Understanding Indian Trade Union existence in the Zeitgeist of the Global.

Jagannathan, Srinath ; Roy, Kaushik

Introduction

Trade unions exist as voices and instruments of thoughts and actions of those who lend their energies to the sustenance of the production system, without being endowed with the corresponding ability to influence the strategies, choice and distribution of rents of the production system. They represent the ethics of the collective in establishing a societal reality of solidarity, community and the demonstration of the ability to aggregate in the face of shared and common experiences.

It has been suggested that the institution of the trade union is under assault in the age of the global (Fairris 2006). Rapid technological changes (Jensen 2003), global movements of capital (Guibboni 2007), the expanding footprints of multinational corporations (Saddler 2000), the tilt of government policy from welfare statism to an empathy with the entrepreneurial discourse of the market (Guerin et al 2004) and the history of trade union militancy itself have created a context, in which the ability of the trade union to represent the vulnerable is being subject to critical interrogation. An approach of understanding the decline of an institution is through the prism of census, densities and macro trends of membership and participation. Such an approach has the inherent weakness of ignoring the reality in its authentic form and merely providing a general statement of average tendencies, devoid of critical nuances, emerging from the grounding of the research project.

Our attempt has been to move away from the explicit industrial frame of engaging with trade union praxis, and instead it is focused towards gleaning insights from the implicit and often ignored aspects of trade union existence in the present context of 'globalisation, liberalisation and deregulation' (Joseph 2004). A collective within a broader social frame is an expression of shared experiences. The power of the human being in being able to relate to ontological similarities of experiences and looking on them not in a disjointed, isolated and individualist way, but in seeing the meaning of similarity as embodied in a collective vitality, is at the heart of the institution of the trade union. Promotion of individualist paradigms in the work organisation context, while claiming to be founded on efficiency and economic rationale, have the potential to suppress the natural human urge to seek social space through an immediate human collective. The unitarist paradigm is an attempt to substitute the collective identity with a personified and agentic identity conceived from the standpoint of the work organisation itself being the only workplace community to which an employee has access. Thus emerges the 'organisation man (or woman)' at the expense of other rich human collectives that could form the community in which employees could operate.

Trade unions are also complex social entities. Not all aspects of trade union behaviour emerge from the perspective of pluralist dialogue or an unequivocal assertion of the rights and responsibilities framework. Like all aspects of social behaviour, trade union behaviour may also have to be subject to regulation and critical scrutiny, in order to ensure that opportunistic behaviour does not assume dominance in an iteration of power plays and brute force. In the zeitgeist of the global, where changes and events occurring in one part of the world affect lives and decisions in other parts, and where the context of the global is forever held up as a backdrop driving institutional transitions, an investigation of trade union existence must be interpreted from the perspective of paradigm shifts in the very meaning of lives that people construct, both in the workplace and the larger social loci.

Method

The choice about tools and techniques that inform the research design often have a deeper philosophical basis, some implications of which are immediately available to the investigators (Noronha 2006) and others part of the research team, but there are aspects of epistemology, the underpinnings and tensions surrounding which, manifest themselves only in the placing of the researcher in her field (Noronha & D'Cruz 2008). The field becomes a living entity for qualitative research, and the data that is accessed from the field is not only the notes of the researcher and the transcripts of interviews, but the reconstruction of all experiences, interactions and observations of explicit and implicit behavioural leanings (Noronha & D'Cruz 2006). It was this possibility of richness in meanings, patterns and understanding of causal networks (Upadhya 2008) as they exist embedded in the reality that inspired us to use an interpretive qualitative approach for our study.

Specifically, we conducted unstructured conversational interviews with trade union leaders representing diverse work contexts including railways, banking, insurance, transport, academics, and power. Though the seven trade union leaders were contacted through what was essentially a convenience sample, the attempt was to speak to voices driven to the margins and vacuums in a diversity of work arenas. The attempt, however, was never to chase the margins or access trade unions in the belief that they have been marginalised. Yet, the reality of populating the margin and the vacuum of powerlessness, ideological thinness, degeneration of identity and the disenchantment with the utilitarian seemed to reinforce itself across the sequence of the interviews. Thus, in our journey to explore trade union existence in the age of the global, we came across the patterns of the marginalised leading to a methodological dilemma. In many sites, trade union leaders sought our help and intervention to redress the situation they were entrenched in. The contradictory pulls of the researcher as a participant observer as contrasted against the safe island of the non-participant observer arose before us. We chose to not intervene and emerge as participant observers by asserting our own sense of powerlessness to the trade union leaders. Thus, the research was in a way the engagement with the community of the powerless.

