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Tuesday, February 23, 2016

The Season of Lent


“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy ,“ said Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, asking us to be merciful in our lives. A lawyer asked Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?“ Jesus replied, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?“ The lawyer answered, “You shall love the Lord, your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.“ Jesus said he had given the right answer.The season of Lent that concludes with Easter preceded by Good Friday focuses on three major observances to be taken up with renewed spirit and zeal for the 40 days of the season: mercy , fasting and alms-giving.The message of Lent is a time for reflection and transformation of one's attitudes and deepening of one's faith, demonstrating and sharing it through corporal and spiritual works of mercy . “Faith finds expression in concrete, everyday actions meant to help our neighbours in body and spirit,“ says Pope Francis, adding that feeding the hungry , visiting the sick, showing kindness to strangers, offering instruction, giving comfort... “on such things will we be judged“.Particularly during the Year of Mercy , he said, we are called to recognise our own need for God's mercy , the greatness of God's love seen in the death and resurrection of Christ and the obligation to assist others by communicating God's love and mercy through words and deeds.
India remains world's largest arms importer, with 14% of global share
New Delhi:
TIMES NEWS NETWORK


India continues to remain the world's largest arms importer, accounting for 14% of the global imports in the 2011-2015 timeframe, in yet another indicator of the country's enduring failure to build a strong domestic defence-industrial base (DIB).The latest data on interna tional arms transfers released by a global think-tank, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), also shows India's arms imports remain three times greater than those of its rivals China and Pakistan. Its biggest suppliers are Russia, the US, Israel and France.
After India, China ranks second in the global arms import list with 4.7%, followed by Australia (3.6%), Pakistan (3.3%), Vietnam (2.9%) and South Korea (2.6%). China used to top the imports chart earlier but has gradually built a stronger DIB over the last couple of deca des to even emerge as the world's third largest arms exporter after the US and Russia.
Incidentally , Pakistan is the main recipient of Chinese arms exports, notching up 35% of the total, followed by Bangladesh (20%) and Myanmar (16%). Russia, in turn, is China's largest arms supplier with 59%, followed by France (15%) and Ukraine (14%).
Noting that India's arms exports has jumped by 90% between 2006-2010 and 20112015, SIPRI reiterated the well-acknowledged fact that “a major reason for the high evel of imports is that the In dian arms industry has so far argely failed to produce com petitive indigenously-desig ned weapons“.
As earlier reported by TOI India has spent over $120 bil ion on arms acquisitions over he last 15 years, most of them rom foreign suppliers, and will spend much more than hat in the coming decade. Sin ce it came to office in May 2014 he Modi government has laun ched a major “Make in India“ drive in the defence sector but t's yet to translate into anyt hing concrete on the ground. The import bill is further set to zoom upwards with some major deals, without any Make in India component, in the pipeline. This includes the direct purchase of 36 French Rafale fighters for over Rs 60,000 crore and the Rs 39,000crore acquisition of five advanced Russian S-400 Triumf air defence missile systems.
Defence minister Manohar Parrikar, on his part, has warned DRDO and its 50 labs as well as the five defence PSUs, four shipyards and 39 ordnance factories to improve their performance and be ready to compete with the private sector in the defence production arena.
Parrikar hopes the new defence procurement procedure (DPP), which will be notified within a couple of months and gives top priority to a new indigenous design, development and manufacturing (IDDM) category under “Buy Indian“, will help bolster the indigenous DIB.

Source: Times of India, 23-02-2016

Monday, February 22, 2016

Economic and Political Weekly: Table of Contents


Vol. 51, Issue No. 8, 20 Feb, 2016

Editorials

50 Years of EPW

Law & Society

Indian Agriculture Today

Commentary

Book Reviews

Perspectives

Special Articles

Notes

Discussion

Current Statistics

Appointments/programmes/announcements 

Letters

Web Exclusives

Reports From the States

Only Gandhi wrote about paupers’

Jan Breman takes a long view of the changes he’s seen in India over half a century.

