Lock-out Ends at Hindustan Lever Calcutta Factory

Posted to the IUF website 07-Nov-2003

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On 21 March 2003 Hindustan Lever, the Unilever subsidiary in India, locked out its workforce at the Garden Reach factory in Calcutta. Although the Hindustan Lever Sramik Karmachari Congress had submitted a Charter of Demands, the major issue was the company's plan to dismiss a large portion of its contracted workforce, which was represented by the Hindustan Lever Contractors' Labour Union.

In response to an appeal for international solidarity from the IUF, unions around the world sent messages of protest to Unilever in support of the locked-out Calcutta union and its umbrella organisation, the Hindustan Lever Employees Union, part of the IUF-affiliated All India Council of Unilever Unions (AICUU).

These protest messages also cited the deadlocked wage negotiations between Hindustan Lever and the AICUU constituent All India Brooke Bond Employees Federation. On 8 September the federation achieved a good settlement of that dispute.

Negotiations mediated by the West Bengal state government to end the Garden Reach lock-out began on 5 September and on 26 September an agreement was reached to end the lock-out. The decision of the AICUU delegates' conference meeting in Goa on 17-18 September to collect one million signatures on an appeal to the West Bengal State Government and Hindustan Lever to lift the lock-out helped put pressure on the company.

Despite the heroic solidarity and support of the struggle of the contract workers by the union representing permanent workers, the company succeeded in reducing the contract workforce by 150. Some of these contract workers had been employed at the plant for 15 years, and will have difficulty in finding other employment. Negotiations on the union's Charter of Demands are being resumed, and the AICUU has established the goal of ending the exploitative system of contracted labour at Hindustan Lever.

AICUU General Secretary Franklyn D'Souza expressed his thanks to the IUF and its affiliates for the support given to the Garden Reach union in its bitter six-month long struggle