Our interviews were located in the scheme of a larger project of investigating trade unions in which different emerging aspects such as that of the Right to Information Act were encompassed. The unstructured conversational interviews is a rich source of information and meaning, especially when focused around the broad discipline of a research question within which there is flexibility for different patterns and themes to emerge (Gille and Riain 2002). The first author conducted these interviews assuring the trade union leaders of confidentiality and seeking permission to record these interviews. The interviews were conducted across three Indian cities of Ahmedabad, Chennai, and Mumbai, span four languages, i.e., English, Hindi, Marathi and Tamil.

This study essentially adopts an inductive interpretive approach through which the transcripts, notes and the experiences of the interviewer contribute to the emergence of themes. No themes were assumed a priori and the literature review is embedded in the development of these themes that follow subsequently rather than existing as a separate compartment of the research exercise. Sometimes, unions representing the same affiliation were studied across different cities or within the same city representing different hierarchical positions in the chain of affiliation. This was done to ensure that the effect of the global was fully understood, as the global was being sampled through multiple sites and places in an attempt at the interpretive celebration of divergent and convergent schemes existing within the gestalt of the trade union collective. We now develop the two themes of power and ideology as emerging from our study. These themes exist in overlap with each other to create overarching conditions of connectedness. We have been greatly guided by Jerome Joseph's (2004) book which looks at the different frames of connectedness and allows us to travel beyond the signs, sounds, and symbols of explicit industrial relations into the nuances of implicit industrial relations. A brief profile of the seven unions, whose leaders were interviewed, is captured in Table 1.

Alienated Connectedness

The terrain of alienation when viewed from the standpoint of authentic human experience is a fascinating journey into the realm of possibilities that the human condition can exhibit. Jerome Joseph's voice on the Indian industrial relations front has moved the frontiers of alienation thought over twenty five years of rigorous and engaged scholarship. He extensively reviews the conceptualisation of the different strands of alienation research and traces their philosophical roots to Marx's writings on powerlessness and self-estrangement, Durkheim's engaged pronouncements on normlessness and socio-cultural isolation and Weber's representation of disenchantment. While alienation emerges from a 'sociological imagination' and is the consequence of a poignant intersection of divergent social realities, it still has been examined empirically as an experience that deeply affects the individual human being. In shifting alienation from the plane of the individual to that of a collective, there occurs an exciting transition of frames, realities and ideals (Joseph 2004). Society including the work context is no longer an impossible horizon of the inevitable, which cannot be altered under any circumstance by the powerlessness of the frame of an individual, leading to the strangulating paralysis of self estrangement (Roberts 2007). Society is now a contested field of contrasted realities (Metcalfe 2008), an interaction of collectivities in search of meaning and norm and the efforts and endeavours of a collective to relieve itself from the yoke of the 'irrational impulse to dominate and subjugate' (e-mail conversation with Joseph 2008) of another aggregation of interests that has deeply entrenched itself as a driver of power. The calculus of powers has the potential to unleash a situation where a collective is pushed to the margins as a society begins to found itself on a set of values that nonchalantly ignore the cries of the margin and exclude it from the culture representing the mainstream (Braveman 2007). Thus, there arises the collective tragedy of socio-cultural isolation. For instance, entire pockets of human ontology residing in wretched urban spaces called as slums are coerced out of the boundary of the cultural spaces of other urban inhabitations. Thus they can never attend certain marriages held in great pomp, never be able to send their children to certain schools reserved for the elite and never have access to that specific world of literature that elevates the human mind. Then the dangerous, numbing and frightening response of the marginalised collective as a severe disenchantment with the current arrangement of society and its inability to react and assert a position that demands change and yields a renaissance of ideas. Thus alienation as a collective experience is embedded through the agency of a sociological tragedy. When the social process resulting in the genesis of the margin is articulated the experience of alienation becomes a more pronounced reality. The manifestation of alienation in the context of the work organisation is an alignment and reconciliation of contradictions and the reality of the cathartic blind of the different converging strands of alienation arranged on the one hand against the necessity to remain connected to the context for the purpose of livelihood and survival on the other hand. The intense shrinking of choices takes place into a vacuum of inevitability, where the regime of domination and subjugation presents itself as the only possibility (Kloeze et al 1980). In such a circumstance, every small difference of material well being within the members of a collective manifests itself through the complicated nuances of aspiration, empathy and envy; every single act of intervention representing elements of kindness evokes hopes, only to be quashed many times by an apologetic or unapologetic retreat citing the resurgence of the logic of calculation over the romance of the ideal; every declaration of policy gets reflected through the eyes of interests, prospects and apprehensions. Thus a fascinatingly painful response of the worker collective emerges to the reality of alienation. We present below the experience of alienation through the voices of seven trade union leaders to understand trade union praxis within alienated connectedness as constituted by ideology and power.