Perhaps no other scholar in the social sciences has studied India’s poor and its informal economy as intensively as Jan Breman. The sheer temporal span of his research is mind-boggling. He began his study in south Gujarat 15 years after India’s Independence — in 1962. And he was in south Gujarat in 2014 as well — that’s more than half a century of field work. In his latest book, On Pauperism In Present and Past, published last month, Professor Breman, 79, argues that what is being ‘Made in India’ right now at an impressive rate are paupers. Professor Emeritus at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, Prof. Breman was in Delhi recently, and in a freewheeling interview discussed, among other things, pauperism, the Gujarat model, and the return of social Darwinism to mainstream discourse. Excerpts:
Where is the need for terms such as ‘pauper' and ‘pauperism’ as analytical categories, when we already have ‘poverty’?
There is a difference between poverty and destitution, or what I call pauperism. In poverty, it is difficult to make ends meet. You somehow cope, do your level best to add to your income. So you also have your wife and children working along. In destitution, you are simply unable to cope. You are so utterly poor that it is difficult to even survive. And if you survive, you need outside support. Unfortunately, the poverty debate in India has more or less been appropriated by economists. So we look at income or consumption or employment levels, and not at the social or political dimension of poverty. A category such as ‘pauperism’ is needed to capture these non-economic aspects as well.
There is a difference between poverty and destitution, or what I call pauperism. In poverty, it is difficult to make ends meet. You somehow cope, do your level best to add to your income. In destitution, you are simply unable to cope. 
You argue in your book that India’s poverty line is a destitution line. Are you saying that those below poverty line in India are not poor but destitute?
Not all but a good number are. According to the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS), the poverty line fixed by the Planning Commission is a joke: 76 per cent of the Indian population is living in poverty. If you have such a vast mass of poor, you have to differentiate between levels of poverty. Certainly a big number is close to the poverty line. But in my estimate, about 25 per cent of India’s poor are destitute, or paupers.
So from an economist’s perspective, do we need another line, below the poverty line, to identify the paupers?
The poverty line is a sort of magical construction. If you cross it, you are suddenly out of poverty. So the policy focus is always on those who are able to go past that threshold. As a result, there is absolutely no interest in those at the bottom, those way beneath the poverty line.
So who is a pauper, in sociological terms?
In the first place, the paupers are the non-labouring poor, those who have no earning capacity. They never had or have lost their labour power and therefore can’t make a living. These include the elderly, the disabled, the chronically ill, but also widows with small children, divorcees without any support from others. Basically, in order to survive in poverty, you need a household. You cannot manage on your own because the flow of income varies with the seasons. You need to pull the household together to bring in the income — this is why you have child labour in India, isn’t it? But paupers also include the labouring poor, especially those whose income and employment are erratic or seasonal.
But Indian economists don’t believe in terms like ‘pauper’.
That’s true. It was only Gandhi who wrote about paupers in an article published in Young India in 1928, when he was in south Gujarat. He argued that we cannot fight colonialism if we do not fight colonialism in our own society. He pointed out that paupers had been around in India for a long time. I use the term pauper to evoke the conditions in Victorian England, where the casual poor were driven out of the countryside to work in the mills during the industrial revolution. In the same way, the casual poor are being driven out of the countryside in 21st century India.
England amended its Poor Laws in 1834 to pauperise the rural labour and drive them to the cities. What is India doing to create an exodus from the countryside?
Your agrarian crisis. Agriculture is not able to provide livelihood for the land-poor and the landless classes, who have lived in the villages from time immemorial. So they are forced to leave the villages. But the city doesn’t want them either.
How can you say the city doesn’t want them? India is building a hundred smart cities. Who will live in them if not migrants?
