workforce members. But authors have got two arguments to counter the same. First, the issues of pay equity and division of labour are related to possible assumptions in managerialism. Cronforth’s study had part-time managers who managed a small group of trained workers. In contrast in the proposed Co-operative, there was a requirement of full-time professional managers. They are relevant especially in a place of work where hard managerialism with hierarchical structures was practiced as part of labour control. Second, the proposed Co-operative that could not even arrange funds for regular operation was likely to face difficulties in preparing the worker-members to get trained in self-management to manage a large complex operation of mining. Assessing the uncertainty The focus in this section is to examine whether the (lack of) sensitivity of the leaders of the movement towards individual differences (particularly their risk-taking ability) of 360 members has triggered a split that finally went against the venture. Sugden (1998) explains the inclination of the members in investing their paltry savings into working capital for running the Co-operative. According to him, the members’ inspiration is descending from a set of “normative expectations”, which are the shared belief of a group to stick to a set norm and condemn any kind of infringement of the norm irrespective of individual gain. Fields (2008) called it a “we-rationality” where one demands the normal members to perform consistently with their belonging to the group (Navarra 2011). The authors suspect whether every member had a similar “appetite for risk” and would equally believe in investing his savings, rather than rationally assessing his payoff. On enquiring it was found that the elected leaders of the movement failed to perform their “homework” before assuming that all 360 separated workers belonging to different quarters of existing company have a common agenda to follow one set of norms established by the Co-operative. It is equally arguable that members of the Co-operative may not pursue a sole objective of profit maximisation unlike what the shareholders in traditional firms usually end up doing. The Co-operative’s members normally have a wide variety of goals to accomplish which include wages, pension, health benefits, child care, furthering political cause, extending solidarity, etc. Countering the argument, Erdal (2011) claimed that profit maximising in a worker-managed enterprise is

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more associated with workers’ interests in comparison to a traditional capitalist firm. But there was nothing extraordinary found among the separated workers (e.g. a natural bonding) that would induce them to work hard for increasing the total revenue of the Co-operative instead of looking at the individual pay-offs, a finer aspect that arise from worker–democrat discourse as opposed to a managerialist discourse. As Gulati et al. (2002) cautioned, the authors do suspect that the decision making often might get decelerated on account of improvident conflicts, which are largely attributed to an inevitable disparity of goals between members and the co-operative. Besides, for many, this investment is sought to be made from the limited resources at their disposal, which were the only means of survival (and meeting unforeseen contingencies of life) for the majority of separated workers. This all the more lay emphasis on the need to park the funds prudently (and in safe investments). Hence, the big volume of savings pulled into working capital for making the Co-operative functional corresponds to a direct cost for the member. Members though do it for the common good; the benefits for them get eventually diluted within the group. Furthermore, it was not the predispositions entrenched in the managerialist mindset, which the ex-workers have confronted with, but the sheer laidback leadership that pushed the members to uncertainties. For instance, the allocational efficiency of a worker-managed enterprise in comparison to a conventional capitalist firm was never deliberated upon in any of the Co-operative’s preliminary meetings. According to Ellerman (1984), the co-operative, when faced with market competition in the capitalist system, has often fallen apart. This is appropriate in a condition where the movement has a support base made of labour union affiliated to a political party with members commonly volunteering at the preliminary phase of registration and submission of proposal, instead of considering them and others as the Co-operative’s worker-members (see Cornforth’s disagreement with the idea of degeneration). Also, one of the significant outcomes of the Co-operative’s proposal cast doubts among majority members and that was the fact that ex-workers were not prudent businessmen, but were mostly manual workers. Their typical workplace was ruled by professional managerialism over workplace democracy. Shortfall of technical and managerial expertise One of the critical points of consideration while undertaking to run a project of greater magnitude is the availability of managerial, entrepreneurial and technical competencies. In the final step, the authors

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analysed the information available from interviews and discussion with NML personnel and ex-workers to check if a shortage of required functional expertise has any role to perform against the Co-operative’s functioning. During the first few meetings with ex-workers, particularly those who spearheaded the movement, the authors could gather that members were apparently firm on accomplishing their goal of reopening the closed mine. The presence of local political leaders with the help of former union leaders who have affiliation to the political party boosted their confidence. But political parties are not prepared in providing anything beyond solidarity. Though mostly falling in the age bracket of 50–55 years, the members seemed determined, showing no sign of feebleness. Nevertheless, the Co-operative soon realised that the need to get young managers and technicians on board was of utmost importance. Even though one group of scholars has argued in favour of worker participation suggesting that labour brings rich experience to workplace and a great deal of knowledge about production, which is usually not available with managers, yet the other group claim that “participation is counterweight to productivity-diminishing managerial decisions motivated by the status and power goals of managers” (Sarkar and Ghosh 2014: 14). Contrasting the co-operatives’ initiatives in countries like Argentina, which were successful in offering both technical and financial support to their members soon after the formation of co-operative (Ranis 2005; Fields 2008), there was no similar assistance obtained by the members from any corner in the case of NM Project Co-operative until the time of data collection. As explained by Hammer (2012) one of the reasons could be the dominance of producers’ co-operative in the region over other forms of cooperative. Besides, majority white-collar staffs (ex-managers of NML) were apprehensive of the situation from the day the Co-operative was formed. Ex-executives’ notions add on to an absolute managerialist discourse in the first place. So the authors noticed sheer managerialism displayed by the ex-managers on one hand and the worker democracy that was profoundly visible among those who steered the co-operative movement on the other hand. But more pragmatist views appeared from a conversation with a handful of ex-executives. The conversations were very candid. According to them, managing the day-to-day operations of a big mine and concentrator plant involve far complex functions of quality, cost, maintenance and sales, than running an abandoned tea garden that encompasses a far less complicated production process about which the workers seemed to be more knowledgeable than their managers. This is a point where ex-executives express the hard managerialism4 as opposed to workplace democracy.

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It is important to note that majority of the separated workers who promised to contribute their paltry savings to reopen the closed mine were illiterate and it was not just a part of a managerialist discourse to justify and promote “professional managerialism”. Even though the ex-executives’ sentiments are mostly an offshoot of a typical managerialist approach, the Co-operative’s reaction concerning the managers’ assumptions was conferred on their ability to rope in at best few exmanagers of the NM Project. Within a week of registration of the Cooperative, the leaders of the movement approached close to two dozen ex-executives. According to Fusfeld (1983), the shift to a system where workers exert larger influence over production processes lead to reduction in the number and cost of managers at workplace. Even so, the ratio of managers to workers in the erstwhile NM Project was already low in comparison to the industry average. Therefore, ex-executives of NML have the potential to deliver and fill the technical gaps considering that they are professionally qualified and have sufficient experience. There were two sources of managerial expertise for the co-operative: internal (ex-executives) and external. But, will the ex-executives join up the movement like their blue-collar counterparts? Ex-executives can certainly “feel for the cause” and tender their support to the Cooperative with lesser pay on offer in return for higher expertise provided there is unity among the separated managers and workers and they share equal amount of vulnerability. The authors couldn’t trace any of the two among the managers who have opted for VRS. Since many of them were residents of other states, consequent upon their release they preferred to settle down at places closer to home instead of staying back in a remote location as that of the NM Project site. Since they were professionally and technically qualified, backed by their long years of experience, a majority were in search for jobs looking for a salary at par with what they would have received from NML had they not taken VRS. However, to no one’s surprise the Co-operative would be the last place for them to try for an opening as the worker-managed mine would not have been able to pay up to their expectation. Besides, those managers who have retired from other locations and units of NML and settled in places close to NM Project site were approached too. But once again the low salary on offer by the Co-operative turned out to be the biggest bottleneck. Beyond the boundaries of rationality where managers cared only about the salary exist the attitudinal biases that held back most from coming to terms with the fact that an organisation of workers would be able to run the complex mining operations. A few of them ridiculed the initiative by equating it with the dabbawalas and suggesting that it is not a child’s play to operate

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a mine and plant as it is with distributing tiffin boxes day after day. One even termed the attempts as a sheer “fantasy”, which in short sums up the reactions of ex-managers and reflects a hard managerialist attitude. Coming from a hierarchical organisational set-up, with large power–distance culture, it was quite a job for many to accept the idea of working under worker bosses, where their promotion decision and performance evaluation shall be in the hands of those who sometime back were a bunch of ordinary workers.

Conclusions Among the key issues that kept troubling the Co-operative from the beginning, the significant one was the dearth of financial resource such as working capital and human resources including administrative and technical personnel (engineers). Reopening a closed mine and bringing it back to a functional form call for intense capital investment and hence a co-operative in the mining industry will soon turn susceptible to vagaries of private investors unless it makes the investments, which banks allow the conventional capitalist firms to make. In the given case, we witnessed the difficulty that the Co-operative had in getting off the ground owing to lack of initial capital. None of the banks evinced interest in lending capital to the Co-operative. On the organisational front, the leaders and their followers seemed to have not attained a fair consensus over property and distribution relation, nor did they understand each other well. The Co-operative’s inability to eliminate the tenet of “division of labour” and internal pay equity resulted in them failing to thrive on expertise. If the wage rate that majority voted for reflects the interests of a median worker, the Cooperative should have paid more attention to pay equity. Since they didn’t, their resultant compensation structure failed to retain the 360 willing members after some time, leave alone the engineers and managers. NML being overprotected financially by the state plus its deep bureaucracy did not allow it to come with an attractive proposition. Consequently the Co-operative turned edgy over the proposed apportionment of legal ownership and effective control of production of the NML’s agreement. However, the members showed readiness to surrender to the market borrowings as they had no other choice, knowing well that market borrowings could ruin their future with lenders exercising de facto control over the Co-operative after some time. Not just that, in case the Co-operative fails to meet its own expectation, it would snowball into a major social problem in an already deeply divided society.

