LABOUR Industrial Violence: A Case Study Sandeep Pendse THE knowledgeable urban intellectual does not believe this, but owners of factories do make every effort to oppose unionisation of workers. Industrialists are not, in spite of the current myth to that effect, helpless, unfortunate, innocent creatures held to continuous reason by rapacious 'privileged' workers. The owners accept the existence of unions only when all their efforts to prevent and break them have failed. The forms of the effort vary. Suave and sophisticated managements of large companies use subtle techniques, eg. corruption, veiled intimidation, legally watertight victimisation, promotion of inter-union rivalries, and use of the state machinery. Crude, inexperienced owners of new, smaller factories abuse workers, assault them and throw them out with no pretenses of legality. Both seem to be unaware of the considered opinion of some of our intellectuals that trade unions are corrupt, co-opted bodies which actually serve the interests of capital. They seem to find organisations of workers inimical to their interests, and leave no stone unturned to break or at least weaken them. Any industrial centre in India would supply a mass of facts to support these contentions. Victimisation of activists, look-outs or fake closures, clashes between "groups of workers" and assaults on active workers are, however, not dramatic enough to disturb deadened sensibilities.