Talk to policymakers, talk to municipal officials of any city. They will tell you they don’t want the poor around, that they are a burden on our modern, beautified, smart cities. The policy of the municipality in every Indian city has been to periodically evict the poor. I have studied this phenomenon closely in Ahmedabad, where the poor are evicted from their homes that are close to their worksites and displaced to the outskirts of the city where no work is available. They try desperately to find employment but are unable to establish themselves even in the slums. They hang around in the labour chowks, they become pavement dwellers because there is no shelter for them in the night. When weeks pass by without any work at all, they go back to the villages. I use the term ‘circular migration’ to describe this movement — from villages to cities and back to villages, in an endless cycle. This is widespread in Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu. But you find it in every State.
Do you see the Gujarat model being successfully implemented across the entire nation?
That is clearly the agenda of the National Democratic Alliance government. Is it possible to do it? We’ll have to see. Maybe some concessions will be made, but they will never be adequate because the Bharatiya Janata Party’s ideology does not permit pro-poor policies.
But the BJP government has an ambitious skill development programme to make the poor employable.
The stated emphasis may be on skill development but what investment is there on skill development? The BJP has cut the public education budget. What I see, among the people living in the slums, is not skilling but deskilling. In Ahmedabad, I meet workers dismissed from the mills where they used to be skilled weavers. They have lost not only their job, wages and the benefits of belonging to the formal economy but also their skills. They are now looking for employment as casual, unskilled labour. Deskilling is a bigger phenomenon in India today than skilling.
But the NDA is not doing anything very different what from the UPA was doing, is it?
Well, I would blame not only the current government but also the former one. We have to understand what’s going on in India in a globalised frame. India’s economic policies are determined by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. They are therefore pro-capital, and anti-labour. Today the World Bank is at the end of its tether. Its formula of formal capital in the informal economy failed because the poor don’t own much capital. Then came the whole microcredit phenomenon, which was also a failure. Then came cash transfers, which is about bringing the poor into the market. But all these recipes have failed to raise the incomes of the poor. Having run out of ideas, they have now started blaming the poor for being poor.
How can the poor be blamed for being poor?
If you look at the World Bank’s latest World Development Report, it says that the basic problem with the poor is that they don't save. Really? If you are poor, you are desperately trying to get enough food for your family, you don’t have money for housing, or for education, or for health, and on top of all this, it now appears that you carry the defect of not having an ‘accumulating mind’!
But India is a democracy, and the poor can mobilise politically, can’t they?
Yes, the saving grace in India is democracy. It has given some power to the poor to claim rights. But can democracy continue in an economy where the gap between the haves and have-nots is constantly growing? Around the world, with inequality growing, democracy is also facing a threat.
What are your thoughts on the proposed labour reforms?
India is basically in a race to the bottom in terms of offering the lowest possible wage rates for labour, and thereby attract investors. This policy was already in place under the UPA – it is about outdoing China as far as wage levels are concerned.
How is migrant labour faring in China as compared their counterparts in India?
I visit China every ten years to get a sense of what’s going on there. My first visit was in the early 1990s, and I’ve been doing research among migrants coming to the cities. I found three big differences between the migrant workers in China and those in India. Firstly, the Chinese migrants had some property in the village, whereas in India, they are mostly landless. Second, the Chinese migrants have been to school, but the Indian ones are illiterate. Thirdly, you won’t see children at work in China, and in India, you do.
So when Chinese migrants come to the city, they have some economic holding back in the village, and they are schooled, and this makes a big difference. When I first came to China, the migrant’s dream was to buy a sewing machine or a bicycle. When I went back ten years later, they not only had sewing machines and bicycles, they also had a fridge, an electric rice cooker, a TV set. When I went back a third time, around the turn of the century, they had a motorbike. This was possible because China has been focussing on the domestic market by increasing the purchasing power of the working classes. But the Indian government is not interested in increasing the purchasing power of the poor – this is what I meant by a race to the bottom. India wants to pay its workers the lowest possible wage rate, in the hope that it can compete better with the Chinese in export markets. But this has resulted in there being more pauperisation in India, which is not the case in China.
