Armed with bows, arrows and sticks, tea garden workers block a road at Chunarughat of Habiganj for three hours yesterday, protesting the government move to set up a special economic zone in the area. Photo: Star
January 1, 2016
G. SAMPATH
The Hindu
“Not surprisingly, there has been a persistent corporate chorus demanding a labour regime that allows companies to freely hire temporary workers even for core operations. And the Modi government is eager to deliver.” File picture of workers at Maruti’s Manesar plant on strike. PHOTO: KAMAL NARANG
At a public event during his recent visit to India, French economist Thomas Piketty drew attention to the “hypocrisy” of the Indian elite in the way it wanted to pursue capitalist development — obsessed with growth, but indifferent to welfare. Nowhere is this hypocrisy more evident than in the debate over labour reforms.
The prevailing wisdom is as follows: India has too many antiquated labour laws which hamper growth and investment. The need of the hour is a brisk pruning of this unruly thicket of pieces of legislation into a handful of elegant laws that make it easy for companies to hire and fire as they wish, and pay whatever salaries they can get away with. Once such laws are in place, foreign investment will flood into India, manufacturing will shoot up, and millions of Indians will find employment and “make in India” happily ever after.
From an industrial relations perspective, turning this corporate dream into reality requires two things: one, trade unions must be neutralised; two, contractualisation (temping/casual labour) must become the legal norm rather than illegal supplement for regular work.
Both these are effectively a reality in today’s India. But our legislative framework militates against it, leaving the capitalist class vulnerable to being challenged by the working classes on legal grounds. It is in this context that the incident of July 18, 2012 at Maruti’s Manesar plant assumes historic significance, for India’s working class as well as for the investor class.
The context
Since Independence, trade unions in India have mostly fought modest and pragmatic battles for outcomes such as higher wages and better working conditions. But this changed in the 1990s. Gurgaon-based labour activist Shyambir points out that after liberalisation, most strikes by workers have been not for wage hikes but for the right to form a union.
The right to collective bargaining is enshrined in our Constitution. Article 19(1)(c) grants all citizens the right to form a union. On top of it, we also have a Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970 that prohibits employment of contract workers for core industrial work. And yet, the Indian state has either stood by or actively colluded while employers tried every tactic, including illegal termination, to prevent union formation, and kept hiring temporary workers for regular jobs.
In the National Capital Region’s Okhla-Faridabad-Noida-Gurgaon-Manesar industrial belt, it is common to find workers toiling on 12- to 16-hour shifts for as little as Rs.9,000 a month, for years together. It raises a fundamental question: whose interests have the labour laws served all these years? Evidence suggests that it is not the labouring classes.
And yet, oddly enough, the clarion call for labour reforms is coming not from the working classes but from the corporate class. One reason for this could be that with global capitalism yet to recover from the shock delivered in 2008, the only way out of the crisis is to tighten the screws on labour to extract more value.
In such a scenario, who wants a labour class feeling empowered to fight for its entitlements? From this perspective, the Manesar conflagration was a decisive event that has, at least for now, beaten back labour and put capital firmly in control in an age-old conflict.
The background
To quickly summarise the incident of July 18, 2012: an outbreak of rioting at the Manesar plant left one HR executive dead and 40 others injured. The police arrested 147 Maruti workers and slapped murder charges on all of them. The dominant narrative about this event is one of labour militancy gone wild, holding it responsible for the loss of life and property.
What has not attracted critical scrutiny is the final outcome of the larger conflict between labour and management of which this incident was the culmination: the termination, in one go, of 546 permanent workers and 1,800 temporary workers. Such a mass retrenchment would be unthinkable in the normal run of things. Were we to ask who gained the most from this sorry episode, the answer is definitely not the worker.
The provenance of this incident goes back more than a year, to June 2011. That’s when Maruti workers began agitating for their right to an independent union. After several months of struggle, the Maruti Suzuki Workers’ Union (MSWU) was formed in early 2012. Now, the MSWU in early 2012 was a different animal from the kind of unions Indian managements were used to dealing with. It derived its power from something unprecedented in the short history of labour struggles in post-liberalisation India: a strategic unity between permanent and temporary workers. It was too dangerous a threat, one that no management would brook.
According to Shyambir, “After its formation in March 2012, right up to the incident of July 18, the main agenda of MSWU was regularisation of temporary workers. They wanted pay parity for permanent and temporary workers. Their slogan of ‘Same Work, Same Pay’ made them hugely popular.”
Given that around 80 per cent of industrial workers in the Gurgaon-Manesar belt are hyper-exploited contract labour, this union may have made a big impact on labour mobilisations had it been allowed to flourish. With the purge of 2,300 workers that followed July 18, 2012, the threat was snuffed out.
The present scenario
By October 2012, within three months of the July clash, Maruti had set up a new system of “company temps” in place of the earlier system of hiring temporary workers through contractors. Under this regime, the temporary worker will work for six months. Then he is laid off for five months, after which he may be recalled for another six months.
Both corporate commentators and labour activists have termed this a master stroke. While the former see in this a replicable model to pre-empt labour unrest, the latter consider it a move designed to prevent unity between permanent and temporary workers by regularly churning the latter.
In September 2015, Maruti announced a salary hike of Rs.16,800, spread over three years, for permanent workers. When temporary workers agitated for a similar revision, unlike in early 2012, the permanent workers did not back them. If breaking the unity between permanent and temporary workers was the mission, it had been accomplished.
Maruti, for its part, has presented its system of “company temps” as a superior alternative. When contacted by The Hindu, a management source said that “the new system is superior to the contract system since it is a direct recruitment by the company. No contractor is involved, and company temps enjoy all benefits like canteen food, uniform, PF, ESI bonus, etc.”
