Immanuel Ness on the ‘Super-Exploitation’ of Contractual Workers in India
Immanuel Ness,
professor of political science at Brooklyn College, City University of New
York, spoke to The Wire on trade unions and labour laws in
India, social relations between labour and capital in the global south, merits
of spontaneity in workers’ agitations and much more. Ness has studied the
working class in India for more than a decade and his observations appear in
his book Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class which
also has China and South Africa as case studies. The full transcript of the
interview is available below the video.
Akhil Kumar: Hello and welcome to this video interview
with Immanuel Ness. I am Akhil Kumar from The Wire and today
we will discuss trade unions, labour laws, and the concerns of the working
class in the global south and India vis-à-vis the developed nations in the West
and other places which Immanuel has recently visited for his research. Immanuel
Ness is a professor of political science at the Brooklyn College of the City
University of New York. His book, Southern Insurgency: the Coming of
the Global Working Class has India as one of the case studies.
Welcome, Immanuel. Your research on India has required you to travel across the
country a number of times, I’m assuming? Can you begin by commenting on the
trade unions in India and the social relations between labour and capital here?
Immanuel Ness: Yes, I think it is well known that the
trade unions have declined dramatically over the last 20-30 years since
liberalisation took place. The original base of the trade unions were in the
old import substitution industries and in the public sector and over the period
of neo-liberalism that has gained greater force especially now, the capacity
for trade unions to represent workers has declined dramatically. As a consequence,
we have seen a growth of production for export promotion and also for internal
production to a great extent. Much of this is funded by foreign direct
investment and through private capital.
There is a very large
amount of private capital in this country that pushes forward the kinds of
rapacious production and these are the sectors of the workforce that
traditional trade unions have had a very hard time organising in general. Many
of the workers are contract workers and many of them work at wages that are
1/5th of what full-time workers have and this represents the major
contradiction of trade unions in this country. The official unions have not
mobilised nor organised members of the contract sector which represents at
least 80% of all the workers in this country. That alone is one of the big
questions. However, workers are organising themselves as they always do and
always will. That’s part of the aspirations of workers that will always happen
to a greater or lesser degree.
Over the last several
years, I have seen an extensive growth in the level of self-activity amongst
the workers and a greater degree of recognition that this sector of the working
class in this country, which represents the mass majority of workers, is highly
exploited, are living under the most horrendous slums and shanties around and
within cities. They represent the major social force for transformation, not
just from an economic perspective but also from a more extensive perspective,
one that would perhaps change the society into one that is far more
representative.
AK: You have studied working-class organisation
in a number of countries. Did you notice anything unique during your research
that you found in the methods in which the Indian trade unions organise and the
Indian working class is putting up a resistance to global capital?
IN: Yes. Picking up on the point I was making
earlier, Indian trade unions do not organise the vast majority of workers. They
only organise exclusively amongst those workers who are full-time, permanent
labourers, who tend to be better off and earn higher wages. They too are
exploited but they are not super exploited in the way that contract workers
are. So, in my travels around this country over the last decade or more, I
found a number of organising campaigns that have been initiated. Most of them
had been around issues of full-time workers. There have been some attempts
amongst trade union organisations or NGOs to organise contract workers or at
least to represent them in some way, but they have not been sustained in any
case.
In India, the main
contradiction is between contract workers and permanent workers and so you see
various efforts amongst permanent members to organise and unions to organise
and mobilise workers who are permanent, but efforts are made on the part on
unions to organise contract workers to represent the vast majority. That is the
major difference of India and other countries around the world where there is
trade union competition. For instance, in a case such as South Africa, you have
globalisation efforts that run the spectrum. In other words, there are contract
workers in South Africa.
However, you do not have the kinds of separation that
are so distinct between permanent and contract workers. One could, for
instance, point to cases where union officials will say, “we have been
extremely successful in mobilising these Hyundai workers.” When I ask them
about the contract workers, they say they do not organise them at all.
I think we should be
happy for the kinds of organisations that do take place but I also think that
if we really want to be serious about it, it represents a dividing line and
further divides the working class in this country. If you are going to only
mobilise full-time, permanent workers who are relatively privileged, and not
mobilise the vast majority of workers who are far more impoverished, who live
under far more difficult, unsanitary conditions without proper housing, and who
work in conditions without even a basic wage package or pension. They go to
work places where one can hardly breathe, such as Wazirpur.
This is a major issue
in this country, and it is not so much in other countries. This is not to say
that this is true and other countries do not have struggles. There are very
important struggles that are unfolding and there are contradictions in the
labour movements that are somewhat similar to India in the sense that the
parties that represent trade unions and trade union centers are fraying and
losing their commitment rooted in class struggle unionism. This is something
that is almost universal, but in India, the major contradiction and division,
is the difference between permanent and contract, and it plays itself out in
furthering the super exploitation of the labour force of this country.
AK: You mentioned that you found out that the
major trade unions are not interested in working with the unorganised sector.
Why do you think that is?
IN: I would say that there are many different
possibilities and credible arguments that it is not just a willful neglect of
the majority of workers in this country. It has much to do with the setup in
general that the structural conditions to organise contract workers are so
limited that it makes it almost impossible for official trade unions to engage
in that kind of activity. I would also say that the capitalist state of India,
major corporations and the laws of this country make it almost impossible to
organise contract workers. On the one hand, I would argue that the structures
of the state that regulate labour and capital relations through labour
commissioners and so forth read down negatively to any kind of possibility to
organise within the system. The only way to organise is really outside the
system and outside the official labour capital setup, as I would put it.
In that way, for
instance, one could file a complaint but even those complaints are very
difficult to act on and to affect more than several workers at a time. You can
have workers struggles that involve more than a few because most workers are
not even considered to be permanent. Due to this lack of permanency, if you go
to the labour board or the labour commissioner and they will say “where is this
worker? He doesn’t work here”. Workers can be fired at any moment and so in
some ways, they are not even seen and this contract sector makes it very
difficult for official unions to push it forward.
One can also argue that there
is a high level of corruption. In general, it is easy to just organise the
permanent sector and with such a large working class in this country, if you
are only just organising permanent workers that is a sizable class of workers
and so if 20% of the workforce in this country were organised into a militant
workforce, able to contract capital, that would be significant. At the same
time, one can just imagine if the vast majority of workers, the other 80% or
more, could be organised into unions that would create conditions for social
transformation.
This is not something
individual leaders of these unions want to do or they do not have the capacity
to do it and it would take a huge fight against the state to achieve this. As I
said a moment ago with respect to South Africa, the struggle in South Africa is
unfurling and will continue to because there is a resistance that is developing
amongst the working class and it is willing to fight back hard. There are some
sectors of the trade union movement there that is willing to fight back to
change the system. As we know, the end of apartheid did not bring about the
equalisation of wages in any way. It has not provided labour rights in any
significant manner, it has not created any kind of economic democracy, it has
created more inequality as a consequence of their subservience to the norms of
neo-liberal capitalism.
In this country, there
is a longer history.. read more:
