The other half
T.K. RAJALAKSHMI
in New Delhi
An International Labour Organisation report examines the gender aspect of the global financial crisis.
PAUL NORONHA
WOMEN ROLLING PAPAD at Dharavi in Mumbai. There are lakhs of women employed in home-based work, but they are "invisible" as they are unregistered workers.
THERE is no gainsaying the fact that labour markets will deteriorate because of the global economic crisis. A recent report, “Global Employment Trends for Women” by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), suggests that there is a gender aspect too to its impact on jobs. The magnitude of the crisis will unfold only in the months to come.
But responses from policymakers, including those in India, which began with a denial of the projected impact of the slowdown, have been slow and inadequate. In fact, trade unions in India were quite surprised when a Minister recommended that employees be prepared for wage cuts. And, given the fact that various gender differentials already exist in employment, working conditions and wages, the report, which looks at the gender impact of the economic crisis, gains more significance.
The report, a sequel to the “Global Employment Trends 2009” released early this year, underscores one of the recurrent themes in ILO documents over the years: lack of access to decent work will only increase poverty and social instability. It is not desirable, therefore, to have a huge workforce employed in what does not constitute decent work and decent terms of employment. Stating that the emerging trends are extremely worrying for both men and women, the report says the time has come for a coordinated effort internationally to stop the slowdown.
The report includes a new category called the vulnerable employed to denote own-account workers and unpaid family workers. These workers are in the informal or unorganised sector and are characterised by insecurity of employment, and have no social security, bargaining power or decent wages.
At the global level, the share of the vulnerable employed among all women employed is as high as 52.7 per cent compared with 49.1 per cent for men, says the report. Vulnerable employment exists all over the world but is acute in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. The conclusion that emerges is that the shift away from vulnerable forms of employment into regular, salaried wage work will result in real economic freedom and economic independence for women. This, in turn, will have an impact on the social status of women.
The report further says that while the share of women in wage and salaried work grew from 41.8 per cent in 1997 to 45.5 per cent in 2007, the corresponding increase of female own-account workers was much higher. Own-account workers have fewer formal arrangements of work, lack social protection and safety nets, and are incapable of generating enough savings at times of financial crises.
The report does not specify whether the disadvantages for women in the current global crisis will be more compared with those of men, but given the large employment of women in agriculture, where wages and returns in most parts of the world continue to be very low, there is no doubt that the economic situation for these sections can only be expected to worsen.
The report calls for greater investment in female education, changes in labour legislation and the setting up of certain conditions that enable sharing of family responsibilities so that women can participate equally in labour markets. Studies conducted by the ILO in Bangladesh show that as women’s education improved, the male-female wage gap decreased. But in addition to providing education, the onus on governments is to make commitments to free and accessible health care and provide foodgrains at low prices. In India, it is a well-known fact that high health care expenditure is a major reason for rural indebtedness and that out-of-pocket expenditure on health is as high as 80 per cent. The government’s expenditure on health is less than 1 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP).
Gender differentials, says the report, come from a number of reasons, including crowding of women in low-paying industries and differences in skills and work experience. More often than not, it is the demand from industry for women in low-paying jobs that results in the overcrowding of women. Certain types of industries prefer women for certain categories of jobs that offer low wages. Training women workers for skilled-category jobs is a non-existent practice. They are driven out of economic necessity to settle for low-paying jobs and debilitating working conditions.
The impact of the crisis, with its gender differentials, is not going to be the same in all parts of the world. The crisis may prove to be devastating for men and women equally in developed economies, with the unemployment rates for men slightly higher than those of women. According to the report, the ranks of the unemployed increased by 13.8 million between 2007 and 2008, marking the largest year-on-year increase in recent times.
In fact, what is noticeable is a reduction in the gender gap of the rate of unemployment. Of the total 193 million of unemployed the world over, men constituted 112 million and women 81 million. Access to labour markets is stated as one of the reasons for the low employment of women.
If decent work was easily accessible, there is little doubt that women would have joined the ranks of the employed in huge numbers. In the absence of work qualifying as decent and of a permanent nature, men have the greater advantage than women in negotiating jobs. Significantly, the question that needs to be addressed more aggressively by the ILO and others is whether decent work is easily available.
Gender pay gap
Gender pay gap is prevalent all over the world, including in the United States. The report notes with concern that the reduction in the gender pay gap has slowed down. In developed economies, there was a reduction in the gender gap in the unemployment rate in 2008, which implied that the situation of men in the labour market had worsened than that of women. It is for these reasons that the report is unable to conclude that women have been more adversely affected by the economic crisis in developed economies.
Between 1995 and 2005, the sector having the highest employment growth rate for both men and women in the developed economies was real estate, renting and business activities. In financial intermediation, the sector where the crisis originated, employment distribution was slightly more favourable to women than men. Hence, the report surmises, the impact of the crisis in this sector would have affected women more than men.
Economic status plays a major role in labour force participation by women. In developed countries, the report argues, a low rate of employment of women may indicate that women here have a choice and can afford not to enter the labour market. But in developing countries, this choice is absent. This, besides other social factors, is a reason for women opting not to enter the labour market. The report says that these women who stay at home do a lot of household activities and shoulder a lot of unpaid family care responsibilities, which does not reflect in the national incomes of governments as such work is classified as non-economic activity.
The broad trend observed in India and perhaps the rest of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa is that women, out of sheer economic necessity and to meet the high cost of living, cutting across caste, community and religious lines, enter the labour market in a thousand ways which are still to be recognised as economic activity by their governments.
S. SIVA SARAVANAN
At a spinning mill in Dharapuram near Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu. The report says a very small proportion of women are employed in industry while the large majority are employed in agriculture.
For instance, there are lakhs of women employed in home-based work, doing piece-rate jobs where they are paid unimaginably low rates. They are quite invisible as they are unregistered workers, without any legislative or social entitlement. Likewise, there are hordes of women employed as domestic workers, who again lack any wage structure or protective legislative system.
As the report shows, a very small proportion of women are employed in industry while the large majority are employed in agriculture. There is what is called an overrepresentation of women in agriculture. Almost everywhere in the world, there are fewer women employed in industry as compared to other sectors.
While the feminisation of agriculture and of poverty has become a cliched term, the feminisation of industry is yet to happen. What the report does not explain are the reasons for the growing feminisation of agriculture. Is it a sign of distress or of hidden prosperity? Globally, the share of women employed in agriculture stands at 35.4 per cent as compared to 32.2 per cent for men. It is almost 60 per cent in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, which perhaps means that this is where governments ought to direct their policies for women in order to create decent conditions of work.
Services sector
The services sector is another area which has seen a burgeoning of female employment in recent times. According to the report, in 2008, the services sector accounted for 46.3 per cent of all female employment while male employment comprised 41.2 per cent. The conditions of work and wages, of course, vary from region to region though it can be safely surmised that the worst conditions prevail in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Much of the work in agriculture as well as the services sector is unorganised, devoid of any overarching legislation that guarantees social security and decent wages.
But then there are government policies itself which may need to be reversed. The report highlights the global food crisis that originated with the neglect of agriculture and hit countries in Africa the most. This, in turn, affected women who were employed, and continue to be employed, in agriculture in large numbers. Africa, which was more than self-sufficient in food 50 years ago, is now a massive food importer, says the report, quoting a study.
The report’s analysis that one of the reasons for the failure of the sector is gender inequality and lack of empowerment of women is inadequate in the least as much of international attention and donor-driven funding for development for several decades has been in Africa. There is a need to introspect on the kind of programmes, including structural adjustment, which much of Africa was made to undergo in the past few decades, and the impact of such externally imposed policies on agriculture and much of the social sector. The report recommends greater investment in rural infrastructure, education and social capital, something that the Left parties in India have been advocating. •
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Role of TradeUnions
Sustainable Growth and the Role of Trade Unions
- Ardhendu Dakshi
Sustainable growth of the economy is extremely vital for the working class and the trade unions. A steady and all round expansion of production and services means steady jobs, a secured life and prospect of a decent wage and a better career. Continuous growth of economy also denotes higher consumption by the people, general improvement of their standard of living and the working class, being a part of the society, also is the beneficiary of sustained growth of the economy. A balanced growth in all the three major sectors like agriculture, industry and services signifies a mutually supportive system with a better distribution of the wealth generated by the society. With a proper distributive system in place, the economy develops into a self-sustaining or self-generating one. This is something that not only the working class but also all other sections of toiling people want to have for their prosperity and peace in life. A proper macro-economic management can bring about big social changes and stability in the society that can usher in a situation conducive for further growth. The fundamental principles for the policy makers must be driven by the desire to uplift the condition of the common people who will ultimately hold the economy up and help it to expand.
The class, conscious trade unions look beyond the primary task of looking after the welfare of their members, to the other aspects of economic management and related developments. We have seen in the past as well as in the present time that wrong policies and mis-management of the economy can bring disaster in the life of the people but the working class are always hardest hit during an economic downturn. When the economic slow-down starts because of unbalanced and unplanned growth driven only by profit-motiveness by the capitalist class the workers are simply thrown out of their jobs, common people are forced to suffer all their hardships in life and when protests grow and situation become unmanageable, their democratic rights are trampled down. In the world of capitalism this is the general rule. In spite of all the known fault lines of capitalism, the governments run by the capitalists, in order to maintain their dominance have resorted to violence against their own people in their own countries as well as against other countries and the people there. The horrors of war all through the twentieth century are results of capitalist crises and the pursuit of world capitalism to establish their absolute dominance over world economy.
The Role of Trade Unions
There are two types of responses from trade union when the crisis strikes the head of the workers. One section of trade unionists call such crises as "natural" by claiming that economy, as always, have "ups" and "downs" and therefore, the workers shall have to bear it out and, with great hope, should wait for better times. They also are keen to protect the domestic employers, for obvious reasons, and the governments by shifting the responsibility to the "global" phenomenon of economic crisis. This is an easy option to deceive the workers and the people. They preach tolerance and ask workers to make sacrifices in order to protect capital and the capitalists though they are mainly responsible for such crises.
Last 20 years, in the matters of economic development, is a period fit for a close study. The period of "Neo-Liberal Globalization" is marked by high rate of growth but is a disbalanced and skewed one is proving to be un-sustainable and the crisis is deepening. We have witnessed a massive transfer of wealth from poor countries to rich countries and from poor people to rich people. Huge production capacities have been generated by paying "One dollar or, at the best, two dollars to the workers". In the process some people have become phenomenally rich and a new middle class has emerged enjoying the best of their life at the cost of the working class. Most of the national governments and policy makers have put a supportive frame-work to help such a crude, ruthless exploitation of labour. Some trade unions also fell in line calling globalsition as "inevitable".
Apart from the economic suffering by the working class the other big loss is their trade union rights. Except for the socialist countries, there has been a pervading decline of trade union rights in both developed and developing world. In the developing countries labour law enforcement has been lax and in some countries the entire legal framework for protection of labour has been demolished. All these steps have led to further impoverishment of the working class in both industrial and rural agricultural sectors.
