This short summary is limited in two ways, first of all because it relies on information of the public media, which in most cases only covers official labour disputes. Secondly, because it covers the limited time-frame of October 2008 to December 2008. Out of the total 50 to 60 strikes and protests that were mentioned by the wider media during this period by far the most disputes were taking place in the public sector, mainly over the question of wage increases[89]. A similarly high portion, and this seems more relevant for the future, are struggles of casualised workers, like those who do daily wage work sub-contracted from the public sector, demanding higher minimum pay and/or regularisation [90], or in some cases, battle for the payment of delayed wages [91]. There have been struggles in the traditional agriculture-related sectors [92] and in strikes in the sectors of the new economy [93]. There have been spontaneous walk-outs after accidents, and riots on prestigious construction sites of the crisis regime [94]. There are much fewer reports of struggles in the private manufacturing industry, and those mentioned are divided between struggles for higher pay and those against job cuts [95]. There are some struggles that directly relate to the impact of the crisis or resist further re-structuring [96]. Something that has posed and will increasingly pose a problem for workers in industry are lock-outs. In winter 2008/09 the lock-outs increased, e.g. at tyre makers MRF Ltd. and Apollo Ltd. (Kerala) [97] and at Bosch in Jaipur. In the past there have been frequent incidents where small strikes were provoked – with the complacency of the official unions or not – in order to legitimise a lock-out, in order to facilitate restructuring and cost cutting. Workers will have to find new ways of avoiding this trap.

The impact of the crisis hits hard on a generation of workers who regained their confidence in various struggles over the last few years, particularly those in the booming industries and new industrial clusters. In October 2008 casual workers at Hero Honda went on wildcat strike for better conditions and pay [98]; only a few days later all major two-wheeler manufacturers announced that sales will probably drop by 10 percent in 2009. We find a similar situation in a very different sector, the diamond industry in Surat and Saurashtra regions in Gujarat, where the industry depends on the work of roughly 700,000 workers and their families. The region witnessed a major strike wave in July 2008 with workers demanding a 20 percent wage increase. Diamond factories were pelted with street stones; security guards shot at protesting workers. This movement was then hit by the crisis. Undertaken after the onset of the recession in November 2008 a study comprising 1,000 diamond units in Surat revealed that over 600 have been shut down. In Amreli 60 percent of the total 1,500 units were said to be closed. On 20th of December workers gave an ultimatum of 10 days to the government to support laid off workers and their families and give a 20 percent electricity subsidy to the crisis stricken units – otherwise they would resort to strike action. The actions of diamond workers continued despite the looming threat of work-time or even job cuts [99].

The tragic element of this crisis is that it has enforced in some parts what the workers’ struggles haven’t been able to – but on terms of capital: in the textile industries in Bangalore or the diamond polishing factories in Surat the working-week was reduced to five days and many units operate on eight-hours shifts. But this will be only a temporary situation before actual further job cuts take place. Currently workers’ wages are being cut and they are forced to sign that they will make up for the lost working-time in the future. In that sense two major questions arise: what happens to the sacked migrant workers, i.e. will they be able to stay in the industrial areas, will they have to go back to their respective villages and how will this affect the economically drained rural areas, of Orissa, UP, Bihar etc.? And will the crisis wash away the little gains of the boom – in terms of minor wage increases, but more importantly, in collective experience of struggle?

In the following we want to dare an optimistic outlook on the possibly unifying or at least reshaping impact of the crisis. We will focus on three terrains of the proletarian unrest which have been politically decisive over the past few years: the new industrial and urban clusters, the movements against destructive industrial projects and the battlefields of the rural proletariat.