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The Co-operative though made an effort to combine state, employer and workers; it stumbled upon numerous blocks, some of which were elaborated in this chapter over a period of time. These are intriguing features, which have enthralled separated workers but have failed to thrive in a long run. Therefore one can suitably conclude that the inability of the worker (democratic) discourse to surmount the managerialist discourse has resulted in the failure of the Co-operative.

Notes 1 The SICA has been enacted in the public interest to deal with the problems of industrial sickness with regard to the crucial sectors where public money is locked up. 2 Total mineral produced at the Project site over a period of 20 years was of the order of 4.05 million tons. Percentage grade of mineral fell from a maximum of 1.35 in 1982–83 to a minimum of 0.81 in 1993–94. 3 Sensitivity analysis is the study of how the uncertainty in the output of a system can be apportioned to different sources of uncertainty in its inputs. 4 Hard approach to managerialism, where institutional management has “resolved to reshape and redirect the activities [of their institutions] through funding formulas and other mechanisms of accountability imposed from outside the academic community – management mechanisms created, and largely shaped, for application to large commercial enterprises” (Trow 1994: 12).

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14 Uprisings by women in tea plantations Contextualising the Pombilai Orumai movement in Kerala Jithin G. The tea plantation sector in Kerala has undergone several changes in its structure and organisation since colonial times, which have also brought about significant changes in labour relations. The industry which started to operate in the south Indian states in the mid-nineteenth century found potential labour source in the recruited Tamil labourers. The Tamil immigrant workers, mostly from Sri Lanka, have been kept under the bondage of feudal relations inside the estates, and the plantation managements have continued to discipline the labour force through coercive methods (Raman 2002). The trade unionism in the sector has, undoubtedly, loosened the feudal labour relations of colonial origin in the plantations. It is true that as compared to the colonial era, the post-independence period had accorded certain legal protection to the workers, though in a limited fashion. For instance, the wage pattern for workers is far better in Kerala as compared to the other tea-growing states of India. It should, however, be mentioned that the tea plantation sector in Kerala was not free from the larger re-organisations that happened in the global tea trade from time to time and its manifestations in production organisation and labour relations in the country. As studies have noted, the living and working conditions of the workers remained the same in the plantations of Kerala as well (Bhowmik 2015). Moreover, the working population has always been affected by the changes occurring in the plantation sector such as ownership patterns, which was also part of the larger restructuring of the industry. Among others, the immediate repercussions of all these for workers, as Raman (2002) noted, was the social and economic marginalisation of the plantation workers. The crisis in the tea sector was further aggravated by the risks of preferential treatments and restriction in market access through non-tariff barriers that various bilateral and free trade agreements brought about under the new trade regimes. In several instances,

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such risks of international tea trade precipitated down to the workers and the small grower sections in the sector in various forms. One unique response in the wake of the economic crisis from the plantation managements was reduction of wages and welfare provisions of the workers. With plantation industries being the “only industry in the organised sector that employs female labour” on a large scale, women are the most affected victims in the tea plantations (Bhowmik 2002). As studies have already pointed out, women workers in Kerala tea plantations are also not free, as in other states, and are always within the hegemonic and hierarchic relations of class, caste and gender (Raman 2002). Although several mobilisations led by trade unions staged inside the tea plantation sector, the women questions never got prominence. The Pombilai Orumai movement, which the present chapter discusses, initiated by the Dalit women workers of Kanan Devan Hills Plantation Limited, Munnar, which started on 5 September 2015, was an attempt by women workers to articulate and assert their concerns in their own language without the support of their male co-workers and trade union leaders. The women workers, who share the same history of language, class and caste, have been undergoing multiple marginalisations on the basis of their identities such as caste, class and gender (Krishnakumar 2015). This movement led by the Dalit women could be seen as a form of protest against the capitalist relations in the plantation sector as well as a means of resistance against the patriarchal notions inside the trade union structure (Raman 2015). Hence, the one-and-a-half-month-long historic strike by the women workers of the Kanan Devan Hills Plantation, under the banner of “Pombilai Orumai”, can be seen as an alternative class mobilisation beyond the existing trade union narratives about the workers’ rights and agitation. The sudden outrage from these women workers was mainly due to the indifferent attitude of the plantation management and the state and their failure to ensure proper working conditions, welfare measures and wage revisions for workers inside the plantation sector. The organised women’s movement of Pombilai Orumai, which addressed the class-related issues pertaining to the tea plantations, thus became a unique model of resistance in the history of labour strikes in the country. The focus of this chapter is to contextualise this sudden uprising of women workers in the wider canvass of the colonial rootedness of bondage in labour relations, decline of trade unionism due to the restructuring of the tea plantation sector, marginalisation of women workers with the interplays of caste and gender in the sector and the male dominance in trade unionism,

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which always failed to reflect the women question in their own language. The chapter is divided into four sections. The first part (“The origin of Pombilai Orumai movement”) briefly discusses the history of origin of the movement. The second part (“Tea plantations and the workers: an overview of the historical bondage”) sheds light on the history of bondage in tea plantations, where most of the present problems lie. The third part (“Crisis in the tea industry: employee buyout model and the KDHPCL story”) locates the growing labour problems such as casualisation that came up as part of the employee buyout model adopted in Tata Tea plantations as a response to the recent global crisis in the tea industry. The fourth section (“Women workers, trade unions and the Pombilai Orumai”) analyses the new questions of representation raised by the movement, their strategies to address it and the responses of state machineries and mainstream trade unions.

The origin of Pombilai Orumai movement The immediate origin of Pombilai Orumai movement could be traced back to the long neglect of Plantation Labour Committee (PLC), a body, which is responsible for wage revision and addressing other issues of the workers. PLC, which includes representatives of the state government, plantation management and the recognised trade unions inside the plantation sector, has been neglecting the longpending demands of the workers. The validity of the previous wage revision agreement framed by the PLC in May 2011, which stipulated the quantity of tea leaves to be plucked and the wages thereof, came to an end on 31 December 2014 (Krishnakumar 2015). As per this agreement a plantation worker who plucks at least 21 kg of leaves was expected to get Rs 232 as the daily wage. The plantation managements and the government did not take any interest in the wage revision, even though there had been many such demands from the trade unions. The PLC met several times after 31 December 2014. However, no decisions were taken to increase the wages or bonus of the women workers. The demands for an increment in wages and bonus and better working conditions raised by the trade unions inside and outside the PLC meetings were never addressed by the plantation management. The Labour Ministry of the state government, which did not show any interest in initiating discussions on labour issues within the PLC meeting, was a mute spectator towards the inhuman attitude of the plantation management (Kareem 2015). The government did not initiate any discussions on wage revision

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and continued adopting a negative approach towards the plantation labour issue. They were more sympathetic towards the plantation managements as they felt that any hike in wage and bonus may hamper the interests of the planters (Krishnakumar 2015). Meanwhile, the plantation labourers and the trade unions were consistently demanding a hike in the yearly bonus from the existing 19 to 20 per cent. It was on 22 August 2015 that the Kanan Devan management decided to drastically reduce the yearly bonus from the existing 19 per cent to 8.33 per cent, which sparked off the women’s agitation (Krishnakumar 2015). This was a unilateral and undemocratic decision taken by the plantation management with the support of the state (Kareem 2015). The state was more concerned with the interests of the plantation management, and thus played second fiddle to the latter in the finalisation of wages, even though the government too recognised the genuineness of the workers’ demands for wage revision (Rammohan et al. 2015). This resulted in the uprising of women workers, which went on for almost forty days during the peak harvest months of September and October. The All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC) and the Centre for Indian Trade Unions (CITU) have been working among the plantation labourers for quite a long time. While the AITUC and the INTUC are the largest and second-largest unions, respectively, inside the Munnar estates, CITU too enjoys a considerable support base. Nobody can deny the role of these trade unions in facilitating certain crucial legal regulations within the plantation management policies, but there were allegations of “corruption and being hand in glove with the management” against the trade union leaders (Krishnakumar 2015). However, the trade union leadership, as argued by Krishnakumar (2015), hence “misjudged the situation that they sought to chastise the workers jointly for the goslow in the estates during the peak harvest month of September, limiting individual production to the minimum level of 21kg”. The women workers did not pay any attention to the trade union’s game plan; instead, they decided to organise themselves without any involvement of the trade unions or the political parties. The women workers representing all the 92 divisions of the Munnar estate went on a strike and occupied the Munnar hill station completely. The all-women collective thus formed, that is, the Pombilai Orumai, did not allow the male-dominated trade unions and political parties to dictate terms to them or to hijack their protests. In fact, Pombilai Orumai was not a sudden response to a sudden issue, but signified a historically evolved response to all kinds of exploitation and

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“bondage, servitude and suffering” that the women plantation labourers have been experiencing since as far back as the rule (Krishnakumar 2015). They believed that their voices were not being heard by the male-dominated trade unions (Thampi 2015), which were not according due importance to gender-specific issues in the plantation sector. The negligible female representation in the trade unions was either only in namesake or was without any powers of decision-making regarding the working of the unions. The bureaucratisation of the trade unions has also weakened their collectivity, thereby reducing their bargaining power and assertiveness. The Pombilai Orumai movement thus became the response of the women workers in the Kanan Devan Hills Plantation against the indifferent attitude of the state and the plantation management. The trade unions, especially those led by the Leftist parties that were expected to address the issues raised by the women workers, could not reorient their organisational mechanisms by being engaging the women workers through the usual trade union mobilisation and were lagging behind Pombilai Orumai in conceptualising the issues affecting women in the plantation sector. However, as against the mainstream media, which criticised the trade unions for fostering the women’s uprising, the Munnar issue should be studied from a larger historical context in terms of the role of the state, the plantation management and the trade unions in bringing up Pombilai Orumai. The anti-trade union rhetoric shared by the mainstream media tried to undermine the position taken by Pombilai Orumai against the state and the plantation management in causing deterioration in the living conditions of the working class, especially women.

