Are Trade Unions
Relevant Today?
This is the question
doing rounds in outfits representing labour interests, particularly in the
un-organized sector.
Long queues at the
labour courts, with rising number of petitions each day suggest trade unions
have lost the will to fight it out in
the field with strikes or direct action. They now now prefer to get engaged in protracted
disputes settled by litigation committees or tribunals.
“The reality is that
in the new so-called liberal economic order, the workers are totally at the
mercy of the employers who can fire anyone at will. Job security is an
out-dated concept. With most government departments these days outsourcing
services, the bargaining power of unions has been drastically reduced,” says
Abhinay Prasad, president of the Self-employed Workers and Vendors Association,
of Agra
In a country
populated by farmers and unorganized work force, the relevance of celebrating
May Day remains highly questionable, adds a former trade union activist Shravan
Kumar Singh. “Who is fighting who? Trade unions as “schools of revolution” is
an out dated concept. The leftists these days feel left out from all spheres of
public discourse. They hardly have any contribution
to make in a system where roles are not clearly defined and the economic
classes not clearly segregated, as Marx would have wanted,” Singh added.
As the number of
self-help employers is going up steadily, it becomes difficult to decide who is
exploiting and who is being exploited. “But our fight is chiefly against the
government agencies and the police who harass and often turn exploiters of
vendors or petty shop keepers,” Abhinay Prasad adds.
"Trade unions
everywhere are losing their revolutionary character and are seen degenerating
into litigation committees, striking deals and bargains with managements. Their
preoccupation is no longer waging a class struggle or sharpening the political
consciousness of their members but winning small mercies from the
establishment," says socialist commentator Paras Nath Choudhary.
Strikes are no longer
in fashion. This is because trade unions leaders are now members of the
management boards, with a responsibility to keep the wheels of industry running
in their collective self interest, adds Ram Kishore, president of the Socialist
Foundation. “These days we do not see any effort by the working class to wage a
relentless struggle for restructuring society according to Marxist thinking.
Karl Marx visualised that the working class would eventually become the
vanguard of socialist revolution, with trade unions acting as the organising
centres for uniting the forces of workers competing with one another and for
giving them elementary class training. But today’s reality is vastly different,
Kishore said.
Trade Union leaders no
longer want to play a political role. The old model of a trade union always
being in conflict with the establishment has changed. “Now there is close
coordination and co-existence. This has put the ordinary worker in a permanent
state of tension and uncertainty. The labour class can not afford to fight as
alternatives are no longer available, due to shrinkage of the job market and the
economy not really looking up.”
What is the role of a
trade union in today's context? Candidly their role has vastly reduced and as
political entities their contribution is minimal.
Today's grim reality
is that as institutions of labour activism, they cannot challenge the system or
even question the existence of a society based on a division of classes. The
history of the trade union movement in India
Clearly, the trade
union movement is at a crossroads. It has to redefine its agenda and its
ideological parameters. Organising rallies to promote sectarian interests is
one thing, but getting involved with a larger struggle to usher in socialism
and leading the working class to dismantle the feudal-capitalist complex is
quite another.
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