It has become a fashion among intellectuals and the mass media to denigrate trade unions as economistic, selfish and oblivious to national, political and social imperatives. Such accusations serve the needs of the neo-liberal regime of the international coalition of industrial and finance capital well.

These denigrators also have the temerity to belittle labour in the name of unorganised labour. They know well that the only source of power for the proletariat is organised solidarity; the unorganised workers have to organise themselves before they can get a fair deal. But these ‘friends’ of unorganised labour appear to be oblivious to this truth and prescribe palliatives that would make these workers endure their hellish conditions longer.

The same denigrators of organised labour also sing in chorus that the bane of Indian trade unionism is that it is over-political. The fact is that politics is concentrated economics. There is no water-tight separation between economic struggle and political struggle. Every economic struggle is more or less political. Trade unions may be charged with economism only when they allow local and immediate interests to override global or long-term class interests. 

History of the Emergence of the Trade Union Movement in India

In order to appreciate the role of the working class in Indian politics, we need to review, however cursorily, the history of the trade union movement in India. The working class emerged with the emergence of modern industry during the later half of the nineteenth century. Nationalist sentiments also started simmering at the same time. The Indian National Congress was founded in 1885. Between 1882 and 1890 at least 25 strikes were recorded in the then Bombay and Madras presidencies. There was a strike in Budge Budge Jute Mills in 1895. In the same year, the textile workers of Ahmedabad struck work. But the workers were not organised. Accordingly, these temporary upheavals dissipated after making some important but modest gains.

Two strikes during the first decade of the twentieth century merit some discussion. These were the harbingers of a new trend of militancy and resistance, bringing into relief the relationship between the emerging trade union organisations and the struggles with the national renaissance and resistance. One was the railway workers’ strike that started in Asansol and spread to Allahabad and Tundla. So complete was this strike that the then capital of British India, Calcutta (Kolkata), was completely cut off from the rest of the country. This strike, which lasted for ten days, was almost immediately followed by the strike of the railway engine drivers, firemen, brakemen and others in December of the same year. Both the strikes were brutally suppressed. Six hundred railway workers were dismissed. British troops were called out and engaged to run the railway. The workers’ assemblies were broken up by police and military force.

The Statesman of Calcutta underlined the portentous significance of these strikes.

There are some factors of the strikes of East India Railways, which appear to us to portend great trouble in the future and which the railway authorities will probably feel, on further reflection, worthy of the most careful consideration. An industrial India is rapidly going up and its development will doubtless be attended by characteristics of an industrial community; the formation of trade unions and that concomitant of labour disputes and strikes.

As the imperial mouthpiece, the matter was serious enough for The Statesman to deserve an editorial, where it wrote:

No nation, however pliant or submissive, can be flouted to defy it without avenging itself on its oppressors. Unless we are much mistaken, the retribution has made its appearance in Bengal in the form of a conscious unity of a realisation of the power of combination, the first fruits of which we have just seen in the temporary paralysis of the traffic of the railways in India.

Politically more significant was the strike of the Bombay workers against the incarceration of Tilak for sedition in 1908. The entire city burst out in angry protest as he was put on trial for sedition. Thousands of people waiting outside the court where the trial was taking place clashed with the police. In July, Bombay workers struck work and came out on the streets in processions. The strike reached new heights when 65,000 workers of Bombay went on strike on 19 July 1908. Office workers joined them on the succeeding days with small tradesmen, shopkeepers and dock labourers. Firing on, killing and arresting the workers on strike continued but it did not deter what was the first political general strike anywhere. At least 200 people lost their lives in the protest demonstrations. Many more were injured and thousands were taken into custody. To the same category belongs the general hartal by Muslim and Sikh arsenal and railway engineering workers of Rawalpindi in May 1908. This was part of a nationalist upsurge joined by the rising industrial working class, which was directly linked with the protest against the deportations of nationalist leaders.

The political general strike of the Bombay workers heralded the entry of a new social element ? the industrial working class, in the battle for political independence from alien rule. Its significance as a historical event was noted and hailed by Lenin in his revolutionary writings. The action was also symptomatic of the frustration, anger and deep resentment at the appalling conditions in which the industrial workers had to work in Bombay and other industrial centres. The Textile Factory Labour Committee was set up on 11 December 1906 to investigate the labour conditions in textile factories. The report of the Committee, presented in June 1907, only confirmed the well-known facts of the harsh exploitation of the Indian workers. It specially referred to the appalling housing conditions and proposed that factory hours should be limited to 12 hours a day or 72 hours a week.