Tea plantations and the workers: an overview of the historical bondage The Pombilai Orumai episode cannot be viewed in isolation without taking the history of the plantation sector in Munnar into consideration, which dates back to the nineteenth century (Thampi 2015). It was during the late 1850s and early 1860s that the British decided to develop the plantation industry in the hilly areas of Travancore. However, it was only in the early 1890s that tea replaced coffee as the main plantation crop in the Peermade and Vandiperiyar regions of Travancore, where Munnar is geographically located (Baak 1997: 64). The Kanan Devan Hills Produce Company was formed in 1889 after John Muir, a representative of James Finlay and company, negotiated with the proprietary planters of Munnar to merge with them (Rammohan et al. 2015).

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The tea plantation industry required the labour force throughout the year unlike other plantations like the coffee or cardamom or pepper, which required only seasonal labour. Once coffee and the other crops were replaced by tea on a large scale, the plantation industries started facing an acute shortage of labour supply due to the scarcity of local labour as the areas where plantation crops are largely cultivated were less populated (Sarkar and Bhowmik 1998). Moreover, the local labourers had better bargaining power and such an organised working force did not fulfil the expectations of the plantation management. The management could gain considerable profit only by reducing labour costs in the labour-intensive plantation industry (Bhowmik 2011). This compelled the planters to recruit labour from the plains and they found a potential labour force among the low-caste workers in the Madras Presidency, who were affected by mass poverty and deprivation due to historical reasons (Baak 1997: 106–115). The highly populated and famine-affected districts of Coimbatore, Madurai, Salem and Tirunelveli acted as the major recruiting centres for the plantation labour in Kerala as the vulnerable Tamil workers had fewer options of alternative sources of employment and were also easier to discipline than the other workers (Baak 1997: 103). Moreover, the plantation managements preferred Tamil workers who offered family labour to the individual labour offered by the local population (Baak 1997: 110). The availability of family labour among the Tamil workers in the plantation helped the managements to extract cheap labour. The lack of opportunities for alternative jobs prevented the Tamil workers from leaving the tea plantations and compelled them to opt for a permanent settlement inside the plantations (Bhowmik 2011). As against the general trend in the organised sector, the plantation sector has a high participation of female labour due to the fact that the cheap labour required for profit can be attained only by employing female labour (Sarkar and Bhowmik 1998). Thus, as Rammohan et al. (2015) explain, female labour has been sourced from the Tamil regions for a permanent settlement in the plantations. This system of labour recruitment in tea plantations of Kerala, commonly known as the kangany system, was extremely oppressive as that the kanganis, or the recruiters, were acting at the behest of the plantation management by brutally suppressing the workers (Baak 1997: 104). The kanganis were helping the plantation managements by punishing the workers and keeping them in bondage (Raman 2002). The kanganis were given contracts to bring the labour force to the

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tea plantations from the surrounding Tamil-populated districts of the Madras Presidency and the labourers were given advances for a few months (Baak 1997: 104). This compelled the labourers to always stay attached to the plantation industry without seeking alternative employment during the year-long season. The management also expected that the illiterate and obedient workers would neither complain nor get organised (Baak 1997: 108). The bonded labour existing in the tea plantations of South Kerala was sustained through the kangany system, and the plantation managements were successful in extracting huge profits out of this slavery-like system. The plantation managements were also keen on preventing the emergence of a labour market around the workers in order to sustain the cheap labour source (Bhowmik 2011). The plantation managements also enjoyed the patronage of the colonial administration. The managements continued to exploit the recruited workers who were not legally protected by any labour laws. This intense segregation suffered by the workers in the isolated plantation estates made the entry of trade unions in the estates even more difficult (Raman 2002). The Workmen’s Breach of Contract Act VIII, which came into effect in 1859, prevented the Tamil workers from breaching the contract with the kanganis (Baak 1997: 116). Thus the kangany system was protected and legalised institutionally through this Act. The plantation labourers, who already lacked any sort of legal protection, thus got further marginalised by this act. The Breach of Contract Act, as explained by Bhowmik, made it mandatory for an immigrant worker to work for a minimum period of five years after the commencement of the contract, and it advocated legal punishment for any breach of contract and violation of the very same Act (Bhowmik 2011). Raman also describes how both the judiciary and the police, with the support of the colonial bureaucracy, kept on helping the plantation management in order to continue with their grip over the plantation labourers. The coercive apparatus of the colonial administration was largely used by the plantation managements in order to perpetuate their control and domination over the plantation workers by exploiting them for getting the maximum surplus (Raman 2002). For instance, the colonial state, upon a request from the plantation management, decided to open a large number of police stations within the plantation estates in order to increase the domination of the State over the plantation workers (Raman 2002). This intensified the brutal punishment meted out to the workers in the plantation sector. In order to avoid a situation whereby workers would start leaving the estate en masse, the management has made

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the plantations completely secluded from the outer world (Baak 1997: 120). The living conditions of the workers inside the plantations were pathetic. The workers were denied even basic facilities such as proper housing, healthcare and education, and they faced several sorts of ill-treatments from the estate managers, supervisors and other superior officers. The workers found it difficult to escape from this exploitative bondage as it was being perpetuated by the existing management. Raman (1986) explains that the workers were kept in perpetual bondage in such a way that “the planter – capitalist exploitation, on the one side, and the master – servant feudal relations, on the other, literally squeezed the workers for a long period”. The crisis in international tea trade and losses of tea companies also had a direct effect on the workers as they were easy targets. Raman (2002) explains the logic behind the plantation management’s decision to share the losses with the workers. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the workers were subjected to wage cuts and other austerity measures. In short, the workers engaged in the plantation sector faced many difficulties during the pre-independence period. The pro-planter legislations of the colonial administration, coupled with the atrocious suppression of the workers under the kangany system and the continuing neglect by the management of the dismal living and working conditions inside the tea estates, deepened the plight of the suffering workers. The limited inroads made by trade unions were also curtailed due to the legal protection that the plantation managements secured from the colonial judiciary. The feudal relations existing in the colonial plantations continued to perpetuate the logic of profit maximisation through exploitation of the workers by the capitalist planters. The changes after independence also brought little hope for the plantation workers. The post-colonial plantations were characterised by new kinds of production relations with a sympathetic attitude towards the working population. The governments were forced to provide employment protection and security measures to the plantation workers. The state had to recognise the trade unions working among the plantation employees. “In the initial post-Independence stage, plantation labour benefited from laws granting protection to workers, mainly because of the struggles of the working class that had pressured the government to pass these laws. Later as a result of this protection, plantation labour was able to organise struggles on its own”, says Bhowmik (Bhowmik 2011). The passage of the Plantation Labour Act in 1951 was an important event in the history of plantation labour as

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it gave some minimal welfare measures to the workers (Raman 1986). This Act was the first ever intervention on the plantation labour from the part of the state which aimed at improving the living standards of the plantation workers. Although the Act “makes it mandatory for employers to provide housing to their workers and their families, sanitation facilities and provision of potable water in the labour lines, canteens with subsidised food, crèches, primary schools and hospitals, including group medical hospitals for specialist treatment”, as it was noted by studies, there were lapses in its implementation and related problems existed in most of the plantations (Bhowmik 2015). The statutory minimum wages were finalised for the plantation workers in 1952. The legal interventions such as the Industrial Disputes Act of 1947, the Factories Act of 1948 and the Minimum Wages Act of 1948, along with the acts related to the payment of bonus, provident fund and gratuity, were expected to improve the living conditions of the plantation labour. Labour bureaus were set up and various labour officers were appointed to ensure the proper implementation of these laws and to manage disputes between the plantation management and the labourers (Bhowmik 2011). During the post-independence years, there was an advancement in unionisation among the plantation workers and the legal intervention by the state, and an improvement in the living conditions of the workers, who were also provided with certain rights (Neilson and Pritchard 2010). These post-colonial state interventions, on plantation labour relations, though made at a limited level, have made the relationship between the management and the workers more formal by providing legal protection to the workers (Bhowmik 2011). Meanwhile, the plantation managements had started resisting and complaining about the difficulties related to the enforcement of the Plantation Labour Act. But the situation was not satisfactory for the workers either. Although the Plantation Labour Act benefited the workers largely, there has been no further effort from the governments to augment these benefits in response to the structural changes occurring in the plantation sector from time to time (Raman 1986). Relying upon the studies conducted in the tea plantations of West Bengal, Assam and Tamil Nadu, Bhowmik highlights the impact of the Plantation Labour Act in those areas. Though the PLA stressed that 8 per cent of the labour lines in the plantation should be converted into permanent houses every year with proper living conditions and repair facilities on regular intervals along with the facilities for piped water and toilets, the general results were not satisfactory. He makes it clear that even the Plantation Labour Act could not improve the situation in the tea plantations (Bhowmik 2015).

