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Uniting Food, Farm and Hotel Workers World-Wide
Globalization and the Challenge to Unions: A Union View from Unilever India
Posted to the IUF website 11-Jun-2003Share this article.
The All-India Council of Unilever Unions (AICUU) was founded in 1997 at the IUF's Fifth Conference on TNCs in India. The Council brings together some 80 plant-level unions at subsidiaries of Unilever, one of India's major industrial employers. The merger between Hindustan Lever and Brooke Bond set in motion a massive corporate restructuring program centered on the consolidation of brands and production lines, with management seeking to trim payrolls through the use of voluntary retirement schemes (VRS), third-party production, sub-contracting and casualization and growing attacks on trade union rights. The AICUU seeks to build a coordinated union response.
The following appeared as an editorial in the latest issue of the AICUU magazine The Unions' Lever, and we are pleased to publish it here as a guest editorial. Copies of the magazine (in English) can be obtained by contacting The Unions' Lever c/o All India Brooke Employees' Federation Office by e-mail at [email protected] or by fax at +91 022 2416 3804.
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Strengthen the AICUU to combat the assault of globalization!
The implementation of glqbalization policies worldwide and nationwide is making lif~ more and more difficult for the working class. Increasing access and mobility is being given to international capital in India and the effects of this are clearly visible in our company in the mass scale restructuring of the production process. On the one hand, the in-house production system in the form of the big factories is being dismantled and, on the other hand, new satellite units are being set up in tax-free zones and there is a simultaneous increase in the subcontracting system. In the older big factories, in order to speed up the dismantling process, the management is resorting to lay-offs, lock outs, retrenchments and even closures, whereas in the newer units, labour intensification is achieved through increased working hours, performance-linked wage systems and other exploitative methods.
Industrial bosses throughout India are implementing these strategies by reducing the bargaining power of the unions. The Government, the labour machinery and the judiciary are co-operating with them by either refusing to intervene in labour-capital disputes or by reinterpreting the law in such a manner that it is supportive of the globalization process and derogatory to the workers' interests. However, the pro-market ideologists and the big bosses are not satisfied with this support. According to them, considering the intense competition in the international market, the process of lowering wage cost per unit (or, to put it simply, increasing the exploitation of labour) has to be expedited. The protection afforded to workers by the labour laws and the power of unions are being projected as the major obstacles in this process. Intense political pressure is being applied by global capitalist institutions -such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation -together with the national and international big bosses to change the existing labour laws. These changes, as we all know, are aimed at removing the legal protections against arbitrary lay-offs, lockouts, retrenchment, closures and the use of contract labour. They are also aimed at reducing the rights of unions to collective bargaining.
The battle for survival against this offensive of global capital cannot be fought within the framework of existing bargaining structures. The majority of the unions have been involved at factory level bargaining. The major focus of our initiative has to be towards building single industrial federations to effectively implement industry- wide collective bargaining strategy, with the immediate goal of saving the existing jobs and improving the conditions of the workers.
In this context, the initiative taken by the various unions representing workmen from the various Unilever companies in India to come together and register under the Trade Unions Act the All India Council of Unilever Unions (AICUU) as their representative federation is a welcome move.
This federation is a higher organizational form and it will enable various unions in Unilever companies in India to acquire the capability to collectively bargain with the management to protect the interest of the workers and improve their conditions. But. more importantly, this federation has to effectively participate in the ongoing collective struggles of the other trade unions against the offensive of global capital at the national level. Similarly, at the international level, the real work is to build cross border alliances between Unilever unions. In this phase of globalization, effective internationalism rests on the ability of the workers to build an international organization to intervene all along the supply network and the commodity chain of the multinational corporations. The solidarity and the organizing work should actually influence management decisions, defend the victimized workers, ensure trade union rights and evolve feasible common demands for bargaining. The Unions' Lever is sure that the workers of Unilever companies in India will strive to achieve these goals under the leadership of AICUU, with active support from the International Union of Food Workers (IUF),and is committed to play a supportive role in this process.