LABOUR PANGS

Rising cost of living in a fast-growing economy is making workers restless

- Parth Singh

A spectre is haunting Indian manufacturing. The spectre of industrial unrest.

On September 9, more than a thousand workers at the Samsung plant near Chennai downed their tools to protest stagnating wages in what is being called one of the biggest industrial unrests in India in over a decade. Located in Sriperumbudur, around an hour’s drive from the Tamil Nadu capital, the plant accounts for a third of Samsung’s India revenue. The workers say their wages have not kept pace with the rising cost of living in one of India’s most prosperous states. Samsung says it pays its workers twice as much as other companies in the region.

Thirty-seven days later, the strike ended. Yet, the imbroglio has wide ramifications. Both the Centre and governments in states have been bending over backwards to woo electronics manufacturers around the world to come to India and set up manufacturing plants. At the moment Samsung workers in Tamil Nadu stopped work, the state’s chief minister, MK Stalin, was in the US talking to companies about how friendly his state is to foreign investors. The Narendra Modi-led government at the Centre is wary too. A big enough industrial unrest can derail the government’s flagship Make in India campaign.

The past decade has seen India make significant changes to its labour law framework, changes that the forces of global capital have called reform and workers and trade unions have called systematic disenfranchisement. On September 25, when Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) celebrated 10 years of the Make in India initiative, workers and trade unions took to the streets in Delhi, Lucknow and Kolkata to protest against changes to labour laws.

Reason for Rage