But today the Chinese economy is in troubled waters.
So is the Indian economy.
Of course not. Haven’t you heard -- we are growing at 7.6%
(laughs) There is so much wishful thinking in Indian policy circles. The Chinese economy is slowing down, yes, but it is not stopping. What is more critical is the slowing down of the economies in the West. In India, prime minister Modi promised a 100 million jobs in his election campaign. Not only is this impossible to deliver, today even the middle classes are insecure about their future. The whole Hardik Patel phenomenon – it’s because they are desperate for work, and they can’t find any because they want work with dignity. The Kanbi Patels don’t want employment in brick kilns or stone quarries or as construction workers.
So how would you describe the present government’s approach to the poor?
Not only are the poor being blamed for their poverty – that it is their own doing, or lack of merit or whatever – attempts are being made to establish that they are a burden to society. So it is not poverty that needs a solution but the poor. The question as framed by policy-makers and urban planners is: how can we get rid of the poor? That is social Darwinism, and that’s why the comparison with Victorian England is so important.
So you see an Indian avatar of social Darwinism?
How else do we understand smart cities? They are basically about social exclusion – they are not meant to cater to the poor. As the state is getting privatised, a new kind of landlordism – as happened in feudal times -- is coming back, but in the avatar of Special Economic Zones, private townships, etc. Another example of social Darwinism at work are slum evictions, where you say we don’t want these people around – they have to be driven out, they are useless, they create traffic problems, they are anti-social -- for instance, the rape cases in Delhi.
How do you understand the recent incidents of rape in Delhi?
I am more interested in how the middle class reacted it, because the accused were young migrants from the hinterlands -- poor and belonging to the bottom of the social ladder. Of course, it’s a horrible crime and must not be justified. But their crime gets portrayed now as the typical behaviour of the scum that is invading our cities, and why the cities should be cleansed of them. I can see a future where India will not allow the workers who gather at labour chowks to settle down in the cities even though there is no livelihood in the villages.
Recently there has been a debate on reservations in the private sector. Is this a good idea?
In fact, it is required because the public economy is shrinking. We talk about reservations already being there in the public sector but we know that government jobs are being slashed, the public economy is shrinking. With privatisation and disinvestment, employment on the basis of reservations only in the public sector is over and out. Given this, private enterprise should make up for this erosion in public sector jobs by being brought under the ambit of the reservation policy.
Then what happens to merit?
Well, here’s a typical social Darwinist argument – that potentially the OBCs and SC/STs do not have merit; it’s just the high castes who have it.
You have been doing field work in India for over 50 years. What would you characterise as the single biggest change in the sphere of development?
The most striking change is the disappearance of the development paradigm itself.
How can that be? We’ve just elected a Prime Minister who campaigned on the plank of development.
By ‘development paradigm’, I mean the promise of development as seen in the West — through modernisation, industrialisation, and a welfare state that offered prosperity for all and an easy life. You were promised that this would be followed in the Global South. Now we know it’s a myth.
The contrast is no longer between nations but between social classes within every nation – whether you are included or excluded. You see this inclusion-exclusion paradigm growing with the informalisation of the economy. If nine out of ten workers in India are in the informal economy, it means not only that the formal economy is shrinking in size, it also means that it is getting informalised.
Can the poor in India hope for inclusive citizenship?
Citizenship is about rights and obligations. It is about being able to make claims on the state, and at the moment this is a privilege afforded by a minority of the Indian population. Also, inclusive citizenship not only means offering employment (inclusion in economic terms) but also creating space for them in terms of housing, health, schooling, skilling, and inclusion in social terms — which means focussing on equality. But we don’t see pro-equality policies, only pro-inequality policies. The mindset of the Indian elite is: the poor are different from me and I don’t want them around.
(email: sampath.g@thehindu.co.in)
Keywords: IndiadevelopmentJan Breman

