Quarry Workers in Assam

The quarries in Assam represent possibly the most exploitative sector in the state, with hazardous labour conditions and complete lack of unionisation to fight for greater benefits. In addition there is rampant use of child labour, paltry wages and no facilities for drinking water, creches, sanitation or shelter. Harsh material conditions force villagers to come to work in the quarries.

Please read article below for further details.

Exploitation in the Stone Quarries of Assam

[To be published in Himal South Asian in June 2008]

The idyllic and verdant hills of Nagaon district in Middle Assam mask a veritable web of labour exploitation in the various stone quarries across the region. Of vital use for road and other construction projects, the stones are derived through hard labour in extremely harsh conditions. The quarries mainly consist of manual crushers with some having machine crushers and Nagaon is the main centre for stone quarries in the state of Assam, providing stones for construction to many major cities, towns and road-building projects in the state.

The exploitation is harsh with extremely hazardous working conditions comprised of the most informal and unorganised labour. Furthermore a dangerous network of owners and managers including Surrendered ULFA (SULFA) folk, relatives of ruling-class political parties like the Congress and AGP, as well as members of the mercantilist class ensure that the oppressive web remains firmly in place with any attempts at unionising viciously thwarted down.

Unending Exploitation: Visits to quarries reveal the harshness of the working conditions on sight. In the blazing mid-day heat workers clear the ground of trees and bushes for digging, dig out boulders, manually crush them into smaller stones, and fill large boxes with them. The quarries don’t have any shady areas for rest or shelter, and even the natural shade of trees is gone because the foliage has been cleared away to dig for stones. Infants and toddlers, due to lack of facilities for crèches, are left on the ground or on the rocks without any care, while slightly older children work along with the adults. With no facilities for drinking water or a canteen, workers bring their own lunch and water, walking anywhere between 2-5 km early in the morning up rather steep hills in order to reach the quarries so that they might have enough time to fill boxes with stones.

The box is the unit of measurement for their daily wages, and workers receive around Rs 40 to 45 per box. Usually a single adult fills about one box a day on average, which results in workers receiving daily wages far lesser than the prescribed daily minimum wage of around Rs. 75. The wage payment is not only dangerously low in amount but also illegal in method. When workers spend their time clearing the area of foliage and digging for boulders, they get even lesser pay since they don’t have filled boxes to show. The boxes themselves are large, with a length of 6 feet, breadth of 3 feet and depth of 1 foot and with no real government standard for this industry, managers can exert further surplus labour value by trying to enlarge boxes. Payment is not given for half-filled boxes, so workers often end up working much longer than the prescribed 8-hour working day, often 11-12 hours or more, in order to fill up as many boxes as they can in a week.

A particular sign of criminality in the sector is the expansive usage of child-labour that one can witness in every quarry visited. Children as young as 8 end up crushing stones and filling boxes. Since it’s a matter of survival for families, quarry work ends up being a family-affair, as the more hands there are filling the boxes with rocks, the more income the family derives from the paltry piece-rate wages. The extraction of enormous surplus labour by managers and owners through the harsh piece-rate system, the complete lack of workers benefits, and extremely informal, unorganised nature of work has all members of the family working simply in order to survive.

The workers mainly hail from the Adivasi, Tiwa, Muslim and Karbi communities who reside in the various villages around the quarries. Labour is brought in through an abusive contractual network, each village having a contractor that the managers hire in order to recruit labour. Harsh material conditions and lack of choice, apart from a failure on the part of the state in properly implementing schemes like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) result in workers being forced to work in the quarries.

Dangerous Nexus and Exploitative Tactics used: The workers showcased a genuine fear in trying to resist or demand higher wages, due to the presence of SULFA folk as managers, and who essentially function as a set of lumpen thugs in maintaining this exploitative environment. While being interviewed, they didn’t even want to reveal their names or the names of the quarries they worked in for this reason. In case a worker gets critically injured or dies, owners give Rs 2000 or 3000 for a small, traditional funeral and no compensation for the victim’s family. One of the quarries had a startling case of such criminality, where a worker had to have his legs amputated after a boulder fell on him. Soon after the operation, due to continued medical complications and lack of any medical aid or insurance, the worker died. The manager of the quarry paid Rs 2000 to the family and the rest of the medical expenses as well as costs relating to reclaiming the body and arranging for the funeral had to be borne by the family, a bill which ran up to Rs. 20,000. Such a disaster can be completely devastating for poor, rural family.

