The Hindu Business Line : IT's a matter of labour

WHEN Technopark, Kerala's first electronics technology park, began operations in Thiruvananthapuram around 1994, very few trade union leaders or politicians dared enter its premises. For one thing, the glossy steel-and-glass facade of its buildings seemed uncomfortably forbidding. For another, as some leaders admitted privately, few had a clue about what exactly was going on behind those glass walls.

Now all that mystery is likely to change, as the country's trade unions seem set to enter the arena of information technology (IT) as well, and Kerala's union bosses appear even more eager to tame the elusive IT tiger. The country's unions have already said they would take a common stand on the Union Government's move to amend labour laws to provide for contract labour in the IT sector.

The proposed labour law reforms will be thrashed out at the imminent Indian Labour Conference. Meanwhile, the Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has said that the IT sector should come under labour laws and that rights to form trade unions and to strike must be ensured.

The proposed changes to the labour laws, the CPI(M) feels, would adversely affect millions of workers. Companies would find it easier to "hire-and-fire", retrench employees and down shutters once the government slackened control of the sector.

The CPI (M) stresses that workers in the IT and BPO sectors have the constitutional and legal rights to form unions and go on strike, as part of collective bargaining.

"Even the West Bengal government has recognised this right. We are preparing a comprehensive document on the nature of work and services in the IT sector, which employs about four lakh workers in the country. It will be placed before the party's Central Committee in mid-December," CPI(M) General Secretary Prakash Karat told reporters recently.

Polit Bureau member and Confederation of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) chief M.K. Pandhe claims that working conditions in the IT sector were like "a 19th century prison'' and the employees worked like "slaves''. The issue, he said, was whether the sector should be treated at par with essential services like water, power, milk and hospitals or as a moneymaking service.

To be sure, Pandhe's allegations are rather far-fetched, especially his contention about archaic working conditions. The CITU tends to view the IT sector as akin to the traditional labour-intensive industries in the manufacturing and agriculture sectors. But in today's post-industrial world, this is hardly true.

In fact, the French socialist Andre Gorz even wrote an iconoclastic work spelling a `Farewell to the Working Class'. Workers in the IT sector are not exactly living a hand-to-mouth existence, like the industrial working class.

That is precisely what the Revenue Minister and Kerala Congress (M) leader K. M. Mani said at a recent press meet where he labelled the IT labour pool as "sophisticated workers". He alleged that the CPI (M)'s Kerala leadership had put pressure on the party's Polit Bureau to overturn West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya's proposal not to promote agitations in the IT sector. He said that such a stand was meant to defeat the UDF Government's attempt to promote huge investments in the IT sector in the State, especially the proposed Smart City Project at Kochi. However, while it is undoubtedly true that this class of workers cannot be equated with those in the coir or beedi or tile factories, the fundamental issue is one of rights - and the principle of collective bargaining.

Look at what happened in the United States at the start of the dotcom boom there. Around six years ago, organisers at Amazon.com, the world's largest online retailer, launched campaigns against mandatory overtime and the high cost of benefits. At online electronics retailer eTown, days before it decided to sack a fourth of its workforce, customer service representatives filed what is thought to be the first application to hold a workplace union ballot at a dotcom company. Yet, such actions did little to stem the growth of the IT sector in the US.

Unionisation is thus nothing to be feared. In June this year, the Union Network International Apro Forum on Outsourcing/Offshoring at Taipei declared: "We do not oppose business and technological modernization. However, we take the stand that such modernization, particularly web-based service outsourcing, should not be undertaken at the expense of labour, that is, by pitting workers against workers everywhere and rolling back labour rights through a race to the bottom, ignoring the universal core labour rights and forgetting that the end-all and be-all of any economic development is the improvement of the lives of the working people."

A changed world needs changed rules. But certain principles remain universal. These include freedom of association, collective bargaining, fair and equitable hiring policies, and a moratorium on forced labour. Needless to add, these should be tempered with sound sense and practical wisdom, not ideological obduracy.

The writer can be contacted at kgkumar@gmail.com

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