It is a trend that is beginning to take alarming proportions in India Inc. Incidents of labour unrest have been steadily going up across companies in India in the last few years pointing to the growing discontent among workers over wages and other issues.
What is striking to note here is that included in these list of companies are big names such as Colgate-Palmolive, Hero, Maruti-Suzuki, Hyundai, Videocon, Onida, Arvind Mills, Nokia and Mahindra & Mahindra - firms one normally identifies with good governance and human resource (HR) policies.
Colgate, for instance, just announced that the 18-day strike by its labourers at its Goa plant had ceased following intervention by the Labour Commissioner there. Videocon earlier this month had managed to quell labour unrest at its Bharuch plant in Gujarat following a move by it to lay-off workers at the factory. The same goes for Maruti-Suzuki, Hyundai, Onida, Arvind Mills and Nokia, who managed to find a middle path with striking workers at their respective plants.
While bringing labour unrest to a halt remains top priority for company managements simply because of the bad press it generates not to mention the production loss that firms suffer, HR experts point to the deeper malaise plaguing India Inc - the growing disparity in wage levels between white and blue collar staff. By some estimates, this disparity is as much as 30-40 per cent across companies in India and with spiralling costs it doesn't make things better for labourers who very often migrate to cities from rural areas in the hope of having a better standard of living.
Says Arvind Singhal, chairman of Gurgaon-headquartered management consultancy Technopak Advisors, "Sadly, the pace of job creation in India is not in line with the number of people entering the workforce. The result is too many people chasing too few jobs. The consequence of this is that wages are depressed. The situation reaches a head when inflation begins to shoot up. What we are seeing at the moment across companies in India is this struggle for better wages."
How bad is the disparity in wage levels as far as blue-collared staff in India goes can be gauged from this: There is a 200 per cent difference in blue-collared wages in India and the US, according to Sunil Goel, director of Delhi-based HR consultancy Global Hunt. While critics may argue that the comparison between wage levels in India and the US is not fair given the higher of cost of living that exists there as opposed to here, the fact that Indian companies pay paltry wages to their blue-collared staff is an open secret.
Estimates peg the wages of blue-collared staff in the city of Ahmedabad, considered the textile capital of India, at around Rs 6,000-8,000 per month. In Delhi, HR experts say that labourers could get anywhere between Rs 10,000 to Rs 15,000 depending on the number of years they put in and whether they are permanent or temporary staff.
In fact, contractual labourers have been most vociferous in their demand for better wages in the last few years. This became apparent during the violent struggle by workers at Maruti-Suzuki in Manesar, Haryana, last year. Many of them complained that they had not been made permanent even after putting in a good number of years of service, not to mention that they were not entitled to any major company benefit by virtue of them being temporary staff.
K L Bajaj, vice-president, Centre for Indian Trade Union (CITU), a prominent workers' union that operates in a number of companies in the country, says, "Contract workers are the ones most affected in companies, since even basic wages mandated by law are not at times paid to them. Discontent amongst workers and the tendency to go on agitations in such situations is imminent. If the government could abolish the contract system, agitations would also reduce."