Discussions with progressive union activists and labour department officials also reveal the oppressive network of SULFA, ruling-class party folk and traders who run the quarries. On the other side of this dangerous situation are the various insurgent groups who extract “taxes” from the quarry owners. Indeed, while research was being done for this article along with a local labour activist, I was told to leave my backpack behind lest the two of us be confused as insurgents coming on an extortion spree since we were travelling by motorbike to the quarries.

A senior labour department official in Assam, who has witnessed numerous violations during his many inspections (and who would like to remain anonymous until his retirement) believes that what is happening in the quarries consists of the grossest and most criminal labour violations. He revealed that in reality workers are supposed to get around Rs. 75 per day, and that one of the main reasons owners feel emboldened to neglect labour welfare as per law is that even if prosecuted a case can drag on for years in courts, hardly easy for the working poor to deal with. And in the off chance that a verdict favouring labour is given, the punishment meted out for violations of the act is far too mild, usually a nominal fine that is hardly a financial hit for the owners.

Arup Mahanto, leader of the Grameen Shramik Sanstha, a progressive rural workers union in Assam which has been trying to organise the workers in the quarries as well, said that the maximum labour violations occurred in the stone quarries, even more than the oppressive tea industry. With no water, crèches, first-aid facilities, sanitation facilities for women (who form the majority of the workforce), and a complete lack of protective equipment, the owners find every means to extract the maximum amount of profit from the labourers. In striking similarity to the tea industry in Assam, Mahanto further added that managers prefer women workers primarily because they can be exploited more, noting that any events of verbal, physical or sexual abuse are completely buried because of the oppressive environment and tight hold that the owners have over the quarries.

Buddheswar Timung, a local rural activist in Bamuni Karbi village, which is close to many quarries, said that the lack of unionisation was a huge problem. Any attempts at organising the workers have met with either violence or threats of dismissal. Help is not derived from any of the identity-based insurgent movements in the area as they were only interested in extorting money from the owners, rather than fighting for labour rights. He also pointed to the corrupt network that owners and businesses have with political parties as well as bureaucrats as another critical reason for the continuing exploitation.

The corrupt nexus between state officials and business owners was mentioned by numerous people as one of the critical issues. The same labour department official I interview mentioned numerous cases of high ranking bureaucrats, including former Assistant Labour Commissioners, as well as many judges completely in the pockets of the business owners. He said that some of the maximum corruption occurs with respect to the Workman’s Compensation Act that guarantees compensation for workers in case of injury or death. The owner, in what is nothing short of cold criminality, just figures out that it’s cheaper to bribe both, the labour department official and the judge rather than pay the worker his due compensation. And in case there are honest men at the bureaucracy or judiciary, like the labour official I interviewed, then there is always the fallback option for the business owners of going to the biggest bastion of corruption to solve their problems and that’s the political bigwigs whose campaigns are funded by these very big businesses.

Finding a way out: The key problems contributing to this labour exploitation are not altogether impossible to solve. The wilful dereliction on the part of the state needs to be corrected. Serious measures need to be taken by cracking down on businesses that are guilty of these labour abuses as well as corrupt state officials, and more power needs to be given to the labour department to seriously bring these businesses to book.

Another critical gap that needs to be filled by the state is the proper implementation of the NREGA, which guarantees work to one member of all rural families at prescribed minimum wage rates. One of the main reasons that families end up in the exploitative quarry industry is lack of a viable alternative. If rural families had a viable option of being employed under NREGA, then not only would they be guaranteed minimum wage and certain workers benefits, but there would not be a glut of labour enabling quarry owners to exploit and extract surplus labour value. Furthermore, proper implementation of the NREGA would result in an increase of the crude market rate for wages, as unless workers get better wages than what they get under NREGA they would have no incentive to work in the quarries or any other informal sector for that matter. This was amply evident in Tamil Nadu, which was fairly successful in implementing the NREGA scheme in many districts in 2006, which then resulted in an increase of wage rates across the board in the informal sector in certain districts with employers competing with the well-regulated NREGA for labour. It also becomes easier for workers under NREGA to organise themselves into unions and other formations, thereby building class-alliances with workers in the informal sector as well.

