The fear of losing their old power, if not relevance, must explain Tuesday's strike by trade unions. | |
| While the specific provocation was the Supreme Court's verdict, making it illegal for government servants to go on strike, trade union leaders perhaps wanted to avoid a judicial backlash by adding to their list of issues the 'anti-labour' policies of the central government, and early revision of bank wages. |
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| It is far from clear that any of these objectives was served by halting work for a day. A collective bargaining mechanism is already in place in the banks, specifically to handle wage revision, and the government has done nothing of late that can remotely qualify as 'anti-labour'. |
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| In fact, trade unions should be congratulating the labour minister for steadfastly stalling labour reforms, which includes streamlining over 165 labour laws. |
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| And the Supreme Court is unlikely to be impressed by a token strike when the point is an interpretation of the law. The strike is therefore an avoidable blot in an otherwise brightening picture "" for industrial relations have been improving. |
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| According to the latest Labour Bureau survey, the mandays lost due to strikes and lockouts during the last decade have declined sharply, and is now less than 0.5 per cent of the total number of mandays worked. |
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| In absolute terms, the number of mandays lost has dipped in recent years to a third of the old levels. |
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| Trade unions, which had reacted sharply to the Supreme Court order (delivered in August last year after a million government employees and teachers in Kerala launched an indefinite strike) taking away their 'fundamental' right to strike, will do well to note that the operative mood with most people is to get ahead with work, not to go on strike. |
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| The trade unions' real worry must be that the size of the unionised labour force is not growing, so that their base remains poor and diminishing. |
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| The overwhelming majority of new jobs are being created in workplaces that are not unionised. Nor are governments pushing for unionisation, scared that multinationals will prefer to relocate in places with more flexible labour policies. |
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| In India, for example, militancy in large companies has drastically reduced because of the threat of outsourcing to small-scale enterprises. |
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| It's also a pity that the unions chose not to listen to the apex court, which said that the strike is the most misused weapon in the country and has been used often to "hold the State to ransom". |
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| If the trade union movement is losing steam, the unions themselves must ponder over fragmentation, bankruptcy of ideas, huge politicisation and poor unionisation. |
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| In their desperation to play to the gallery, some trade union leaders even predicted that post-privatisation, there would be mass retrenchment. |
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| A closer look at government data would have made them realise that employment in the public sector fell 20 per cent from 2.13 million in the last decade even without any privatisation. |
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| Tuesday's strike also raises a fundamental question about the unions' failure to do anything for the informal sector, where 93 per cent of India's population works. |
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| This segment accounts for 60 per cent of the gross domestic product, 50 per cent of savings and 38 per cent of export earnings, and yet these people are not covered under any labour laws, and have no social security like health insurance, pension and old age benefits. |
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| If the trade union movement in India wants to regain its steam, these are the issues that the union leaders should be looking at. |
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