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The historical understanding of the plantation labour relations show that both the colonial state and the post-independent state provided the management with their coercive apparatus for keeping the plantation workers in their control. The recruited Tamil workers in Kerala plantations continued to face multiple forms of oppression and subjugation with the ongoing tactics of the management to reduce the labour costs by disciplining the workers inside the labour-intensive plantation industry. The non-implementation of the state initiated legal protective measures in the plantations also worsened the situation. Though the trade union interventions could resist the repressive kangany system to certain extent thereby putting an end to the feudal relations, the land relations inside the estates did not undergo any change. As the plantation sector was out of the purview of the land reforms legislation initiated by the Kerala state, the plantation workers were not provided with the legal ownership for the land. The absence of any methodical review to the PLA and other laws governing the plantation economy has made the labour relations inside the plantation tilted towards the management. Thus the state and the management continued to establish a coercive relationship with the plantation workers in the form of this historical bondage. The plantation workers in Munnar have been undergoing several forms of subjugation with this historical bondage that the state and the management offered to them. The identities of caste, language, region and gender also added to the sufferings of the plantation workers. Most of the recruited Tamil workers were from the lower castes, and this gave them extra burden in the plantation life. In addition to this, the women workers had to face the patriarchal notions existing in their family as well as the plantation industry. The trade unions also did not encourage the women workers in their organisational hierarchy. This shared history of the women workers has a role to play in their alienation from the plantation life and thereby organising them against the oppressive agents of the plantation economy; the patriarchy, the state and the plantation management. Pombilai Orumai thus can be seen as a response of the women plantation workers to the historical bondage that the state and management have been trapping them in.

Crisis in the tea industry: employee buyout model and the KDHPCL story The post-1990 period was indeed associated with several crisis tendencies in the tea plantation economy of the country. The crisis developed in the tea industry during the initials years of the new millennium in

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India can be seen as a direct result of the changes happened in the tea industry world over and various free trade policies associated with the post-liberalisation regimes of India. For instance, the increased import of less quality tea from Indonesia and other tea producing countries to Indian market has created a crisis in the tea plantations (Joseph 2009). Also, the fall in auction prices of tea resulting from the extra production of tea in countries such as Kenya also contributed to the crisis situation (Raman 2015). The decrease in international market prices for plantation products also had an adverse effect on the plantation economy of India (Hayami and Damodaran 2004). It has been noted that the crisis due to the overproduction of the tea in the domestic plantations and the fall in the international tea prices has aggravated the crisis affecting the tea industry (Rasaily 2014). As this crisis was aggravated in 2005, most of the tea plantations started facing lockout threats. Many of the tea producing companies in the south India had to either leave the plantation industry or sell the plantation to other private parties. However, the Tatas were very quick in their response in the wake of the widespread crisis in the tea plantation sector. The Tata Tea Limited in Munnar developed a unique model of corporate thinking to come out of the crisis in the form of implementing a participatory management of workers inside the plantation. Almost all the 13,000 workers of the Munnar plantation became shareholders in the new Kanan Devan Hills Plantations Company (KDHPC) Limited formed out of the “Employee Buyout” model of “participatory management” (Deepika 2010). Realising that the tea production industry was becoming a financial burden, and as a gesture of performing the corporate social responsibility, in 2005 the Tata management “offloaded production” as part of a gesture of corporate social responsibility (CSR) by transferring all the estates and management of the plantation to the new company called Kanan Devan Hills Plantations Company (KDHPC) for sublease for a period of thirty years (Rammohan et al. 2015). The Tata tea plantations were intelligent enough to shift the production burden to the workers’ co-operatives in the name of adopting this employee buyout strategy. As the employees buy a major share of the company, this strategy has been widely praised as worker-friendly. According to Joseph, the new KDHPC formed was among the largest participatory management companies of the world and as a pioneering company to opt for participatory management in the plantation sector, it was a “rare example where 69 per cent of the ownership is held by 13,000 odd pluckers, gardeners, drivers and clerical staff and former Tata Tea managers” (Joseph 2009).

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The Tata management compelled 20 per cent of its existing workforce to opt for voluntary retirement schemes before adopting the buyout scheme. Almost 3,500 employees had to go for voluntary retirement as the management wanted “to have a right-sized employee base to the new company” (Joseph 2009). At the same time, the Tatas made it clear that all the social security measures including the schools and hospitals will be retained with the plantation management itself (Deepika 2010). In the new KDHPC, the Tatas continued to have a share amounting to 30 per cent, whereas 7 per cent of the share was given to the Tata Trust and 6 per cent to the former employees of Tata Tea. The rest of the shares were held by the managers and workers of the Munnar Tata tea plantations, wherein the managers were holding the major shares (Rammohan et al. 2015). Almost 70 per cent of the share went to the employees with two persons each representing the plantation workers and the staff on the board of directors. The management also constituted many advisory committees which include workers from different walks of the plantation industry (Joseph 2009). The company adopted a new “bottom-up management” strategy against the earlier existing “top-down hierarchical approach” by making a “radical shift” in their operation from the other plantations in factory, estate and company-level relations (Joseph 2009). Subsequently, Tata Global Beverages (TGB) was formed with the aim of only overseeing the marketing of the product (Rammohan et al. 2015). With the formation of TGB, the Tatas now shifted from production to retail and marketing. Taking inspiration from the KDHPCL model of participatory management, the World Bank has sent a team to enquire about the practical possibilities of backing similar attempts in different tea plantations in India (Joseph 2009). This shows that way in which the Tata Tea operation was in tune with the World Bank model of economic thinking. The initial response of the major trade unions inside the Munnar plantation towards the employee buyout model was positive. As per the news reports, Mr Kuppuswamy representing INTUC, Mr Ouseph representing AITUC and Mr Manikkam representing CITU positively welcomed the employee buyout move. A. K. Mani, a Congress MLA and an INTUC leader working among the plantation workers, was also optimistic about the implementation of the participatory management model at KDHPC (Punnathara 2005). But the Tatas had to face a different experience while trying to implement the employee buyout strategy in the North Indian plantations. The trade unions inside those plantations opposed the move as against the South Indian experience.

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The trade unions felt that the employee buyout model may hamper the working of the Plantation Labour Act within the tea plantations. Their major apprehension was that “they would be pushed out of the purview of the Plantation Labour Act if they became share holders of the new company” (Deepika 2008). However, the employee buyout model became infeasible in the plantations in Munnar. The employee buyout model to a greater extent has weakened the trade union activism inside the KDHPCL as the participatory management of the workers in the running of the plantation has been giving new responsibilities to the workers and direct access to the professional management for the day-to-day issues of the plantation life. The representatives of the workers in the board of directors became new power centres inside the plantations. Trade union activism has been reduced to a mechanical exercise, and the workers inside the KDHPCL started undermining the importance of the trade unions. The interest of the company became the primary concern for the board representatives. To an extent, the workers as a whole were also forced to take such stands. The trade unions inside KDHPCL could not foresee that the employee buyout model will dilute the union activism and weaken the working of the PLA inside the plantation. There were instances of mutual understanding between the different trade unions inside the KDHPCL for not pressing for larger protest actions in the Munnar plantation. As Joseph notes, it was in June 2007 that the plantation workers inside the KDHPCL decided unanimously not to take part in the indefinite statewide strike called by the tea plantation unions in the state. The state-wide strike demanding the immediate solutions for the issues pertaining to the tea industry continued for eleven days except in the KDHPCL (Joseph 2009). The trade unions inside KDHPCL were not able to initiate any protest action as the employee buyout model has restructured the labour relations inside the plantation. The Tata management started bypassing many of the labour laws on the pretext of the sustaining the industry by convincing the employees to perform as “responsible” workers. Though the employee buyout model also fix these responsibilities on the management, the new participatory management scheme has not been successful in addressing the issues pertaining to the living and working conditions of the plantation workers as ensured in the Plantation Labour Act of 1951. Also it gave newer opportunities for the management to blame the workers’ representatives in return for the failure in improving the basic amenities. As both the state and the trade unions failed in understanding the loopholes in the employee buyout model which can potentially