There is always the hope that things can change. One of the foremost needs of the hour is in unionising the workers into a progressive, fighting labour formation that can not only struggle for better working conditions and higher wages but also launch campaigns that can break the corrupt nexus between state officials and business owners. This is where groups like the Grameen Shramik Sanstha as well as activists like Mahanto and Timung play a particularly important role. Indeed, even as workers were being interviewed for this article, Mahanto and Timung, who accompanied me to one of the quarries spoke to workers and set up a meeting with them to start a local union in the quarry. While displaying some hesitancy initially, the workers soon enthusiastically agreed to the meeting upon realising the possibilities of bettering their situation through unionising. It of course, remains to be seen whether it will go forward and how. Unionising the workers in the stone quarries of Assam is not going to be any easy task, and would require grit and courage. It is a hopeful sign that groups like the Grameen Shramik Sanstha display both in what is going to be a long road towards struggling against labour exploitation in this sector.

Assam Sangrami Cha Shramik Sangathan (ASCSS) Members

Members and activists of the Assam Sangrami Cha Shramik Sangathan (ASCSS), a small but militant leftist union, which is trying to break the hegemony of the pro-management, Congress-backed Assam Cha Mazdoor Sangh (ACMS). Please read the article below on Struggles of Tea Garden Workers in Assam for more details.

Struggles of Tea Garden Workers in Assam

Struggles of tea garden workers in Assam


Sipped with lime and honey in expensive china by manor dwellers and savoured in tiny chipped glasses with milk and sugar by commuters in Indian railway stations, Assam tea is a household name for most lovers of the brew. However the story behind the cultivation, plucking and processing of tea leaves in the plantations is one of exploitation and untold hardships for the toiling workers who are the singular reason that this industry is one of the pillars of the Assam economy, and in making the entire Northeast Indian region the largest tea-growing region in the world. Assam alone produces more than 50% of India's total tea, and the Assam economy is deeply reliant on tea-exports of around 150,000 tonnes yearly, both within India and internationally, fetching over Rs. 400 crores in foreign exchange every year and resulting in an industry turnover of over Rs. 3000 crore per annum.


Across the many plantations in Assam, most of which are situated in the upper parts of the state, the condition of the tea garden workers is nothing short of abysmal. Adivasis brought in as indentured slave-labour from Central India by the British form the vast majority of the workers, with the rest consisting of other local tribal communities, as well as Nepalis, Bengalis, Oriyas and so on. During the initial decades from the 1850s till the 1920s under the British, the working conditions were akin to harsh slavery, with flogging, rape, torture and even the throwing of dead workers in rivers. While certainly not comparable to earlier times, the working conditions today are still far from being the well-regulated environment that functions according to the Plantation Labour Act brought out in 1951 to protect the interests of workers in plantations, who form the single largest organised sector workforce in Assam and the entire Northeast region numbering anywhere between 8 to 10 lakhs depending on the season.


The North Eastern Social Research Centre based in Guwahati conducted a comprehensive study in 2004 across 172 tea gardens in Assam along with numerous interviews and group discussions with workers and families. The study brought to light numerous violations of the Act, including inadequate or completely non-existent provisions for drinking water, crèches, schools, proper health facilities, sanitation for women workers and shelter. Even a cursory observation of the plantations today confirms these findings. Upon further investigation and discussions with workers, one learns that wages paid are much lower than prescribed minimum wage rates, no over-time payment is made, and occasional physical abuse occurs.


Babloo, Signus and Ranjit (last names withheld upon request), all workers in Mornia Tea Estate in Lower Assam, complained that they had to drink bitter-tasting, hard water from pre-existing wells, when in fact they're supposed to receive drinking water either through taps or tankers from a public water source. Late wage payments were another huge problem, with some workers receiving their wages as late as 3 to 4 months after the due date. Garden workers received around Rs. 1400 per month on paper, but portions were cut from that for shelter repair (which hadn't been conducted in over 10 years), canteen facilities (non-existent), and educational facilities (again non-existent). This translated to a real wage of about Rs. 45 per day, far lesser than the prescribed daily minimum wage of around Rs. 54. They further said that Provident Fund had been cut on a monthly basis from their salaries, yet since 2000 no retired worker had received gratuity from PF. When asked about this, management simply shifted the blame to their predecessors. The school was in a decrepit condition and the only education the children received, when they weren't working, was from the local church.


