Beyond February 20-21, 2013 Strike

[Following is a slightly shortened version of a statement issued by NUTI on the eve of February 20-21 General Strike.]

Never in living memory has the attack on the working class been as intense as it is today. The attack is brutally violent and unrelenting on every section of the working class.

At the root of this violent attack lies the principal crisis of sustaining capital's profitability. Unionised workers mean an increase in union power which, when sustained militantly, translates not just into winning rights to protected jobs and higher wages and benefits but better and safer working conditions, which to an employer only means—cost. It is this cost that capital is unwilling to bear and hence these rights that capital is unwilling to concede. The violence thus today is increasingly directed at the principal democratic right of workers to form and join unions of their choice.

This violence unleashed by capital is with the collusive support of government. Government has conceded capital the 'right' to define the economy and has subordinated both existing statute and the government machinery to meet capital's needs. The government's concession to capital have been in the form of tax relief, capital subsidy, opening up of public utilities and natural monopolies to the private sector, and the transfer of vast tracts of land for the exploitation of natural resources. This has opened new areas for corruption which too has increased to unprecedented levels. But it has done more and much worse. It has undermined the livelihoods of the rural working people, in particular the most marginalised amongst them, the dalits, the adivasis, the religious minorities and of course women. Where workers have resisted this subordination, government has been willing to use the law and its machinery, assisted by a complicit judicial system, to crush democratic struggles.

The governments' growth strategy lies in tatters and the failure of private capital to act as the driver of the economy is visible. Despite the collapse of the agricultural sector, instability in the manufacturing sector and the uncontrolled inflation, government has persisted with its neo-liberal economic policies. These policies have been shaped in consistent engagement with imperialist forces with government expanding concessions to foreign investment, which in turn, has become necessary to sustain the present model of growth. Further, the public sector disinvestment is taking place by stealth when in fact there is an urgent need to regenerate the public sector in order to shape the direction of the economy towards sustainable national development that ensures equity and social justice.

Economic development remains the political rhetoric within the mainstream. Yet, over the last two decades, government supported and subsidized private sector expansion has resulted in a sharp widening of income inequality. In these 20 years, not just has income inequality worsened, it has come along with a culture of public display of consumption by a small minority while the vast majority of working people continue to live in misery and deprivation. The profits of the present model of economic growth have been appropriated by capital while the costs have been borne by the working class. While direct taxes such as taxes on companies have remained unchanged and the income tax of the richest has been lowered year-on-year, subsidies meant to protect the working poor from the ravages of the market forces, are being cut drastically at each budget in the name of fiscal prudence with simultaneous increase in indirect taxes on all commodities that hit the working poor the most. Government is additionally making every effort to substitute the existing subsidies with targeted cash transfers. This, taken together with the decline of the agriculture sector, has led to unprecedented inflation, and in particular food price inflation. Governments' repeated assurances to bring prices under control have delivered nothing since markets are controlled by big business, traders and corporate and large farmers. Inflation has lowered the value of the rupee and wiped out real earnings of workers across the board. The extension of the public distribution system to all sections of working people, and not just those below the poverty line, is still a dream while the Unorganised Sector Social Security Act 2008 remains a mere piece of paper.

In the last two decades the private sector has destroyed far more jobs than it has created. The majority of new jobs created in the formal sector are of contract workers, trainees, apprentices and other new forms of unprotected and insecure workers while simultaneously pushing a large volume of work into the informal economy with no protection of law. In the formal sector, a large section of the workers receive wages that are a small fraction of the bargained wages of permanent workers whilst, in the majority of cases, perform tasks that are more arduous and less safe. In the informal sector, most workers today are struggling for recognition as 'workers'. The largest number of new jobs created in the last two decades are that of development workers on honorariums or as part-timers and are entirely denied employment rights. Much of the new employment opportunities created for women, restricts them to low wage jobs, many of which are even unrecognised as work. In addition they are subject to every kind of prejudice and harassment including sexual harassment.

The demand for employment is enormous since tens of millions of working people have been rendered unemployed by the agrarian crisis, dispossession and displacement. The social protection to rural working people, envisaged under the MGNREGA, is in disrepair and wages under it are abysmally low and are being increased at a rate far lower than the rate of inflation.

It is this extreme reality that forced the unity of the 11 Central Trade Union Organisations, despite their political affiliation, to call for the two-day All India Strike on 20-21 February 2013 in the understanding that the 'broadest form of national unity of workers' alone can bring about a change in the present situation.

Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 35, Mar 10-16, 2013

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