Bombay Mill Strike

"First tell us why you're here — have you only come to tell us Datta Samant is power-hungry and that we should go back to work?" Textile workers, now back in their village homes three months into the longest strike in their history, are at first suspicious. From the beginning they have heard from their more well-known village leaders only anti-strike propaganda — workers are well off anyway and are causing damage to the nation by demanding too much, etc, etc. But once they find out that these visitors, organisers with agricultural labourers and toiling peasants in a nearby village, are different, are supporters of their strike, have been distributing pamphlets showing this support, their mood changes. A lamp is brought, friends are called, a meeting is held in a small temple in this poor peasant section of a prosperous and merchant dominated village in the foothills of the Sahyadris, and the process of organising the textile workers in Shiralapeth taluka of Sangli district has begun. 

In his article (Special Number, November 1981) Dick Kooiman has argued that the chief explanation for the weak and disorganized condition of the Bombay working class movement in the period 1934-37 was "the institution of the labour officer", which by appropriating the main function of the unions, prevented them from gaining strength. But even a vestigial acquaintance with the history of the Bombay workers' movement suffices to disprove this. 

The five-month old strike in 60 mills spells out a crisis in the institutional framework of capital-labour relations in the Bombay's cotton textile industry. The persistence of the strike has surprised the employers as well as the government, who expected the strike to fizzle-out in a few weeks.

During the drawn-out textile strike in Bombay in 1928, in which communists for the first time played an active rote in an industrial conflict, the multiclass front teas broken as a consequence of the workers' independent action against the entrepreneurs as a class. Even before the no less dramatic strike in 1929, the communist leaders had consolidated their position, and fought at the helm of a one lakh strong organisation.

Textile unionism has been, like unionism in the railways and coal mines in India, industrial unionism, characterised by long drawn out general strikes. Today, as Bombay textile workers have entered into a seemingly indefinite strike, they do so in the context of fundamental changes which have occurred in the last 20 years in the industry; changes which could transform the nature of textile unionism. From the 1918 general strike, which covered 80 mills and involved one lakh and forty thousand workers, up to the present, Bombay textile workers have launched industrial actions which have drawn together workers from the whole industry. These strikes have thrown up different forms of organisations like the Girni Kamgar Union and the mill committees; which were formed as a result of the general strikes of 1924-25 and the six-month long struggle of 1928. These represented the coalescence of two tendencies