Labour in the twenty-first century

As the NDA government leans towards industrialists by scripting reforms that would legalise and expand contract labour, the big question is: do India’s trade unions have it in them to resist this imminent legislative blitz?

On February 24, the RSS-affiliated central trade union Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) will hold a nationwide protest against the NDA government’s labour law reforms. On March 10, all the 11 central trade union organisations (CTUOs), including the BMS, will observe a national protest day. And in end-March, they are planning a mass convention on labour policies to mobilise workers. All this comes in the wake of a 15-point pre-Budget memorandum of demands that the CTUOs had submitted to the Union Finance Minister in January.
India’s ‘labour problem’
Ask any top executive from India Inc. and he would tell you that India has a labour problem. And the International Labour Organisation (ILO) would agree. So here’s a quick but unconventional overview of India’s ‘labour problem’.
There are eight core ILO Conventions against forced labour (also known, in less euphemistic times, as slavery). India refuses to ratify four of those: C87 (Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention); C98 (the Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining Convention); C138 (Minimum Age Convention), and C182 (Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention). India also refuses to ratify another major convention, C131, or the Minimum Wage Fixing Convention. These refusals in themselves present a succinct picture of the status of, as well as the state’s attitude to, labour welfare in India.
The Annual Global Rights Index, published by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), rates 141 countries on 97 indicators derived from ILO standards. The rating is on a scale of 1 to 5-plus, based on the degree of respect accorded to workers’ rights. In 2015, India had a rating of 5, the second-worst category. It denotes “no guarantee of rights”. Despite being a constitutional democracy, on the matter of worker rights, India is in the same club as Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar, all dictatorships.
So yes, India certainly has a labour problem. And a reform of the present labour regime is a must. But what form should this reform take?
In 2014, the industry body FICCI (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry) and AIOE (All India Organisation of Employers) put out a paper titled “Suggested Labour Policy Reforms”. It pointed out that “India’s obsession with an archaic labour policy… is keeping investors away, hindering employment growth and making Indian enterprises uncompetitive”. The paper goes on argue that it is the multiplicity (44 Central and 100-odd at the State-level) of labour laws that is pushing workers to the informal sector, as companies seek “to circumvent the rigorous labour policies”.
According to the ILO, “labour market flexibility is as high as 93 per cent in India”. This means that 93 per cent of India’s workforce anyway do not enjoy the protection of India’s 144 labour laws. But industry’s solution to the labour problem is a dilution of these laws so that the mass of informal workers can be employed formally, but without legal protections.
Contrary to the ILO-mandated norm of tripartite consultations between employers, the state, and the unions in formulation of labour legislations, the NDA government has been faithfully following the FICCI-AIOE script, brushing aside CTUO demands. Unless this policy direction is reversed, labour rights and trade unions will become history so far as India is concerned. So the big question is: do India’s trade unions have it in them to lead the fight in the face of this legislative blitz?
The CTUOs offered a preliminary answer when they came together to pull off a massive general strike on September 2, 2015, which is estimated to have cost the national economy some Rs. 25,000 crore. Only the RSS-affiliated BMS pulled out at the last minute, so as not to embarrass the ruling NDA.
Many commentators, however, have dismissed this show of strength as mere tokenism. They point to the increasing irrelevance of trade unions in general, and the CTUOs in particular.
Firstly, the argument goes, in a globalised Indian economy, the centre of gravity has shifted from manufacturing to services. Secondly, even in manufacturing, the advent of global supply chains has meant a mass informalisation of employment as multinational enterprises break up the production process and sub-contract to suppliers in different parts of the world. This new norm of fragmented production signals a major victory for capital over labour.
To cite just one example, as reported by the NGO, the India Committee of the Netherlands, 80 per cent of the garment workers in Bengaluru toil in sweatshop conditions. They Make-in-India for reputed global brands such as Gap, H&M, Tommy Hilfiger and Zara — without ever being employees of Gap, H&M, Tommy Hilfiger or Zara. This kind of employment will become the legal norm for India’s workers when the proposed amendments become law.
Such hyper-exploitative industrial zones have been around for a while — from Sriperumbudur in Chennai to Bengaluru to Manesar in the National Capital Region. But India’s CTUOs have so far proved incapable of impeding this onslaught.
The fatal flaws
Given their failure to mobilise effectively around these adverse changes, the latest salvo of imminent labour reforms has turned the spotlight back on the CTUOs’ traditional weaknesses, which could prove to be fatal flaws in the confrontation between labour and capital in the current economic scenario.
The first problem is their political party affiliation. Of the Big Five unions, with a combined claimed membership of over 79 million, the BMS (17.1 million members) owes allegiance to the ruling NDA; INTUC (Indian National Trade Union Congress), with a membership of 33.3 million, is affiliated to the Congress; CITU (Centre of Indian Trade Unions, 5.7 million) is an extension of the CPI(M); AITUC (All India Trade Union Congress, 14.2 million) is a wing of the CPI; and HMS (Hind Mazdoor Sabha, 9.1 million) used to be affiliated to the socialist parties but projects itself as an independent union today.