The new urban and industrial clusters

During the 1990s various new industrial clusters developed – or older industrial areas were restructured by FDI inflow and new industries such as call centres. The industrial belt around Delhi (NOIDA, Faridabad, Gurgaon), Bangalore, Chennai, Pune became mass concentrations of a very mixed new generation of industrial workers in the wider sense. They became a magnet for a migrant workforce; they became signs of future promises. In the industrial areas of Gurgaon textile export factories run next to car suppliers, next to mass call centres and IT office blocks, surrounded by slum settlements, serviced by masses of drivers, security guards, rickshaw wallahs. So far these different sections of the working-class – from proletarianised middle-class kids in the call centres to rural peasant-workers in the metal workshops – existed next to each other. The hundreds of employees of the call centre opposite the Hero Honda plant watched the factory occupation of temp workers, the arrival of the police, the mass gatherings on the premises in April 2006 – but their situation seemed too different to allow for more practical relations. The crisis hits all these sectors more or less at the same time; closures of call centres become more frequent, cutting of wages and certain services are common now. During the last few years the workers in these areas have seen the possible – the automatic embroidery machines, the data-highways, the world’s leading architecture, the tourism – and they have felt the real – the 12 hour shifts in the export units, the burn-out after night-shift, the contract work and slum evictions, the kidney trade [100]. They have learnt how to survive collectively, sharing sleeping rooms and resources, changing jobs, migrating back to the village for a while, returning and reconnecting with city-life. They have made experiences in struggle; they have made experience with the official politics and hierarchies [101]. If under the impact of the crisis the betrayed hopes of a lost academic call centre generation, the productive mass experience of temp workers, and the vast informal networks of the service proletariat find points of fusion or repercussion the possible might become real.

The movements against destructive capitalist development

In recent years there have been various local rural movements against industrial or infrastructure projects including those against: the Narmada dam; the Posco steel plant and mining in Sundergarh district in Orissa; aluminium processing plants in Kashipur; a chemical industrial complex in Nandigram; the Tata car plant in Singur West Bengal and various SEZs in the country [102]. The backbone of these movements were local small peasant families whose land and livelihood was put at stake, either by land acquisition and displacement, or by the industries’ destructive effect on the environment. The movement also criticised ‘the jobless growth’, saying that the number of jobs created by the industrial projects were far less than the number of displaced and destroyed livelihoods of peasant households [103]. The representatives of corporations and state played the job card, promising immediate jobs on construction sites and future investments of the supplying industries. They were able to tap into actual local divisions of land ownership; for example the landless Dalit labourers in the tribal areas of Kashipur had no land to defend and the wages paid on the industrial construction sites were said to be two to three times higher than those paid by local farmers. In Singur and Nandigram the ruling CP was also able to mobilise a Stalinist ideology of ‘progressive industrial development’ against the ‘rural backward petty peasantry’, partly on the bases that right-wing opposition parties voiced their support for the displaced people. When ideology wasn’t enough they mobilised their Stalinist para-police to quell the movement. In reaction to this state propaganda of ‘development for the people’, some of the lefty supporters retreated into a false rural romanticism and tribal identity politics. In that way – on the basis of actual divisions between land-holding peasantry / landless and urban / rural proletariat – these movements got caught in the crossfire of various political parties and local interests of different factions of the ruling class. The current crisis hits hard, particularly in these very same mining and steel processing areas; thousands of temp workers, drivers and cleaners were laid off in the second half of 2008. The higher prices for land compensation gained by the local movements and the additional costs caused by it are now intensified by the current slump in steel and car sales and the further development of several SEZ are put on hold. We will have to see whether the local struggles against destructive development, the uprisings of large communities of impoverished semi-proletarianised peasants like the one in Lalgarh in November 2008 [104], and the struggles of laid off workers in these semi-rural areas will be able to find moments of practical solidarity on the bases of their common proletarian existence [105]. The coming together of knowledge of rural movement organising – such as the mass decision-making assemblies during the Lalgarh uprising – and the workers’ experience of cooperating and struggling within the destructive mining and manufacturing machine could be a blow for capitalist industrialisation – and its flip-side, for rural backwardness. A blow even more severe than the current crisis.

