Maharashtra's falling labour unrest a reflection of national trend

Strikes and lockouts are down 95% in Maharashtra since 1981

Doctor-turned-unionist Datta Samant’s textile strikes of the early 1980s changed Mumbai’s industrial landscape, involving multiple mills and lakhs of workers. Strikes and lockouts are down 95 per cent since those days, show the latest numbers from the Maharashtra government’s recently released economic survey.

There were 636 total strikes and lockouts in Maharashtra in 1981. This is down to 29 as of 2021, with a corresponding drop in the number of workers involved (see chart 1).

Maharashtra is not isolated in seeing lower labour unrest. National figures show a steady decline even over the last ten years. Numbers are provisional for later years, but the broad trend suggests a significant decline since 2011 (see chart 2).

The trend also holds if one goes to other industrialised states. There were 135 strikes and lockouts in the year 2000 in Tamil Nadu. It involved 49,437 workers. There were only 15 such instances in 2019. The total number of workers involved is also down by over 90 per cent to 4,589 (see chart 3).

Gujarat numbers were analysed since 2018. The trend is less clear, though it could be because disputes are so few. There were only 13 disputes in 2018. This dropped to 9 in 2019. They rose to 18 in 2020. The number for 2021 was 8 as of October 2021. The total number of workers involved were between 2000 to 5300 in all. This is despite the number of factories in the state increasing from 2018’s 34,081 to 36,726 as per provisional numbers for 2020.

More factories are being opened and more people are at work.

“As per the Directorate of Industrial Safety & Health the number of working factories registered under factories Act-1948 in the State, has increased from 35338 in the year 2019 to 36726 in the year 2020(P). 2.42 The average daily employment in the working factories has also increased from 18.35 lakh in the year 2019 to 18.97 lakh in the year 2020(P),” said the Gujarat State Socio-Economic Review, 2021-22.

Maharashtra’s latest numbers were even lower during the pandemic year when much of the country had been under complete lockdown for extended periods during the year.

“During 2021 there were 29 work stoppages (strikes and lockouts), which affected 6,799 employees against 23 work stoppages which affected 6,434 employees in the previous year. The number of person-days lost due to work stoppages during 2021 was 18.28 lakh as against 19.39 lakh during 2020,” noted the Maharashtra economic survey.

The total number of factories in 1981 was 16,594. They employed 1.2 million people.  This has grown to 36,848 factories in 2021. They employ 2.9 million people.

In other words, the equivalent of around 17 per cent of the total workers in 1981 had been involved in industrial action. This has fallen to less than 0.25 per cent in 2021, as per the latest figures for Maharashtra.

This is not unique to India. The number of industrial disputes in the United Kingdom fell from 304 in 1985 to 6 in 2015, according to data from the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It fell from 73 to 5 for the United States of America in the same period.