Such a recommendation in 1911 represented a great gain against the background of inordinately long working hours, extending to nearly 20 hours a day. The factory legislation limited the working hours of the male workers in the factories to 12 hours a day. No less significant is the historical testimony to the decisive factors behind industrial legislation, that is, the power of unity, collective strength and organisation backed by inevitably innumerable sacrifices, without which not even the most exploitative characteristics of a colonial-cum-capitalist economic system could be even partially curbed.

The Trade Union Movement and Nationalist Politics

The sweep of this strike was too significant to be ignored by perceptive nationalist leaders. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Lala lajpat Rai, C.F. Andrews and others took the lead in organising these militant Indian workers into an all India organisation of workers. Similarly, the Russian Revolution led by the working class, too, inspired the radical nationalist leaders to form the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) just as it had compelled the imperialist bourgeoisie to found the International Labour Organisation (ILO). Except for Mahatma Gandhi, most national leaders were directly or indirectly involved in the formation of the AITUC in 1920. Lala Lajpat Rai, who was then the President of the Indian National Congress, presided over the formation of the AITUC. B.P. Wadia, one of the pioneers of the AITUC movement, underlined the link between democratic movement and the trade union movement in these significant words: “It is necessary to reorganise the labour movement as an integral part of the national movement. The latter will not succeed in the right direction of democracy if the Indian working classes are not enabled to organise their forces and come into their own.”

The moving spirit behind the formation of the AITUC, and of the Trade Union movement, in general, was eloquently expressed in the first manifesto of the AITUC:

Workers of India! The time has come for you to assert your right as arbiters of your country’s destiny. You cannot stand aloof from the stream of national life. You cannot refuse the events that are making history today for India. You are the mass of the population. Every movement on the political chessboard, every step in the financial or economical rearrangement of your country effects you more than it effects (sic) any other class. You must become conscious of your responsibilities. You must understand your rights. You must prepare yourself to realise your destiny.

Workers of India! Your lot is a hard one. How will you better it? Look at the slaves of the Assam Tea plantations, now become desperate. Their real daily wages are less than three annas a day prescribed under government Acts. They are often the victims of brutal treatment working under the lash for unlimited hours, while some of these plantations pay 20 to 40 per cent dividends. They are death and starvation dividends and it is you, your wives, your children who are the innocent, unoffending victims.

Workers of India! This earth is your common heritage. It is not specially reserved for professional politicians or the Simla bureaucrats, or the mill-owning plutocrats. When your nation’s leaders ask for Swaraj you must not let them leave you out of the reckoning. Political freedom to you is of no worth without economic freedom. You cannot therefore afford to neglect the movement for national freedom. You are part and parcel of that movement. You will neglect only at the peril of your liberty.

Workers of India!  There is only one thing for you to do. You must realise your unity. You must solidify you organisations. Do not look for salvation to the Factory Acts. The law cannot give you unity. The law cannot create in you the spirit of brotherhood. That must be your own work. Spoilation of the worker is the cry of capitalists in fields and factories. Let unity and brotherhood of man be your watch-words. Your salvation lies in the strength of your organisations. Cast all weakness from you and you will surely tread the path to power and freedom.

It may be noted here that when the national leaders were reluctant to go beyond dominion status, the working class was positing the need for complete independence from British rule. Right from its birth, the AITUC demanded full freedom and posited Independent India as a socialist democracy. The Rowlatt Acts were militantly resisted by the working class. The AITUC led the working class at the forefront of the anti-Simon Commission movement. It is not fortuitous that Bhagat Singh chose to throw the bomb in the assembly to make the deaf hear when they were scheduled to debate and pass the Industrial Safety Bill, a law for chaining the working class to veritable slavery. It should be obvious to any student of the period that it is the working class movement that contributed significantly to moving national leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhash Chandra Bose and others in the democratic socialist direction.

However, the bourgeoisie saw the talk of socialism from the platform of the Indian National Congress (INC) as mere rhetoric. It was also useful for the mobilisation of the working poor in the fight for freedom. This understanding of the captains of industry appears to be borne out by the events on the eve of independence and the reaction of the INC leaders to those events. As soon as the War ended, the working class moved into militant industrial action in order to make up the loss of real wages during the War, out of the war profits of the industrialists. While the militant trade union movement in the 1920s and 30s impacted politics to move towards democratic socialism, the trade union militancy on the eve of independence appears to have scared the national bourgeois leadership, which hastened to strike a deal with the British bourgeoisie on the one hand and feudal landowners on the other.

The wave of strikes gathered momentum, and political mass action became the order of the day. The first countrywide manifestation was in the massive protest against the trial of the INA prisoners, who became legendary heroes in the eyes of the people. Students and workers were in the forefront of the demonstrations. The scale and intensity of the demonstrations sent jitters up the spine of the imperialist helmsmen, and they had to release the INA prisoners. But the spark had become a prairie fire. The movement steadily rose to a crescendo. On 18 February 1946, the ratings of the Royal Indian Navy (RIN) revolted and took possession of the ships lying in the Bombay, Karachi and Cochin harbours. These rebellious ratings showed exceptional anti-imperialist national political maturity when the national leaders were angling to have power even at the cost of a national split. Deliberately flying flags of the Congress and the Muslim League and the red flag with the hammer-and-sickle, the central strike committee of the naval ratings appealed to the people of Bombay to support their fight with hartal and strike.