Not surprisingly, there has been a persistent corporate chorus demanding a labour regime that allows companies to freely hire temporary workers even for core operations. And the Modi government is eager to deliver.
The labour reforms on the anvil essentially boil down to two things: make it impossible to form a truly independent trade union; make it legal to keep temporary workers permanently temporary, while paying them a subsistence wage.
With the central trade unions seemingly uninterested in putting up a fight on core labour issues, independent trade unions nipped in the bud, and contract labour effectively legal, the only potential challenge that labour now poses to capital is mobilisation based on unity between permanent and contract workers. This was the weapon Maruti workers had assembled at the Manesar factory in 2012. It’s the reason why they needed to be made an example of, so that India’s working classes won’t dare to attempt such experiments in the future.
sampath.g@thehindu.co.in
Every detail of the latest story of abuse of Indian workers in West Asia is both horrifying and painfully emblematic of the condition of Indian migrants to these countries. Three men from Kerala paid an agent to get them employment in Yemen, but they were taken to Saudi Arabia instead. They were trained electricians but were made to work in a brick factory. They were beaten by their employer with a wooden plank for refusing to do the work, the torture captured on camera and sent home to their families. Theirs is far from the first such story of entrapment, deceit and abuse. In October, a woman worker from Tamil Nadu said that her Saudi employer had tried to chop off her hand when she tried to escape. In September, a video emerged online which seemed to show the abuse of an Indian construction worker by his Saudi supervisor. Journalists investigating the construction of the 2022 FIFA World Cup infrastructure in Qatar found Indian workers were among those living in cramped accommodation for low wages and long hours under often exploitative contracts. Earlier this month External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj told Parliament that there were over 7,400 complaints of exploitation made by Indian workers in Gulf countries in 2015 alone.
There are over 6 million Indian workers in West Asia, forming a quarter of the region’s total expatriate workforce, including 2.8 million in the UAE, 1.8 million in Saudi Arabia, and over half a million each in Qatar, Kuwait and Oman. (Money repatriated to India from the Gulf countries was $32.7 billion in 2014, compared to $10 billion from the U.S.) The International Labour Organisation estimates that many of the 600,000 workers in the region who are victims of forced labour are Indian citizens. In fact, the chain of exploitation begins at the recruitment and migration stage in India, as was the case with the men from Kerala in Saudi Arabia — a police officer in fact put them in touch with the agent. The Ministry of External Affairs is aware of the problem; and Ms. Swaraj has been quick to respond to outrage over such incidents, offering help and support. However, there has not yet been a lasting fix to the problem; recruitment remains largely unregulated, India’s push for higher wages remains unfulfilled, and protections for Indian workers once they discover the nature of their employment are often difficult to come by. Many of these workers are leaving behind impoverished lives, and might not always be in a position to assert their rights in the hope of a better life for their families. These are India’s real NRIs — in numbers and in terms of remittances and investment in their home countries. India must do better by them.
Bangladesh Hindu-Bouddha-Christian Oikya Parishad yesterday demanded the government protect rights of the religious and ethnic minorities, and ensure their proper representation in all strata of society including politics, business, administration and the armed forces.
The Parishad leaders gave the government a six-month ultimatum to implement their seven-point demand, which includes setting up of a minority affairs ministry in line with India.
Speaking at a grand rally of minority and indigenous communities at the historic Suhrawardy Udyan in the capital, they said land and other properties of the minority people were being grabbed, in many cases, “even by ruling party leaders and lawmakers”. They said they had been subjected to torture and repression since the independence of the country.
The grand rally, first of its kind since independence, was organised to protect the existence of minority people and to establish their rights and equal status in society, the organizers said.
The rally was held at a time when a secular government has been in power for seven years now with commitment to ensure equality for people of all religious beliefs, they said.
Thousands of people from religious and ethnic minority groups joined the rally from different parts of the country, demanding equal rights and status.
Dhaka Metropolitan Police took additional security measures in and around the Udyan. Metal detectors were installed at different entry points while several CCTV cameras were installed in the rally venue to closely monitor the law and order situation.
Addressing the rally, ruling Awami League lawmaker Suranjit Sengupta said, “Even after a secular government has been in power for the last seven years, minority people have not been empowered.”
He expressed frustration saying none from the minority groups could be made ministers in Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s cabinet.
Suranjit, who served as the rail minister between 2009 and 2014, castigated the AL high command for nominating only nine municipality mayoral candidates from the minority groups out of 235 municipalities across the country.
The AL lawmaker said none from the minorities got licenses of TV channels, private universities, banks, medical colleges and insurance companies.
“Representation and empowerment of the minority people will have to be ensured proportionately while running the state. We will make no compromise to this end. We will wait six months and declare tougher programmes,” he warned.
Bangladesh National Human Rights Commission Chairman Dr Mizanur Rahman blasted the government for not implementing the vested property return act and demanded the country be freed from the grip of bureaucracy to make human rights sustainable.
He called upon the government to take legal actions against the land and property grabbers of the minority people irrespective of political affiliations.
Among others, Maj Gen (retd) CR Datta Bir Uttam and Ushaton Talukder MP addressed the rally.
DEMANDS OF THE MINORITY COMMUNITY
Rana Dasgupta, general secretary of the Parishad, placed the seven-point demand that included reservation of 20 percent of parliamentary seats, and appointments of minority people in all strata of the administration.
He also demanded formation of a national minority commission to ensure human rights of the religious and ethnic minority groups, full implementation of the CHT Peace Treaty, and enactment of minority protection act.