In such a situation the role of class oriented trade unions has been altogether different, if not opposite. As for example, we, in the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), have all along opposed this model of growth as we knew that it would not be sustainable. Another major development is causing more worry for the workers in developing countries.
For various reasons the western economies have shifted their manufacturing base to the developing countries. Availability of cheap and skilled labour, raw materials and better infrastructural facilities are the main considerations. But to keep their control over the emerging economies they have kept their hold over the stock markets and investment agencies. This is a dangerous situation because, in such a mechanism, the economy of developing country is tuned to the needs of developed world without creating a strong domestic market to fall back on, in case there is a demand slump in developed world. All these will lead to a globalized crisis and the main sufferers will be the workers in developing countries. Their trade unions will have little chance to protect jobs of their members, not to speak of decent wage and labour rights.
The duty of the class-based trade unions is to hit at the root of the cause of fragile and vulnerable economic structure. Understanding the cause unsustainable growth and to fight for changing the macro-economic policies is the fundamental duty of class conscious trade unions.
The capitalists preach that poverty anywhere is danger for prosperity everywhere but they do not practice their own dictum. Poverty has increased in most of the developing countries in last 20 years. In some countries, like India, the recent growth is impressive but illusory because there has been no simultaneous growth of domestic market. 80 per cent of people live just at subsistence level and 90 per cent of the workers cannot buy the products they produce. In case of a slack international demand the growth in India cannot be sustained. The government may only try to prop up the stock market, the manufacturing sector is bound to face a collapse in a global slump.
The role of trade unions has to be one to avoid such a situation. Trade unions must play a role of intervention in the policy making stage through mass action, should oppose wrong policies by the government, particularly in capitalist economies, and fight for distribution of wealth to the people and the workers so as to ensure a better real income by them. These steps only can guarantee a sustainable growth of the economy where production, distribution and consumption can be evenly matched and market is developed in the country. When the orthodox capitalist system fails, trade unions, obviously, should have a role to intervene to change the economy and the society. More than anything else, sustainable growth of economy is extremely vital for the working class a well as their trade unions.
Internationalisation of Movement
All said and done we believe that when trade union movement becomes a social movement for a change, it cannot be confined in one country, inside one geographical boundary, in this era of globalization. We are witnessing two dangerous trends all over the capitalist world that are influencing the life of conventional working class in post world war-2 situation, particularly in the era of globalization.
Firstly, there is gradual displacement of regular workers in advanced countries by informal and illegal immigrant workers who do not enjoy same rights like regular workers. Secondly, in the developing countries there is large-scale displacement of regular workers by contractors' workers or informal workers. Outsourcing of jobs are rampant almost everywhere.
While the employers are totally united and employing the same methods, bargaining with national governments in the same way, about everywhere across the globe, unfortunately national governments are competing with each other to grant more liberal concessions in the matters of wages benefits, social protection and labour rights. The workers are at the receiving end.
This situation compels the trade unions to join hands nationally, regionally and globally. Without a concerted resistance there is poor chance to fight such exploitation at the local level. Let us admit the fact that the multinational corporations are taking full advantage of this situation and maximizing their profit.
We welcome the move by the ACFTU to organize this meeting. Such regional understanding and co-operation will go a long way for protection of the workers job and rights in our respective countries. We in the CITU have always aspired for building up of an Asian Confederation of Trade Unions, where trade unions of all affiliations could work together on common goal of protecting the workers rights. In the present situation such an organization has become a necessity as we apprehend that with accentuating of economic crisis, attack on the workers will intensify particularly in the Asian region.
ACFTU has the strength stature and the wherewithal to help building up an Asian Confederation of Trade Unions. We look forward for the day when such an initiative is taken by the trade unions in different countries and ACFTU takes an appropriate lead to fulfill the important international task.
Our greetings to ACFTU from Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU).
(Speech by Ardhendu Dakshi in Beijing Conference of Trade Unions in South Asia)
- Ardhendu Dakshi
Sustainable growth of the economy is extremely vital for the working class and the trade unions. A steady and all round expansion of production and services means steady jobs, a secured life and prospect of a decent wage and a better career. Continuous growth of economy also denotes higher consumption by the people, general improvement of their standard of living and the working class, being a part of the society, also is the beneficiary of sustained growth of the economy. A balanced growth in all the three major sectors like agriculture, industry and services signifies a mutually supportive system with a better distribution of the wealth generated by the society. With a proper distributive system in place, the economy develops into a self-sustaining or self-generating one. This is something that not only the working class but also all other sections of toiling people want to have for their prosperity and peace in life. A proper macro-economic management can bring about big social changes and stability in the society that can usher in a situation conducive for further growth. The fundamental principles for the policy makers must be driven by the desire to uplift the condition of the common people who will ultimately hold the economy up and help it to expand.
The class, conscious trade unions look beyond the primary task of looking after the welfare of their members, to the other aspects of economic management and related developments. We have seen in the past as well as in the present time that wrong policies and mis-management of the economy can bring disaster in the life of the people but the working class are always hardest hit during an economic downturn. When the economic slow-down starts because of unbalanced and unplanned growth driven only by profit-motiveness by the capitalist class the workers are simply thrown out of their jobs, common people are forced to suffer all their hardships in life and when protests grow and situation become unmanageable, their democratic rights are trampled down. In the world of capitalism this is the general rule. In spite of all the known fault lines of capitalism, the governments run by the capitalists, in order to maintain their dominance have resorted to violence against their own people in their own countries as well as against other countries and the people there. The horrors of war all through the twentieth century are results of capitalist crises and the pursuit of world capitalism to establish their absolute dominance over world economy.
The Role of Trade Unions
There are two types of responses from trade union when the crisis strikes the head of the workers. One section of trade unionists call such crises as "natural" by claiming that economy, as always, have "ups" and "downs" and therefore, the workers shall have to bear it out and, with great hope, should wait for better times. They also are keen to protect the domestic employers, for obvious reasons, and the governments by shifting the responsibility to the "global" phenomenon of economic crisis. This is an easy option to deceive the workers and the people. They preach tolerance and ask workers to make sacrifices in order to protect capital and the capitalists though they are mainly responsible for such crises.
Last 20 years, in the matters of economic development, is a period fit for a close study. The period of "Neo-Liberal Globalization" is marked by high rate of growth but is a disbalanced and skewed one is proving to be un-sustainable and the crisis is deepening. We have witnessed a massive transfer of wealth from poor countries to rich countries and from poor people to rich people. Huge production capacities have been generated by paying "One dollar or, at the best, two dollars to the workers". In the process some people have become phenomenally rich and a new middle class has emerged enjoying the best of their life at the cost of the working class. Most of the national governments and policy makers have put a supportive frame-work to help such a crude, ruthless exploitation of labour. Some trade unions also fell in line calling globalsition as "inevitable".
Apart from the economic suffering by the working class the other big loss is their trade union rights. Except for the socialist countries, there has been a pervading decline of trade union rights in both developed and developing world. In the developing countries labour law enforcement has been lax and in some countries the entire legal framework for protection of labour has been demolished. All these steps have led to further impoverishment of the working class in both industrial and rural agricultural sectors.
In such a situation the role of class oriented trade unions has been altogether different, if not opposite. As for example, we, in the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), have all along opposed this model of growth as we knew that it would not be sustainable. Another major development is causing more worry for the workers in developing countries.
For various reasons the western economies have shifted their manufacturing base to the developing countries. Availability of cheap and skilled labour, raw materials and better infrastructural facilities are the main considerations. But to keep their control over the emerging economies they have kept their hold over the stock markets and investment agencies. This is a dangerous situation because, in such a mechanism, the economy of developing country is tuned to the needs of developed world without creating a strong domestic market to fall back on, in case there is a demand slump in developed world. All these will lead to a globalized crisis and the main sufferers will be the workers in developing countries. Their trade unions will have little chance to protect jobs of their members, not to speak of decent wage and labour rights.
The duty of the class-based trade unions is to hit at the root of the cause of fragile and vulnerable economic structure. Understanding the cause unsustainable growth and to fight for changing the macro-economic policies is the fundamental duty of class conscious trade unions.
The capitalists preach that poverty anywhere is danger for prosperity everywhere but they do not practice their own dictum. Poverty has increased in most of the developing countries in last 20 years. In some countries, like India, the recent growth is impressive but illusory because there has been no simultaneous growth of domestic market. 80 per cent of people live just at subsistence level and 90 per cent of the workers cannot buy the products they produce. In case of a slack international demand the growth in India cannot be sustained. The government may only try to prop up the stock market, the manufacturing sector is bound to face a collapse in a global slump.
The role of trade unions has to be one to avoid such a situation. Trade unions must play a role of intervention in the policy making stage through mass action, should oppose wrong policies by the government, particularly in capitalist economies, and fight for distribution of wealth to the people and the workers so as to ensure a better real income by them. These steps only can guarantee a sustainable growth of the economy where production, distribution and consumption can be evenly matched and market is developed in the country. When the orthodox capitalist system fails, trade unions, obviously, should have a role to intervene to change the economy and the society. More than anything else, sustainable growth of economy is extremely vital for the working class a well as their trade unions.
Internationalisation of Movement
All said and done we believe that when trade union movement becomes a social movement for a change, it cannot be confined in one country, inside one geographical boundary, in this era of globalization. We are witnessing two dangerous trends all over the capitalist world that are influencing the life of conventional working class in post world war-2 situation, particularly in the era of globalization.
Firstly, there is gradual displacement of regular workers in advanced countries by informal and illegal immigrant workers who do not enjoy same rights like regular workers. Secondly, in the developing countries there is large-scale displacement of regular workers by contractors' workers or informal workers. Outsourcing of jobs are rampant almost everywhere.
While the employers are totally united and employing the same methods, bargaining with national governments in the same way, about everywhere across the globe, unfortunately national governments are competing with each other to grant more liberal concessions in the matters of wages benefits, social protection and labour rights. The workers are at the receiving end.
This situation compels the trade unions to join hands nationally, regionally and globally. Without a concerted resistance there is poor chance to fight such exploitation at the local level. Let us admit the fact that the multinational corporations are taking full advantage of this situation and maximizing their profit.
We welcome the move by the ACFTU to organize this meeting. Such regional understanding and co-operation will go a long way for protection of the workers job and rights in our respective countries. We in the CITU have always aspired for building up of an Asian Confederation of Trade Unions, where trade unions of all affiliations could work together on common goal of protecting the workers rights. In the present situation such an organization has become a necessity as we apprehend that with accentuating of economic crisis, attack on the workers will intensify particularly in the Asian region.
ACFTU has the strength stature and the wherewithal to help building up an Asian Confederation of Trade Unions. We look forward for the day when such an initiative is taken by the trade unions in different countries and ACFTU takes an appropriate lead to fulfill the important international task.
Our greetings to ACFTU from Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU).
