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India : general strike
Tuesday 5 October 2010
India’s general strike: Enormous potential for struggle demonstrated
Workers showed courageous determination
On the day of the strike, 7 September, the right-wing nationalist paper, The Hindu, had not a mention of the action on its front page. Instead the lead article itself demonstrated very clearly the need for the strike and for further action. Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh has come out against a high court order that the poor should be given grain that scandalously will now be allowed to rot in the go-downs (ware-houses). It is estimated that 70% of India’s population lives on less than Rs20 a day - less than half a dollar!
The strike gave a glimpse of the potential power of the working class in India. In Mumbai it was reported that 90,000 auto-rickshaw drivers struck. Nationally hundreds of planes were grounded and rallies and protests took place across the country. In Bangalore, where garment workers are super-exploited, members of New Socialist Alternative (NSA), the CWI in India, helped to bring out workers from six garment factories to join the strike.
However, the experience in Chennai gave the impression that more planning and preparation could have yielded much greater results. Auto drivers complained that they had not received a single poster or leaflet to help them advertise the strike. No posters were visible before the day itself. It appears that most areas did not have preparatory meetings either.
There is a myriad of reasons for the workers, poor and young people to strike and protest in India. Poverty, dire working conditions, lack of public services, oppression on the basis of gender, sexuality, religion, caste or language, state repression and many more transgressions of human rights. This strike was particularly focused on the enormous price hikes in food and fuel which further punish the poor. The cost of staples like rice and dal have rocketed while wages stagnate and hours and jobs are cut. Meanwhile the wealthy of India live on a different planet of air-conditioned restaurants and chauffer-driven shopping sprees.
The leaflet of the New Socialist Alternative called for genuinely elected committees of working and poor people to control food prices and for the general strike to be followed by further action - well-organised and prepared.
The strike was called by a number of trade unions mainly, but not all, affiliated to the Communist Parties. Even unions affiliated to the biggest ruling party – Congress – came out and its leader, Sonia Ghandi mouthed words of concern for the plight of workers just before the strike! The attitude of some Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI (M)) members was that the general strike should sound a warning shot to the government. But a ‘warning shot’ with no clear signal of a determined and organised follow up is unlikely to put sufficient pressure on the government.
However, the workers who took action showed courageous determination. Young women working at Gold Winner Oil near Chennai were striking for better wages. Satya has been at the company for six years and receives a miserly Rs3,100 a month (US$ 67). When Priya spent 30 minutes in the bathroom, the ladies’ supervisor at Gold Winner publicly asked her who she had been sleeping with! These women workers also took strike action against sexual harassment. For two days’ action they lost eight days’ pay! They described their conditions as “semi-slavery” and were angry that the mainstream Indian and Tamil Nadu media did not cover their conditions and struggles.
Workers from the Special Economic Zones were also out on strike. Companies in these areas are not required to recognise trade unions or the minimum wage. Of the 70 companies in the ‘Tambaram SEZ 50’ pay below the appallingly low minimum wage.
Young men working at RSB, a supplier for the giant US-based firm Caterpillar, were striking against the price hike and against job insecurity. They were members of a new independent trade union, the United Labour Federation (ULF). Their complaints were many. While managers took home 1,500,000 - 2,500,000 rupees ($32,000), 400 workers shared one toilet, received no lunch or dinner at work and faced suspensions over minor issues. When they established their union, the ULF, the management set up a new boss-friendly union, bringing in political parties for support. It was thus unsurprising that these young militant working class fighters felt there was no political party that represented them. They hoped that Caterpillar workers in the US would organise solidarity with their struggles.
The police were also determined and made mass arrests at the CPI(M) unions’ rally. Hundreds of workers were driven away in vans and trucks. However the presence of western tourists with cameras seemed to keep them at bay at the ULF rally.
The ULF’s honorary president, V Prakash, described the horrendous wealth gap and the conditions of the workers. He condemned the political parties and the way that the trade unions had ordered the strike from the top when it should have been organised from the bottom up.
There was a warm welcome for visiting socialists (from the CWI) who gave solidarity greetings, with particular applause for the call for a new workers’ party to be built across all sections of society and with no discrimination on the basis of gender, caste, sexuality, religion or language. This point was made in the NSA leaflet and repeated by V Prakash. Many participants expressed interest in the leaflets and the work of New Socialist Alternative.
Forum posts
1. India : general strike, 11 October 2016, 09:41
India Is Making Labor History With the World’s Largest General Strike
Only 4 percent of the Indian workforce is in unions. If these unions merely fought to defend their tenuous rights, their power would erode even further. Union power has suffered greatly since the Indian economy liberalized in 1991, with Supreme Court judgments against union democracy and with the global commodity chain pitting Indian workers against workers elsewhere. It is to the great credit of the Indian trade unions that they have embraced — in different tempos — the labor conditions and living conditions of workers and peasants in the informal sector. What power remains with unions can only grow if they do what they have been doing — namely, to turn towards the immense mass of the informal workers and peasants and draw them into the culture of unions and class struggle.