Further up north in Nagaon, this author was privileged to attend a few wide-ranging discussions with workers in various tea gardens in the area (whose identities have been protected due to their worker-mobilising activities) as well as with Arup Mahanto, a rural workers movement leader. All the workers said that the little benefits they did receive in earlier times were rapidly getting eroded over the years. This included rations, free medicines at the hospital in Kandoli Tea Estate (which has now been downgraded to a dispensary), money for firewood at Sagubhai Gardens and many others, all of which have disappeared with further and further deregulation measures in favour of capital in the post-liberalisation era. Mahanto further pointed to the nexus between management, police and corrupt union leaders as one of the crucial reasons for the deteriorating situation. Indeed, 4 of the 5 workers interviewed had been suspended and dismissed due to their attempts at mobilising workers, and all 4 now try to eke out livelihoods by working in the even more exploitative stone-quarry industry or selling firewood, while trying to fight a legal battle to get reinstated.


Women, who are the backbone of the tea industry and the large majority of the workforce, face even harsher working conditions. In all the tea estates visited, one couldn't spot a single crèche for infants and toddlers. Sanitation facilities were either inadequate or completely non-existent. And while nothing explicitly was mentioned, there have been many instances of verbal, physical and even sexual abuse. Women are in fact preferred as labour because most managers feel that they are particularly suited for garden work and easier to exploit. Thus, while women labourers for the most part get the same as their male counterparts, not a single woman can be spotted in the plantation factories where the wages for workers are marginally higher than their garden counterparts.


It must also be added that tea garden workers are caught between the proverbial rock and hard place, and forced to accept increasing labour exploitation due to harsh material conditions and lack of choice. Some who have access to cultivable land tend to be better off and more self-sufficient, at times working in the gardens only for short durations of time out of temporary necessity. Those possessing no or uncultivable land, and who leave the gardens, often end up as informal labour in nearby towns and cities. Education levels, health indicators and poverty levels for the workers are among the lowest in Assam. Many families find it difficult to get their children into educational institutions and later on in finding proper employment. Thus the oppressive environment of the tea garden is often the only recourse for many of these families.


An examination of the reasons for this harsh predicament of tea garden labourers is particularly warranted. Discussions with progressive labour activists, tea garden workers and even upstanding labour department officials reveal three crucial factors contributing to this situation.


One is the present neoliberal environment grossly favouring capital and business. It is amply evident that post-liberalisation, labour has taken a real beating with the state often kowtowing to capital's demands for further deregulation. Now, while most of the legislation protecting labour is still intact, the present neoliberal environment has resulted in the state wantonly neglecting the various labour protection acts and even coming up with schemes like Special Economic Zones to bypass labour regulation as a result of genuflecting to private capital. Even the various levels of the judiciary, where prior to liberalisation would see more pro-labour verdicts, have become far more pro-business.


Furthermore the tea industry has been passing through a crisis with the free import of low priced tea and reduced exports being among its main reasons. This has again affected labour in a harsh manner, with managers increasingly using contract labour, thus reducing benefits, in order to ensure continued profits. Even progressive steps taken by state governments like the recent proposal by the Tamil Nadu Government to increase the minimum daily wage to Rs. 101.5 was met with derision and vigorous protests by plantations owners associations like the United Planters Association of Southern India. Plantation owners across India have refused to accept responsibility for social costs citing the crisis in the tea industry while labourers are almost fully dependent on the plantation system for their sustenance due to lack of viable, alternate livelihoods.


A senior labour department official in Assam, who has witnessed numerous violations of the Plantation Labour Act in the tea gardens he has inspected (and who would like to remain anonymous until his retirement) believes that one of the main reasons owners feel emboldened to neglect labour welfare as per law is that even if prosecuted a case can drag on for years in courts, hardly easy for the working poor to deal with. And in the off chance that a verdict favouring labour is given, the punishment meted out for violations of the act is far too mild, usually a nominal fine that is hardly a financial hit for the owner of a tea plantation.