(Speech by Ardhendu Dakshi in Beijing Conference of Trade Unions in South Asia)
Trade unionsin massive campaigns
Trade Unions to Unleash Massive Campaign -
On ILO Core Conventions
- Swadesh Dev Roye
According to the call of the 87th session of International Labour Conference (ILC) of the International Labour Organisatioon (ILO) the trade union movement all over the world is observing the 60th anniversary of the adoption of the Core Convention No.87.
The Central Trade Unions (CTUs) in our country jointly organized a 'National Workshop on ILO Core Conventions' on 4th November 2008 at the Constitution Club, New Delhi. The presidium of the workshop consisted of MK Pandhe (CITU), H. Mahadevan (AITUC), RA Mital (HMS), R.Sharma (AIUTUC), Abani Roy (UTUC) and Thomas (AICCTU).
A Keynote Paper was presented in the Workshop. Initiating the discussion Com. Pandhe deplored non-ratification of all the Core Conventions by India, which is a founder member of ILO. He spoke on the need for conducting countrywide massive campaign to popularise the Core Conventions of ILO amongst the working class. He put forward suggestions for carrying out protracted propaganda and agitation to mount pressure on the Government to ratify the remaining Core Conventions in India. More and more cooperation and coordinated activities by trade unions and Sub-Regional Office of ILO in India was stressed upon by Com. Pandhe.
It is to be noted that out of the 8 Core Conventions, India, a founder member of ILO and holding a non-elective seat of the Governing Body, has so far ratified only four - Convention Nos. 29,100, 105 and 111 in the years 1954, 1958, 2000 and 1960 respectively. Notably, the two most important Core Conventions i.e., Conventions No. 87 and 98 are not yet ratified by India.
Apart from the members of the presidium those who spoke in the Workshop included Ms. Leyla Tegmo-Reddy, Director and ILO Representative in India, Pong-Sul Ahn, Senior Specialist for Activities with Workers’ Organisations, ILO, India. Those who spoke representing CITU included Tapan Sen, Swadesh Dev Roye, Kashmir Singh Thakur, Sudhir Kumar, D.P. Dubey and Ranjana Nirula. Glaring examples of serious violation of trade union rights and attack on trade union functionaries were presented by speakers from states and industries.
Extracts from the Keynote Paper are as follows: The freedom and rights conferred on workers by ILO Convention No.87 can be precisely summarised as follows: The right freely exercised by workers to organize for furthering and defending their interests. The right to establish and to join orgnisations of their own choosing by workers. Public authorities shall refrain from any interference which would restrict their right or impede the lawful exercise of this right. The organizations shall have the right to establish and join federations and confederations, which shall enjoy the same rights and guarantees and also provides for the rights to affiliate with international organizations. The acquisition of legal personality by all these organizations shall not be subject to restrictive conditions. The law of the land and the way in which it is applied shall not impair the guarantees provided for in the Convention. (ILO Bureau of Workers’ Activities)
Similarly, the salient features of ILO Convention No.98 can be briefly summarised as follows: Protection to workers who are exercising the right to organize, non-interference between workers' organization and employers' organization. Promotion of voluntary collective bargaining. Workers shall enjoy adequate protection against acts of anti-union discrimination. Workers shall be protected against refusal to employ due to trade union membership. Against dismissal or any other prejudice by reason of union membership or participation in trade union activities. (ILO Bureau of Workers' Activities).
The Government of India has been continuously failing to ratify the left out Core Conventions on different pleas. In view of the collapse of the 'market driven' finance capital dominated economic policies of globalization, liberalization and privatisation as manifested in the worst ever capitalist economic crisis since the Great Depression of 1930s, the forthcoming days willl be very challenging for the working class. Already attack has been launched on jobs and wages and to blunt the inevitable resistance struggles by the trade union movement, the employers' class will resort to attack on trade union rights.
To carry forward the campaign through out the country the next joint consultation of the trade unions shall consider Regional Conventions at Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chandigarh and to culminate into a massive National Convention at New Delhi which will adopt further course of action. A delegation of the trade unions will submit a memorandum to the Government. Technical cooperation of ILO, both at the levels of headquarters and at the New Delhi office, will be worked out.
On ILO Core Conventions
- Swadesh Dev Roye
According to the call of the 87th session of International Labour Conference (ILC) of the International Labour Organisatioon (ILO) the trade union movement all over the world is observing the 60th anniversary of the adoption of the Core Convention No.87.
The Central Trade Unions (CTUs) in our country jointly organized a 'National Workshop on ILO Core Conventions' on 4th November 2008 at the Constitution Club, New Delhi. The presidium of the workshop consisted of MK Pandhe (CITU), H. Mahadevan (AITUC), RA Mital (HMS), R.Sharma (AIUTUC), Abani Roy (UTUC) and Thomas (AICCTU).
A Keynote Paper was presented in the Workshop. Initiating the discussion Com. Pandhe deplored non-ratification of all the Core Conventions by India, which is a founder member of ILO. He spoke on the need for conducting countrywide massive campaign to popularise the Core Conventions of ILO amongst the working class. He put forward suggestions for carrying out protracted propaganda and agitation to mount pressure on the Government to ratify the remaining Core Conventions in India. More and more cooperation and coordinated activities by trade unions and Sub-Regional Office of ILO in India was stressed upon by Com. Pandhe.
It is to be noted that out of the 8 Core Conventions, India, a founder member of ILO and holding a non-elective seat of the Governing Body, has so far ratified only four - Convention Nos. 29,100, 105 and 111 in the years 1954, 1958, 2000 and 1960 respectively. Notably, the two most important Core Conventions i.e., Conventions No. 87 and 98 are not yet ratified by India.
Apart from the members of the presidium those who spoke in the Workshop included Ms. Leyla Tegmo-Reddy, Director and ILO Representative in India, Pong-Sul Ahn, Senior Specialist for Activities with Workers’ Organisations, ILO, India. Those who spoke representing CITU included Tapan Sen, Swadesh Dev Roye, Kashmir Singh Thakur, Sudhir Kumar, D.P. Dubey and Ranjana Nirula. Glaring examples of serious violation of trade union rights and attack on trade union functionaries were presented by speakers from states and industries.
Extracts from the Keynote Paper are as follows: The freedom and rights conferred on workers by ILO Convention No.87 can be precisely summarised as follows: The right freely exercised by workers to organize for furthering and defending their interests. The right to establish and to join orgnisations of their own choosing by workers. Public authorities shall refrain from any interference which would restrict their right or impede the lawful exercise of this right. The organizations shall have the right to establish and join federations and confederations, which shall enjoy the same rights and guarantees and also provides for the rights to affiliate with international organizations. The acquisition of legal personality by all these organizations shall not be subject to restrictive conditions. The law of the land and the way in which it is applied shall not impair the guarantees provided for in the Convention. (ILO Bureau of Workers’ Activities)
Similarly, the salient features of ILO Convention No.98 can be briefly summarised as follows: Protection to workers who are exercising the right to organize, non-interference between workers' organization and employers' organization. Promotion of voluntary collective bargaining. Workers shall enjoy adequate protection against acts of anti-union discrimination. Workers shall be protected against refusal to employ due to trade union membership. Against dismissal or any other prejudice by reason of union membership or participation in trade union activities. (ILO Bureau of Workers' Activities).
The Government of India has been continuously failing to ratify the left out Core Conventions on different pleas. In view of the collapse of the 'market driven' finance capital dominated economic policies of globalization, liberalization and privatisation as manifested in the worst ever capitalist economic crisis since the Great Depression of 1930s, the forthcoming days willl be very challenging for the working class. Already attack has been launched on jobs and wages and to blunt the inevitable resistance struggles by the trade union movement, the employers' class will resort to attack on trade union rights.
To carry forward the campaign through out the country the next joint consultation of the trade unions shall consider Regional Conventions at Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chandigarh and to culminate into a massive National Convention at New Delhi which will adopt further course of action. A delegation of the trade unions will submit a memorandum to the Government. Technical cooperation of ILO, both at the levels of headquarters and at the New Delhi office, will be worked out.
Employees Provident Fund
Employees' Pension Scheme -
Oppose Arbitrary Reduction of Benefits, Demand Improvments
- W. R. Varada Rajan
The Employees’ Pension Scheme (EPS) was introduced in 1995 as an additional scheme under the Employees' Provident Fund Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1952. A fierce debate preceded the enactment of legislation in Parliament in this regard. The CITU and some other Left Trade Unions had demanded Pension as a third benefit and pointed out the inadequacies and shortcomings in the EPS put forth by the then Congress Government at the Centre. However, the INTUC, BMS, AITUC and HMS had lent unqualified support to the EPS as brought out by the Government and justified such support with an ingenious argument that once the Scheme comes into vogue, improvements could be made subsequently. The Government on its part included a provision for annual valuation of the Employees' Pension Fund and also assured a comprehensive review after 10 years of introduction of the EPS.
The first four annual valuation reports brought out at the end of November 1996, March 1998, March 1999 and March 2000 had resulted in grant of paltry relief of 4 per cent, 5.5 per cent, 4 per cent and 4 per cent respectively. Thereafter, the annual valuation reports for the period from 2001 to 2005 incorporated an alarming picture of huge deficit in the Pension Fund, based on the assessment of growing contingent liability. Besides, the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation and the Ministry of Labour have been resorting to unilateral interpretation of the provisions of the EPS, adversely affecting even the grossly inadequate benefits contained in the Scheme. The Supreme Court verdict upholding the EPS 1995 had emboldened the Government to take drastic measures detrimental to the interests of the workers.
The Ministry of Labour had put forth several proposals for reducing the benefit-package under the EPS 1995. These proposals were opposed by the representatives of the central trade unions inside the Central Board of Trustees of the EPF. The Government of India attempted to push these proposals at the meetings with the representatives of the central Trade Unions held with the Secretary, Ministry of Labour on 21.4.2005, 21.6.2005 and 18.7.2005 and the Minister of Labour on 16.11.2006. In all these meetings, all the central trade unions had rejected these proposals and unanimously demanded that the contribution from the employers and the Government of India should appropriately be increased in order to grant improved pension benefits and index linked dearness relief to the pensioners.
The Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) has constituted a committee to conduct a comprehensive review of the Pension Scheme. Besides, there is a Pension Implementation Committee under the CBT to continuously monitor the Pension Scheme.
But, the Governmnet of India had issued a Gazette notification (GSR Nos. 688 (E) dated the 26th September, 2008) incorporating several amendments They are:
1. Amendment to Para 12 (7).
2. Deletion of Para 12 A.
3. Deletion of Para 13.
These amendments have far reaching consequences by way of substantially altering the benefit package of the EPS'95 to the detriment of the interests of workers.
The first amendment to Para 12 (7) has increased the rate by which the amount of pension is to be reduced in the case of early pension (availed by those who have completed 50 years of age but are below the age of 58) from 3 per cent to 4 per cent. This will result in immediate reduction in the quantum of pension.