Party affiliations entail three things: one, a restriction of the CTUO’s ability to expand, as it will put off those who do not like its parent party; two, party interests often trump union/labour interests; and three, disunity between the differently-affiliated unions.
For instance, the Congress-affiliated INTUC could not get the UPA to curb the rampant violation of labour laws during its 10 long years in power. Similarly, it is evident that the BMS has had no say in the drafting of the NDA’s labour law amendments. While their political masters — the BJP and the Congress — are on the same page so far as labour reforms are concerned, the CTUOs have struggled to forge a united front.
Their second big weakness, according to Chennai-based activist V. Baskar, is the leadership, which he believes is marked by the “bureaucratic mentality” of a labour aristocracy. “Is it really workers who are heading the CTUOs?” he asks. “They may have been workers once but today they function more like bureaucrats. They prefer policy analysis to on-ground organising. They have failed to extend their reach to the growing mass of informal workers.”
The third weakness is less to do with the unions themselves than with the changing labour landscape. With the majority of the workforce outside the purview of unions, their power to intervene or disrupt has also shrunk proportionately.
The pushback on the anvil
But the central trade union leaders counter these criticisms. “It is true that we are more focussed on policy issues,” says Tapan Sen, general secretary of CITU. “But that is because it’s an important battle right now. At the same time, we are also involved in struggles on the ground.”
One sector where the CTUOs do admit to some difficulty is the burgeoning IT services sector, which is marked by little union presence despite demanding work conditions. Says AITUC general secretary and CPI politician Gurudas Dasgupta, “Yes, we haven’t made much headway in the IT sector. Here our biggest challenge has been the instant termination of workers involved in unionising activity. This has created tremendous fear in the minds of the workers.”
Confirming that this ‘fear factor’ created by managements is a major hurdle to expansion of union activity, INTUC president G. Sanjeeva Reddy says, “Right now industry is aiming for two things: to legalise and expand contract labour; and to develop in-house unions which will dance to the tunes of the management and stay away from CTUOs.”
Says Mr. Sen: “Till about a decade ago, our main challenge was in mobilising the workers in secret and somehow getting the documents to the labour department for registering the union. Once that was done, the trade union became a fait accompli. But today, the state has become such a shameless collaborator that the moment the union papers reach the labour department, a call goes to the employer. They obtain the names of the workers who had applied, and terminate all of them.”
Mr. Sen and Mr. Dasgupta both point out that another hurdle in organising IT workers is their mindset. “They get paid a little more, and just because they wear a tie, good shoes, and have a nice office, they don’t think of themselves as workers. When their exploitation becomes unbearable, their mindset will change. We will be ready for them when the crisis strikes, as it inevitably will,” says Mr. Sen.
Harbhajan Singh Sidhu, general secretary of HMS, points to a larger pattern: “On the one hand, workers anywhere who try to organise a union are immediately terminated — with the state looking the other way. And on the other, there is this constant chorus of voices singing the declining relevance of unions. Can you see what is happening?”
Mr. Sidhu also rejects the charge of disunity among the CTUOs. “All the unions are unanimous on two points: regularisation of contract workers engaged in perennial work; and equal pay for contract workers performing the same job as permanent workers.”
Even the BMS, known for striking out on its own, has been collaborating with CTUOs of ideologically opposite persuasions. Says B.N. Rai, president, BMS: “We are with the other unions in our opposition to three things: FDI, disinvestment and labour reforms. As for labour reforms, the government can reform all it wants provided three entitlements are not compromised: sufficient wages, job security, and worker security. Because the labour law amendments are a frontal attack on these, we will oppose them.”
Striking an ironic note, Mr. Dasgupta points out that much of the credit for uniting the CTUOs should go to the NDA administration: “The current government’s virulent attempt to crush the trade unions has actually helped build unprecedented unity among the different unions.”
Of course, the series of actions planned in March will be a test not only of the CTUO’s unity but also their strength. Mr. Dasgupta rubbishes claims that India’s CTUOs are a spent force rendered even more irrelevant by the absence of a base outside the organised sectors. “We may have limitations.” he says. “But the central trade unions are still very strong in the strategic sectors — oil, coal, banking, defence, insurance. And we will keep fighting the anti-worker programme of this government.”
All the union leaders emphasise that the might of the 11 CTUOs is more than the numerical addition of their individual memberships. “During our general strike last year, it wasn’t just the CTUO-affiliated unions but even independent unions and non-unionised workers who participated. All of them are against labour reforms and a united front of CTUOs will help mobilise the entire mass of workers in both the organised and unorganised sectors,” says Mr. Sidhu.
Summing up, Mr. Reddy strikes a note of conciliation that sounds more like a warning, “The CTUOs have always been open to discussions with the management and the state. We favour solutions that benefit everyone. But under the current government, the employers and the state are together trying to squash the trade union movement. If they do not listen to us, rest assured that our country is in for major turmoil due to labour unrest.”
sampath.g@thehindu.co.in
Source: The Hindu, 22-02-2016