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undermine the working of the PLA itself, the KDHPC workers continued to be in distress. The workers expected that the Annual General Body meetings of KDHPC, in which they held a majority stake, would decide on the new pay scale and bonus schemes of the working labourers. However, against the expectations of the workers, the employee buyout strategy did not show any pro-worker outcome and attitude. The Tatas in Munnar employed the “contemporary logic of accumulation” in the tea plantations in order to break the impasse that the tea plantations had been facing, as a whole. The workers and managers were literally trapped with “over-a-century old tea gardens, where hardly any innovations had been tried or profits substantively ploughed back” (Rammohan et al. 2015). The formation of the new KDHPC also necessitated the downsizing of the workforce in the plantation industry, which, in turn, led to an increase in the workload of the plantation employees (Rammohan et al. 2015). Women workers were overburdened by an increase in quantum of leaves to be plucked. Although the KDHPC had created its own brand called Ripple, the market response to the latter was poor. The entire burden thus fell upon the labourers, and the management found an easy way to escape from its legal responsibilities. The participatory management scheme adopted by the Tatas, which was initially celebrated as being worker-friendly, in reality, became an anti-worker scheme. The general uneasiness during the post-liberalisation period was thus replicated in the Munnar plantations with the strategy of the Tatas to transfer the entire burden associated with the tea production onto the workers while at the same time allowing the management to exclusively enjoy the prosperity emanating from the tea estates (Raman 2015). The participatory management scheme in Munnar offered the plantation managements another opportunity to exploit the workers as the technical ownership did not provide the workers any say in the plantation management (Bhowmik 2015). Though plantation workers attained the position of the “business enterprise”, they had to work as per the directions of the professional Tata management (Joseph 2009). Moreover, the new scheme has been used by the Tatas to impose more burdens on the workers by increasing the number of their working hours and the extent of the work. In order to maximise their profits, the Tatas continued to cut down the incentives for extra plucking and also started reducing the housing, medical and educational coverage for the workers. The decision of the plantation management to make the workers the major shareholders of the Kanan Devan tea plantation in 2005 can be seen as a strategy

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of the management to penalise the working class in the wake of the financial crisis plaguing the plantation sector in the state. The workers were not given any say in framing the policies of the plantation management, and any attempt by them to attend protest demonstrations were met with threats of a lockout. As the plantation areas are out of the control of the Rural Development Department and the poverty alleviation programs, it became difficult for the plantation workers to get the attention of the local bodies. Moreover the plantation areas were not coming under the land reform policy of the government in Kerala. This resulted in deteriorating conditions of the plantation workers as the plantation managements used these to manipulate the governments.

Women workers, trade unions and the Pombilai Orumai As the works in the plantations are generally “gender-specific”, the management found a reason to employ women in large numbers inside the tea estates (Sarkar and Bhowmik 1998). Women are increasingly finding space in the plantation jobs “because of their gendered attributes to the task of picking tea leaves in particular and for maintaining a steady social reproduction of labour” (Rasaily 2014). The percentage share of women’s employment to the total employment in the tea plantations in India has been in the range of 52–55 for most of the years. The data show that the percentage share of women’s employment to the total employment has not fallen below 50 (GoI 2014). The plantation management continued to employ a large chunk of female workforce as it also helped them to keep the wages at a low level (Sarkar and Bhowmik 1998). Moreover, the women workers were considered suitable in view of the low levels of mechanisation and skills required in the tea plantation industry (Bhadra 2004). Apart from the plantation works the women employees are bound to take several other responsibilities. Rasaily notes that the work of an average women plantation labourer “gets extended from the domestic sphere to paid and even unpaid work outside the realm of the household” (Rasaily 2014). The issue of labour relations and exploitation of workers inside the tea plantations cannot be studied without a concomitant understanding of the gender subjugation and disparity existing in the plantations. School drop and subsequent entry to plantation jobs of girl children at an early age are common in Munnar tea plantations. The Munnar plantation has only limited educational facilities as Tamil medium

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classes up to class VII exist. Most of the workers send their male children to their ancestral home for secondary and higher secondary education in their mother tongue making them capable of obtaining Textile industry jobs in Tirupur and other cities of Tamil Nadu. But, the plantation workers never showed interest in sending the female children to Tamil Nadu, thereby giving them the responsibility of household works and the responsibilities of younger siblings. Many of these girl children later replace their elders in the plantation jobs. Among the younger generation, males are increasingly not ready to take up the plantation jobs as they are not economic and they also have the options of making use of the textile boom in the Tamil Nadu or the tourism-related opportunities in Munnar. This makes the tea plantation jobs in Munnar relatively a women affair. Though the shift from the family labour to the female labour in the Munnar tea plantations was evident during initial decades of the post-independence period, it became clearly manifested only after the tourism boom in the region. However, what is important to note is that even though women outnumbered men in the plantation sector, their presence in trade union participation has always been negligible. This male dominance in the trade unions inside the Munnar tea estates has alienated the women workers from the usual trade union articulation of workers’ issues. This was partly a reason for their stagnation at the lower end of the occupation. Thus the women workers who were largely doing the job of plucking leaves continued to suffer due to the prevalence of poor work conditions in the plantations. The workers were denied basic facilities of healthcare, housing and sanitation in the labour lines most of the time. The institutional apathy towards improving the living and working conditions for women workers continued to affect their lives inside the estates. Neilson and Pritchard (2010) elaborate on the general sufferings of the leaf pluckers in the plantations by explaining the plight of the women workers. For instance, the women tea pluckers were provided only plastic raincoats during the monsoons to protect them from being drenched in the rain, which exposed them to many potential illnesses such as cold and flu apart from the usual dangers of snakes and insect bites. Historically speaking the trade unions inside the plantation sector have addressed several labour-related issues and they were able to persuade the management and the state to initiate pro-labour legislations and policies. In Kerala, the mainstream trade unions’ articulation continued to be in a masculine fashion as they always problematised the labour issues from a male perspective. The way in which the trade

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unions engage with the women workers needs to be studied for conceptualising the emergence of Pombilai Orumai in Munnar. The organisational structures of the major trade unions did not have adequate representation of women, as a result of which they lacked the creative capacity to think from the gender perspective. Apart from the usual class-related issues, they also failed to address the specific concerns of the women plantation workers. The marginalisation of women workers in the trade union is not restricted to the plantation sector. However, though the women workers comprise half the labour force in the plantation, there has been no sufficient representation for them in the trade unions. This has completely changed the way of functioning of the trade unions and their articulation of working-class interests. The issues pertaining to women in the plantations such as the lack of educational facilities, unavailability of crèches at the worksite and absence of piped water for the labour lanes never got any prominence in the demands raised by the trade unions. The created inferior position of women workers in the sector, which was not addressed by the trade union, was another reason that worked behind the formation of the uprising. The women workers also lacked occupational mobility due to their low levels of education and skills. As they are left with no alternative job options, another factor which intensifies the occupational immobility, the resultant situation leads them to “stagnation, helplessness and total dependence on their employers and the male members of the family” (Bhadra 2004). The advent of tourism and allied developments has opened up employment options of driving and sundry works for the male workers in the Munnar plantations (Krishnakumar 2015). But the women workers continue to be entrapped in the plantations as “the pattern of limited gender equity [which] obtains in the tea plantation labouring community is inadequate to negate the exploitative relations across classes and status groups in the system” (Bhadra 2004). Pombilai Orumai represents an alternative mode of trade union mobilisation, which goes against all the traditional concepts regarding labour mobilisation. As opposed to the regular methods of plantation labour strikes, the women workers assumed the leadership of the agitation and did not allow any male worker to get involved in decision making. The historical bondage and the exploitation that the women workers have been facing inside the tea plantations have perhaps compelled them to come out and express their outrage against the plantation management and the state. This discontent against the state and plantation management among the women workers was visibly evident throughout their protest demonstrations. The struggle also

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projected the participatory management scheme of the Tatas in Munnar as the primary reason for deterioration in the living conditions of the workers. But the media highlighted the Pombilai Orumai only as a critique of the trade union narratives without laying much emphasis on the other issues. The commonsensical notion of anti-trade unionism that has been propagated by the media was widely accepted in the civil society in Kerala. The general secretary of the CITU Kerala unit, Elamaram Kareem dismisses the media propaganda, which categorises the Munnar agitation as an anti-trade union struggle (Kareem 2015). According to him, the “anti-labour attitude of the Tata management and the casual attitude of the government” have intensified the anger of the plantation workers. He claims that the negligence of both the plantation management and the state government’s Labour Department in terms of giving inadequate medical and educational facilities and their unwillingness to raise the daily wages and the bonus payments for the workers has triggered the sudden uprising of the women workers (Kareem 2015).The politics of Pombilai Orumai, according to Thampi (2015), is a continuity of the rights-based political assertions of socialist feminists, and the increasing degrees of inequality prevalent in the plantation sector have triggered the reaction of women workers. Kareem (2015) opines that the responsibilities and duties of the state in terms of providing the basic amenities and working conditions inside the plantation sector need to be stressed much more in the course of the movement. Besides, along with the plantation management, the state also has a role in managing the plantation issues. Ensuring social security for the workers should, in fact, be made the responsibility of the state (Thampi 2015). Pombilai Orumai members were not allowed to attend the Plantation Labour Committee meeting as they have not been recognised by the plantation management and the state. In the wake of the local body elections, which was scheduled to happen in November 2015, the government was compelled to negotiate with the trade unions. However, the original demands of Pombilai Orumai have still not been met. The unions had to compromise by accepting a package of 20 per cent including a bonus rate of 8.33 per cent and a one-time ex gratia payment of 11.6 per cent (Raman 2015). The minimum wage of Rs 500 per day that the trade unions had demanded also did not materialise. Still, due to the pressure exerted by Pombilai Orumai movement, the basic daily pay has been increased from the erstwhile figure of Rs 232 to Rs 301 (Raman 2015). Although the state government was in a dilemma for more than a month regarding its next course of action, the subsequent

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events showed that the government could resolve the issue to a certain extent by offering peripheral assurances to the agitating workers.

