Abstract
The industrial relations (IR) framework in India is centred around the formal industrial employment model wherein employees bargain and negotiate with their employer through their trade union(s) and the government plays a significant mediatory role. This legally arranged framework of IR excludes informal workers, who are normally not engaged in a workplace-based industrial employment, from its purview. Such an orientation has led trade unions enjoying legislative safeguard to primarily organize industrial employees on the basis of their workplace engagement. The narrow trade union focus on industrial employment has left informal workers’ concerns largely unrepresented in traditional IR. In this backdrop, while concerns of deteriorating worker power because of declining trade union membership and influence occupies IR scholars, informal workers innovative organizing strategies and resultant worker power remains largely unnoticed. In this chapter, I conceptualize this subtler source of worker power that has been gaining strength in India. I conceptualize the power generation capacity of what I term as workers’ aggregations. In the workers’ aggregation variety of collective action, unlike trade unions, power is per se not dependent on the numerical strength of the workers’ organization; power emanates from the diffused range of functions and relations that these workers’ aggregations undertake and sustain. In this chapter, I argue that the future of effective and sustainable IR in India lies in taking cognizance of these organizations and their modus operandi, while also recognizing the changing nature of bargaining (involving mainly the state) in economic relations.
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Notes
- 1.
At a general level of understanding, informal workers are workers who do not share the characteristics of the industrial employees and remain outside the form that is structured around the relationship between employees, employers and the government. Informal workers may be waged workers (even if there are problems at ascertaining an employment relationship), self-employed or own-account workers (i.e. vendors not employing others). For a more detailed discussion on the idea of informal, see Routh (2011) and Routh and Borghi (2016).
- 2.
- 3.
There is an absence of reliable data on the union density among informal workers. According to the latest government statistics, approximately 80% of informal workers do not have an organization in their respective activities. See National Sample Survey Office, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (2014). National Sample Survey (NSS) Report No. 557, 68th Round: Informal Sector and Conditions of Employment in India, vi–vii, 25, 90, available at http://mospi.nic.in/Mospi_New/upload/nss_report_557_26aug14.pdf (accessed 30 May 2016).
- 4.
When we consider self-employment in the context of informal workers, we have to be mindful of the regular movement between self-employment and wage work by informal workers.
- 5.
The TLA was the parent trade union from which the SEWA was born, but the SEWA later severed its links with the TLA.
- 6.
The SEWA always had (and still has) highly educated committed members on its rolls. The SEWA’s professional members and outsider friends hold degrees from universities such as Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Johns Hopkins. These educated professionals would often speak on behalf of the self-employed worker members of the union, when these workers were unable to speak for themselves.
- 7.
Unprotected Manual Workers (Regulation of Employment and Welfare) Act, 1969, No. 30, Acts of Parliament, 1969.
- 8.
For a more detailed description of activities by waste-pickers’ organizations, see Routh 2014, pp. 80–84.
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Acknowledgements
I thank the editors and David Beale for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter. Errors remaining are my responsibility.
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Routh, S. (2017). Locating Worker Power in a Changing Bargaining Scenario. In: Noronha, E., D'Cruz, P. (eds) Critical Perspectives on Work and Employment in Globalizing India. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3491-6_12
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