...and one for all

LABOUR: Watch out as unionism grows in the hallowed portals of the ITeS sector.

On January 24, Manila was listening to an Indian who "brought the concept of a union in the IT-enabled Services (ITeS) sector in his country".

R Karthik Shekhar, who took the lead to float the Union for Information and Technology Enabled Services (UNITES) in September 2005, was giving a lecture at an event organised by the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The lecture was on how to start a union in the ITeS sector, and the employees in Manila are preparing to start a union of their own.

To grow the union to the current 9,000-strong membership was a tightrope walk for Karthik and the other founder members. It began when no one dared to "bell the cat".

Today, UNITES claims, its voice is being heard on several cases, from the Pratibha Murthy murder to the BelAir exit issue. Even some BPO firms have started heeding the genuine demands of the union.

"On January 26 last year, we held a gate-meeting near the HSBC call centre office in Hyderabad. We addressed the employees, distributed pamphlets about their plight. It was attended by many, though they feared a backlash from the management. But this brought in good results by the way of annual increments for employees and almost all of them got a hike of 50-100 per cent," says Karthik.

Karthik, who earlier worked with an MNC IT firm in Bangalore as a senior lead specialist, recalls how he faced punitive measures when he raised the issues of employees' rights and replicating in India the union model which the company was following in the US and Europe.

"This was practising double standards. I was dubbed a union leader, twice denied promotions due to me, falsely implicated in several cases and my performance was appraised as poor. The situation was such that I had to resign. Then I thought of starting an organisation which can at least bring the genuine demands of employees to the notice of the management," he recalls.

The initial response from peers and even family members was not favourable. "Initially people laughed at me, even my in-laws and parents were against my decision to start a union for ITeS professionals. My wife, however, was a big support. She took up the responsibility of earning the daily bread by starting a poultry farm," says Karthik, a BTech in computer science from BMS College in Bangalore.

Things have changed a lot in the last one year. Today, UNITES has six offices across the country, with the head office operating in Bangalore. Its present members are from many top BPO firms in India including HP, IBM Dell, HSBC and FirstSource (Earlier ICICI OneSource).

Of the 9,000 members that the union has, about 2,500 are from Bangalore, 1,500 members from the national capital region, 1,300 from Hyderabad and the rest from Chennai, Trivandrum and Kochi.

"I know that these numbers are very small considering that there are over 4.5 lakh ITeS professionals in Bangalore alone. But we are getting overwhelming responses and more and more people are coming out in the open. There are, however, some who don't want to be named due to the fear factor. This stigma, however, is not going to last long," said Karthik.

In 2007, UNITES plans to target at least 20,000 members. It is affiliated to the Indian National Trade Union Congress and is part of Union Network International, which has over 16 million workers in 13 different sectors from 163 countries.