Where have all the workers gone?

Chennai, Dec. 11: An existential crisis assails the Citu. More important, it has acknowledged as much.

The CPM’s labour arm, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions, appeared to give its wardrobe of ideas an unexpected airing when it suggested a second look at the entire trade union movement.

Its general secretary M.K. Pandhe said that without a rethink trade unions “will become irrelevant in the era of liberalisation and globalisation”.

On the third day of the 11th all-India conference, the Citu said delegates and members were convinced that the only way to “prevent liberalisation and globalisation from wiping away the trade union movement altogether” was to form an umbrella structure.

Calling it a “major step towards structural unification”, it revived the idea of a Confederation of Indian Trade Unions at the national level, which was immediately described by observers of the labour movement as a utopia.

Key differences among trade unions — all affiliated to political parties with conflicting interests — are the reason why such a confederation, like the Trades Union Congress in Britain, is believed to be impossible to achieve.

Pandhe, however, highlighted the common causes to stress the importance of coming together in a confederation. Privatisation was one such issue, he said, which all unions oppose.

The confederation will be a formalised common platform and a superstructure to evolve common policies and action plans to “fight the attack against the workers” in the wake of the new economic policies, he said.

He sought to push the idea also because merger efforts between unions in the past have failed. Pandhe cited the instance of the CPI-affiliated Aituc and the Hind Mazdoor Sabha (HMS). A similar attempt by the Congress-backed Intuc and the HMS has also yielded no result.

Except the Intuc and the BJP-affiliated BMS, “everyone else has come forward to form a sponsoring committee of Indian trade unions”, he said, suggesting that this could be used as the stepping stone to a confederation.

Pandhe hoped that “despite our political differences, we can come together on common issues concerning workers’ welfare”. As a “common issue” he mentioned the entry of a large number of women into new service sector jobs. This in itself is a suggestion of the Citu engaging with trends that are fairly new — such as the employment of women in call centres. Few better examples can be found of globalisation.

It might warm the heart of chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee to know that Citu’s general secretary for Bengal, Kali Ghosh, sat next to Pandhe as hints of soul-searching were dropped. There is a common belief — and admission even in the CPM — that the Citu’s militancy has given Bengal a bad name, scaring away investors. The chief minister is expected at the conference at the weekend.

“Soul-searching” was mentioned, in fact, by Pandhe, though he prescribed that exercise for all unions.

The backdrop for this introspection is the steady erosion of the trade union movement. Some of the delegates from abroad informed the conference how trade union membership, as a percentage of total workforce, had fallen steeply to 12 per cent in the US and 8 per cent in France.

Pandhe’s own report presented at the conference admits that the Citu had not been able to expand the organisation and failed to reach the target of 40 lakh membership set two years ago. “Membership figures (34 lakh now) do indicate a state of stagnation,” the report said.