If for example, the eligible pension on completing 58 years of age is Rs. 1000 per month and the employee has to exit the job on completion of 50 years of age, either due to resignation, retrenchment, illness or otherwise, he would get an early pension applying a reduction of 3 per cent per year i.e. 24 per cent reduced from the monthly pension and would get Rs. 760 per month. This reduction rate has now been enhance to 4 per cent and in this case the reduction would be 32 per cent or the monthly pension would be Rs. 680 only.
The second amendment (Deletion of Para 12 A) is altogether eliminating the option available at present for commutation of pension. The existing provision enables a member to commute up to a maximum of one-third of his pension so as to receive hundred times the monthly pension. This facility was mad available after three years of commencement of the Pension Scheme i.e. from 16.11.1998 onwards.
If for example, the eligible pension is Rs. 1000 per month and the pensioner opts to commute one-third of his monthly pension the commuted value of will be equal to 1/3 x 1000 x 100 = Rs. 33333 and the same will be paid at the time of exercise of option for commutation. The balance pension payable on monthly basis will be Rs. 667.
This option for commutation is totally abolished now. The pensioner is thus denied the opportunity to commute one-third of his monthly pension and avail a lump sum amount to meet exigencies like marriage in the family, death of kin, medical expenses etc. The concept of commutation is a universal component of any pension scheme and this is done away with arbitrarily.
The third amendment (Deletion of Para 13) eliminates the existing option available to a member eligible for pension to draw reduced pension and avail a return of capital under any of the three alternatives provided. Unlike the option for commutation, the option for return of capital must be exercised at the time of applying for pension itself.
The three alternatives are:
i. A pensioner during his lifetime can opt to avail a revised pension of 90 per cent of original pension with return of capital equal to 100 times the original monthly pension on death of the member payable to the nominee.
ii. A pensioner during his lifetime can opt to avail a revised pension of 90 per cent of original monthly pension; the widow of the pensioner can opt to avail a revised pension of 80 per cent of original monthly pension on the death of her husband; the nominee of the pensioner can also exercise this option on the remarriage of the widow; In these case the return of capital will be equal to 90 times the original monthly pension.
iii. A pensioner can opt to avail a fixed pension for a period of 20 years notwithstanding whether the member lives for that period or not. Under this option the member can avail a 87.5 per cent of original monthly pension for 20 years and at the end of 20 years, avail return of capital equal to 100 times the original monthly pension.
All these three alternative options for availing return of capital have now been totally eliminated.
Besides these adverse changes in the benefit package under the Employees' Pension Scheme 1995, the notification incorporates an amendment to the table under the EPS revising the rates of damages to be levied from an employer who makes a default in the payment of contributions/charges payable as prescribed in the scheme.
The existing rate of damages and reduced rates are as under:
Period of Delay (Pre-revised) Rate of damages (As amended)
Less than two months 17 % 5 %
2 months & above but less than 4 months 22% 10%
4 months & above but less than 6 months 27 % 15 %
6 months & above 37 % 25 %
Such damages are levied under the Employees' Provident Fund (EPF) Scheme and Employees' Deposit Linked Insurance (EDLI) Scheme as well. The Government of India has issued two other Gazette Notifications (GSR Nos. 689 (E) to 690 (E) dated the 26th September, 2008) incorporating identical amendments to the tables under these two schemes as well.
These amendments arte intended to benefit the employers who are defaulting the remittance of contributions under these schemes. While on the one hand the Government of India has virtually abolished the inspection of establishments to do away with the 'harassment' of employers and has pledged to promote voluntary compliance, the penal element in respect of defaults in compliance have also been softened.
Only the subject of reducing the rate of damages was placed as an agenda item of the 181st, 182nd and 183rd meetings of the Central Board of Trustees (CBT), EPF held on 24.1.2008, 17.4.2008 and 5.7.2008. In the CBT, the agenda item was deferred on all the three occasions. A decision has since been taken on this deferred item of the agenda at the back of the CBT. This is highly deplorable.
While the first amendment to Para 12 (7), i.e. enhancement of the rate of reduction in the case of early pension, had been mooted by the Consultant Actuary and the Valuation Reports. But the other amendments had never been raised at any time before either in the meetings of the CBT or in the meeting of the Pension Implementation Committee. Moreover, these issues were not discussed in the meetings with the representatives of the Central Trade Unions, referred to earlier.
These arbitrary decisions have been given effect to even while a comprehensive review of the EPS' 95 is under way and the Committee set up for the purpose has held two sittings.
The trade union movement should vehemently protest over this unjustified move, which has rendered the statutory tripartite body of the CBT irrelevant and reduced the tripartite consultation mechanism in the Labour Ministry to a mockery.
Here it is also worthwhile to record here that a decision taken by the CBT after due deliberations at its 182nd and 183rd meetings for reduction of threshold limit for coverage of the EPF & MP Act, 1952, from the existing limit of 20 workers to 10 workers had not been given effect to. While the Ministry of Labour has chosen to maintain a studied silence over this decision, it has no qualms to decided with unseemly haste flouting all norms to impose adverse changes in the benefit package of the EPS' 95.
The trade union movement should demand immediate withdrawal of these Notifications and urge the Government of India to initiate a dialogue with the Central Trade Unions for bringing meaningful improvements in the Employees' Pensions Scheme like enhancement of the minimum pension bringing it on par with the minimum pension available under the central government pension scheme applicable to pre – 2004 recruits and provision of index linked dearness relief for the pensioners. For this, the contribution from the employers and the Government of India should appropriately be hiked.
Oppose Arbitrary Reduction of Benefits, Demand Improvments
- W. R. Varada Rajan
The Employees’ Pension Scheme (EPS) was introduced in 1995 as an additional scheme under the Employees' Provident Fund Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1952. A fierce debate preceded the enactment of legislation in Parliament in this regard. The CITU and some other Left Trade Unions had demanded Pension as a third benefit and pointed out the inadequacies and shortcomings in the EPS put forth by the then Congress Government at the Centre. However, the INTUC, BMS, AITUC and HMS had lent unqualified support to the EPS as brought out by the Government and justified such support with an ingenious argument that once the Scheme comes into vogue, improvements could be made subsequently. The Government on its part included a provision for annual valuation of the Employees' Pension Fund and also assured a comprehensive review after 10 years of introduction of the EPS.
The first four annual valuation reports brought out at the end of November 1996, March 1998, March 1999 and March 2000 had resulted in grant of paltry relief of 4 per cent, 5.5 per cent, 4 per cent and 4 per cent respectively. Thereafter, the annual valuation reports for the period from 2001 to 2005 incorporated an alarming picture of huge deficit in the Pension Fund, based on the assessment of growing contingent liability. Besides, the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation and the Ministry of Labour have been resorting to unilateral interpretation of the provisions of the EPS, adversely affecting even the grossly inadequate benefits contained in the Scheme. The Supreme Court verdict upholding the EPS 1995 had emboldened the Government to take drastic measures detrimental to the interests of the workers.
The Ministry of Labour had put forth several proposals for reducing the benefit-package under the EPS 1995. These proposals were opposed by the representatives of the central trade unions inside the Central Board of Trustees of the EPF. The Government of India attempted to push these proposals at the meetings with the representatives of the central Trade Unions held with the Secretary, Ministry of Labour on 21.4.2005, 21.6.2005 and 18.7.2005 and the Minister of Labour on 16.11.2006. In all these meetings, all the central trade unions had rejected these proposals and unanimously demanded that the contribution from the employers and the Government of India should appropriately be increased in order to grant improved pension benefits and index linked dearness relief to the pensioners.
The Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) has constituted a committee to conduct a comprehensive review of the Pension Scheme. Besides, there is a Pension Implementation Committee under the CBT to continuously monitor the Pension Scheme.
But, the Governmnet of India had issued a Gazette notification (GSR Nos. 688 (E) dated the 26th September, 2008) incorporating several amendments They are:
1. Amendment to Para 12 (7).
2. Deletion of Para 12 A.
3. Deletion of Para 13.
These amendments have far reaching consequences by way of substantially altering the benefit package of the EPS'95 to the detriment of the interests of workers.
The first amendment to Para 12 (7) has increased the rate by which the amount of pension is to be reduced in the case of early pension (availed by those who have completed 50 years of age but are below the age of 58) from 3 per cent to 4 per cent. This will result in immediate reduction in the quantum of pension.
If for example, the eligible pension on completing 58 years of age is Rs. 1000 per month and the employee has to exit the job on completion of 50 years of age, either due to resignation, retrenchment, illness or otherwise, he would get an early pension applying a reduction of 3 per cent per year i.e. 24 per cent reduced from the monthly pension and would get Rs. 760 per month. This reduction rate has now been enhance to 4 per cent and in this case the reduction would be 32 per cent or the monthly pension would be Rs. 680 only.
The second amendment (Deletion of Para 12 A) is altogether eliminating the option available at present for commutation of pension. The existing provision enables a member to commute up to a maximum of one-third of his pension so as to receive hundred times the monthly pension. This facility was mad available after three years of commencement of the Pension Scheme i.e. from 16.11.1998 onwards.
If for example, the eligible pension is Rs. 1000 per month and the pensioner opts to commute one-third of his monthly pension the commuted value of will be equal to 1/3 x 1000 x 100 = Rs. 33333 and the same will be paid at the time of exercise of option for commutation. The balance pension payable on monthly basis will be Rs. 667.
This option for commutation is totally abolished now. The pensioner is thus denied the opportunity to commute one-third of his monthly pension and avail a lump sum amount to meet exigencies like marriage in the family, death of kin, medical expenses etc. The concept of commutation is a universal component of any pension scheme and this is done away with arbitrarily.
The third amendment (Deletion of Para 13) eliminates the existing option available to a member eligible for pension to draw reduced pension and avail a return of capital under any of the three alternatives provided. Unlike the option for commutation, the option for return of capital must be exercised at the time of applying for pension itself.
The three alternatives are:
i. A pensioner during his lifetime can opt to avail a revised pension of 90 per cent of original pension with return of capital equal to 100 times the original monthly pension on death of the member payable to the nominee.
ii. A pensioner during his lifetime can opt to avail a revised pension of 90 per cent of original monthly pension; the widow of the pensioner can opt to avail a revised pension of 80 per cent of original monthly pension on the death of her husband; the nominee of the pensioner can also exercise this option on the remarriage of the widow; In these case the return of capital will be equal to 90 times the original monthly pension.
iii. A pensioner can opt to avail a fixed pension for a period of 20 years notwithstanding whether the member lives for that period or not. Under this option the member can avail a 87.5 per cent of original monthly pension for 20 years and at the end of 20 years, avail return of capital equal to 100 times the original monthly pension.
All these three alternative options for availing return of capital have now been totally eliminated.
Besides these adverse changes in the benefit package under the Employees' Pension Scheme 1995, the notification incorporates an amendment to the table under the EPS revising the rates of damages to be levied from an employer who makes a default in the payment of contributions/charges payable as prescribed in the scheme.