Trade unions leaders are reticent to say how many people struck work on September 2, 2016. They simply cannot offer a firm number. But they do say that the strike — the seventeenth general strike since India adopted its new economic policy in 1991 — has been the largest ever. The corporate news media — no fan of strikes — reported that the number of strikers exceeded the estimated 150 million workers. A number of newspapers suggested that 180 million Indian workers walked off the job. If that is the case, then this is the largest reported general strike in history.
And yet, it has not been given much consideration in the media. Few front page stories, fewer pictures of marching workers outside their silent factories and banks, tea gardens and bus stations. The sensibility of individual journalists can only rarely break through the wall of cynicism built by the owners of the press and the culture they would like to create. For them, workers’ struggles are an inconvenience to daily life. It is far better for the corporate media to project a strike as a disturbance, as a nuisance to a citizenry that seems to live apart from the workers. It is middle-class outrage that defines the coverage of a strike, not the issues that move workers to take this heartfelt and difficult action. The strike is treated as archaic, as a holdover from another time. It is not seen as a necessary means for workers to voice their frustrations and hopes. The red flags, the slogans and the speeches — these are painted with embarrassment. It is as if turning one’s eyes from them would somehow make them disappear.
A leading international business consultancy firm reported a few years ago that 680 million Indians live in deprivation. These people — half the Indian population — are deprived of the basics of life such as food, energy, housing, drinking water, sanitation, health care, education and social security. Most of Indians workers and peasants are among the deprived. Ninety percent of India’s workers are in the informal sector, where protections at the workplace are minimal and their rights to form unions virtually non-existent. These workers are not marginal to India’s growth agenda. In 2002, the National Commission on Labor found that “the primary source of future work for all Indians” would be in the informal sector, which already produced over half the Gross Domestic Product. The future of Indian labor, then, is informal with occasional rights delivered to prevent grotesque violations of human dignity. Hope for the Indian worker is simply not part of the agenda of the current dispensation in India.
The class struggle is not the invention of the unions or the workers. It is a fact of life for labor in the capitalist system. The capitalist, who buys the labor power of workers, seeks to make that labor power as efficient and productive as possible. The capitalist retains the gains from this productivity, sloughing off the worker to their slums at night to find a way to get the energy to come back the next day. It is this pressure to be more productive and to donate the gains of their productivity to the capitalist that is the essence of the class struggle. When the worker wants a better share of the output, the capitalist does not listen. It is the strike — an invention of the 19th century — that provides the workers with a voice to enter the class struggle in a conscious way.
In India, the first strike was in April-May 1862, when the railway workers of Howrah Railway Station struck over the right to an eight-hour work day. What inconveniences the strike produces to the middle class has to be weighed against the daily inconveniences that the workers endure as their extra productivity is seized by the capitalists. Those workers in 1862 did not want an interminable 10-hour shift that depleted them of their life. Their strike allowed them to say: we will not work more than eight hours. The critic of the strike will say, surely there are other ways to get your voice heard. No other way has been shown to the worker, who had neither the political power to lobby nor the economic power to dominate the media. It is silent, but for these festivals of the working class.
Workers in Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat joined the strike with great enthusiasm. This included over 70,000 crèche and mid-day meal workers as well as port workers in Bhavnagar. Garment workers in Tamil Nadu and automobile factory workers in Karnataka closed their shops. Bank and insurance employees joined power loom operators and iron ore miners, while transport workers across the country decided to stand outside their bus and truck depots. Communist unions joined with other unions to ensure the widest mobilization of workers.
Each local union in this strike had its own grievances, its own worries and frustrations. But the broad issues that united these millions of workers revolved around the demand for workplace democracy, the demand for a greater share of the social wealth and the demand for a less toxic social landscape. The workers — through their unions — took their 12-point demands to the government, which ignored them. At the last minute, when it seemed as if the strike would be robust, the government attempted to deliver small concessions. This was not sufficient. It was, as the labor unions put it, an insult. There is no expectation that the strike itself would lead to major concessions from the government. After all, last year, 150 million workers went on strike and the government did not shift from its anti-worker policies. Instead, the government of Narendra Modi deepened its commitment to “labor market reforms” — namely to eviscerate unions and to enhance the right to fire workers at will.
What the strike says is that India’s workers remain alive to the class struggle. They have not surrendered to reality. In 1991, when the government decided to open the economy to the turbulent interests of global capital, the workers rebelled. In August 1992, textile workers in Bombay took to the streets in their undergarments — they declared that the new order would leave them in abject poverty. Their symbolic gesture is the current reality.