Workers at the Samsung Electronics unit in Tamil Nadu’s Sriperumbudur called off their 37-day-long strike on October 15 after negotiations with the management and the state government. The workers struck due to grievances over low wages, working conditions and the non-recognition of their union.
The protest, one of the largest Samsung has seen in recent years, saw over a thousand workers join, paralysing operations at the plant and threatening production. During the protest, workers also went on a one-day hunger strike on Gandhi Jayanti and staged a ‘road roko’ to draw attention towards their demands.
The strike finally ended following a conciliation process in which the management agreed to a wage hike and assured it would not victimise striking workers. As part of the settlement, the question of recognition was referred to the court, and both parties agreed to await its verdict.
At the heart of this protest was the question of collective bargaining and the demand that Samsung must recognise the workers’ new union. In July, workers unhappy with poor working conditions, low wages and ill-treatment by the management formed the Samsung India Workers’ Union (SIWU) with help from the Centre of Indian Trade Unions.
The Samsung management, however, refused to recognise SIWU, which claimed to represent more than four-fifths of the plant’s workforce. Instead, it engaged with an internal ‘workmen’s committee’, which the workers claimed was a company-backed internal structure.
Even the state government’s initial response resonated with the management’s hostility towards the newly formed union. It deemed the strike illegal despite the union’s strike notice three weeks before the beginning of the strike. The Samsung management also pronounced the strike illegal under sections 23 and 24 of the Industrial Dispute Act, 1947 to withhold workers’ salaries for the duration of the strike.
Labour legislation and collective bargaining
This trend of stifling workers’ demands for collective bargaining is not new. In the past, whether it was opposing the formation of category unions among loco-running staff members in the 1960s or, more recently, opposing the Hero Honda and Maruti factory workers’ effort to establish independent unions, the state and the management have proactively undermined workers’ efforts to establish unions in opposition to management-backed workers’ bodies.
This hostility towards workers’ efforts for collective bargaining in an inherently unequal relationship between the employer and the worker is embedded in the architecture of the labour dispute-settlement regime in post-colonial India, which in recent years has become explicitly pro-business, weakening any legal protections that workers had in the past.
Drawing from previous labour legislations like the Bombay Industrial Dispute Act of 1938 as well as post-war labour legislations like the Bombay Industrial Relations Act of 1946 and the Industrial Disputes Act of 1947 shaped the elaborate architecture of labour dispute settlement in post-colonial India.
To address the government’s concern over the growing post-war labour unrest in industrial centres, these legislations enacted provisions to enforce proper industrial relations and grievance redressal through compulsory conciliation and arbitration.
These legislations further introduced the category of ‘approved unions’. Required to meet certain obligations, approved unions were offered rights and privileges in return. One of the most significant of these privileges was the status of being the sole representative of workers employed in an industry or an industrial unit in any arbitration proceedings.
These approved unions derived substantial advantages from the management and the state, such as the right to enter mill premises during an industrial dispute, collect union dues and even acquire legal aid at the government’s expense.
Also read: Why Are Samsung’s South Korea Workers on a Historic Strike?
To avail themselves of this status, however, trade unions had to renounce the option to strike until all other avenues of resolution were exhausted.
Thus, these legislations created a legal structure in which recognised unions gained an undue advantage over non-recognised ones. In short, the right to representation and collective bargaining was not based on a union’s popular support within an industry or a plant, but instead on their willingness to comply with state-centric industrial relations.
Considering that only one union could be registered in an industry or an industrial unit, the practice of appointing approved unions severely restricted the claims of other unions that claimed far more comprehensive support than approved unions.
Union recognition and the secret ballot
Union recognition has been a persistent problem in the Indian industrial relations system. While the Trade Union Act of 1926 allows any seven workers to come together and register themselves as a union, the existing architecture of labour legislation fails to establish an acceptable and democratic method to determine a union recognised for collective bargaining.
In the existing industrial relations system, a prerequisite for a trade union to be recognised as an approved union is the verification of its annual duty-paying membership by the labour department and the registrar of unions, both of which hold discretionary powers.
While this system has run into controversy, giving rise to questions surrounding its authenticity, relevance and feasibility, the state remains opposed to determining the recognition of a union by secret ballot and letting workers democratically choose their representative unions.
Let me substantiate this with an example: at the Samsung manufacturing unit, an internal company-backed ‘workmen’s committee’ was preferred to represent workers and thus undermined any scope for workers’ initiative.
Under existing laws, where recognition is not determined by a secret ballot but by membership dues, a new union like the SIWU would always find it challenging to get an opportunity to represent workers and acquire a level playing field against company-backed unions due to the vast discretionary powers lying with the management and the state.
The supporters of a state-centric recognition process in the past had argued that a secret ballot would inevitably pattern itself after electioneering and give rise to corrupt practices like rigging.
Emphasising the need for responsible unionism in developing countries, this view on the eve of Indian independence reasoned that a secret ballot would bring caste, communal, linguistic and regional forces into play, thereby politicising the workers’ rights movement entirely.
Implicit in the opposition to the practice of a secret ballot, however, was the widely shared opinion that an uneducated and essentially apolitical workforce would not be able to exercise ‘rational’ choices, and that it would either make reckless decisions or be ‘misled’ into supporting political projects impertinent to its interests.
Often, we see the formation of popular unions and their struggle to represent workers’ interests through the lens of trade union rivalry, narrow political goals and law and order. Concerned with ensuring industrial peace and ‘cultivating responsible trade unionism’, we have forgotten the necessity of an industrial relations system that should be democratic in nature and participative in practice.
The present system of conferring ‘approved’ status to a union to represent workers is not just anti-worker, but even anti-democratic in nature. Ironically, even after 75 years of independence, while a worker is empowered to elect their government, they remain disenfranchised to choose a union that can represent them.
The significance of the Samsung workers’ struggle lies in the fact that despite an unfair industrial adjudication system and legal framework as well as renewed attacks through the labour codes passed in 2020, the efforts to demobilise labour have remained more desired than achieved.
Through this strike, workers not only successfully managed to gain material incentives, but also brought the question of democracy in industrial relations to the forefront and compelled the management and the state to negotiate with an unrecognised union.
Robert Rahman Raman is a labour historian with a PhD from the Centre for Modern Indian Studies at the University of Goettingen.