The existing rate of damages and reduced rates are as under:
Period of Delay (Pre-revised) Rate of damages (As amended)
Less than two months 17 % 5 %
2 months & above but less than 4 months 22% 10%
4 months & above but less than 6 months 27 % 15 %
6 months & above 37 % 25 %
Such damages are levied under the Employees' Provident Fund (EPF) Scheme and Employees' Deposit Linked Insurance (EDLI) Scheme as well. The Government of India has issued two other Gazette Notifications (GSR Nos. 689 (E) to 690 (E) dated the 26th September, 2008) incorporating identical amendments to the tables under these two schemes as well.
These amendments arte intended to benefit the employers who are defaulting the remittance of contributions under these schemes. While on the one hand the Government of India has virtually abolished the inspection of establishments to do away with the 'harassment' of employers and has pledged to promote voluntary compliance, the penal element in respect of defaults in compliance have also been softened.
Only the subject of reducing the rate of damages was placed as an agenda item of the 181st, 182nd and 183rd meetings of the Central Board of Trustees (CBT), EPF held on 24.1.2008, 17.4.2008 and 5.7.2008. In the CBT, the agenda item was deferred on all the three occasions. A decision has since been taken on this deferred item of the agenda at the back of the CBT. This is highly deplorable.
While the first amendment to Para 12 (7), i.e. enhancement of the rate of reduction in the case of early pension, had been mooted by the Consultant Actuary and the Valuation Reports. But the other amendments had never been raised at any time before either in the meetings of the CBT or in the meeting of the Pension Implementation Committee. Moreover, these issues were not discussed in the meetings with the representatives of the Central Trade Unions, referred to earlier.
These arbitrary decisions have been given effect to even while a comprehensive review of the EPS' 95 is under way and the Committee set up for the purpose has held two sittings.
The trade union movement should vehemently protest over this unjustified move, which has rendered the statutory tripartite body of the CBT irrelevant and reduced the tripartite consultation mechanism in the Labour Ministry to a mockery.
Here it is also worthwhile to record here that a decision taken by the CBT after due deliberations at its 182nd and 183rd meetings for reduction of threshold limit for coverage of the EPF & MP Act, 1952, from the existing limit of 20 workers to 10 workers had not been given effect to. While the Ministry of Labour has chosen to maintain a studied silence over this decision, it has no qualms to decided with unseemly haste flouting all norms to impose adverse changes in the benefit package of the EPS' 95.
The trade union movement should demand immediate withdrawal of these Notifications and urge the Government of India to initiate a dialogue with the Central Trade Unions for bringing meaningful improvements in the Employees' Pensions Scheme like enhancement of the minimum pension bringing it on par with the minimum pension available under the central government pension scheme applicable to pre – 2004 recruits and provision of index linked dearness relief for the pensioners. For this, the contribution from the employers and the Government of India should appropriately be hiked.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
PROLETARIAT
DEFINITION OF PROLETARIAT –Sukomal sen
Since the days of Marx, things have changed enormously and as has been pointed out, the technological revolution has also led to a revolutionary change in the labour process. For the present generation of Marxists this change has to be properly understood and things are to be judged and examined in the light of the basic formulations of Marx and Engels.
The working class has always had to undergo a particular pattern of labour-process depending upon the structure of capitalist accumulation and technological developments of the instruments of labour. In Marx's day a huge number of wage-labourers belonged to the domestic industry. Even in industry, `machinofacture', the distinctively capitalist method of mass production based on the large-scale use of machinery which Marx analysed in depth in Capital (volume one) was limited for much of the nineteenth century to a few advanced sectors, notably the Lancashire Cotton trade. A vast amount of capitalist enterprise was organised on the basis of manual rather than steam-power technologies. In fact, Machinofacture was generalised, not during the period of the Industrial Revolution itself, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the development, especially in the United States, of mass assembly-line production.
The working class did never possess any fixed structure or compo¬sition. Rather, this structure and composition had changed as the needs of capital accumulation have altered. Periods of crisis can be seen at times of reorganisation and restructuring, as ineffi¬cient sectors are run down, bankrupt capitals taken over, and new sectors and more efficient capitals take their places. The working class itself participates in this process as some are destroyed and others created.
In the present era of scientific and technological revolution combined with capitalist globalisation of economy, the capital¬ists are more and more using labour saving devices. Electronics, cybernetics and automation have provided the capitalists with these drastic labour saving devices.
As Marx has said, with the universalisation of education, the merchant capitalists get a ready-made mass of job-seekers who can be employed as commercial wage-workers doing the work of accoun¬tancy, buying and selling etc. Like wise, high level of technical education in computers and automation have also provided the service sector industries the opportunity for recruiting techni¬cally skilled workers for performing the desired job. It means the industrialists need various types of workers doing various types of jobs -- some manual workers, some mechanists, some clerical, some computer-operators, some supervisors and so on. In fact, Marx also visualised this proliferation of the workers in various types of work, all in the interest of the capitalists.
In Capital (volume three), in the chapter on Classes, Marx per¬haps tried to explain this situation but the manuscript remained unfinished.
Marx posed the question and sought to answer, "What makes wage- labourers, capitalists and landlords constitute the three great social classes?
"At first glance -- the identity of revenues and sources of revenues. There are three great social groups whose number, the individuals forming them, live on wages, profit and ground rent respectively, on the realisation of their labour-power, their capital, and their landed property.
"However, from this standpoint, physicians and officials e.g. would also constitute two classes for they belong to two distinct social groups, the members of each of these groups receiving their revenue from one and the same source. The same would also be true of the indefinite fragmentation of interest and rank into which the division of social labour splits labourers as well as capitalists and landlords -- the latter, e.g., into owners of Vineyards, farm owners, owners of forests, mine owners and owners of fisheries." 35 (emphasis added.) Unfortunately, the manu¬script breaks off here and Marx did not complete his observations on the nature of fragmentation and splits of the labourers.
But Marx mentioned `interest and rank' which causes `infinite fragmentation of social labour' which `splits labourers'. In fact, in modern manufacturing industry including service industry the splitting of labourers depending upon skill required and rank is obvious.
In another place Marx said, "The real lever of the overall labour process is increasingly not the individual workers. Instead, labour-power socially combined and the various compelling labour-powers which together form the entire production machine participate in very different ways in the immediate process of making commodities... some work better with their hands, other with their heads, one as a manager, engineer, technologist, etc, the other as overseer, the third as manual labourer or even drudge. An ever-increasing number of types of labour are included in the immediate concept of produc¬tive labourer, and those who perform it are classed as productive workers, workers directly exploited by capital and subordinated to its process of production and expansion." 36 (emphasis added).
So, if what Marx said above is considered in the light of what Marx said in regard to `splitting of labourers', then it is pertinent to conclude that all those who form part of what Marx called `Collective Labour', the complex division of labour in¬volved in producing commodities, are productive workers, even if they do not work with their hand. Moreover, in the light of Marx's analysis of the commercial wage-worker, there is no evi¬dence to suggest that Marx regarded only productive workers in manufacturing industry as forming the proletariat.
In fact, the distinction between productive and unproductive labour is therefore, between labour which contributes to the self-expansion of capital and labour which does not. Marx's main example of the latter is that of domestic servants, the largest single category of workers in Victorian Britain, employed out of the revenue of the middle and upper classes. But one point Marx did not mention that these poor strata of the people who engaged themselves as domestic servants had no other means of livelihood and so they were forced to sell their labour-power. While Marx said of splitting of labourers whatever complex form it may assume, it follows from Marx's analysis of capitalism that socio- economic compulsion to sell one's labour-power is the obvious characteristic of the proletariat. Accordingly all wage-labour¬ers are subject to the fundamental constraints of the capitalist relations of production -- non-ownership of means of production, lack of direct access to the means of livelihood, non-accessibil¬ity of land or insufficient money to purchase the means of live¬lihood without more or less continuous sale of labour-power. These categories will include not only commercial clerks and lower government employees and other numerous number of scattered daily labourers (including domestic servants) since they have no other means of livelihood except selling his or her labour-power.
Here it may be pertinent to heed what Rosa Luxemburg said in her The Accumulation of Capital, Chapter XVI on The Reproduction of Capital and its Social Setting about the sources from which the rural and urban proletariat is recruited. She pointed at the source, "the continued process by which the rural and urban middle strata become proletarian with the decay of peasant economy and of small artisan enterprises, the very process, that is to say, of incessant transition from non-capitalist to capi¬talist conditions of a labour-power that is cast off by pre- capitalist, not capitalist, mode of production in their progres¬sive breakdown and disintegration."37 This analysis is valid not only for 19th century Europe; it is equally valid in the condi¬tions prevailing in India today.
Another point has to be considered in this respect. Marx provided a general definition of service when he said, "A service is nothing more than the useful effect of a use-value be it of a commodity, or be it of labour." He then made an interesting comment on skilled and unskilled labour: "in every process of creating value, the reduction of skilled labour, average social labour e.g. one day of skilled labour to six days of unskilled labour, is unavoidable." 38
A worker who is employed for producing goods renders a service to the capitalists. And because of this service a tangible and vendible object takes shape as a commodity. But when the useful effects of labour do not result in a vendible object then it creates a different situation. Harry Braverman's explanation of these circumstances appears quite logical. He states, "When worker does not offer this labour directly to the user of its effects, but instead sells it to a capitalist, who re-sells it on the commodity market, then we have the capitalist form of production in the field of services." 39
Arguing in detail that service is also a productive labour gener¬ating surplus value in the capitalist relation of production, Braverman makes the following illuminating observation:
"In the history of capitalism while use of one or another form may play a greater role in a particular area, the tendency is towards eradication of distinction among its various forms, particularly in the era of monopoly capitalism, it makes little sense to ground any theory of the economy upon any specially favoured variety of labour process. As these varied forms came under the auspices of capital and become part of the domain of profitable investment, they enter for the capitalist into the realm of general or abstract labour, labour which enlarges capi¬tal. In the modern `Corporation' all forms of labour are employed without any distinction, and in the modern conglomerate Corpora¬tion some divisions carry on manufacturing, others carry on trade, others banking, others mining and still others `service' process. They live peacefully together, and in the final result as recorded in the balance sheet the forms labour disappear entirely in the forms of value." 40 (emphasis added)
The question sometimes arises that since the workers' wages and amenities are rising, of course due to their resistance struggle, whether the workers who are better paid or whose standard of living has risen, still possess a revolutionary potential.
Marx dealt with this question before he wrote Communist Manifes¬to. In his Wage Labour and Capital, Marx observed,
"When productive capital grows, the demand for labour grows; Consequently, the price of labour, wages, goes up. ...
