Industrial restructuring, unions and the state: the case of textile mill workers in Ahmedabad city

Abstract

This paper looks at the case of 50,000 odd workers who lost their jobs between 1983-84 as a result of closure of privately owned textile mills in Ahmedabad city. In a large majority of cases, these workers did not receive their due benefits or retrenchment compensation; and they remained outside the organized manufacturing sector, in situations of unstable self employment, as casual labourers, or as unemployed. The instrumentalities adopted by the Textile Labour Association (TLA) to get compensation or alternative employment projects, from the central government, for these workers exclusively to offer Voluntary Retirement Schemes to public sector employees. No comprehensive social security net has been devised for displaced workers in the private sector. The paper argues that despite India s democratic set up, a long tradition of trade union politics and a continuing labour-friendly rhetoric, state attention to the need for social safety nets even for the organized sector of the work force has been minimal. Shrinking employment in the organized manufacturing sector and the depletion of the bargaining space of trade unions have facilitated this process. Additionally, the TLA has not put forward the textile workers case within the framework of a broad critique of the state s lack of attention to the need for social security and alternative employment in a context of industrial restructuring. The TLA is seen as characterized by an ageing leadership, heavily conciliatory methods of negotiations, and bound to an ideology of supporting rather than challenging the state. Working within these paradigms, the TLS appears to have been unable to identify instrumentalities of effective intervention called for a situation where neither the market nor the state have provided alternatives to the displaced workers. Caught between these forces, many thousands of displaced workers have been left outside of the framework of industrial restructuring.