In praise of Trade Unions: an elegy or an agamoni?

1.    The time of solidarity

In the jute mill, on the first day of my maiden career, the Head Clerk (Bara babu) showed me a chair with a table which would be my office. The Chief Labour Welfare Officer, my boss, took me around the shop floor, where under-clad people worked on dusty floors in the midst of constant drone of huge machines. Flakes of jute fibers circulated in the air, huge coils of mud coated jute fibers got turned into threads and eventually into beige course cloths. It was daunting and intimidating. 

Two days later, I had my first encounter with the collectives. A group of about twenty five muscular adults suddenly collected in the yard from inside and crowded the cabin of the Chief. He called me over and asked me to hear their issue. The group came to my table and the entire room was teeming with people. The leader of the pack, a bearded, hefty man in his forties, addressed me agitatedly with their issue in a high decibel pitch. After some time, seeing that I was a rookie, and unused to their dialect , Anish Khan, a weaver, hailing from Azamgarh, came forward, scattered others and slowly explained. A dear colleague was in the Employees State Insurance Hospital about 10 km away and not receiving any treatment. I was puzzled. What should I do?

I did some quick thinking under stress. Packing my briefcase, I asked them to accompany me. In the hospital an emaciated adult worker lay on a soiled bed cloth. I looked out for the doctor and fortunately a person of my age happened to be the doctor treating him. He listened to the issue and explained that the person was suffering from syphilis, but was on medication and the cure would take some time . He also assured to take special care. Anish who listened to the conversation in English, with little comprehension asked me. When I explained, he felt embarrassed and explained that his friend often frequented the red light areas, but he was good at heart. Anish, who was a rough talking, stout leader of the weavers, became my friend from that time.

2.    The passion in the duels

Industrial relations was never a fashion in the B Schools: in the way the suave, soft functions like L&D, OD were. At workplace, Trade unions can really get red hot. We heard about a soft HR man, who reportedly exited his office through a back door the moment he was told of groups advancing towards his office with some grievance. Another story was about a reluctant IR professional who would schedule his meetings half an hour before the closing time so that he could leave on the ground that the office transport would depart. But mature trade union leadership are always great to deal with, bringing in the heat of action. It is like playing fast bowling. Of course there would be bouncers and glares and intimidation and chin music. The ‘good cop bad cop’ strategy of negotiation is quite in use by the trade union leaders in dealing with new industrial relations professional. But once the IR man stares back and hooks the bouncer or ducks under with a smile, the batting becomes a joy. Once a union leader told me with great affection in a private chat ‘Do not concede easily. Take something back in return. If you have to convince us, give good logic and persevere.’ In adversarial situations, it would be like wars – with strategies and tactics, and the adrenaline rush in winning, but at the end of it all when peace is achieved through a settlement, the bonhomie would be back.

3.    The archetypal IR man

The essential skill sets of an Industrial relations professional are surprisingly similar to selling skills, but are highly undervalued. An ability to listen deep, sometimes watching the non-verbal more than the spoken word; promising little , but keeping the promises; being empathetic rather than parroting the stand taken by the boss; knowing the subtle art of resolving conflicts , wrapping things up when the moment comes - are some of the skills for both . But the connector really is trust and trustworthiness. I remember once in a loss making business we had to resolve serious liquidity problem by deferring a staggered pay out to the employees, and the bad news was that pay out was covered by the settlement with the union. I approached the union president on a one on one conversation, and after hearing the facts he advised me to go ahead and defer the payment by six months or till the financial situation eases, but ‘do not quote this discussion’. The pay-out was deferred without any loss of man days.

But trust also can pose dilemmas. I can think of two kinds of management behaviour which typically undermine trust in a unionised workplace. First , when for short term gains a manager resorts to dysfunctional behaviours: giving false promises ; setting one against the other as a habit to drive a wedge within or between unions ; or taking excessive interest in the inter or intra union fault lines. I was once told the story of a veteran professional who ‘cried with one eye, while smiling with the other’ to describe the lack of trustworthiness. Secondly when senior leadership would also dabble in manipulating specific union leaders for their personal leverage. In that situation management spoke with forked tongues resulting in erosion of trust.