The Bombay workers led by the AITUC promptly and collectively responded. The three railway workshops and all other small and big factories went on strike without exception. Over three lakh workers were on strike. Processions of the workers paraded the streets. Shops closed down everywhere. People and the working class stood their ground in the face of vicious military intervention that officially killed 250 persons. Most of the martyrs must have been workers as the mass shooting mainly took place in the working class heart of Bombay.

While the workers of Bombay were displaying such militant nationalist fervour, their counterparts in Calcutta did not fall behind. On 23 February 1946, about a lakh workers from factories and railway establishments struck work in solidarity with the RIN revolt. Amrita Bazar Patrika of 25 February 1946 wrote, “Participation of so many workers in anti-imperialist struggle created a new situation in our country.”

It was the culmination of the mass popular uprising to which the working class contributed substantially. An atmosphere of revolt prevailed in the three wings of the armed forces. It is this simultaneous ferment that raged among the civilian and military workers, which completely upset all the plans of the British to hold on to their Indian possession a little longer as Churchill so fervently desired. Army headquarters reported to the government, “It is not possible to make a satisfactory appreciation on normal military lines, since no one can forecast the extent of hostile action with which we may have to deal.”

The naval ratings had to call off their strike in the face of downright opposition and hostility of the bourgeois leadership. But they declared with solemn dignity that they were surrendering not to the imperialist government, but to “the Indian people”. The wave of strikes meanwhile continued to mount in intensity. Postal workers struck work on 11 July 1946. On 21 July all other sections of the Post and Telegraph department went on strike. July 29 witnessed an unprecedented general strike in support of these workers. Another notable strike that stirred the country was the South Indian Railwaymen strike. The vigorous celebrations of May Day that year all over the country on the crest of the anti-imperialist wave vividly demonstrated the grit and determination of the working class to culminate the national struggle for freedom.

The British saw the writing on the wall and decided to quit. Their spokesman stated to Parliament that Britain was left with only two alternatives, either to maintain power by “a considerable reinforcement of troops” (English papers put the figure at “an occupation force of 500,000 men”) or to make the political transfer on the basis of a settlement.

A.V. Alexander, who had come with the cabinet mission for talks with Indian leaders, told the House of Commons on 18 July 1946:

We have to deal with a situation where there is a political awakening throughout the world and especially in the East, and if some attempt had not been made to get the agreement we have so far secured in India, I am certain we should have faced a position of uprising and a bloodshed and disturbances that no one could at the moment forecast.

It should thus be obvious to any person without blinkers, who is aware of the events preceding the so-called transfer of power, that the working class played a decisive role in making the British bourgeoisie take the prudent decision to hand over the reigns of government to the Indian bourgeoisie and leave the country.

The Trade Union Movement and the Indian State

This militant upsurge in the working class movement on the eve of independence not only hastened the transfer of power by the British bourgeoisie to their Indian counterparts but also scared the national bourgeoisie. It pushed them to strike a deal with the landowners and jettison the programme of radical land reforms recommended by the Kumarappa Committee constituted by the All India Congress Committee (AICC), and launch a legal and organisational attack on the working class. It all but smashed the striking and bargaining power of organised labour by floating a new trade union, namely the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC). At the same time, it enacted the Industrial Disputes Act 1947 to hamstring collective bargaining by fettering industrial action and steering industrial disputes into the court and away from rather than towards the bargaining table.

It may be recalled here that the leadership of the struggle for independence was committed to repeal the Defence of India Rules as soon as they came to power. They kept that promise but for the retention of the Rule 81A, which applied to the working class by enacting the Industrial Disputes Act 1947. This was acknowledged in the statement of objects of the Act. Adjudication, in contrast to collective bargaining, obviated the need to effectively organise the workers into fighting collectively and promoted sycophantic unionism on the one hand and briefcase union leaders on the other. Therein lay the original sin that bedevils the Indian trade unionism even today in the form of a multiplicity of unions. Sukomal Sen has rightly called the division of the trade union movement in India at the dawn of independence the greatest attack of the national bourgeoisie on the working class. The enactment of the Industrial Disputes Act 1947 is equally pernicious because it works insidiously. The offensives of the Indian bourgeoisie have had long-term implications insofar as the division of the trade union movement and the imposition of compulsory adjudication that blocked the emergence of class consciousness. It promoted legalistic business unionism that could not develop solidaristic and class political unionism.