In addition, due to this free hand being given to private capital by the state, many senior union leaders also point to a dangerous trend developing over the last few years in conflict-ridden states like Assam. Often large private companies demand further deregulation or cheaper land prices citing the supposed violent scenario in the region as a cause for making the place more attractive for private investment. Threats are then carried out of taking investment elsewhere or pulling out existing investment which gets the state governments to meekly capitulate, wilfully overlooking harsh labour violations.


The second contributing factor playing out in the oppressive conditions of the tea garden workers follows very closely on the heels of the present neoliberal environment, which is the developing corrupt nexus between tea garden owners and state officials. The same labour department official mentioned numerous cases of high ranking bureaucrats, including former Assistant Labour Commissioners, as well as many judges completely in the pockets of the tea garden owners. He said that some of the maximum corruption occurs with respect to the Workman's Compensation Act that guarantees compensation for workers in case of injury or death. The tea garden owner, in what is nothing short of cold criminality, just figures out that it's cheaper to bribe both, the labour department official and the judge rather than pay the worker his due compensation. And in case there are honest men at the bureaucracy or judiciary, like the labour official I interviewed, then there is always the fallback option for the business owners of going to the biggest bastion of corruption to solve their problems and that's the political bigwigs whose campaigns are funded by these very big businesses.


The third and possibly most changeable factor contributing to the exploitation of tea garden workers is the corruption and complete pro-management functioning of the Assam Cha Mazdoor Sangh (ACMS) affiliated to the Congress-backed INTUC federation. ACMS has a complete hegemony over the labour scenario in the tea gardens of Assam, and essentially run as the on-the-ground labour controlling wing of the garden owners.


Indeed the ACMS units I met across Assam seemed anything but aware or concerned about labour rights. In the Mornai Tea Estate, the president and general secretary of the local union didn't even know about the Plantation Labour Act 1951, which covers the very workers they represent! While in Kandoli Tea Estate, the ACMS unit was instrumental in teaming up with managers as well as the police and orchestrating the dismissal of numerous workers who were struggling to get compensation for the family of one of their dead fellow-workers in addition to fighting for better medical benefits.


However a small ray of hope can be found in some fledgling attempts at more progressive labour organising. In direct contrast to the ACMS is the much smaller and infinitely more valiant Assam Sangrami Cha Shramik Sangh (ASCSS) which has led numerous struggles and won some important victories in the few tea gardens that it has a base in. And while one didn't see a single woman in any of the meetings with ACMS unions, all the ASCSS meetings had at least a third of the participants being women. In addition, all of the ASCSS unit leaders had a good understanding of labour rights as well as the need to tackle issues of self-exploitation among workers such as patriarchy, alcoholism, and sectarianism.


Subhash Sen, veteran trade union leader in Assam and leader of the ASCSS pointed to numerous occasions when ACMS had been instrumental in sabotaging struggles to gain greater benefits for workers, and also indicated the longstanding tie-up between ACMS and tea garden owners in ensuring that more progressive and militant unions were prevented from fighting for workers rights. He pointed out to a particular event that showcased the abominable lack of concern that ACMS leaders had regarding workers. It was under the tenure of former Deputy Health Minister, Pawan Singh Gatwar, a former Vice President of INTUC and leader of ACMS, that hundreds of tea garden workers died of gastroenteritis and malaria, with nothing being done by the ministry. Sen further outlined the need and plans of the ASCSS in trying to break this hegemony of the ACMS and build a genuinely progressive movement that yields positive results for workers in the long-run.

Progressive groups like the ASCSS have a long way to go in this endeavour, as Sen himself pointed out that their membership of 50,000 was a mere drop in the ocean of tea garden workers, compared to the ACMS membership of around 7 lakhs. However launching a struggle in the tea gardens of Assam that can break the state-owner nexus as well as the hegemony of a corrupt, derelict union is no easy task. The courageous militancy shown by the members and leaders of the ASCSS in many struggles is a step forward, one of many that needs to be taken, but a hopeful sign nevertheless

Two Unions for Two Classes of workers: Guwahati Refinery (Revised Article Published in India Together)

http://www.indiatogether.org/2008/mar/eco-iocunions.htm

In an era where workers across the world have been facing an unprecedented assault at the hands of capital, there is some merit in examining the labour struggles at the Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) Refinery in Guwahati, the largest city in the state of Assam and the entire Northeastern region of India.