The battlefields of the rural poor

After the food riots in spring 2008 the think tanks of the ruling class – including the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN – talked about the need to strengthen small peasantry and subsistence farming. We think that this new emphasis is not a humanitarian move towards food security and democratic small-scale development, but a strategic move to contain and individualise mass misery. Those who drop out the rat-race of the cash crop sector are supposed to survive on their own plot of land, backed up and controlled by micro-credit schemes and NGO management. Those who cannot be tied to their own soil are supposed to enrol in the labour intensive rural labour schemes, becoming dependent on political leaders of the village council or the ration shop regime [106]. The question is how to break out of either the misery of individual subsistence or the subjection to state welfare schemes. Struggles over land-ownership or distribution used to be bloody and those land-occupations we read about are often long drawn out and tend to get stuck in the division between ‘landless ex-farmers’ and ‘rural labourers’ [107]. More frequently we can read about struggles within the NREGS [108], which demonstrate that the rural poor do not see themselves as individual claimants, but as waged workers. The NREGS might turn into the opposite of what the state had intended. I.e. into an Indian wide generalisation of struggles along two main proletarian questions: how much do we earn, not based on an individual harvest or individual relation with the local land-holders, but in a power-relation with the state as the general manager of social surplus; and what kind of work do we have to do, why should it be labour-intensive and what kind of ‘infrastructure’ are we supposed to construct with our work. Their struggles will turn dry as long as the state manages to isolate them from those struggles in the material profit production of rural industry and agro-business, e.g. the struggles of plantation workers. In many cases the struggle of plantation workers has gone in a similar direction, cutting out the middle-men of individual plantation proprietors and addressing the state with their demands. We can only hope that these ‘proletarian’ struggles – through the massive waves of rural migration – will mix with or at least influence the experience of small farmers’ struggle and their attempts of, e.g. cooperative farming and permaculture.

We hope that the daily organisational forms of the people in struggle – their cooperation at work, their exchange as neighbours, their experience and mobility as migrants – will become the foundation of a wider movement. In order to understand and support this process we have to see beyond the existing representative forms of political or union organisations. We also hope that the miserable boom of the recent years and the current crisis will show up in new desires within the coming struggles: the boom has shown us the enormous social productivity and wealth; the crisis is just the boom’s other face, showing us that as long as this productivity and wealth has to express itself in money terms; in GDP growth, in share prices or plan targets, it will consequently be based on mass misery. The automated welding departments will automatically produce the 14-hours shifts in the slum workshops or rising numbers of unemployed workers and sick units [109]; the rise in cash-crop in some areas will be based on the general social demise of the rural poor.

If we want to be of help for these struggles and understand their full potentials we need a wider debate about actual changes in the daily conditions of the rural and urban proletariat. As a small step we attach a questionnaire for local use, as a platform for a wider exchange of experience.

Notes

[89] For example: 400,000 government employees, including teachers and health workers, went on a day-long strike in Kashmir in November 2008; in West Bengal over 250,000 teachers, paramedical staff, contract workers, health workers, anganwadi sevikas, state secretariat employees and non-gazetted state government employees, have begun preparations for an indefinite strike in January 2009; 80 percent of the 50,000-strong village civil servants went on an indefinite strike demanding wage increase in Andhra Pradesh; more strikes or dharnas (manifestations) have been carried out by State Road Transport Corporation Employees Association (Karnataka), State Government employees (Gujarat), All-India State Bank Officers’ Federation (AISBOF), Reserve Bank of India officers and employees, All India Federation of University and College Teachers’ Organisations (AIFUCTO), Federation of Central Universities Teachers’ Associations, Southern Railway Mazdoor Union (SRMU), All India Postal Employees Union.

[90] For example: City Municipal Daily-wage Employees’ Association (Kanataka), contract security guards of a Medical College Hospital (UP), Telecom Contract Workers’ Union (Tamil Nadu), State Anganwadi Employees’ Association (Karnataka), State Marketing Corporation Employees Union (Tamil Nadu)

[91] For example: “The social forestry department (SFD) employees were taken aback when a group of 43 ‘van majoors’ (daily wage forest workers) confined them inside the office for around four hours to protest against non-payment of wages for the past four months. The workers are affiliated to the Maharashtra State Forest and Social Forestry Department Daily Wagers Sanghatana”. In Gujarat in November 2008 over 1,000 employees of the Gujarat State Road Transport Corporation (GSRTC), staged a dharna at GSRTC head office after its authorities failed to pay for working employees’ leave since 2005.