Ideology

Union A is a collective of public sector transport workers and is affiliated to an umbrella trade union belonging to a national political party. In response to a question regarding the resources and capabilities available with the senior leadership of the state unit of the trade union, and the paucity of the same at the local level, a union member said: 'We are the people who work here. Whatever work is there, we do it ... The need is for us.... after every 6 months it is declared here that it is an essential service. We cannot go on strike. We cannot do anything.'

Central to ideology is the clear understanding of a desired condition or aspiration which must be approached (Morrell 2008). Also, such a desired condition or aspiration is not confined to restricted contexts (Rosenthal 2004). It is a broad expression encompassing values of the universal (Hing et al 2008). The moment limits are placed in terms of local contexts, the dynamics of the immediate environment and the gains and benefits that are sought to be achieved acquire precedence over aspirations and ideals that must be universally approached. Thus in this situation, ideology yields way to the devolution of and degeneration of the strategic ideal to the tactical benefit (Fattore & Jommi 2008). Thus when the union member says, 'We are the people who work here ...' it follows by implication that the senior leadership doesn't work in the field. The restriction of the context of the union to 'here' and the consequent absence of the possibility of ideology becomes a reality. The fact that the government is declaring their service to be an essential service is again seen from the prism of the affect on their organisation and them alone. The broader zeitgeist of 'globalisation, liberalisation and deregulation' which drives the paradigm of power is never discerned and the collective becomes constricted to the narrow perimeters of one organisation, though the effects of policy are affecting the working class at large. Thus the failure to articulate, protest and engage in ideological dialectic with the state thrusts through the restriction of context and the failure of the traditional trade union structure to build the feeling of belonging to a broader movement.

In essence, there emerges the dawn of isolation in the minds of the trade union operating within the restricted context of an organisation. Isolation from the higher levels of trade union leadership and from the negotiating space exists which lead to loss of voice in the formulation of regulatory policy. This is accompanied by the dominance of the culture of the market in preempting instruments such as strike (Clegg & Coupasson 2004). In a sense, the emergence of socio-cultural isolation from all fronts and the consequent sentiment of helplessness and alienation--'We cannot do anything.'

The inability of trade union structures to effectively organise collectives on broad societal scales leads to a vacuum in trade union praxis, where the cause of a broad universal collective is abandoned, and each local collective is left to fend for itself. The sense of ideological bonding dissipates and soon emerges socio-cultural isolation from numerous spaces and the dazzling dawn of the ability to do 'nothing' and alienation of an intense kind, experienced by all those associated with the collective. Quo vadis--enterprise unionism?

Violence was recently orchestrated against the members of Union B on account of their regional identity. Union B is a collective of self employed individuals in the transport industry. Though this violence had a clear ideological agenda of rendering second class citizenship to people belonging to specific regional identities, and was orchestrated by a political party with a view to gaining popularity, the general secretary of the union failed to identify and condemn the political and ideological meaning behind the violence. Though he expressed distress at the violence, an ideological interpretation of that violence was missing. Such a sentiment could emerge from a sense of vulnerability at nothing being done by the state to bring the perpetrators of the violence to book and the consequent feeling of powerlessness. While speaking about the violence, the voice of the union leader dropped to a whisper. The general secretary said: 'Violence, violence, it is taking place. Especially, during the past two or three months, violence has been happening ... The result of the violence is that it affects us ... Recently, over the past one month, it has subsided'

Thus the powerlessness of the union is in not being able to do anything about the violence, though its members were affected by it. They could only wait and watch until the violence subsided. In this case, the members of the union did attempt a spontaneous strike after the union office was attacked but withdrew it after the state intervened to assure that action would be taken against the perpetrators of violence. The union was however unable to sustain collective action, though the state had apparently made no progress in identifying and proceeding against the perpetrators of violence. The violence had only 'subsided'. It had not ended.