Assam and indeed the rest of Northeast India, because of numerous movements with nationalist and sub-nationalist aspirations, continue to have much of its small town and rural population face the brunt of a heavily armed, hegemonic Indian state. One cannot travel to a single sub-district or district without seeing even the lowest ranking police constable carrying a rather deadly INSAS assault rifle (compared to other parts of India where he might, with luck, carry a baton to imperiously whack a poor pickpocket’s rear end). And while workers in an urban centre like Guwahati might face marginally less violence at the hands of armed security forces, they face the assault of resource usurpation, low development priorities and the overall oppressive treatment meted out to the region by the central Government of India. This obviously results in harsher material conditions for the working poor, even in the formal, more organised sectors.

IOC is a public sector undertaking meant for refining the oil that’s been discovered and extracted by other undertakings such as Oil India and ONGC. Workers here would naturally fall under the highly organised sector. At a larger level, oil represents one of the key resources that fall under the afore mentioned issue of resource usurpation that the region faces at the hands of the Indian state, but this article will focus more on the labour struggles at the plant-level.

The labour stratification here presents an interesting, albeit hardly uncommon, picture of workers division. As is the case with the majority of the plants across India cutting across industrial sectors and public-private lines, workers are divided into permanent employees and non-permanent workers, who are further divided into contract workers and daily-wage labourers. Naturally the demands for each group hardly overlap and might sometimes even clash. In addition there are social and cultural divisions that result from the creation of a labour aristocracy side by side with a working poor, all in one plant. Needless to say that this is hardly fertile ground for fostering strong workers unity and thereby launching union struggles that can successfully press for rights and demands.

Furthermore in the IOC Refinery (again as is the case in most other industries) there are two unions for the two classes of workers. It is important, from the standpoint of understanding labour rights, to examine how trade unions handle such complex and difficult situations thrust upon them by capital…whether with ingenuity and honesty, or just mere capitulation to management and the forces of capital. The IOC Refinery unions offer one such case in point

At the refinery, there is the Refinery Workers Union (RWU), for permanent workers, who for the most part consist of English-educated IOC staff members below the rank of officers or managers. They seem to be very much part of India’s growing and increasingly prosperous middle class, conceivably with generational aspirations to move up the socioeconomic ladder, and quite possibly possessing every opportunity to do so. Indeed, one of the union members I spoke with, upon knowing that I was from Bangalore, proceeded to ask me numerous questions about South India, as he and his family were planning an extended holiday touring the region. The conversation covered hotels, beaches and tourist hotspots, hardly things that India’s labouring masses get a chance to even dream about. The union office itself is an impressive two-floor building, with a drama hall, couple of offices, kitchen, a children’s park outside, some sports facilities, and a guest room where they were kind enough to allow me to spend a couple of nights in.

Barely hundred metres away is the dusty, one-room office of the United Workmen’s Union (UWU), which is the union for all contract workers and daily-wage labourers. Affiliated to the leftist All India Central Council of Trade Unions (AICCTU), its membership includes workers who can barely make ends meet, if at all, on paltry wages with insecure work in often hazardous conditions. The union has seen multiple struggles on numerous issues including fighting for higher wages, timely payment, compensation for victims of injury or death, better health benefits and numerous others. For entertainment, there is a single carom board usually played on a by-turn basis by large numbers of members, who crowd around it in the evenings after work.

Thus the socioeconomic differences between the two classes of workers, and indeed the infrastructure levels of the two unions are stark and plainly visible. However an interesting feature is the manner in which the unions themselves have dealt with the situation of workers division.

