Visty Banaji
The future of trade unions
Traditional trade unions seem unable to play the vital and beneficent roles they once did. What brought about this decline and how can they be reinvented in a totally different form?
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therefore, be a strange ‘‘shuturmurg’’ who cannot see the declining power and militancy of unions, not just in India, but around the world.
The Twilight of the Titans
In the Indian context, perhaps the longest-term trend cutting the ground out from under the feet of traditional unions is the growing proportion of the workforce with a distaste
for unionization. The bulk of the workforce is expanding, sunrise industries like Information Technology and financial services considers it infra dig even to become union members, leave aside depending on collective bargaining for salary increases and benefits. Agitation in the traditional manner would be unthinkable (as well as unsafe) for them. Simultaneously, in traditional industries, not only are
FEBRUARY 2021 |
The road less travelled
ntil the early eighties, managers in general and personnel managers in particular periodically went through moments of tension and ignominy at the hands of their workmen and union leaders. By the end of the eighties, however, the frequency of violence started coming down and industry breathed a sigh of relief. Some Industrial Relations (IR) managers even claimed the major part of the credit for taming rampaging unions. They actually deserved as much credit as the crow landing on a palm tree as it falls.1 Of course, there continue to be sporadic incidents of violence and vandalism, especially when the precariat sees no other resort and I have analyzed these earlier.2 The spontaneity of the conflagrations, however, confirms the lack (rather than the resurgence) of trusted and strong union leaderships that can sit eyeball-to-eyeball with managements and resolve worker demands. It would,
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