Conclusion As a form of protest against the “system of gender segregation practised in the plantations”, the unity of the women in Munnar was so commendable that it did not even allow male family members to join the struggle or to take part in the crucial decision making while persisting with their struggle (Raman 2015). Although the issue of women’s unity in Munnar garnered a lot of attention and was raising the gender–class– related issues of the tea plantations that have not been addressed by many, the lack of an organised structure and a clear programme within the Pombilai Orumai has created certain difficulties in enabling the women to establish a women trade union of their own. Further, there were differences of opinion within the women’s collective immediately after the successful agitation regarding the formation of a separate women’s trade union and also with respect to the other future plan of actions. The disintegration of Pombilai Orumai after the first phase of the agitation should be studied by analysing the usual tactics played by the state and the plantation management, right from the colonial time, in weakening the working-class unity. Albeit there has been no evidence to suggest the role of the plantation managements behind its disintegration, the conspiracy theories related to the involvement of Tamil separatists and other radical elements in the Munnar agitation propagated by the management and a section of the media itself also played a role in weakening the movement. The decision of the leadership of Pombilai Orumai to take part in the local body election and subsequently their willingness to support the Congress-led UDF in forming a ruling coalition in the Munnar panchayat deepened the internal contradictions regarding the issue of women’s unity in Munnar. This also compelled us to revisit the movement, which points to a lack of clarity in the long-term organisational structure and the political tactics of the alternative trade union movements in raising the class issues.

References Baak, P. E. 1997. Plantation Production and Political Power: Plantation Development in South-West India in a Long-Term Historical Perspective, 1743–1963. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bhadra, M. 2004. “Gender Dimensions of Tea Plantation Workers in West Bengal”, Indian Anthropologist, 34(2): 43–68.

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Bhowmik, S. K. 1994. “Tea Plantation Wage Agreement: Workers’ Interests Sacrificed”, Economic and Political Weekly, 29(41): 2645–2647. Bhowmik, S. K. 2002. “Productivity and Labour Standards in Tea Plantation Sector in India”, in Sivananthiran, Alagandram & Ratnam, C. S. Venkata (eds.), Labour and Social Issues in Plantation in South Asia, pp. 133–166. New Delhi: International Labour Organization – South Asia Multidisciplinary Team & Indian Industrial Relations Association. Bhowmik, S. K. 2011. “Ethnicity and Isolation: Marginalization of Tea Plantation Workers”, Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts, 4(2): 235–253. Bhowmik, S. K. 2015. “Living Conditions of Tea Plantation Workers”, Economic and Political Weekly, 50(46&47): 29–32. Deepika, M. G. 2008. Employee Buy-Out: The Case of Tata Tea Ltd: Oxford Business and Economic Conference. Oxford: University of Oxford. Deepika, M. G. 2010. “Employee-Buy-Out and Participatory Management: The Case of Kannan Devan Hills Plantations Company”, Economic and Political Weekly, 45(37): 63–71. GoI. 2014. Statistical Profile on Women Labour 2012–13. Chandigarh/ Shimla: Labour Bureau, Ministry of Labour and Employment. Hayami, Y. and Damodaran, A. 2004. “Towards an Alternative Agrarian Reform: Tea Plantations in South India”, Economic and Political Weekly, 39(36): 3992–3997. Joseph, B. 2009. Sipping the Storm in their Tea Cups: A Case Study of Employee Buyout at TATA Tea. Retrieved January 10, 2016, from International Labour and Employment Relations Association: ilera–directory.org. Kareem, E. 2015, September 26. Munnar Tea Plantations Strike: Some Facts. Retrieved December 10, 2015, from People’s Democracy, http://peoplesdemocracy.in/2015/0927_pd/munnar–tea–plantations–strikesome–facts. Krishnakumar, R. 2015. “Storm in a Tea Garden”, Frontline, October 30, 2015, 32(21): 120–123. Neilson, J. and Pritchard, B. 2010. “Fairness and Ethicality in Their Place: The Regional Dynamics of Fair Trade and Ethical Sourcing Agendas in the Plantation Districts of South India”, Environment and Planning A, 42(8): 1833–1851. Punnathara, C. J. 2005. “Employees Participatory Management Tata Tea Turns a New Chapter”, February 2. Munnar, Kerala. Raman, K. R. 1986. “Plantation Labor: Revisit Required”, Economic and Political Weekly, 21(22): 960–962. Raman, K. R. 2002. Bondage in Freedom: Colonial Plantations in Southern India c.1797–1947. Working Paper No. 327. Trivandrum: Centre for Development Studies. Raman, K. R. 2015. “In Kerala, Victory for Pombilai Orumai”, The Hindu, October 18. Calicut. www.thehindu.com/news/national/state-view-in-keralavictory-for-pombilai-orumai/article7775034.ece (accessed on 11 February 2016). Rammohan, K. T., Soman, S. and Joseph, E. 2015. “Munnar: Through the Lens of Political Ecology”, Economic and Political Weekly, 50(46): 33–37.

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Rasaily, R. 2014. Women’s Labour in the Tea Sector: Changing Trajectories and Emerging Challenges. Trivandrum: National Research Programme on Plantation Development (NRPPD), Centre for Development Studies. Sarkar, K. and Bhowmik, S. K. 1998. “Trade Unions and Women Workers in Tea Plantations”, Economic and Political Weekly, 33(52): L50–L52. Thampi, B. 2015. “Thozhilinte Rashtriyam: Penninte Prakshobham” (in Malayalam), Mathrubhumi Weekly, October 4, 4–11.

Glossary

Agarbatti Incense stick Arogya Sevikas Women health workers Beedi Indian cigarette filled with tobacco flake wrapped in a dry leaf Beldar Brick stacker Dabba Walas Persons who collect and deliver lunch boxes in Mumbai Dais Traditional midwives Dalal Brokers or middlemen or mediators Dharna Rally of protest Ghar Kamgar Domestic worker Halipratha System of perpetual bondage (either for life or for generations) Ilanthamizhagam Iyakkam The Young Tamil Nadu Movement Jajmani Relationship between landowner and servant (occupational caste groups) Jalaiwala Fireman Kangany Recruiter and supervisor in tea plantations of Kerala and Tamil Nadu Kudumbasree A network of self-help group in Kerala Kutcha Not proper Mahila Samaj Women’s collective Mahila Sangha Women’s groups Matsyafed Name of a chain of co-operative of fishworkers Mazdoor Labour Meen karigal Vending woman Morcha An organised rally Mukkuvar Fishermen community and a caste name

340

Glossary

Munshi accountant Muqaddam An important person in the village Nikasiwala Unloader Pathera Moulder Prajapati or bharaiwala or kumhar Transporter Pucca Proper Rapaswale Brick levellers Samiti A committee/collective Sanghatana An organisation Shramik Mahila Morcha Toiling Women’s Front Société Salariale Society of wage earners Stree Mukti Manch Women’s Liberation Forum Sumangali A married woman Thekedar/Jamadar Contractor/jobber/middleman Toddy An alcoholic beverage extracted from palm trees Vallam A wooden boat

Index

Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) 218 Adivasis 32, 165 Agarwala, R. 4, 5 agriculture sectors 28 Ahn, P. S. 5, 47, 103 Ahn, Y. 5, 103 All India Brick Kiln and Tiles Manufacturers Federation (AIBTMF) 110 All India Central Council of Trade Unions (AICCTU) 52 All-India Network of Sex Workers (AINSW) 230 All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) 321 Anglo-Saxon model 77 anti-growth agents 86 anti-sex-work advocacy 228 anti-worker 63 Aquaculture Authority Bill 132 arogya sevikas 210, 211, 213 artisanal marine fishing community 117 Asia-Pacific Network of Sex Workers (APNSW) 238 Associated Chambers of Commerce of India (ASSOCHAM) 34 Atzeni, M. 308 Bain, P. 195 Baldwin, M. A. 238 Banerjee, N. 2 Bapuji, B. R. 302 bargaining zone 71

Bawa, K. S. 104 beldars 98 Bellagio International Declaration of Street Vendors 144–5 Ben-ner, A. 306 Besley, T. 86 Beteille 100 Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) 81, 95, 101, 191; child labour schools 106–7; Construction Workers’ Welfare Board 107–8; initiatives, organising 103–4; primary achievements of 104– 10; provident fund, accessibility 108–9; tools, organising 104–10; wage negotiations 104–5; women workers participation 109–10 Bhatt, Ela 124, 146 Bhatt, Ramesh 211 Bhattacherjee, D. 47 Bhowmik, S. K. 251, 253, 324, 325 Bombay textile strike 47 bondage, breaking 95–115 bottom-up management strategy 329 Breach of Contract Act 324 Breman, J. 99, 267 brick kiln sector: bondage, factoring 99–100; challenges to 110–12; collective bargaining and unionisation 100–3; production, factoring 96–100; production processes 98–9; social dimensions, labour 99 brick kiln workers, Punjab 95–115

342

Index

Building Workers International (BWI) 83 Burgess, R. 86 business process outsourcing companies (BPOs) 50 capital-labour dichotomy 30 capital labour relations 113 capital vis-à-vis labour 72 Catholic Church 56 Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (CMFRI) 122 Central Statistical Organisation (CSO) 284 central trade union organisations (CTUOs) 48–50, 53, 57, 80 central trade unions 166 Centre for BPO Professionals (CBPOP) 186, 187, 192, 285 Centre for Indian Trade Unions (CITU) 191, 321 Chandrasekhar, C. P. 159 Chang, H. J. 32 Christian evangelical groups 228 class consciousness 275 class fragmentation 30–2 Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) 228 Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) 132, 135 Coastal Women’s Forum 121, 125 collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) 197, 289, 290 Comeau, Y. 250 Committee for Asian Women (CAW) 84 Committee for Fair Fisheries Agreements (CFFA) 134 Committee of Public Sector Trade Unions (CPSTU) 53 community-based organisation (CBO) models 236 competitive markets 71 Congress party system 46 construction sector 25 Construction Workers’ Welfare Board 107 contemporary labourscape 18–29, 40 contract labour 53 Contract Labour Act 34

contractual employment 100 Cornforth, C. 309 corporate social responsibility (CSR) 328 Council of Workers’ Organisations (CWO) 87 cross model 71–8, 87; integration, market logic 72–7; market logic 71–2; organisation, implications 77–8 cultural identities 30–2 daily wage labourers 28 dais 211 Dai Sangathan 214, 217 Dai Shala 214 Dalits 32, 99, 165, 237, 282; see also Scheduled Castes Dalit woman worker 30 Dave, Hasmukhbhai 50 D’Cruz, P. 277 decentralised bargaining mode 47 democracy 189 Dewan, R. 2 domestic workers: conditions of work 160–5; domestic work, situating 158–60; employment, extreme insecurity of 162; migrant 165; movement, in Maharashtra 158–77; organising wave 165–6; social security provisions 162; women 158–60, 164; workplace issues 160–5 dominant public sector 66 dualistic labour market 74 Dunlop, J. T. 252 Durand, J.-P. 251, 266 Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) 230 Dutt, R. 101 economic liberalisation 45, 50 economic liberalisation policies 47, 253 economic mobility 230 economic principles 63 economic transformation 62 Ellerman, D. P. 310 Employee Assistance Scheme (EAS) 300

Index employee buyout model 327–32 Employees’ Family Pension Scheme 101 employer-employee relationship 80 employment, private sector 49 enterprise unionism 67 equal employment opportunity (EEO) 182 Erdal, D. 308, 309 Essential Services Maintenance Act 68 ethnicity 31 Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) 126, 129 Factories Act 259, 326 false dichotomy 230 Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) 34 female employment 20 female vendors 141 Fields, Z. 298, 308, 309 fisheries: aquaculture growth and 132–3; coastal zone attack and 132–3; complex organisational challenge 117–38; contemporary situation 135; feminist perspective, in movement 127–8; global discourse, positive trends 133; government policy, reorienting 128–9; initial surprises 119–21; international organisation, fishworkers 135–6; larger struggle, beginning 125–6; leadership growth 130; livelihoods, safeguarding 117–38; macro picture of 121–3; matrilineal, unique characteristic 119; national movement, building 130–1; people’s organisations 124; poverty 119; professionalisation of 134; strategies, organising 123– 9; supportive factors, international level 134–5; territory, struggle for 131; trade union mode 126–7; understanding, livelihood option 118–19; visibility, international level 129; woman in 119–21 fishing community see fisheries

343

fixed chimney bull trench kilns (FCBTK) 96 flying geese pattern 72 Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) 129, 136 food vendors 143 Forcadell, F. J. 308 Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) 197 foreign direct investment (FDI) 47, 110 foreign portfolio capital 72 formal sector 77 Forum for IT Employees (FITE) 198–201, 203, 204 Freira, Paulo 120 Fusfeld, D. R. 308, 312 Gandhi, Rajiv 47 gendered responsibility 160 gender group dimensions 28 George, S. 2, 34 Ghigliani, P. 308 Ghosh, J. 159 Ghosh, R. 97, 102 global framework agreements (GFAs) 83, 84 globalisation dynamics 62–88; cross model 71–8; industrial relations system 65–8; informational spaces, of organisation 84–5; knowledge, organisation and contestation 85–7; post-reform period 68–70; utopian centralist 87–8; workers’ movement, corporatist model 87–8; workers’ movement, cross model 79–82 global networks 77 global union federations (GUFs) 73, 76, 77 global unionism 76 global unions: bargaining rights 83–4; service conditions 83–4; union establishment 83–4 Goenchar Ramponkarancho Ekvott (GRE) 126 governance, models of 62–5 Gram Swaraj Movement 132 Gulati, G. M. 306, 310

344

Index

Haiven, L. 266 halipratha 99 Hammer, A. 311 harassment, political parties 140 hard managerialism 311 health security 221 Hensman, R. 55 Hernández-Truyol, B. 230 Hind Mazdoor Sabha (HMS) 104 home-based workers’ organisations 57 Homenet India 57 Hoxie, R. F. 266 human resource management (HRM) 182, 185 immediate issues, vendors 139 Immoral Traffic Prevention Act (ITPA) 233, 235 Indian Labour Conference (ILC) 80 Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC) 46, 48, 49, 80, 196, 321 Indo-Norwegian Project (INP) 121 industrial conflict 53, 56 Industrial Disputes Act (IDA) 34, 46, 192, 199, 203, 291, 326 Industrial Employment Act 3 industrial relations approach 252 industrial relations system (IRS) 64, 65–8 informal economy 82, 139 informal employment 20, 22 informal worker movements 239 informal workers’ union: for women 57 Information Technology Professionals Forum (ITPF) 186, 190, 197, 285 internal job postings (IJPs) 182 International Collective in Support of Fishworkers (ICSF) 129, 131, 134, 135 International Federation of Commercial, Clerical, Professional and Technical Employees (FIET) 186 international financial institutions 34 International Labour Organization (ILO) 62, 229, 234; propositions of 62

International Metalworkers’ Federation 250 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 64 International Trade Union Congress (ITUC) 77 IT and ITES sectors: developments, encouraging 198–201; identity and employee mobilisation 283–9; identity construction 277–83; mistaken identities in 275–92; professional identity, invoking 182–5; unionisation 275–92 Jaganathan, S. 132 jalaiwalas 98, 101 Jensen, M. H. 308 Jhabvala, R. 142 job centrifugation dynamic 250–3 job contract 25, 26 John, J. 99 Kagadkach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat 81 Kainth, G. S. 102 Kanan Devan Hills Plantations Company Limited (KDHPCL) 327–32 kangany system 323, 324 Kareem, E. 335 Karnataka Sex Workers Union (KSWU) 226, 227, 230, 235–40, 243–5 Kharwa community 137 Khera, R. K. 253 Kohli, A. 35 Koodunkulam village 130 Kothari, Rajni 46 Kotiswaran, P. 230 Kudumbasree 57 Kumar, K. 7 labour aristocracy 68 Labour Bureau 100, 101, 160 labour collective action 54 labour flexibility 58, 250 labour law reforms 3 labour market deregulation 1, 54 labour market deregulation policies 17

Index labour market reform policies 2 labour market reforms 1 Labour Progressive Front (LPF) 52 labour reforms 50 Labour Reforms and Decent Work in India (Sundar) 253 labourscape 17–40 labour space 17–40; defending and redefining 4–7; mobilisations and resistances 35–40 Lampel, J. 308 larger working-class movement 5 large-scale mobilisation, labour 53 Larson, J. 230 legitimacy crisis 50 Le Queux, S. 266 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) movements 227 Lévesque, C. 266 licence raj 47, 250 Lok Swasthya Mandali (LSM) model: activities 211–14; challenges 222–3; collective action 222; community health programme 213–14; co-operative model, health security 217; dual roles, balancing 215–21; genesis of 209–10; health outcomes 219–20; health workers, empowerment 218–19; HIV/ AIDS communication intervention 219; impact, understanding 218; income-generating activities 212–13; organising 220–1; policy advocacy 214–15; priorities, balancing 221; self-reliance 221– 2; service provision, sustainability 215–17 London Metal Exchange (LME) 299 Maharashtra bandh 54, 55 Maharashtra Domestic Workers Welfare Board Act 171, 172 Maharashtra Rajya GharKamgar Kriti Samiti 166 Mahila Samaj 121 Maithe, S. 96 Majbi Sikhs 106 Major Port Trust Act 261

345

Majumdar Committee 125 male-female wage differentials 22 male street vendors 141 “Mandal/ Mandir/Fund – Bank years” 47 Marianad Cooperative Society 122 Mayya, S. 298 Meckling, W. H. 308 member-based organisations (MBOs) 124 micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) 98 mineral in concentrate (MiC) 303 Mines and Minerals Development and Regulation Act (MMDRA) 302 Minimum Wages Act 3, 258, 326 Ministry of Women and Child Development (MWCD) 233 Mirchandani, K. 184, 277 Mishra, N. K. 2 mohalla committee 261 Mohammad, N. 2 Mohankumar, S. 2 Mohanty, M. 52 movable chimney bull trench kilns (MCBTK) 96 Mukkuvar caste 118 multinational corporations (MNCs) 64, 75, 76, 83 Mumbai Port Trust Dock and General Employees’ Union (MPTDGEU) 250, 253–63 Mumbai’s shipbreaking yards 253–5 munshis 98, 102 Murray, G. 261, 266 Muslim women 28 National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM) 130 National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) 34, 181, 198 National Association of Street Vendors of India (NASVI) 140, 143–8, 154, 155; membership profile of 145–6; National Policy 150, 152; network, building 146– 7; new discourse, street vendors 149–54; strategies by 146–7

