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Angels Are Turning Red
The nurses' strikes indicated the outburst of the self-concealed and politically ignored labour's unrest in the hospital industry. It is the beginning of a different form of class struggle, a demand for a more adaptive and communicative strategy from the established trade unions and the political left. This article looks at the labour-capital conflicts in Kerala's hospital industry, class formation and unionisation of nurses and the approach of political parties and the government to the question of labour.
Since 2009, the nurses in India have been organising strikes against the ever-increasing exploitation of labour in the private hospitals. The strikes affect Kerala more because a large majority of nurses in India are from the state (Percot and Rajan 2007: 320; Nair and Haeley 2009: 14). In Kerala, even the nurses in private hospitals, who are traditionally refrained from any kind of trade union activities, also formed some politically independent unions in 2012, and their strikes met with some positive results. The increase in nurses’ wages in Kerala forced the corporate hospitals in Delhi, Hyderabad and Chennai to announce new wage package in order to prevent the possibility of nurses’ exodus to their home state.1 This article looks at the labour-capital conflicts in Kerala’s hospital industry, class formation and unionisation of nurses and the approach of political parties and the government to the question of labour.
Hospital Industry in Kerala
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