In the cases of Unions A and B, we saw that there was an inability to interpret actions and events from an ideological standpoint. Union C is the state unit of a national trade union affiliated to a national political party. Though it was able to articulate the ideological underpinning defining state action, it simultaneously expressed its helplessness and disenchantment with the policies of the state. Many of these policies were emerging from the deregulation paradigm and in recent times, they were also finding sympathy from the judiciary. 'Because the internal circular of the government.... what is the work of the labour inspector now? ... If the owner violates any labour law, then to implement that law, who should repeatedly try to convince? Labour inspector ... But taking advantage of this situation, labour inspector is doing something else ... He goes and becomes the consultant of the owner. He becomes the consultant of the industrialist ... That today, if an owner terminates an employee ... Then what is the view of the courts? ... That the worker should prove that he is working in this company ... And he should have completed at least 240 days ... I card is not there ... Attendance register is not there ...'

Thus Union C has been able to spot the broad policy directions of the government and the nature of decisions emerging from the judiciary with the advance of liberalisation, deregulation and globalisation. It is able to articulate trends emerging in the industrial relations scene as a consequence of deregulation in the zeitgeist of the global. The increasing irrelevance of regulatory action in the form of factory inspections is very well recognised by it. Also the lack of sympathy emerging from judicial action and an extreme rigidity in interpreting rules, which transfer onus onto labour to obtain evidence towards acquiring benefits are also recognised by it. In essence, such recognition leads to disenchantment and also a simultaneous comprehension of powerlessness as it is unable to do anything to obtain material evidence in the absence of basic artifacts of employment such as the I-card and attendance register.

The theme of ideology offers a nuanced explanation of the possibility of alienation through socio-cultural isolation, disenchantment and powerlessness. The manner in which a union is organised or the original impulse to collectivise that informs the union often determines its ideological positioning. If the original impulse to collectivise is to fight for concessions and benefits in the context of the local, or if the collective is detached from any attempts at being a part of a larger labour movement, then there exists a possibility of the union restricting itself to the domain of benefits and concessions without any ideological awareness of the attempt to influence larger policies which can drive these benefits and concessions. This lack of ideological awareness in turn leads to socio-cultural isolation as the union begins to lose sources of support and empathy from other social forces. Even in places where ideological orientation is strong, alienation could emerge by the growing feeling of powerlessness and disenchantment with the climate in which employment relations are being regulated.

Power

While powerlessness itself has been conceptualised as a form of alienation, it is necessary to appreciate that the narrative of power moves into the work context through the agency of organisational paradigms such as authority, hierarchy and status (Guest & King 2004). The inability of a collective to influence the exercise of power in these matters leads to a situation where obedience and conformance become a convention and norm, and challenge, even in the sense of the right, the moral and the human becomes difficult (Hales 2005). It may be suggested that the ruthlessness that follows in the organisations through the existence of discrimination and harassment is representative of the tyranny of individual managers and should not be seen as the extension of an organisational license to discriminate and harass. But the fact that it is the occupation of organisational roles that gives courage to managers to get away with unacceptable behaviour (McCabe 2004), delaying taking decisions without justification, subvert individual resistance through intimidation and exploit the weak and the vulnerable suggests that, somewhere in the process of justifying that they are working for the organisational cause, managers seek to persuade key organisational actors to ignore aspects of their behaviour which do not fall under the purview of immediate organisational concerns (Benjamin & Goclaw 2005). The failure of an employee collective to deal with such an exercise of power leads to the emergence of dominance, suppression and the seeking of favours through, what is essentially a replication of feudal networks.

