The union, however, insists the face-off took place because the company refused to negotiate and instead “victimised” its leaders and members. Says A. Soundararajan, Citu leader and honorary president of the Hyundai Motor India Employees Union: “At the very inception, the management declared that no union will be allowed. This very declaration made the workers want a union. The management reacted by transferring the president and general secretary (of the trade union) to Mumbai and Delhi, and dismissed 76 workers and suspended 23.”

The strike was called off on 8 May after the Commissioner of Labour began conciliation proceedings, and after Hyundai agreed not to take action against the striking workers or sign settlements with the rival, pro-management workers’ committee.

One of the country’s largest tyre-makers, MRF, too has just been through both a strike and lockout at its Arakkonam unit. The majority union, the MRF United Workers Union, launched a sit-down strike on 9 May after the company signed a settlement with an older MRF Arakkonam Workers Welfare Union. MRF retaliated by trying to force out the workers from the plant by declaring a lockout from 18 May. The workers were evicted on 20 May and the company lifted the lockout on 27 May claiming that 1,000 workers reported for work on the first shift.

While an MRF statement said the agreement it signed with the older union gave a handsome rise of as much as Rs 5,000 per month to the workers, the rival union leading the strike claimed its only demand was recognition as the majority union. Says P.V. Paramasivam, president of the MRF United Workers Union: “We have more than 1,200 workers supporting us here and in the Pondicherry factory. But the management has entered into an agreement with the MRF Workers Welfare Association, which has barely 50 members.”

Companies that had been spoilt by not having to deal with aggressive unions in the spell of high growth are finding it difficult to cope with re-emerging demands for collective bargaining. The case of Nestle is interesting, particularly since the Geneva-based International Union of Foodworkers (IUF) is determined to embarrass the Swiss multinational by filing several complaints for breach of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) guidelines before its home government.

The OECD guidelines spells out standards for employment, international relations and human rights for multinational enterprises headquartered in Switzerland.

“I have no intention to recognise them (striking union) because we have a very good and officially elected workers committee.” Hyundai MD and CEO Heung Soo Lheem

Brewing Over The Years
Though these wildcat strikes and militant protests have suddenly made a splash in the media, the problem has been festering for some time. Over the past two decades, both the shop-level bargaining power of unions and political clout of the labour movement has slowly eroded. During the 1970s and 1980s, the movement was a political force to reckon with. George Fernandes’s 1-million strong Railway Union paralysed the national rail network in 1982 for nearly a month, while Datta Samant led 250,000 textile workers in Mumbai on a crippling one-year strike that shook the Congress-led Maharashtra government in 1981. It was an era when transport and taxi unions were used to shut down cities and bring governments to their knees.

These powerful, ideologically oriented labour movements began to wilt in the late 1980s with governments cracking down on the militant unions. Simultaneously, industry underwent a structural change. Higher levels of technology with smaller sets of skilled employees replaced the older, labour-intensive processes. Manufacturing was broken up with ancillary production being outsourced to contract labour. Finally, the economic reforms and liberalisation piloted by the P.V. Narasimha Rao government in 1992, with its mixture of privatisation and labour rationalisation, broke the backs of the powerful, centralised trade unions.