"A noticeable increase in wages presupposes a rapid growth of productive capital. The rapid growth of productive capital brings about an equally rapid growth of wealth, luxury, social wants, social enjoyments. Thus, although the enjoyments of the worker have risen, the social satisfaction that they gave has fallen in comparison with the increased enjoyments of the capi¬talist, which are inaccessible to the workers, in comparison with the state of development of society in general. Our desire and pleasure spring from society; we measure them, by society and not by the objects which serve for their satisfaction. Because they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature.
"In general, wages are determined not only by the amount of commodities for which I can exchange them. They embody various relations". 41
These words of Marx are quite significant in understanding the present situation when due to workers' struggles and various other factors, the wages and other amenities of the workers have gone up and their standard of living is not also at the same level as it was in the mid-nineteenth century. Capitalism leads to a wider disparity in economic terms between the owners and the wage-workers. The workers may achieve a higher wage level or amenities, but in comparison to that the wealth and prosperity of the owning or propertied class are rising in geometrical progres¬sion.
Particularly, in this era of capitalist globalisation and the triumph of finance capital, this disparity in income is reaching an unprecedented height. Even the protagonist of globalisation, the World Bank in their successive reports has expressed concern at this rapidly widening disparity and that more and more people getting impoverished and jobless and World Bank apprehend an increasing dissatisfaction among the toiling and poorer sections against the ruling regimes.
So it is not a question of how much rise has taken place in the wage level; the question actually centers round whether the toiling sections are getting their due proportion of the income generated in a country. This sense of deprivation and disparity actually gives impetus to working class militancy.
Considering all these facts and formulations, today's manufactur¬ing workers, skilled service sector workers, commercial workers in the mercantile firms and financial institutions like banks, insurances and the clerical and subordinate workers in the serv¬ice to the capitalists in the phenomenally expanded government sectors, the scattered and individual daily workers -- all natu¬rally come within the definition of the wage-workers while the industrial wage-workers form the core of the proletarian class.
Even the domestic workers who have no other way of sustenance than selling their labour-power, though they do not produce any value and not organised against capitalist exploitation but a highly deprived and exploited lot, are also getting proletaria¬nised within the broader definition of the term. But if one sticks to the definition of proletariat to the manual industrial workers only in the pattern of nineteenth century, then the proletariat will be reduced to a small and declining nineteenth century stereotype only and this definition will not be compat¬ible with the reality of the present situation when manual work¬ers in traditional industry are sharply declining giving place to service workers and commercial workers including part-time and casual workers.
All these factors taken together prove the untenability of the fashionable notion that the proletariat is a fast declining class or even disappearing and a `new middle class' is appearing on the scene with high level of wages and amenities who do not possess any militancy of struggle or revolutionary potential.
************************
Since the days of Marx, things have changed enormously and as has been pointed out, the technological revolution has also led to a revolutionary change in the labour process. For the present generation of Marxists this change has to be properly understood and things are to be judged and examined in the light of the basic formulations of Marx and Engels.
The working class has always had to undergo a particular pattern of labour-process depending upon the structure of capitalist accumulation and technological developments of the instruments of labour. In Marx's day a huge number of wage-labourers belonged to the domestic industry. Even in industry, `machinofacture', the distinctively capitalist method of mass production based on the large-scale use of machinery which Marx analysed in depth in Capital (volume one) was limited for much of the nineteenth century to a few advanced sectors, notably the Lancashire Cotton trade. A vast amount of capitalist enterprise was organised on the basis of manual rather than steam-power technologies. In fact, Machinofacture was generalised, not during the period of the Industrial Revolution itself, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the development, especially in the United States, of mass assembly-line production.
The working class did never possess any fixed structure or compo¬sition. Rather, this structure and composition had changed as the needs of capital accumulation have altered. Periods of crisis can be seen at times of reorganisation and restructuring, as ineffi¬cient sectors are run down, bankrupt capitals taken over, and new sectors and more efficient capitals take their places. The working class itself participates in this process as some are destroyed and others created.
In the present era of scientific and technological revolution combined with capitalist globalisation of economy, the capital¬ists are more and more using labour saving devices. Electronics, cybernetics and automation have provided the capitalists with these drastic labour saving devices.
As Marx has said, with the universalisation of education, the merchant capitalists get a ready-made mass of job-seekers who can be employed as commercial wage-workers doing the work of accoun¬tancy, buying and selling etc. Like wise, high level of technical education in computers and automation have also provided the service sector industries the opportunity for recruiting techni¬cally skilled workers for performing the desired job. It means the industrialists need various types of workers doing various types of jobs -- some manual workers, some mechanists, some clerical, some computer-operators, some supervisors and so on. In fact, Marx also visualised this proliferation of the workers in various types of work, all in the interest of the capitalists.
In Capital (volume three), in the chapter on Classes, Marx per¬haps tried to explain this situation but the manuscript remained unfinished.
Marx posed the question and sought to answer, "What makes wage- labourers, capitalists and landlords constitute the three great social classes?
"At first glance -- the identity of revenues and sources of revenues. There are three great social groups whose number, the individuals forming them, live on wages, profit and ground rent respectively, on the realisation of their labour-power, their capital, and their landed property.
"However, from this standpoint, physicians and officials e.g. would also constitute two classes for they belong to two distinct social groups, the members of each of these groups receiving their revenue from one and the same source. The same would also be true of the indefinite fragmentation of interest and rank into which the division of social labour splits labourers as well as capitalists and landlords -- the latter, e.g., into owners of Vineyards, farm owners, owners of forests, mine owners and owners of fisheries." 35 (emphasis added.) Unfortunately, the manu¬script breaks off here and Marx did not complete his observations on the nature of fragmentation and splits of the labourers.
But Marx mentioned `interest and rank' which causes `infinite fragmentation of social labour' which `splits labourers'. In fact, in modern manufacturing industry including service industry the splitting of labourers depending upon skill required and rank is obvious.
In another place Marx said, "The real lever of the overall labour process is increasingly not the individual workers. Instead, labour-power socially combined and the various compelling labour-powers which together form the entire production machine participate in very different ways in the immediate process of making commodities... some work better with their hands, other with their heads, one as a manager, engineer, technologist, etc, the other as overseer, the third as manual labourer or even drudge. An ever-increasing number of types of labour are included in the immediate concept of produc¬tive labourer, and those who perform it are classed as productive workers, workers directly exploited by capital and subordinated to its process of production and expansion." 36 (emphasis added).
So, if what Marx said above is considered in the light of what Marx said in regard to `splitting of labourers', then it is pertinent to conclude that all those who form part of what Marx called `Collective Labour', the complex division of labour in¬volved in producing commodities, are productive workers, even if they do not work with their hand. Moreover, in the light of Marx's analysis of the commercial wage-worker, there is no evi¬dence to suggest that Marx regarded only productive workers in manufacturing industry as forming the proletariat.
In fact, the distinction between productive and unproductive labour is therefore, between labour which contributes to the self-expansion of capital and labour which does not. Marx's main example of the latter is that of domestic servants, the largest single category of workers in Victorian Britain, employed out of the revenue of the middle and upper classes. But one point Marx did not mention that these poor strata of the people who engaged themselves as domestic servants had no other means of livelihood and so they were forced to sell their labour-power. While Marx said of splitting of labourers whatever complex form it may assume, it follows from Marx's analysis of capitalism that socio- economic compulsion to sell one's labour-power is the obvious characteristic of the proletariat. Accordingly all wage-labour¬ers are subject to the fundamental constraints of the capitalist relations of production -- non-ownership of means of production, lack of direct access to the means of livelihood, non-accessibil¬ity of land or insufficient money to purchase the means of live¬lihood without more or less continuous sale of labour-power. These categories will include not only commercial clerks and lower government employees and other numerous number of scattered daily labourers (including domestic servants) since they have no other means of livelihood except selling his or her labour-power.
Here it may be pertinent to heed what Rosa Luxemburg said in her The Accumulation of Capital, Chapter XVI on The Reproduction of Capital and its Social Setting about the sources from which the rural and urban proletariat is recruited. She pointed at the source, "the continued process by which the rural and urban middle strata become proletarian with the decay of peasant economy and of small artisan enterprises, the very process, that is to say, of incessant transition from non-capitalist to capi¬talist conditions of a labour-power that is cast off by pre- capitalist, not capitalist, mode of production in their progres¬sive breakdown and disintegration."37 This analysis is valid not only for 19th century Europe; it is equally valid in the condi¬tions prevailing in India today.
Another point has to be considered in this respect. Marx provided a general definition of service when he said, "A service is nothing more than the useful effect of a use-value be it of a commodity, or be it of labour." He then made an interesting comment on skilled and unskilled labour: "in every process of creating value, the reduction of skilled labour, average social labour e.g. one day of skilled labour to six days of unskilled labour, is unavoidable." 38
A worker who is employed for producing goods renders a service to the capitalists. And because of this service a tangible and vendible object takes shape as a commodity. But when the useful effects of labour do not result in a vendible object then it creates a different situation. Harry Braverman's explanation of these circumstances appears quite logical. He states, "When worker does not offer this labour directly to the user of its effects, but instead sells it to a capitalist, who re-sells it on the commodity market, then we have the capitalist form of production in the field of services." 39
Arguing in detail that service is also a productive labour gener¬ating surplus value in the capitalist relation of production, Braverman makes the following illuminating observation:
"In the history of capitalism while use of one or another form may play a greater role in a particular area, the tendency is towards eradication of distinction among its various forms, particularly in the era of monopoly capitalism, it makes little sense to ground any theory of the economy upon any specially favoured variety of labour process. As these varied forms came under the auspices of capital and become part of the domain of profitable investment, they enter for the capitalist into the realm of general or abstract labour, labour which enlarges capi¬tal. In the modern `Corporation' all forms of labour are employed without any distinction, and in the modern conglomerate Corpora¬tion some divisions carry on manufacturing, others carry on trade, others banking, others mining and still others `service' process. They live peacefully together, and in the final result as recorded in the balance sheet the forms labour disappear entirely in the forms of value." 40 (emphasis added)
The question sometimes arises that since the workers' wages and amenities are rising, of course due to their resistance struggle, whether the workers who are better paid or whose standard of living has risen, still possess a revolutionary potential.
Marx dealt with this question before he wrote Communist Manifes¬to. In his Wage Labour and Capital, Marx observed,
"When productive capital grows, the demand for labour grows; Consequently, the price of labour, wages, goes up. ...
"A noticeable increase in wages presupposes a rapid growth of productive capital. The rapid growth of productive capital brings about an equally rapid growth of wealth, luxury, social wants, social enjoyments. Thus, although the enjoyments of the worker have risen, the social satisfaction that they gave has fallen in comparison with the increased enjoyments of the capi¬talist, which are inaccessible to the workers, in comparison with the state of development of society in general. Our desire and pleasure spring from society; we measure them, by society and not by the objects which serve for their satisfaction. Because they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature.
