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August 10, 2003
Review: Decline of labour power
IN THE second half of the preceding century the global production system was transformed. Industry began discarding old modes of production and embracing new technologies. There occurred a visible change even in the ways we lived, worked, behaved and thought.
Small wonder, the era of new technology also heralded a new age in the history of work. Local workplaces began merging with global workplaces as various components of the products were outsourced and produced in different countries by a workforce having different nationalities and possessing new knowledge skills.
However, the new technology, as has always been the case, was not without its victims. A major casualty was the institution of centralized trade union whose power and influence was on decline. Traditional jobs became fewer, many of them receding from the formal into informal sectors. In 1985-95, trade union membership dropped by 20 per cent in 48 out of 92 countries, according to an ILO report. As it turned out, the advent of new technology was out of sync with the ethos of the organized labour. Since then, efforts have been continuing to establish a viable synergy between new technology and the organized labour by retraining the latter but these have met little success as yet. What the new investor looked for was a new manpower. The old factory worker was seen as an anachronism.
The Indian government adopted a new industrial policy in 1991 whose major objective was to integrate trade and industry with the global market, a key measure being privatization of state-run industries. However, India did not find it easy to traverse the path of change. Structural reforms were introduced in an atmosphere of a great deal of skepticism among political parties, intellectuals and bureaucrats. Trade unions got together to resist the new industrial culture.
But what surprised the critics in the meantime was that the economy and industry began to look up. Foreign investment started coming. The Indian corporate sector underwent gradual transformation. Multinationals were discovering India as a profitable outsourcing and production centre in several areas.
It is in this economic setting that the author of this book, a collection of papers written during the last five years, has tried to explore the symbiotic relationship between labour and the technological change in post-1991 India. It is a commendable effort by the author, who teaches at Delhi University and has already written two books on trade union issues. Kuriakose Mamkootam examines closely the impact of the change in the production system on the working class and the tensions it has created.
The author concludes that one of the reasons why this change has been very slow in India is that it has met strong resistance from the workers. This is besides the fact that industrial relations have always been of adversarial nature in that country. But this is not peculiar to India. The industrial relations in the United States, the UK and many other countries including Pakistan have often been confrontationist. Only Germany, Japan and Sweden are known to be among a few instances where a cooperative model has worked.
But trade unions have nowhere in the world welcomed technological changes. Reason: they feared the new technology was a weapon in the hands of the entrepreneurs to eliminate trade unions. Since 1991, trade unions in India are struggling to come to terms with the changing occupational structure and at a great expense; the workers are gradually losing faith in the politicized and centralized structure of the trade unions.
The book unfolds various phases of this grim situation in an unemotional, scientific manner citing numerous studies conducted on the subject. Some readers may find this observance of scholarly discipline irritating but it makes the treatment of a highly sensitive development more objective and convincing.
As the author points out, the situation became worse when contract/temporary labour began replacing regular employees who were members of the plant unions. In fact, the change in the production system also gave rise to a change in the outlook of the entrepreneur. He saw the employees as one of the inputs, not in human terms. More emphasis was now on ways to meet stiff competition and maximize profit.
Debashish Bhattacherjee, who in 1999 wrote a wonderful report on India’s labour situation after economic liberalization for the ILO, says: “In both the public and private sector, employment in industry has substantially declined especially since the economic reforms. The trend in most industries is to reduce permanent employment and to use more contract, temporary and casual workers... the trade unions lack new strategies in the older and declining sectors of production and the number of plant-based independent and unaffiliated trade unions is on the rise, which may have caused a decline in the power of centralized affiliated unions, especially in the private sector”.
The indications are that the trend of subcontracting and outsourcing the jobs will continue to increase. Although the trade unions have been trying to restrain the managements from doing so, the neo-liberal policies being adopted by India on the behest of the IMF-World Bank-WTO trio are also contributing to this phenomenon. A study shows that 83 per cent of the new addition to the workforce during the past decade has been absorbed by the informal sector. So, in the post-liberalized India the informal sector has been growing rapidly and the formal sector has been shrinking drastically.
Meanwhile, internationalization of products (Nike shoes designed and financed in the United States but manufactured in Indonesia) have generated paradigmatic changes in product, marketing and labour strategies. Consequently, labour-capital relations have also been realigned. The new generation of manpower, possessing new skills and knowledge, is distinct for its individualistic profile and lack of solidarity with the working class.
The new worker is keen to see the traditional unions being replaced by enterprise unions which focus on localized bargaining. The salary and fringe benefits have also become more individualized and performance-based. In fact, there is a growing fear among trade union leaders that the workers may revolt against them if they do not protect their immediate interests. This is precisely what happened in a jute mill near Kolkata where workers refused to obey union directives and tried to resume work.
The problem arises from the fact that today’s economies are increasingly based on knowledge. And it is the management of knowledge that determines success or failure. That is why information technology and globalization are intimately inter-connected. The way Mamkoottam has examined the emerging phenomenon needs to be studied by those engaged in trade union activities in Pakistan.
Labour and Change: Essays on Globalization, Technological Change and Labour in India
By Kuriakrose Mamkoottam
Response Books, a division of Sage Publications, B-42, Panchsheel Enclave, Post Box 4109,
New Delhi-110017, India
Tel: 91-11-2649 1290-7.
Email: marketing@indiasage.com Website:
www.indiasage.com
ISBN 0-7619-9742-3
182pp. Price not listed
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