346

Index

National Centre for Labour (NCL) 58, 130 National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) 251 National Commission of Labour Inquiry Report 101 National Committee for Enterprises in Unorganised Sector report 20 National Democratic Alliance (NDA) 3, 50, 54 National Fish Workers’ Forum (NFF) 127, 130–2, 135, 136 National Legal Services Authority (NALSA) 234 National Marine Regulation 137 National Network of Sex Workers (NNSW) 230, 234, 238 National Platform for Mass Organisations (NPMO) 79 National Policy on Street Vendors 150 National Renewal Fund 48 National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 253 National Rural Health Mission 221 National Sample Survey Organisation’s (NSSO) 2 Navarra, C. 307 Neetha, N. 28, 162 Neethi, P. 40, 56, 57 Nehru, Jawaharlal 46 Neilson, J. 333 neoliberalisation policies 48 neoliberalism 40 neo-oligopoly model 87 neo-social movement unionism 82 networking, organisational form 71 New Generation Network (NGN) 287, 288 New Trade Union Initiative (NTUI) 54, 237 new trade unionism 7–9 Nihila, M. 2 nikasiwalas 98 Niranjana,Tejaswini 47 Noiseux, Y. 259 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) 52, 73, 74, 83 Noronha, E. 277

Novel Mineral Project (NM Project) 297, 299–313; ownership, apportionment 302–4; revenue, sharing 307–9; separated workers and company, liability 302–4; takeover proposal, commercials 304–6; technical and managerial expertise, shortfall 310–13; uncertainty, assessing 309–10; workers’ co-operative, launching 300–1 Novel Minerals Ex-Workers Co-operative Society 297 Novel Minerals Limited (NML) 297, 299, 302–4 Nuevos Estudios Laborales 252 oligarchic leadership 181 organisational models 70–1 organisational politics 71 organisational sclerosis 68 organisational spaces 66 Other Backward Classes (OBCs) 118, 141, 282, 283 paid leave 27, 28, 164 participatory management scheme 331 patheras 99 patherhars 105 patron-client relationship 100 People’s Union for Civil LibertiesKarnataka (PUCL-K) 235 picketing organisations 185 Plantation Labour Act 325, 326, 330 Plantation Labour Committee (PLC) 320 plantation managements 321, 324 Polluter Pays Principle 132 Pombilai Orumai movement 318– 36; origin of 320–2; trade unions and 332–6; women workers and 332–6 post-colonial plantations 325 post-globalisation period 64 “post-industrial” workforce 7 post-liberalised Indian labour space 1–4 post-reform period 38, 39, 48–52

Index potential conflicts 74 primary labour market 252 Pritchard, B. 333 privatisation 45 professional managerialism 312 profit-based retrenchment 201 Programme for Community Organisation (PCO) 127 prostitution 228 Provident Fund Act 107 pro-worker jurisprudence 67 public sector strike 47 Pune City domestic workers’ organisation 167–8 Pune Shahar Molkarin Sanghatana 162, 167–8; advocacy and lobbying 171–2; community support, harnessing 170; federating 170–1; larger women’s movement 172–5; negotiation strategy 169–70; networking 170; strategy of organising 168–75 Radice, H. 276 Raman, K. R. 318, 324, 325 Ramesh, B. P. 184, 277 Rammohan, K. T. 323 Ranis, P. 308 rapaswale 98 Rasaily, R. 31, 332 Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) 161, 174, 221 Scheduled Castes (SCs) 142, 282, 283 Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers Act 133 scholar-activist dialogue 267 Sekar, R. H. 2 self-employed own-account worker 20 Self Employed Vendors Association of Karnataka (SEVAK) 144 Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) 4, 6, 52, 57, 81, 84, 124, 143, 150, 208–24; co-operative, establishing 211 service model of unionism 66 service sector expansion 18

347

SEWA bank 208, 209 SEWA Health 210, 211 sexual exploitation 228 sexual harassment 162 sexual labour 231 sexually transmitted infections (STI) 234 sex work: contradictory state 232–5; criminalisation 232–5; HIV prevention 232–5; labour perspectives on 228–31 sex workers: activists 229; HIV prevention interventions 242; informal labour movement 243–5; investment climate 242; mobilisation 226; organising, labourers 235–40; unionisation 243–5; work conditions 231–2; worker’ identity, articulate 240–3 Shah, A. 100 Shah, S. 230 shipbreaking workers: coalitions with social movements 265; contextualisation, element of 255– 6; environmentalist movement 265; international coalitions and solidarities 264; issues and field view 259–65; leadership 262–3; recognition and visibility 260; struggle, chronology of 256–9; 360-degree approach, informal workers 263–4; transparency 262–3; union democracy 262–3; union, finance 265; worker conflict, resolving 260–1 shipbreaking yards 250, 253–5 Shramik Mahila Morcha 173 Sick Industrial Companies Act (SICA) 298 Singh, A. 139 Singh, S. 2 small-scale fishworkers 137 social clause issue 76 social group dimensions 28 social justice 62 social justice–promoting institutions 62 social media campaign 199 social movement unionism 190 social security 25

348

Index

social security measure 23 sociodemographic factors 183 sophisticated human resource management strategies 185 Sousa Santos, B. 250 South Indian Federation of Fishermen’s Societies (SIFFS) 122–3 space, struggle for 139–56 Special Economic Zones (SEZs) 3, 97 spillover effects 64 sporadic engagements 103 Srinivas, B. 298 Srivastava, R. S. 2 State Domestic Labour Welfare Board 172 state-industrialist nexus 8 State Insurance Act 241 state interventions 48, 65 state-of-the-art infrastructure 184 Stree Mukti Manch 173 street vendors 141–3; forms of stresses 143; internal challenges 147–9; NASVI 143–7; national law, follow-up 154–5; organisational dynamics 147–9; organising 143–6 Street Vendors Act 153, 155 Street Vendors’ Bill 153 Sugden, R. 309 Sumangali marriage scheme 100 Sundar, K. R. S. 39 Sundar, Shyam 53, 54, 56, 253 Suppression of Immoral Traffic Acts (SITA) 233 Swasthya Sathins 213 Tata Global Beverages (TGB) 329 Taylor, P. 195 tea industry, crisis 327–32 tea plantations 322–7 Thampi, B. 335 Tharu, Susie 47 Thatte, Medha 175 top-down hierarchical approach 329 town vending committees (TVCs) 153 Toyota production 33 Toyota Production System (TPS) 34 trade liberalisation 1

Trade Union Act 161, 197, 241 trade unionism 250–3; changing trajectories of 45–8 trade union membership 17 trade union mobilisation 334 trade union movement 66, 67, 81; restructuring and reorientation of 79–82 trade union rights, denial of 53 trade unions 50, 54, 78, 181; constitutional and incorporated 67; cost-push inflation 68 trade union security assurance 69 Traditional Coastal and Marine Fisherfolk Act 133 traditional trade unions 45 traditional unions 57 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Protocol 234 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) 129 unemployment 69 UNI-Asia Pacific Regional Organisation (UNI-APRO) 186, 187 Union for ITES employees (UNITES) 188–91, 199, 201, 203, 204, 276, 277; class and identity 289–90; functioning of 191–8; identity and employee mobilisation 283–9; nominating office bearers 193; philosophies of 285 unionisation 36; alliances and policy changes 52–5; change, capturing 201–3; changing trajectories of 45–8; Congress Party, in public sector 46; economic and political crisis 47; female membership 38; at firm level 55–7; gender dimension 38; globalisation 52; in informal sector 57–8; information technology sector 275–92; in IT/ITES sector 181–204; phase of 45–7; in post-reform period 48–52; professional identity and 185–6; public sector strike and 47; rate of 48–9; sector-wise status of 36, 37; sex workers 243–5; trends and trajectories 45–59

Index Union Network International (UNI) 186, 187, 195 United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) 234 United States Agency for International Development (USAID) 228 unorganised employment 69 Unorganised Sector Social Security Act 128–9 unscrupulous street-smart organisations 147 Upadhya, C. 277 urban employment 18 urban informal workers 139 Vasavi, A. R. 277 Veshya Anyay Mukti Parishad (VAMP) 230 voluntary retirement schemes (VRS) 53, 299, 300 wage-employment trade-off 296 Wienerberger 97 women workers 2; domestic workers 158–60, 164; intensive

349

training programmes 123; Pombilai Orumai movement and 332–6; Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) 4, 6, 52, 57, 81, 84, 124, 143, 150, 208–24; in tea plantations 318–36; women’s organisation 123 worker-employer relationship 165 workers’ co-operative 298–9 workforce distribution 19 working-class movement 62–88; informational spaces of 78; organisational models 70–1 Workmen’s Breach of Contract Act 324 work stoppage workers 54 World Bank 34, 35, 64 World Federation Fisher People (WFFP) 136 World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) 77 World Forum of Fish Harvesters and Fish Workers (WFF) 136 World Health Organization (WHO) 234 World Trade Organization (WTO) 64