For The Right To Strike!
By Tapan Sen
People's Democracy
24 February, 2004Today India is witnessing the 9th all India general strike since the onset of the disastrous liberalised economic policy regime. The date of the general strike was finalised in the joint meeting of all major central trade unions in the country held at the INTUC headquarters at New Delhi on January 5.
This general strike is not to press any economic demands of the workers.
The strike is essentially for defending the right to strike in the face
of prohibitive order of the Supreme Court in that regard. The strike is
also directed against the disastrous economic policy regime of the NDA
government resulting in deepening poverty, growing unemployment,
reckless privatisation and closures - all bringing about a severe
distortion in the economy as a whole, much to the detriment of the
national interest.
CONCERTED ATTACKS
Both the issues taken up for the forthcoming general strike are closely
interrelated. The ongoing attacks on labour rights are a direct outcome
of the vigorous implementation of the Fund-Bank dictated policies of
liberalisation by the NDA regime. The working class movement has been
consistently striving to build a countrywide resistance against such
policies from the day they were implemented. This resistance has now
started drawing support from the mass of the populace beyond the
boundaries of the trade union movement. To meet this resistance the so
called labour market reform has now become the main agenda of second
generation reforms which aims at imposing the conditions of slavery on
the working people and strip them off all their rights to collectively
express and protest. As part of this effort the bills to amend the
Industrial Disputes Act and the Contract Labour (Regulations and
Abolition) Act have already been finalised and cleared by the NDA
government. They are designed to vest unfettered power with the
employers to hire and fire at will and deploy workers on contract in
every sector on the one hand and to impose insurmountable embargo before
the unions to organise, collectively represent and strike on the other.
Those bills could not be brought before the 13th Lok Sabha by the NDA
government, may be because of its immediate political constraints in
view of advancing of the general election.But along with this legislative initiative to enslave and casualise the
entire working class, the administrative exercise by the State machinery
to totally clip the rights of organised working class movement has come
out with all force. Even the judicial wing has come forward to
supplement, as well as legitimise, the proactive and mostly unlawful
actions by the State to curb the trade union activities in active
collusion with the employers. This is manifested in the consistent rise
in the employers' militancy during the entire post-liberalisation
period. They are randomly resorting to lockouts and closures even in the
face of a decline in the incidence of strikes. In fact, during
1991-2000, lockouts accounted for 60 per cent of the total mandays lost.
In 1999 alone, mandays lost owing to lockouts were eight times more than
those lost due to strikes. In 2001 it was three times more while in 2002
it was four times more. If mandays lost due to closures and undeclared
shutdowns are also taken into account, more than 90 per cent mandays
lost during the entire post liberalisation period can be attributed to
the employers' class alone. Yet the apex court in its judgment delivered
on August 6, 2003 did not hesitate to describe 'strike' as a weapon
'mostly abused by the workers'.
Besides lockouts and closures, flagrant violations of labour laws,
particularly pertaining to statutory minimum wages, are so common that
the workers got tired of even filing complaints regarding the same since
the enforcement machinery has been made totally ineffective by the
government in the name of becoming "investment friendly". As for
example, of the total complaints lodged regarding violation of Minimum
Wages Act during 2002-03, hardly one third have been attended to and
disposed of according to the latest Annual Report of the Union Labour
Ministry (2002-03). In reality, violation of existing labour laws on
workers' rights-related matters is being indulged and promoted by the
government machinery as a part of their policy of so called
"investment-friendliness".
RECENT BACKGROUND
The toiling people of the country, who create wealth for the nation, are
being attacked with a vengeance by the employer-class. They are losing
jobs in several thousands owing to closures, lockouts, and more so, due
to unlawful shutdowns. And they remain deprived of even the minimum
statutory compensations in most of the cases. Any form of organised
protest against unlawful shutdowns and lockouts have been tackled with
brutality by the local police and administration that are always ready
at the beck and call of the employers. Such is the experience in almost
every case of lockouts and closures in the industrial centres of
Rajasthan, Haryana, Punjab, UP and many other states of the country. The
happenings with the striking employees of Tamil Nadu betrayed perverse
vindictiveness on the part of the state administration, unheard of in
the entire history of labour movement. Such perversion has become the
norm under the new policy regime where the ruling polity and the
employer class are conniving in their effort to eliminate the
possibility of any organised and collective expression of dissent by the
working class. It is not without any reason that the highest court in
the country justified all vindictive actions of the Jayalalitha
government against the striking employees, while pronouncing a decisive
ban on the right to strike of all employees in general. At the same time
it did not even bother to look into the issues arising out of unilateral
actions of the state government, which led to the strike in the first
place. And most interestingly, while the ban has been pronounced by the
apex court on the workers right to strike, in another judgment passed in
December 2003, the employers have been virtually conferred the "right to
kill". In the said judgment, an owner of a Kerala based factory who shot
dead two striking workers, squatting at the factory gate on the day of a
general strike on March 15, 1998, was acquitted on ground of self
defence although he was sentenced to life imprisonment by the lower
court after detailed hearing of the case. It is also noteworthy that
while responding to the complaint lodged by the CITU and Public Services
International with the ILO on the repression on the Tamil Nadu state
govt employees, the Vajpayee govt. fully endorsed all the atrocities
committed by the Jayalalitha regime. The perverse bias of the entire
state machinery against the working class thus stands thoroughly exposed.