"In general, wages are determined not only by the amount of commodities for which I can exchange them. They embody various relations". 41
These words of Marx are quite significant in understanding the present situation when due to workers' struggles and various other factors, the wages and other amenities of the workers have gone up and their standard of living is not also at the same level as it was in the mid-nineteenth century. Capitalism leads to a wider disparity in economic terms between the owners and the wage-workers. The workers may achieve a higher wage level or amenities, but in comparison to that the wealth and prosperity of the owning or propertied class are rising in geometrical progres¬sion.
Particularly, in this era of capitalist globalisation and the triumph of finance capital, this disparity in income is reaching an unprecedented height. Even the protagonist of globalisation, the World Bank in their successive reports has expressed concern at this rapidly widening disparity and that more and more people getting impoverished and jobless and World Bank apprehend an increasing dissatisfaction among the toiling and poorer sections against the ruling regimes.
So it is not a question of how much rise has taken place in the wage level; the question actually centers round whether the toiling sections are getting their due proportion of the income generated in a country. This sense of deprivation and disparity actually gives impetus to working class militancy.
Considering all these facts and formulations, today's manufactur¬ing workers, skilled service sector workers, commercial workers in the mercantile firms and financial institutions like banks, insurances and the clerical and subordinate workers in the serv¬ice to the capitalists in the phenomenally expanded government sectors, the scattered and individual daily workers -- all natu¬rally come within the definition of the wage-workers while the industrial wage-workers form the core of the proletarian class.
Even the domestic workers who have no other way of sustenance than selling their labour-power, though they do not produce any value and not organised against capitalist exploitation but a highly deprived and exploited lot, are also getting proletaria¬nised within the broader definition of the term. But if one sticks to the definition of proletariat to the manual industrial workers only in the pattern of nineteenth century, then the proletariat will be reduced to a small and declining nineteenth century stereotype only and this definition will not be compat¬ible with the reality of the present situation when manual work¬ers in traditional industry are sharply declining giving place to service workers and commercial workers including part-time and casual workers.
All these factors taken together prove the untenability of the fashionable notion that the proletariat is a fast declining class or even disappearing and a `new middle class' is appearing on the scene with high level of wages and amenities who do not possess any militancy of struggle or revolutionary potential.
************************
Judicary and Working Class
Judiciary and working class-Prabhat Patnaik
There are at least five clearly discernible tendencies which emerge when we look at a number of verdicts handed down by the higher courts, including the Supreme Court, in the last few years. The first is a tendency to restrict the rights of the working people. The Supreme Court’s verdict in the case of the Tamilnadu government employees, denying their right to go on strike, the Kerala High Court’s judgment against bandhs, and the Calcutta High Court’s ban on public demonstrations (and that too because one judge’s car got held up owing to a demonstration) are examples of such encroachments. These no doubt are particular verdicts, but unless the particularity of the particular is emphasized, what is decreed in one case is open for extension to all cases. In short, the Kerala High Court’s order, or the Calcutta High Court’s order, or the Supreme Court’s order in the case of government employees, is open for more general replication.
Of course, a bandh, a strike, or a demonstration do cause inconvenience for a large number of people, but that is precisely why they are effective weapons in the hands of workers. They never adopt such measures lightly. To believe otherwise is precisely to fall prey to upper class prejudices, as the judiciary has been doing. And if the avoidance of inconvenience to others were the over-riding objective, then a directive to the government to avoid situations that call forth such actions would not have been inapposite. No such directive however accompanied the verdicts. Instead, the right to strike enjoyed by the working class all over the world, and obtained after long years of struggle; the right to call bandhs which were a part of India’s freedom struggle and cannot suddenly be termed illegitimate; and the right to hold demonstrations which is an accepted part of any democratic society, and widely used all over the world, including recently in the metropolitan centers of the advanced countries against the invasion of Iraq by their own governments; were all taken away at one stroke of a whimsical pen.
In the same category incidentally is a whole set of judgements, including by the Supreme Court, sanctioning the dismissal of an employee for misbehaving with the management. In a case relating to the dismissal of two Bennett Coleman (BCCL) workmen for fighting with their officers, the Supreme Court ruled that not only could the employee be dismissed, but even his gratuity could be forfeited. Likewise, upholding an order dismissing an employee of the Madhya Pradesh Electricity Board (MPEB) who had fought with an officer, a Supreme Court bench sternly pronounced that discipline is the “sine qua non for the efficient working of the organisation” and that “obedience to authority in a workplace is not slavery”. In another case, the Supreme Court upheld the dismissal of an employee by Bharat Forge who had fallen asleep. The bench made the sweeping statement that falling asleep at work amounted to a level of misconduct that could justify dismissal. It also upheld, on an appeal filed by Mahindra and Mahindra, the company’s decision to dismiss an employee for using “filthy” language against his boss 11 years earlier. According to the judgement, using abusive language against a superior at the workplace is reason enough for dismissal.
It is nobody’s argument of course that misbehavior should be condoned, but as any Primary School teacher knows, what appears as misbehavior on the part of one could well have been provoked by the actions of the other, so that deciding culpability is not easy. To give management carte blanche under these circumstances is tantamount to encroaching on the rights of the workers, to abetting the victimization of workers by management.
The second tendency is to “roll back” affirmative action. The most obvious example is the recent verdict that “reservations” in admissions need not be adhered to in the case of educational institutions which receive no funding from the State. This verdict not only is against affirmative action but also arbitrarily restricts the domain of State intervention. It is equivalent to saying that the State has no right to levy income taxes on employees outside the public sector. The proposition that the State is an overarching entity whose domain of intervention covers the entire universe of civil society and is not confined to only that part which is financed by it, is accepted in every modern society; and yet the Supreme Court has chosen to jettison it for reasons having little to do with any serious social philosophy and with consequences that are far-reaching and dangerous.
The third tendency is an encroachment on people’s livelihoods and rights of domicile in the name of improving the environment. The classic case of this was the shutting down of factories in Delhi for the sake of reducing pollution, and the throwing out of work of thousands of workers. More recently, pronouncements from the Supreme Court bench that “Delhi should not be allowed to go the way of Mumbai”, meaning that restrictions must be placed on the people’s right to domicile in the metropolis in order to avoid undue strains on civic amenities, suggest a judicial endorsement of an attack on the livelihood of the metropolitan poor and on a basic right which they have enjoyed for long. To be sure, strains on civic amenities should be avoided, and polluting industries should be shut down. But these are issues whose settlement requires proper redressal for those adversely affected. The modus operandi of such settlement moreover is through discussion and the emergence of a social consensus. To attempt to “solve” them through judicial diktats is not just ham-handed; it is profoundly anti-people and betrays typical upper class prejudice.
The fourth tendency is the encroachment on the lives of the people in the name of preventing illegal immigration. The worst example of this is the recent striking down of the IMDT Act by the Supreme Court. Illegal migration is a bogey raised by the Right. While the perniciousness of this bogey comes home to us when it is used as a means to harass Indians in metropolitan countries (the most obnoxious instance of such harassment being the so-called “virginity tests” that used to be carried out in Britain), the use of the same bogey at home as a means of harassing the poor, especially those belonging to the minority community, in the name of preventing Bangladeshi immigration, scarcely arouses anger. And the judiciary, in yielding to this bogey, echoes the prejudices of the Right which in turn reflect upper class prejudices.
The fifth tendency is a general endorsement by the judiciary of the neo-liberal outlook. This is manifest in innumerable judgements, notably on the BALCO privatization issue, the Orissa Bauxite case, and the Rajasthan mining issue. It is also manifest in the rather sympathetic treatment meted out by the Supreme Court to Union Carbide on the Bhopal Gas Tragedy issue, which was very much in keeping with the neo-liberal spirit of bending over backwards to accommodate multinational corporations.
The foregoing discussion is far from exhaustive, both in the listing of tendencies and in the listing of cases. I have not included in my review the socially reactionary judgements handed down by the judiciary, such as the recent infamous judgement of the Delhi High Court allowing child marriage (of a girl as young as 15 years). I have focussed here only on those cases which impinge on the rights of the oppressed classes and have done so only through a few illustrative cases. A more detailed, though again by no means exhaustive, list of cases where the judiciary has given important verdicts against the common people in recent years can be found in the Appendix to this paper.
Three caveats are in order here. First, to say that the judiciary has shown an anti-people attitude in important verdicts in recent years does not mean that its record is uniformly dismal. There have no doubt been other instances where it has shown concern for the poor, a notable example being the Supreme Court’s directive for the distribution of foodgrains to the BPL population. Much no doubt depends upon the individual judges. Such concern for the poor on the part of the judiciary, however, has been on the whole the exception rather than the rule.
The second caveat is that notwithstanding its open espousal of current bourgeois attitudes, or of the social philosophy of what someone has aptly called “muscular liberalism”, in cases relating to the denial of basic rights to individuals, the judiciary has been more sympathetic. But that is entirely in keeping with the bourgeois outlook. An attenuation of the rights of the people as a whole can go very well with, and indeed does go very well with, scrupulousness in safeguarding of the rights of individuals qua individuals. What is more, this scrupulousness also tends to obscure the larger picture of the judiciary’s playing the leading role in attenuating the democratic rights of the people as a whole.
The third caveat is that this role of the judiciary should not be attributed to any malevolence on its part. It is as much subject to the neo-liberal barrage unleashed by the media, and by imperialist agencies generally, as anybody else, and it imbibes these ideas and prejudices. But precisely because it is in the position of being an arbiter on people’s lives, without facing the constraints that other organs of the State face, its attitudes and prejudices have a far more profound impact in restricting people’s democratic space than those of any other organ of the State. In short its acquiring a leading role in essaying a “thermidor” in the Indian context has to be located within specific historical circumstances rather than in any individual or collective malevolence on the part of the judicial luminaries. And an inevitable fall-out of these circumstances is the judiciary’s thrusting itself forward as superior to the other two organs of the State.
*********
There are at least five clearly discernible tendencies which emerge when we look at a number of verdicts handed down by the higher courts, including the Supreme Court, in the last few years. The first is a tendency to restrict the rights of the working people. The Supreme Court’s verdict in the case of the Tamilnadu government employees, denying their right to go on strike, the Kerala High Court’s judgment against bandhs, and the Calcutta High Court’s ban on public demonstrations (and that too because one judge’s car got held up owing to a demonstration) are examples of such encroachments. These no doubt are particular verdicts, but unless the particularity of the particular is emphasized, what is decreed in one case is open for extension to all cases. In short, the Kerala High Court’s order, or the Calcutta High Court’s order, or the Supreme Court’s order in the case of government employees, is open for more general replication.
Of course, a bandh, a strike, or a demonstration do cause inconvenience for a large number of people, but that is precisely why they are effective weapons in the hands of workers. They never adopt such measures lightly. To believe otherwise is precisely to fall prey to upper class prejudices, as the judiciary has been doing. And if the avoidance of inconvenience to others were the over-riding objective, then a directive to the government to avoid situations that call forth such actions would not have been inapposite. No such directive however accompanied the verdicts. Instead, the right to strike enjoyed by the working class all over the world, and obtained after long years of struggle; the right to call bandhs which were a part of India’s freedom struggle and cannot suddenly be termed illegitimate; and the right to hold demonstrations which is an accepted part of any democratic society, and widely used all over the world, including recently in the metropolitan centers of the advanced countries against the invasion of Iraq by their own governments; were all taken away at one stroke of a whimsical pen.