Thanks to the solidaristic tradition of the trade union movement led by AITUC in pre-independence India, organised labour in India has continued to have democratic influence on Indian politics. Even when the ruling class and its state attacked organised labour, they had to reckon with its power to fight for democratic rights. At the risk of jumping through space and time, I will cite the political dialectics of the recent years.

Ever since the balance of payment crisis made the Indian bourgeoisie kneel before the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) and accept market fundamentalist prescriptions for the economic policy of the Washington consensus, the clamour for taking away the century-old gains of the working class of India through changing the labour laws has grown. Attempts to legislate to establish a hire-and-fire regime has been going on for quite some time. A national commission, the Second National Labour Commission, was constituted with the express purpose of bringing labour laws into conformity with the neoliberal economic policy that was announced in 1991. Organised labour has so far succeeded politically in preventing the state from deregulating the labour market through the repeal of protective labour legislation. The state, however, has utilised the weakness in the trade union movement to deregulate the labour market to some extent through executive and judicial activism.

An ideological campaign has been launched through the media to prove that neo-liberalism could have brought in the millennium, but for the rigidities of the labour market created by protective labour laws and trade unions. Even some well-meaning persons and intellectuals have brought forward the idea that organised labour has gotten away with a larger share of the national cake and are responsible for the plight of the majority of workers who are fated to eke out a precarious living in the informal sector. The bourgeois state took the cue and started talking of caring for the hapless workers of the informal sector in order to weaken the resistance of the organised working class against the new economic policy, and to attack their employment security and working conditions.

The fact is that the organised working class – the class-conscious contingent of trade union movement – has been in the forefront of the struggle for legislation for the protection of the informal sector workers. The resolutions and actions of the national trade union centres and their advocacy for the same at the Indian Labour Conference speak volumes in this regard. Informal sector workers constitute the bulk of the membership today of some of the national federations such as CITU and AITUC. AICCTU (All India Central Council of Trade Unions) is largely an organisation of the unorganised sector workers. However, the objective realities in the informal industrial and agricultural sectors on the one hand, and the number filters used in most labour legislation on the other, militate against the quick emergence of a strong countervailing power of the workers in these sectors. It is a long fight that has to be led by the organised labour and its political formations. There is no short cut.

The Trade Union Movement and Its Ideological and Political Struggle

However, the division in the trade union movement engineered by the ruling class through the good offices of redoubtable Sardar Patel, Gandhian labour leader Gulzari Lal Nanda and even ‘progressive’ leaders such as the former president of AITUC, Jawaharlal Nehru, has had the most deleterious effects on the political capacity of the trade union movement in Independent India. Once introduced, the competitive logic of the market was bound to proliferate divisions, as it did. The bulk of the trade union leadership subscribes to the political philosophy and political economy of the capitalist class and has been instrumental ultimately in disarming the trade union movement politically. This has been manifest in recent years in the struggle against the decidedly anti-labour economic policy of the country. Their success in demobilising the working class politically ensues from the simple fact that divisions in their ranks have made the competition prevail in the labour market. Competition among capital makes capital thrive whereas competition among workers can only lead to the race to the bottom in every respect.

Markets, including labour markets, normally breed competition among their participants. While competition combines capital through the formation of the average rate of profits automatically, the workers need to consciously combine against the common sense of the individual market experience. The bourgeoisie has succeeded in blocking the emergence of class-consciousness of the workers by engineering divisions within the organised labour at the very dawn of independence. The politically class-conscious trade union leaders have to work against heavy odds.

Moreover, trade unions by their own nature suffer from dualism. They are formed to fight for better terms for their wage slavery and not against slavery itself. Thus, they remain caught in the web of bourgeois relations. It is this dual nature of trade unions that enables the bourgeoisie to co-opt its leadership. Trade unions are also legally constrained in taking up political actions.

Hence, the political struggles of the working class have to be waged through a political formation that they help build. This lack of identity between political action and trade union action gives birth to an unfortunate tendency of their total separation that constrains the widest possible political mobilisation of the working class. All the Communist groups ‘consciously’ indulge in working class politics. However, their own maturity is somehow tied to that of the class they claim to represent. As Marx once remarked, if more than one group claims to politically represent the working class, that simply implies that the working class of that country is not yet ready for a political party of its own. The political influence of the working class or their trade unions in post-independence India, unlike pre-independence India, is accordingly constrained. The working class political party is yet to be born out of the working class movement. Until then, the assertion of the political interests of the class has been and will be articulated, however fuzzily and contradictorily, through the existing Communist/Socialist political formations and civil society organisations that honestly claim to play the class politics of the working class and work in close collaboration with the class struggle-oriented trade unions and political parties.