Talking to members and leaders alike from both unions, there was the common feeling that unity among the two unions and mutual support for each others struggles was important. Instances were even mentioned of one union joining in the struggles of the other, despite not having any vested demands. Strong communication links also seemed to be maintained between the two. One of the crucial reasons for this mutual support seems to be the fact that there is an overlap of leadership, and even the constitutions of both don’t bar cross-membership. While the UWU for the contract/daily-wage workers is affiliated to the AICCTU, the RWU has AICCTU leaders in central roles, despite not officially affiliating. In speaking with both unions, one heard fairly honest and forthright descriptions of successes and, more importantly, failures. It would seem obvious that unions representing workers from the same plant should naturally support each other, but this is often hardly the case, with multiple plant-level unions fighting with each other to gain the support of the workers, thereby severely reducing the militancy of the working class movement. In addition, there are many sectors and plants where unions for contract and daily-wage workers barely even exist. Significant examples of this can be found in the numerous automobile industry plants in Gurgaon (Haryana), where for the most part only permanent workers have any form of representation or space for collective bargaining, while the contract and daily-wage workers are left to languish without any real association.

Biren Kalita and Janik Barman, both AICCTU leaders and central guiding forces of the two unions at the IOC Refinery spoke candidly about the existing contradictions among the workforce and the unions representing them. Barman said that the main focus was directed more towards the rights and demands of the contract and daily-wage workers as their situation was far more precarious and their needs greater, but still required some time also to be directed towards the permanent workers union as there was the need to build workers solidarity and two-way support. He further mentioned that not enough had been done by them with respect to daily-wage workers in the UWU and women workers in both unions, specifying that patriarchy in the membership of both unions was a huge hindrance in this.

Keshav Goswami, Secretary of the UWU, spoke at length about past struggles to bring contract and daily-wage workers onto a unified platform. He mentioned that in previous years there were as many as nine different unions for all the contract and daily-wage workers, with the AICCTU-affiliate being the biggest. This caused serious dilution in negotiations and overall collective bargaining measures with management. After much perseverance, three to four of the more progressive unions formed a collective platform which soon resulted in all the workers coming under it, followed by a democratic process to decide the federation that the workers wished to affiliate with. Goswami also mentioned the mutual support among the two unions, and spoke about future plans in the struggle for workers rights including, canteen facilities, Provident Fund for contract/daily-wage workers, skill development and better infrastructure for the union. He mentioned the need to promote women’s leadership as well as conduct workshops on workers rights and contract labour law.

While overall, the mutual support between the two unions is heartening to see, and certainly a creative way to thwart capital’s attempt at workers division, there are many visible problems as well. For instance, much of this unity seems to be maintained by the common AICCTU leadership, progressive leftist leaders like Kalita and Barman, and it remains to be seen how it will continue should it pass on to future hands through elections or any fissure in either of the unions.

Another extremely bad indicator seems to be the abominable lack of women in leadership positions. While research was being done for this write-up, one didn’t come across a single female leader, office-bearer, committee-member or even just a member in either union that I could speak to. Women seem to form around 20-25% of the contract/daily-wage workers (depending on the season), and I was told that there were some women members in the UWU committee, but I didn’t see any in all the visits I made to the office. The RWU has a women’s organisation that primarily comprises of the wives of permanent staff members, and one does see them occasionally in the RWU office. However this seems to be primarily a socio-cultural group and not a political one with a clear goal of combating patriarchy within the unions. The expressed need to combat patriarchy by some of the leaders does not seem to have percolated down to the membership based on conversations with members and workers.

Furthermore, one could notice that the progressive thinking imaginably coming from a leftist federation like the AICCTU, had not had as much of a political effect on the members as I’m sure the AICCTU themselves would like to see happen. Most of the members I spoke with were avowed supporters of the Asom Gana Parishad, a party which is hardly a bastion for progressive thinking. Some were also quite open in their dislike for Bangladeshi Muslims and Biharis whom they felt were taking over Assam through their continued migration, mostly as poor labourers, into the state.

No doubt combating patriarchy, politicisation of the membership and maintaining unity are problems that numerous unions across India face. And while some of these problems might not be as directly connected to the day-to-day travails of traditional unionism that focuses on acquiring higher wages, better benefits, safer work environments, and good health care, they still merit serious examination as they point directly to the manner in which unions can play a significant role in positive societal (and political) change. However, one does get the feeling that the overall direction that the IOC Refinery unions in Guwahati are heading in is positive and, hopefully, slowly inching towards building a genuinely progressive workers movement.