In the same category incidentally is a whole set of judgements, including by the Supreme Court, sanctioning the dismissal of an employee for misbehaving with the management. In a case relating to the dismissal of two Bennett Coleman (BCCL) workmen for fighting with their officers, the Supreme Court ruled that not only could the employee be dismissed, but even his gratuity could be forfeited. Likewise, upholding an order dismissing an employee of the Madhya Pradesh Electricity Board (MPEB) who had fought with an officer, a Supreme Court bench sternly pronounced that discipline is the “sine qua non for the efficient working of the organisation” and that “obedience to authority in a workplace is not slavery”. In another case, the Supreme Court upheld the dismissal of an employee by Bharat Forge who had fallen asleep. The bench made the sweeping statement that falling asleep at work amounted to a level of misconduct that could justify dismissal. It also upheld, on an appeal filed by Mahindra and Mahindra, the company’s decision to dismiss an employee for using “filthy” language against his boss 11 years earlier. According to the judgement, using abusive language against a superior at the workplace is reason enough for dismissal.
It is nobody’s argument of course that misbehavior should be condoned, but as any Primary School teacher knows, what appears as misbehavior on the part of one could well have been provoked by the actions of the other, so that deciding culpability is not easy. To give management carte blanche under these circumstances is tantamount to encroaching on the rights of the workers, to abetting the victimization of workers by management.
The second tendency is to “roll back” affirmative action. The most obvious example is the recent verdict that “reservations” in admissions need not be adhered to in the case of educational institutions which receive no funding from the State. This verdict not only is against affirmative action but also arbitrarily restricts the domain of State intervention. It is equivalent to saying that the State has no right to levy income taxes on employees outside the public sector. The proposition that the State is an overarching entity whose domain of intervention covers the entire universe of civil society and is not confined to only that part which is financed by it, is accepted in every modern society; and yet the Supreme Court has chosen to jettison it for reasons having little to do with any serious social philosophy and with consequences that are far-reaching and dangerous.
The third tendency is an encroachment on people’s livelihoods and rights of domicile in the name of improving the environment. The classic case of this was the shutting down of factories in Delhi for the sake of reducing pollution, and the throwing out of work of thousands of workers. More recently, pronouncements from the Supreme Court bench that “Delhi should not be allowed to go the way of Mumbai”, meaning that restrictions must be placed on the people’s right to domicile in the metropolis in order to avoid undue strains on civic amenities, suggest a judicial endorsement of an attack on the livelihood of the metropolitan poor and on a basic right which they have enjoyed for long. To be sure, strains on civic amenities should be avoided, and polluting industries should be shut down. But these are issues whose settlement requires proper redressal for those adversely affected. The modus operandi of such settlement moreover is through discussion and the emergence of a social consensus. To attempt to “solve” them through judicial diktats is not just ham-handed; it is profoundly anti-people and betrays typical upper class prejudice.
The fourth tendency is the encroachment on the lives of the people in the name of preventing illegal immigration. The worst example of this is the recent striking down of the IMDT Act by the Supreme Court. Illegal migration is a bogey raised by the Right. While the perniciousness of this bogey comes home to us when it is used as a means to harass Indians in metropolitan countries (the most obnoxious instance of such harassment being the so-called “virginity tests” that used to be carried out in Britain), the use of the same bogey at home as a means of harassing the poor, especially those belonging to the minority community, in the name of preventing Bangladeshi immigration, scarcely arouses anger. And the judiciary, in yielding to this bogey, echoes the prejudices of the Right which in turn reflect upper class prejudices.
The fifth tendency is a general endorsement by the judiciary of the neo-liberal outlook. This is manifest in innumerable judgements, notably on the BALCO privatization issue, the Orissa Bauxite case, and the Rajasthan mining issue. It is also manifest in the rather sympathetic treatment meted out by the Supreme Court to Union Carbide on the Bhopal Gas Tragedy issue, which was very much in keeping with the neo-liberal spirit of bending over backwards to accommodate multinational corporations.
The foregoing discussion is far from exhaustive, both in the listing of tendencies and in the listing of cases. I have not included in my review the socially reactionary judgements handed down by the judiciary, such as the recent infamous judgement of the Delhi High Court allowing child marriage (of a girl as young as 15 years). I have focussed here only on those cases which impinge on the rights of the oppressed classes and have done so only through a few illustrative cases. A more detailed, though again by no means exhaustive, list of cases where the judiciary has given important verdicts against the common people in recent years can be found in the Appendix to this paper.
Three caveats are in order here. First, to say that the judiciary has shown an anti-people attitude in important verdicts in recent years does not mean that its record is uniformly dismal. There have no doubt been other instances where it has shown concern for the poor, a notable example being the Supreme Court’s directive for the distribution of foodgrains to the BPL population. Much no doubt depends upon the individual judges. Such concern for the poor on the part of the judiciary, however, has been on the whole the exception rather than the rule.
The second caveat is that notwithstanding its open espousal of current bourgeois attitudes, or of the social philosophy of what someone has aptly called “muscular liberalism”, in cases relating to the denial of basic rights to individuals, the judiciary has been more sympathetic. But that is entirely in keeping with the bourgeois outlook. An attenuation of the rights of the people as a whole can go very well with, and indeed does go very well with, scrupulousness in safeguarding of the rights of individuals qua individuals. What is more, this scrupulousness also tends to obscure the larger picture of the judiciary’s playing the leading role in attenuating the democratic rights of the people as a whole.
The third caveat is that this role of the judiciary should not be attributed to any malevolence on its part. It is as much subject to the neo-liberal barrage unleashed by the media, and by imperialist agencies generally, as anybody else, and it imbibes these ideas and prejudices. But precisely because it is in the position of being an arbiter on people’s lives, without facing the constraints that other organs of the State face, its attitudes and prejudices have a far more profound impact in restricting people’s democratic space than those of any other organ of the State. In short its acquiring a leading role in essaying a “thermidor” in the Indian context has to be located within specific historical circumstances rather than in any individual or collective malevolence on the part of the judicial luminaries. And an inevitable fall-out of these circumstances is the judiciary’s thrusting itself forward as superior to the other two organs of the State.
*********
Marx and Trade Unions
Marx And Trade Unions
B T Randive
WHEN Karl Marx entered on his political activities, the trade unions of the working class had just started coming into existence. Their emergence was an anathema to the capitalist rulers, and they were banned in many countries.
Those who thought of socialism in those days- the utopian socialists, the petty bourgeois socialists and others-did not understand the importance of this form of working class organisation. Some of them were openly opposed to trade unions, considering them to be useless and harmful, while others demanded a ban on strikes for being harmful to social development and interests.
Others still saw in the trade unions and strike the exclusive instrument of social change. But they would not go beyond economic struggle and abjured all politics on principle, as compromise with the existing order. None of these viewpoints understood the link of the trade union struggle with the struggle for the emancipation of the working class and society from capitalist bondage and with the struggle for the capture of political power by the working class.
This was because they did not understand the content of the modern class struggle and the role of the working class as the leading force of the socialist revolution.
For Marx, the working class was the only revolutionary class facing the capitalist class. In the Communist Manifesto he said: “Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.”
Every activity of this class was therefore, important for Marx-activity in which the class got consciousness to move forward. The formation of trade unions and the trade union movement were important steps in the formation of a class, a common class-consciousness. The superior organisation- the political party of the working class could not be formed and expanded in isolation from this practical struggle involving the large mass of workers. That is why the statutes of the International Working Men’s Association provided for affiliation of trade unions and other organisations of the working class, along with individual membership.
In the conduct of the historic International Working Men’s Association, as well as after its dissolution, Marx continued to attach due importance to the trade unions in the revolutionary struggle of the working class and at the same time exposed the leadership which severed this link.
The aim of the International Working Men’s Association, in the eyes of Marx, was not only to unite the trade unions for daily struggles and international cooperation. The trade unions, of course, achieved primary importance because they represented the direct class activity of the working class. The real aim was to work for the political unification of the international working class movement in the struggle for social emancipation – political organisation of the working class. It was arrived at by focusing on organisation which, in the words of Engels, “would demonstrate bodily, so to speak, the international character of the socialist movement, both to the workers themselves and to the bourgeois and to the Governments-for the encouragement and strengthening of the proletariat, for striking fears into the hearts of its enemies.” (Selected Works, vol. 3, page 82). To achieve this purpose it was necessary to pay close attention to the trade union movement.
B T Randive
WHEN Karl Marx entered on his political activities, the trade unions of the working class had just started coming into existence. Their emergence was an anathema to the capitalist rulers, and they were banned in many countries.
Those who thought of socialism in those days- the utopian socialists, the petty bourgeois socialists and others-did not understand the importance of this form of working class organisation. Some of them were openly opposed to trade unions, considering them to be useless and harmful, while others demanded a ban on strikes for being harmful to social development and interests.
Others still saw in the trade unions and strike the exclusive instrument of social change. But they would not go beyond economic struggle and abjured all politics on principle, as compromise with the existing order. None of these viewpoints understood the link of the trade union struggle with the struggle for the emancipation of the working class and society from capitalist bondage and with the struggle for the capture of political power by the working class.
This was because they did not understand the content of the modern class struggle and the role of the working class as the leading force of the socialist revolution.
For Marx, the working class was the only revolutionary class facing the capitalist class. In the Communist Manifesto he said: “Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.”
Every activity of this class was therefore, important for Marx-activity in which the class got consciousness to move forward. The formation of trade unions and the trade union movement were important steps in the formation of a class, a common class-consciousness. The superior organisation- the political party of the working class could not be formed and expanded in isolation from this practical struggle involving the large mass of workers. That is why the statutes of the International Working Men’s Association provided for affiliation of trade unions and other organisations of the working class, along with individual membership.
In the conduct of the historic International Working Men’s Association, as well as after its dissolution, Marx continued to attach due importance to the trade unions in the revolutionary struggle of the working class and at the same time exposed the leadership which severed this link.
The aim of the International Working Men’s Association, in the eyes of Marx, was not only to unite the trade unions for daily struggles and international cooperation. The trade unions, of course, achieved primary importance because they represented the direct class activity of the working class. The real aim was to work for the political unification of the international working class movement in the struggle for social emancipation – political organisation of the working class. It was arrived at by focusing on organisation which, in the words of Engels, “would demonstrate bodily, so to speak, the international character of the socialist movement, both to the workers themselves and to the bourgeois and to the Governments-for the encouragement and strengthening of the proletariat, for striking fears into the hearts of its enemies.” (Selected Works, vol. 3, page 82). To achieve this purpose it was necessary to pay close attention to the trade union movement.
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