Discrimination and harassment perpetrated against individual employees can be a serious cause of trauma and sometimes irreparable pain. The vulnerability of the individual and the need to continue in employment forces people to suffer quietly. The absence of suitable grievance redressal mechanisms, the fear to access these mechanisms even in the case of their existence, along with the dilemmas between the calculations for survival and the need to defend oneself against being wronged, all contribute to the burden of stress, anger, disappointment and complete surrender to the situation of being powerless in resisting discrimination and harassment (Vaara et al 2005). The deputy general secretary of Union D, the state level unit of a national trade union affiliated to a political party, provided a description of a harrowing incident of discrimination and harassment:

"There was a director here ... He used to spend money extravagantly ... Similarly, victimisation, unheard of.... There is a lady who is working. She has not conceived ... after ten to twelve years, she conceives. Her husband is also a worker ... Then, at the time of conception, when she requested to work in a safe place ... the director... threw her to a place where they cleaned the place of bacteria...."Thus the exercise of managerial power perpetrates harassment. When the union is unable to intervene on behalf of the employee in order to dispense away with the harassment, then not only is the powerlessness of the union established, but normlessness within the organisation also becomes evident. Eventually continued harassment even after the intervention of the union may lead to self estrangement of the employee.

Normlessness becomes evident in the experience of Union E also. Union E is a collective of informal sector workers at a public sector site. Even when the president of the union put in numerous applications to the relevant government authority for transfer of work permits on compassionate grounds from one family member to another, citing relevant rules and conventions, the files always got delayed and the response sought in the applications was not granted by the administration. The president of union E said, "Like one of our colleagues had fallen inside a well ... his backbone was broken ... now he is no longer in a position to work ... So it is there in the rules ... that he can give his number to his brother ... He can give it to his son also ... But his son is only 4 or 5 years old, ... So his younger brother ... tried very hard ... that coolie's wife's affidavit also we have put up ... Even then his problem has not been solved. ... Till today the number ... has not come. The poor person's ... family is suffering a lot." There emerges administrative delay in spite of several reminders and reference to rules by the trade union. The failure to address issues at an appropriate time trying to resolve them in consultation with the collective as soon as possible, leads to the exercise of discretion. Thus there is suffering, normlessness and powerlessness.

Power is not only manifested through the agency of formal authority available to managers, but also through blatant resort to illegitimate intimidation when the interests of administrators or managers are threatened. The president of union F emphasised that as individuals, employees were powerless, and even if they attempted to resort to numerous provisions of law to resolve grievances and fight against arbitrary acts, it was unlikely that the letter and spirit of the law would be respected and it was more likely that pressure would be exerted on employees to retreat from the legal engagement. While such attempts at intimidation could still be countered with the support of a union, the more un-easy and discomforting sense of powerlessness and disenchantment emerged from judicial pronouncements and the climate of integration with the global economy that perhaps informed them: 'But other side of that agony ... the Supreme Court has forgotten. After becoming unemployed ... a man gives away his livelihood. ... the Fundamental Right ...to survive, and right to life can be enjoyed only with the livelihood. If you have no livelihood, you cannot have life.... Your family cannot sustain. ... As soon as an employer removes the worker, terminates services, there will be uproar, reaction. The whole family will start to get mental torture ... That aspect of his suffering court did not take into consideration. Only it takes the aspect of money, which is not living, which is a material. Real thing, even our Supreme Court has forgotten. Therefore we are now a days passing the order for 10% of the back wages. In some cases, no back wages. After fifteen years, you go, engage your job and start work. You may not know the skill of the job also after fifteen years. So this is the picture of our judiciary with regard to our labour, labour laws.'

