Trade unions

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This paper argues that the bilateral nature of labour-management relations is being obfuscated today by a unitarian management project. Democracy in the business organisation and the workplace in particular has to have an organic evolution and not through a motivation plan from above. Institutions of industrial relations including the union and collective bargaining can be the best via media for bringing in new institutions that are genuinely imbued with a participative and cooperative character. The paper reviews a sample of contemporary writings that focus on why unions still matter, new possibilities for unions and union-participatory approaches to management.

This study, covering a two-decade period, shows that on the whole trade unions have experienced an erosion in their strength. Also, with the introduction of new technology in the cotton textile industry, the tussle is now between workers and machines, with mills acquiring sophistication and cutting production costs through reduced employment.

Three hundred thousand workers marched in pouring rain in Bombay on August 1, bring Bombay's strike of 250,000 textile workers, the largest in history, to a new level of political confrontation with the Congress(I). "Without destroying the anti-working class power of Congress, the basic problems of textile workers and other sections of workers cannot be solved", declared the workers' leader, Datra Samant. Other union representatives, women's organisation representatives, and activists of the Lai Nishan Party called for workers' take-over of factories, recalled China's 'long march' and stressed the transformation of the workers' struggle into a political one.

"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.