4.    The union management Jazz

Imagine large numbers of employees getting agitated over a common issue and the channels for ventilating the issues fail to work. In 2007-08 about 400 employees of the Nasik unit of WNS Global Services, one of India's biggest BPOs, and a non-unionised workplace, agitated over pay and stayed away from work for two days , the management was clueless about how to resolve the impasse and who to talk to. The employees returned after only repeated assurances from the management.

Contrast this with another incident that I remember. Employees in a unionised battery manufacturing plant got agitated over rumours of the canteen, processing beef instead of mutton in the canteen. The grey haired union leader, who was called in by the panicked management team, came in, went to the canteen and returned leading a large group of agitated employees to the Personnel managers’ cabin. In a wonderful denouement of a resolution drama, the union leader exhibited the hide of butchered animal and looked at it a long time by turning it on all sides, while the mass of onlookers waited, and finally saying it to his close aides ‘big goat. Not cow. But why can not the canteen manager procure Kochi patha (smaller goats)?’ The agitators got the message and the anger defused.

Do the traditional union leaderships resist change? Yes and no , in my experience, and a lot depends on the leadership and the intensity of purpose of the management . I heard the story of a Left affiliated Trade Union which was responsible for stalling the introduction of computers in offices in Kolkata when the process was smooth in other parts of the country. A move by management to clandestinely place computers in some offices in the night was thwarted by vigilant union leadership. There is no doubt that Trade Unions, pursuing the political agenda of their guardian parties often took stubborn stands and impeded the growth plans. Often the conversations could get stuck and the clear feeling would be that the actors who were not on the table were more powerful in pulling the strings.

Of course it could get tough. But the experiences could be different also. I was told the story from a friend that at a time when a particular left affiliated union seemed to have taken a principled stand on the issue of modernisation and VRS, he received a chance tip about a thawing of the stand at the level of the political leadership. He took a chance and drove the issue hard, forcing the local leadership to bring in senior leaders for consultation, and he could work out a through agreement with the union on the issue which helped the company to go ahead with the held up plans for modernisation. Often, therefore, the problem lay with the management side for not trying hard enough, for making wrong assumptions, for not keeping track with the shifts in the minds of the political leadership. In simple terms, lacking agility and awareness of how things worked inside a Trade union.

In another company pursuant to the implementation of an Enterprise Resource Planning system, certain roles belonging to workmen categories became redundant (reconciliation of accounts for example), leading to redundancies. So the decision was to look at two options: reskilling the back office workers into customer facing roles, and redeploying them to new, but distant locations. The unions resisted, but when management persistently communicated to them with the downside and the upside of such redundancies, they understood the logic and swallowed the bitter pill. The change was implemented without any agitation.

5.    The decline of the unions and the lever for rebirth

In the new millennium, however, the traditional trade union has truly lost its zing. The millennial employee is not attracted to unionisation because collective action belongs to a bygone era. Individualism has come to dominate our social structure and thought. The traditional trade union organization is based on an opposing ideology of mutual aid and support, in which individual interests yield to group interests and in which feelings of solidarity and class membership are of pivotal importance. The emergent individualism can be "utilitarian individualism" or can even evolve into “expressive individualism”. The "new" employee is seeking an interesting and fulfilling job, where he can realise his expressive self and feel that he is an integral, contributing member of the organization.

Historically, trade unions promoted "bread and butter" goals focusing on the economic aspects of the job, such as higher wages and job security. Traditional unions have been less interested in securing employee rights to participate as equal partners in the workplace. That is where they missed the bus. And to my mind the chance for a phoenix like resurrection of Trade unions shall lie in two areas: for the permanent employee working in a decent workplace, in embracing the mojo of individualism and channelising it for more expressive partnership in the workplace; and secondly, in mobilising the new class of what Guy Standing termed as ‘precariat’ – the ominously surging multitude of temporary , insecure workmen.