The Hindu : Double standards on labour

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jul 05, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - Editorials

Double standards on labour

THE DETENTION OF scores of trade union leaders in Tamil Nadu under the State's own Essential Services Maintenance Act (ESMA) and subsequent assumption of summary powers to dismiss employees through an ordinance raise issues far beyond the merits or otherwise of the demands of Government employees and the question whether such strong-arm methods are conducive to resolution of employer-employee disputes. The strike of the Government staff in fact started a day ahead of schedule, sparked by widespread arrests of union activists.

At the bottom of the issue is the failure of India to ratify two of the eight "core" conventions of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). India, a founder-member of the ILO and ostensibly an adherent to the organisation's basic concepts and values, has consistently abstained from ratifying the Convention (No. 87) on Freedom of Association and Protection of Right to Organise and the Convention (No. 98) on Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining. The reason trotted out by India all these years is that these apply to all employees without any discrimination whatsoever, with the sole exception of the armed forces and the police, and thus confer the core rights on civilian government employees too. India has contended that in practice workers in the country enjoy "constitutional guarantees" on democratic and labour rights, social security and job security, while there are "grievance redressal mechanisms" such as the Joint Consultative Machinery in the case of Central staff. The "main reason" that the Centre has cited for not ratifying the two core ILO conventions is "the inability of the government to promote unionisation of government servants in the highly politicised trade union system of the country." This stance amounts to a defiance of common sense. If the right to strike — the single biggest weapon of the working class in the exercise of its right to organise and to collective bargaining — can be snatched away by legislative processes such as ESMA. This in effect means denial of the core rights, despite the "constitutional guarantees" the workers are supposed to enjoy. India's failure to come to terms with this reality has led to avoidable tensions created in the past by the Centre's own ESMA. Now State Governments may be emboldened to follow the Centre's past record.

Clearly, labour rights and standards do not, and ought not to, depend on "political" or any other bias in trade union organisational structures. In fact, the "highly politicised" nature of the trade union movement in India (where "politicised" means organising along party lines and not political consciousness of workers) has only favoured employers, including governments, inasmuch as it has encouraged divisions within the trade union movement. The problem of the impact of strikes on the public and consumers has been compounded by State-owned operation and ownership of essential utilities such as in the power sector, whereby a strike in an undertaking paralyses all production in that sector. This is a result of economic structures chosen by public policy and should in no way be used to deny workers their democratic rights. In the West, workers have been organising industry-wide direct action covering private enterprises. That is the trade union movement's own strategy and its basic rights cannot be compromised in the name of maintaining "essential services". It hardly behoves the world's largest democracy on the one hand to proclaim that labour standards should not be linked to trade issues since they belong in the realm of the ILO and on the other not to honour core standards evolved by the same ILO.

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