The Way To A Dusty Death
Scene One: Tucked away in Ghatkopar, an eastern suburb of Mumbai, is a tiny house with a courtyard overflowing with people. It has no address but is a local landmark. Bustling with activity and visitors all day, this is the union office of Kamgar Aghadi, but is better known as Datta Samants office. It has been around for as long as anyone can remember. Here Samants word is law where his followers sit around for hours and even days just for a brief encounter with their leader.
Scene Two: Calico Mills, Mumbai, late seventies. Datta Samant is addressing a gate meeting. As workers cheer him on, fumes from the factory engulf the area and Samant faints on the dais. Workers rush towards him and the meeting is suspended. Once Samant recovers, he blames the management for the poor maintenance of the mill. The management blames him for stalling work at the mills and hence affecting maintenance but the workers are all with Samant.
Scene Three: Mantralaya, October, 1996. A meeting is on inside the labour minister, Sabir Sheikhs office where the management and workers of the locked out Premier Automobiles Ltd -Peugeot factory are talking terms for peace. Outside a small group of hecklers is banging against the door, protesting against the negotiations being carried out without union leader, Datta Samant. The meeting is broken up but, within a fortnight, so is Samants union. He is isolated as the management strikes a deal with the majority of the workers and unlocks the factory gates.
Very briefly, these instances sum up Datta Samants influence on the trade union movement. He was the undisputed monarch of Kamgar Aghadi until his death and over a large section of the workers during the eighties. But over the years, he had been edged to the periphery of the business where he once held centrestage.
Datta Samant shot to fame with the textile strike in the seventies. The longest ever strike in the Maharashtras industrial history, Samant reportedly starved with his workers during the agitation. A grassroots leader, he appealed to the workers to fight for more wages and recognition for his union. The wage agreements that most mills had with the workers were extremely archaic and Samant promised them a better deal. The workers went along with him for a few years but when the strike dragged on deserted him. The workers gradually began going back to work but none really forgot Samants contribution. Also his uncompromising attitude through the agitation earned him the tag of a militant leader.
Over the years however, Samants hold over the workers had been slipping. His unions were being challenged in almost every company they claimed a majority. The most recent instance of a power tussle was at National Rayon where Datta Samant was struggling to prove his strength. In most companies, he had lost members to the Shiv Sena whose influence has increased while that of Samant declined. One senior executive with a multinational company remembers that Samant in the eighties came with a convoy of workers and followers to negotiate wage settlements. Towards the end, he would come alone and unguarded although he had received threats to his life.
This, sadly, is not how Samant intended it to be. A doctor with a flourishing practice, Samant was first drawn to the labour movement by the plight of the quarry workers, whom he later organised and unionised. Then came the textile strike where he won over the workers and antagonised the mill owners for life. His fiery gate meetings were legendary and he grew to be a cult figure. In fact, militancy in Maharashtra which was at its peak during the time came to be associated with him and Samant was seen to be behind every protest. Says Rajan Mehrotra, vice president, Novartis, who has known Samant since 1985, I have personally interacted with the man and he has contributed significantly to the trade union movement.
Unfortunately, all his contributions had become history even before his death. This was because Samant continued to live in an ideological time warp. He failed to rise beyond the routine wage and benefits bargaining to discuss productivity issues. In his latest battle with the management at Premier Automobiles, he opposed changes in product mix that the management wanted. Samant, in an interview to this paper had said at the time, All these product mix changes are a sham. All they want to do is get rid of the workforce. Although Premier and Peugeot denied these allegations Samant refused to negotiate and finally lost. As his power dwindled, the states industrial relations also became less acrimonious. Says S T Sawant, director of the Maharashtra Institute of Labour Studies (MILS), Samant was an individual while the other unions are all federations. So when his power dwindled , militancy also lessened.
Labour researchers say that Samant had also lost the pulse of the workers. In India, job security has only recently become an issue as companies have launched voluntary retirement schemes. Samant believed that jobs were for life and he never really knew how to cope with the new situation. He also refused to discuss productivity or technology changes on the grounds that these would ultimately lead to job loss. He could do little however, when workers bypassed him to take the VRS.
To his admirers, he was a principled leader who would not bend his principles to suit the changing economic and political climate. Says Kiron Mehta, union leader of the Philips Employees Union (PEU), We knew that whenever we had an issue which was politically sensitive, Datta Samant would not hesitate to take an unpopular stand. His critics however say that he simply failed to read the times. In an age where workers had accepted the voluntary retirement schemes, union leaders like Samant should have worked towards educating the workers on life after retirement or forced the management to provide better training and opportunities for re-employment of the workers. For the only way to combat job insecurity is to lower the cost of job loss and that is by making workers more employable. While it is not always clear to companies why they should spend on making their employees more attractive for competitors, it is upto the trade unions to force through retraining and training programmes.
Samant lacked the vision to equip his workers for the changing times. To be fair, most of the other unions are also just as clueless. Says Vasant Gupte, professor with the Maniben Kara Institute, Whatever we may say, a lot of workers are going to lose their jobs with the changing technologies. We need to train them workers have to be multiskilled. The unions however are not geared for these changes at all. According to Gupte, most unions in India have failed to face up to these changes and hence membership is on the decline.
Union strength has whittled in Maharashtra and across the country as today just about 10 per cent of the total workforce is unionised. And the national trade unions have lost out to independent internal unions. Samants Kamgar Aghadi, despite being a smaller union, failed to cash in on the trend while the Shiv Sena unions have gained in the process. The three Shiv Sena unions, the Bhartiya Kamgar Sena, the Shramik Sena and the Maharashtra Shramik Sena, have spread their influence and claim to have a membership of over two lakh workers in Maharashtra today. Much of the gain that these unions have made has been at the cost of unions like the Kamgar Aghadi, the Rashtriya Mill Mazdoor Sangh and the Intuc.
Samant, when alive, dismissed the Shiv Senas rise. He believed that the Shiv Sena unions were management stooges which were promoted by the employers to keep out antagonistic union leaders like himself. He was not entirely wrong in many instances, the Shiv Sena was used to counter an existing union which was creating trouble for the employers. Says Sachin Aher, leader of the Rashtriya Mill Mazdoor Sangh, The Shiv Sena unions influence has grown and all of us have lost some workers to them. He believes that their growth is largely due to the fact that the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance is in power in the state.
Samants death will give the Shiv Sena unions an opportunity to widen their net further. According to S T Sawant, director of the Maharashtra Institute of labour Studies, Other unions will use this opportunity to increase their membership and put their ideology on a wider scale. At the same time, it will drive home the fact that the underworld is here to stay in the trade union movement. As Sachin Aher of the RMMS who is also the brother-in-law of Arun Gawli, underworld don, says: If this could happen to Samant, it could happen to any one of us.
If this fear forces the unions to clean up their stables, Samants death would have made a significant impact. And in death he would have achieved what he could not ensure in his lifetime.