Unions cry foul, say recording system faulty.
Industrial disputes recorded a decline in the second year of the economic slowdown, with a dramatic fall in the number of strikes and lockouts in 2009, as compared to the previous year, making some trade unions cry foul.
“The current year, reckoned by the number of man-days lost because of strikes and lockouts, has so far been a good year,” the Economic Survey says. The number of strikes was as low as 91 between January and November 2009. It was 250 last year and 210 in 2007.
The number of man-days lost in strikes also declined to 2.05 million in 2009 from 7.02 million in 2008.
The Survey cites figures from the Labour Bureau of the Ministry of Labour and charts out the steady decline since 2004.
The number of lockouts also declined to 31 in 2009 from 182 in 2008. It was 179 in 2007 and 241 in 2004. The number of man-days lost in lockouts has also come down drastically. Only 0.84 million man-days were lost in lockouts between January and November 2009, compared to 10.46 million in 2008.
While the Survey paints a rosy picture of a steady decline in the number of strikes and lockouts over the years, trade unions question the method of recording strikes. “They are underestimating the number of strikes and following a system of recording that is giving them a rosy but incorrect picture,” says M K Pandhe, national president of the Centre of Trade Unions affiliated to CPM.
A number of strikes are excluded from official statistics as they are bandhs, which are not called under the Industrial Disputes Act. In 2009, there were more statewide bandhs than strikes. These were called by workers of coal and steel sectors and even the electronics sector, says Pandhe, adding, in many cases, employers don’t inform the government about the strike and so the strikes get excluded.
“Companies prefer not to go for lockouts as the government has to be informed and workers have to be paid wages. So, workers are suspended. That gives a low number of lockouts,” says D L Sachdev, secretary, AITUC.
The strikes by the unorganised sector workers in factories that are not registered also do not get counted. Hundreds of thousands of factories are not registered and employ millions of workers, the unions say. They add the slowdown may have accounted for fewer strikes, implying that the decline, if not the figures, may not be totally off the mark.
Among the sectors, financial intermediaries (excluding insurance and pension funds) recorded the maximum number of strikes and lockouts. The Survey notes that in terms of dispersion of incidences of strikes and lockouts, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Rajasthan are the most affected.
