Locating Worker Power in a Changing Bargaining Scenario

Abstract

The industrial relations (IR) framework in India is centred around the formal industrial employment model wherein employees bargain and negotiate with their employer through their trade union(s) and the government plays a significant mediatory role. This legally arranged framework of IR excludes informal workers, who are normally not engaged in a workplace-based industrial employment, from its purview. Such an orientation has led trade unions enjoying legislative safeguard to primarily organize industrial employees on the basis of their workplace engagement. The narrow trade union focus on industrial employment has left informal workers’ concerns largely unrepresented in traditional IR. In this backdrop, while concerns of deteriorating worker power because of declining trade union membership and influence occupies IR scholars, informal workers innovative organizing strategies and resultant worker power remains largely unnoticed. In this chapter, I conceptualize this subtler source of worker power that has been gaining strength in India. I conceptualize the power generation capacity of what I term as workers’ aggregations. In the workers’ aggregation variety of collective action, unlike trade unions, power is per se not dependent on the numerical strength of the workers’ organization; power emanates from the diffused range of functions and relations that these workers’ aggregations undertake and sustain. In this chapter, I argue that the future of effective and sustainable IR in India lies in taking cognizance of these organizations and their modus operandi, while also recognizing the changing nature of bargaining (involving mainly the state) in economic relations.