[92] For example: Beedi workers laid siege to the office of the Assistant Commissioner of Labour demanding the reopening of branches of Bashai Beedi Company at Chinnapur, Khanapur, Kanteswar, Goopanpally and at a couple of other places in the town and payment of salary arrears (Andhra Pradesh); there have been strikes by cashew workers in Kerala for wage increases.

[93] For example: In October 2008 the Bollywood industry was crippled by a strike of casual technicians and a short while later an indefinite strike by thousands of workers in India’s thriving TV entertainment industry disrupted the broadcast of popular soaps in Winter 2008. The striking workers, who include technicians and assistants on set, are demanding a pay rise. They want a raise of up to 20 percent in their daily wages. At the moment some earn as little as 12 US Dollars a day. In winter 2008, drivers for call centres and information technology industries went on strike for better conditions in Karnataka.

[94] For example: Thousands of building workers destroyed company property after a fatal accident on Commonwealth Games construction site in Delhi. In Jamshedpur in December 2008 contract labourers of Adhunik Alloys & Power Limited closed the company gate and staged a dharna demanding compensation for the family of a worker who was killed on the premises.

[95] For example: In October 2008 temp workers at Hero Honda (Haryana) went on strike for higher pay, so did temp workers at Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Ltd in Andhra Pradesh in protest against the steel plant management’s refusal to hike the salary by Rs 1,000 a month as promised by the Union Steel Minister. Workers at car part supplier Bosch Ltd went on strike – and were locked out – in November in Rajasthan. KEC power equipment workers walked out in Nagpur. In Bangalore a section of garment workers planned a strike in November 2008, urging the State Government to fulfil their demands, including increase in minimum wages. A union rep stated We demand minimum wages to be fixed at Rs. 6,000 a month and there should be 10 percent increase annually in the wages. In West Bengal Dunlop workers blocked road and rail traffic in winter 2008, after the closure of the plant.

[96] For example: In October 2008, 400 building workers at IT park Quark City in Haryana protested against their sudden dismissals; the developer had been hit by the credit crunch. We have already mentioned the symbolic protests of the Jet Airline workers in October 2008. In October over 350 Bata employees across 70 outlets in Mumbai and Thane stopped work. The decision came a day after the management decided to put permanent employees on temporary contracts, due to the prospect of a slump in sales. In December around 150,000 public sector insurance employees struck in protest against the government’s move to amend the Insurance Act and the General Insurance Business (Nationalisation) Act, which would allow FDI in the sector. In December 2008 ground-handling staff of Air India staged a demonstration at Bengaluru International Airport (BIA) in Devanahalli in protest against the Civil Aviation Ministry’s new policy on outsourcing ground-handling work, which is likely to come into force in January 2009.

[97] At the end of January 2009 after more than seven weeks the lock out at Apollo was still dragging on.

[98] For a short summary on the strike at Honda:

http://gurgaonworkersnews.wordpress.com/gurgaonworkersnews-no914/

[99] For example news from 30th of December 2008: “Bhawani Gems, a diamond polishing unit at Ashwani Kumar Road in Varachha, was the scene of commotion when hundreds of jobless diamond workers assembled outside the unit and demanded jobs. The unit owner, Manji Patel, told the assembled crowd of 400 workers to come in January as he did not have a stock of rough diamonds. He, nevertheless, announced a relief kit comprising Rs 1,500 in cash and other household items for each diamond polisher who was working in his factory and at present jobless. But anger was writ large on the faces of the workers as they turned down the offer and said they will be content only with a job and not money. The news soon spread like wildfire”.

[100] Gurgaon became one of the international hubs for kidney trade; mainly migrant workers selling their kidneys to the rich. http://gurgaonworkersnews.wordpress.com/gurgaonworkersnews-no9/

[101] The strike and/or lock-out at Maruti in 2001, the police attack on the Honda HMSI workers in Gurgaon in 2005 and the workers’ unrest and consequent death of the factory manager of the Italian automobile parts manufacturer Graziano in NOIDA in 2008 were not only the most publicised clashes, but also bitter lessons for the local working class. For a short summary of the protest and the solidarity forum see:

http://gurgaonworkersnews.wordpress.com/gurgaonworkersnews-no914/

http://www.geocities.com/grazianoworkerssolidarity/

[102] A very good account on the mode of agricultural production, land-distribution and the movement against the mining project in Kashipur:
People’s Union for Democratic Rights – Halting the mining juggernaut (July 2005)

http://www.pudr.org/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view&gid=45&Itemid=63

http://sanhati.com/singur_news/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nandigram_SEZ_controversy

http://kashipursolidarity.tripod.com/

http://www.minesandcommunities.org/article.php?a=66

http://delhisolidaritygroup.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/72-hour-fast-in-defence-of-a-secular-india/

[103] For example supporters of the struggle against the Singur plant reckon that the lively-hood of 15,000 people would have been destroyed by the car plant, which will create only 1,000 new jobs.

[104] In November and December 2008, after a brutal police raid tens of thousands of impoverished ‘tribals’ set up road blockades and encircled police stations in the West Bengal district of Lalgarh. After a month of partly violent confrontations with CPI(M) cadres and state forces, the rank-and-file dominated movement won their demands for compensation and withdrawal of the police presence in the area. Interestingly enough at the same time when roads where blocked in Lalgarh, railroads were blocked in Kolkata. At the Dunlop plant management had issued an order of temporary closure at the Sahaganj factory. A large number of Dunlop workers and supporters attacked the management, forcing the officials to leave the factory premises. The irate workers organised blockades on the railway tracks and access roads. Workers were told to collect an ad hoc amount of Rs 2,000 every month till the company’s present financial crisis was over and the normal work at the factory began. But, the workers refused to accept that and instead they approached the state government to intervene. A detailed account on the Lalgarh uprising can be found at:

http://sanhati.com/front-page/1083/

[105] That there are potentials for this kind of class movements is confirmed by a day-long strike called for by Maoists in eastern India in January 2009. The strike shut down factories in the three states of Jharkhand, Bihar and Orissa, and saw work at mines affected and highways blocked. The strike was called to protest against rising prices and what the rebels said were police atrocities against villagers.

http://tvnz.co.nz/world-news/maoists-strike-and-riot-in-india-2450212

[106] Officially the so called ‘governmental fair price shops’ are shops where ‘officially poor’ people can buy basic items (wheat, rice, kerosene etc.) for fixed and allegedly lower prices. In order to be able to buy in the shops you need a ration card. The ration card is also necessary as a proof of residency, but in order to obtain the ration card you have to prove your residency. Catch 22 for many poor. Local politics use the ration depots and cards as a power tool that reaches far into the working class communities. Depot holders are answerable to the local political leaders and in return they receive this privileged position, which often enables them to make money on the side.

[107] For example a news item from the Times of India, December 2008: “The struggle of close to 5,000 landless tribals continues and reaches the 500 day mark at a rubber estate in Chengara (Kerala). The tribals formed a Sadhu Jana Vimocha Samyukta Vedi (SJVSV) and have been demanding land from the government. But 170 families of plantation workers who have lost their livelihood due to the occupation of the estate are opposing them and staging another protest.

[108] For example: In Karnataka in January 2009 the Pranta Krishi Coolikarara Sangha (KPKCS) threatened the government with a strike, demanding a wages rise for workers engaged in works taken up under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) from 83 Rs a day to 150 Rs. Some general sources about the struggle around the implementation of the NREGA

http://www.righttofoodindia.org/rtowork/ega_articles.html

http://sanhati.com/news/1168/

http://sanhati.com/articles/908/

[109] According to government figures of December 2008 there are currently 85,000 ’sick units’ in India, meaning factories that are not fully utilised due to financial difficulties.

[Excerpted from the Working Paper: “Current crisis regime and impact on class struggle in India”, produced by Gurgaon Workers Newsletter, February 2009.]