The global also has the potential to induce various competitive forces in the industry structure and also influence governmental policy that leads to the decline of domestic industry in certain sectors. The inability of the union to project a voice that is sufficiently strong in society to influence adaptation to competitive pressures through adequate support from the government, both in terms of policy and resources, leads the union to understand what is achievable and what is not. The union descends from the terrain of the ideological to that of the pragmatic. The reconciliation of reality between the union bosses and the members of the union manifests itself in the form of an uneasy dialectic as the union members now live in the fear of being permanently moved from the organised sector to the unorganised sector. There are only certain areas in which the union can operate now. There are other areas in which the union is powerless to act. A poignantly collective sense of self-estrangement emerges when the union realises that it is powerless to intervene in numerous areas of collective interest. Then what is the essence of being a collective? While the utility of collective existence itself is questioned at one level, at another level, it is realised that the assault on the working class would have been even more brutal in the absence of a collective. Thus the project of discovering energy to fight on, even in the face of a strong sense of self estrangement becomes difficult. A senior member of Union G, operating in the textile sector said: "Out of the 65, after the textile industry policy which came out in 1985 ... One after the other 32 to 40 mills ... closed down and now 12 mills ... are functioning ... And there are 12000 workers ... There was an age when there were 150000 workers. Now only 12000 workers remain ... And it is only for them that we are now running our union." Facts are accepted as reality even though they constitute self estrangement--there are mills which have closed down, we cannot do anything about them, yet the need to remain connected in spite of the experience of alienation--the need to work for the 12000 workers who remain.

Conclusion

The global has created a context around which work organisations, social and political histories revolve. It is very difficult to resolve the contradictions that the global itself has brought, and the contradictions stand at markedly opposite poles--opportunity and deprivation, domination and collaboration, war and peace, terror and calm, accommodation and intolerance, celebration and tragedy, money and morality, right and wrong. The dialectic of the global informs the actions of individuals, collectives and states. We attempted to examine some aspects of this dialectic as reflected through the experience of alienation in the collective consciousness of a trade union.

In the climate of 'deregulation, privatisation and globalisation', in spite of formal associations and linkages, there appear breaches in the emergence of labour movements that rise above local contexts to make ideological meaning of the changes taking place at different levels of the society, economy and the polity. In the absence of ideology, the possibility of socio-cultural isolation becomes prominent. Consequently, the antithesis to any adversarial thesis that the zeitgeist of the global may present becomes substantially weaker, in being bound by responses to events in local contexts alone, and the failure to appreciate the bigger picture. As a consequence, frustration emerges as the powers that be in the local context feign helplessness and claim to be making decisions compelled by circumstances and ordained by policy from higher levels. And unless trade unions are able to build ideological consensus that translates into recognition and interpretation of reality at the grassroots in the language of a broad labour movement, it is likely that problems will persist.

Similarly, the politics of power presents numerous dilemmas before the trade union. Even in the face of explicit arbitrary action, discrimination and harassment, the trade union is unable to intervene in aid of the vulnerable to an effective extent and redress their grievances, pain and suffering. The larger climate of state policy and judicial interpretation of laws is also quoted as a handicap in the ability of trade unions to be able to counter power with the instruments of the collective. The blunting of the instruments of the collective such as strike and other actions have also contributed to the asymmetries in power. The collective experience of alienation can be a numbing, devastating and debilitating tragedy as one sees the victimisation of a colleague and friend, but is unable to do anything about it, either individually or collectively. And the recurrence of such tragedies in the age of the global, is a theme that flows across the conversations that we had with seven trade union leaders.

Future extensions to this research must look at how the global is reflected through the eyes of multiple stakeholders. An ethnographic approach that simultaneously engages with multiple stakeholders through its location in organisational sites where such interactions are an everyday reality would be of great help in understanding the vulnerabilities and strengths of each stakeholder and how these get amended in the various events accompanying the phenomenon of globalisation. Also, a thorough investigation into trade union structure, from the office of the trade union leader to the last mile in the grass roots where a member pays her fee, either reluctantly or out of a sense of voluntary energy emerging from identification with the trade union, must be looked into see, how structure itself may have undergone changes, for the better or the worse in the zeitgeist of the global.

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Srinath Jagannathan (E- mail: srinathj@iimahd. ernet.in) & Kaushik Roy (E-mail: kaushik@iimahd. ernet.in) are Fellow Programme students in Personnel & Industrial Relations and Bsiness Policy areas respectively in Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad

Table 1: Brief Representation of the Seven Trade Unions Whose
Leaders Were Interviewed.

Union Space Sector Affiliation

A Public employer Transport Political party

B Self employment Transport Independent

C Public and private Across industrial Political party
 employers and government units

D Public and private Across industrial and Political party
 employers government units

E Self employment at Railway Political party
 public site

F Public and private Textiles, chemical, Political party
 employers press, municipality

G Private employers Textiles Independent