Labour relations usually go for a toss when industry is unwilling to deal with workers as stakeholders with legitimate concerns and demands.
Pilots, you could argue, are, strictly speaking, not workmen. They earn six-figure salaries, fly sophisticated aircraft—and not always under supervision. So if you go by the archetypal view of a workman — grease-stained and wearing blue dungarees, most likely, and coming under an overseer — the pilot does not quite fit the picture. He belongs to the stratosphere of the labouring class. So when pilots strike work, they get a lot of flak from within the industry and without. The public (we’re talking of the upper classes whose travel plans get disrupted) turns antagonistic and grassroots trade unions seldom back their agitation.
The striking pilots of Jet Airways are thus getting little sympathy from anyone. Their employer Naresh Goyal calls them terrorists who are holding the country to ransom. That’s an extreme description of workers who have merely formed a union, but the chairman of India’s largest private airline is very decidedly voicing the commonly-held view of trade unions by industry. Organised workers are big trouble.
The organisation formed by the Jet Airways pilots, the National Aviators Guild, is the latest in a lengthening list of trade unions to attract punitive action from employers. Jet has been forced to cancel its flights because it underestimated the solidarity of its pilots. When the Guild issued a strike notice last month after two leaders of the newly set up union were summarily dismissed, the airline had taken the threat lightly. There would be no disruptions and all flights would operate on schedule, it had promised. Now it is learning that the pilots mean business.
Across industries, from automobile manufacturing to food processing, from multinationals to domestic companies, the trend is similar. Workers, true blue-collar ones most of them, are increasingly feeling the need for trade unions to represent their concerns and wage demand, and almost uniformly, companies have been seeking to crush such associations. Statistics compiled by the Union government’s Labour Bureau indicate the growing magnitude of the problem. It says the number of workers affected by strikes has risen from 570,000 in 2007 to 930,000 last year. These figures tell a partial story because these figures account for only those work stoppages that have been reported to the government; so many disputes go unrecorded.
The interesting development in the past year and a half is that many of these work stoppages have been called because managements clamped down on the formation of unions. South Korean companies, for instance, are adamant that they will not allow unions. Hyundai last year dismissed several dozen workers, suspended and transferred many others all because of their involvement in a trade union that the workers had formed in 2007. Hyundai, for another, prefers to deal with a workers committee because managements find it easier to deal with a small group (with a limited membership) rather than confront a properly registered body that has the backing of the majority. Not that it works in all cases. Jet was comfortable dealing with the Society for Welfare of Indian Pilots on even wage revisions till a couple of years when it decided that it was just a welfare body without legal rights! It’s true that in India, trade unions have exercised political and economic influence far in excess of the numbers they represented but times clearly have changed.
Unions, for the most part, are no longer affiliated to political ideologies and do not seek the support of party unions unless forced to the wall. In fact, the old-style political unions have been neatly emasculated over the past decade, thanks to workers’ disenchantment with such organisations and the changing patterns of manufacturing. With outsourcing of several manufacturing processes that led to the break-up of mammoth organisations workers found that they could no longer rely on the powerful political unions to wage their battles for them. The new outfits were small and because they used superior technology they employed fewer people. Workers realised they needed to negotiate their demands for job security and better working conditions on their own.
Has this made employers less ready to negotiate a fair deal for a fractured workforce that has chosen to keep the industrial peace by and large? It would appear so. Southeast Asian management styles, primarily South Korean, have made the working environment tough for labour. But industry is finding that in the wake of the global meltdown and its impact on India, workers are now turning restive and are becomingly increasingly agitated about the denial of basic rights.
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Surprisingly, well-known multinationals which follow OECD guidelines on workers rights on their home turf have led the charge against labour here by denying them their fundamental right to form unions —and their example could be prompting Indian companies to turn high-handed. For instance, early this year the Swiss giant Nestle India approached three high courts to seek a permanent ban on all union activities, including meetings near factory gates.
The tendency to view workers as a problem rather than partners in their enterprises is specially true of Indian employers, where the myth that rigid labour laws restrict the ability of employers to create additional jobs continues to be current despite evidence to the contrary. According to a recent report of the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) the organised sector created much fewer jobs than the unorganised sector, and worse, offered no job security or the normal benefits provided to regular workers. In fact, the NCEUS’ estimates indicate that close to 46 per cent of all the jobs generated in the organised sector in 2004-05 went to informal workers.
Analysts have pointed out that if the labour laws were indeed as rigid as industry always complains, it has not prevented companies from unbundling employment and taking increasing recourse to outsourcing and contract labour. What has happened simultaneously is that union activities have been repressed to a high degree. And a recent report of the global trade union organisation ITUC has noted “the generally hostile attitude of employers towards trade unions” which is acting as a deterrent to organising workers. Calling workers terrorists is clearly part of this syndrome.