FRIDAY, JULY 29, 2005
China's Chairman, Our Chairman
SAUGATA ROY
In power, the Left pushes growth, not workers' rights
After striking Honda workers were beaten by Haryana policemen and politicians from the Left began to mutter about the perfidy of multinationals, Bengal's industry minister Nirupam Sen announced that the Japanese were great employers and had an excellent track record in Bengal. So, Japanese ambassador Yasukuni Enoki can rest easy. Gurgaon isn't Bengal, where the Japanese are investing aggressively.
Enoki is assured that proactive Left Front MPs, who espoused workers' causes at the Gurgaon Honda firm, will busily brush aside such violence as a mere "law and order" issue, just the way they did during the July 26, 2002 agitation at Siliguri's Chandmoni Tea Estate. There, two plantation workers were killed in police firing when workers from among garden squatters tried to block National Highway 34 against the Left Front government's bid to sell the tea estate dirt cheap to make way for a housing project. And all this happened while the assembly was in session. Chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee apologised for the firing but didn't yield to the Opposition demand for a judicial inquiry.
Or, take the case of Hind Motors. It has been a month since the company has suspended 137 employees without notice. The same union, AITUC led by MP Gurudas Dasgupta as its chief patron which led the agitation in Gurgaon, and CPM's Santoshree Chatterjee, the local MP, chose to keep a very low profile. This Wednesday, Titagarh Wagons, a private company, slapped a lockout notice on its factory gate without the AITUC union — the sole bargaining agent — having a clue about what was going on.
Lockouts, lay-offs and closures have been very common in traditional manufacturing industries in Bengal. The mainstream Left trade unions — mainly CITU, affiliated to the CPM — have accepted the new order, often helping managements implement downsizing plans and lay off workers. Result: As many as 500 employees were thrown out of their jobs in the Hindustan Development Corporation's Tiljala unit with the tacit support of union representatives — all in the name of revival.
The cosy nexus between the ruling Left coalition and its affiliated unions explains why Bengal tops the list of provident fund defaulters in the jute sector. Or the fact that wages of north Bengal's tea plantation workers are the least in the country, even lower than Assam. And this after nearly 30 years of Left Front rule.
Some independent employees' bodies did try to resist the joint party-union offensive, but couldn't make any headway in most cases. Central trade unions — CITU and the Congress-affiliated INTUC — left them in the lurch and the police followed up cases of worker unrest with rare vengeance.
The case of Asiatic Oxygen in Howrah is interesting. There, about 25 employees are waiting for VRS money for more than a year, while the management has been shifting out all the machinery and equipment stealthily with the connivance of the police. The only exception to this rule is Philips India, where the CPM labour wing, CITU, could manage to convince management to absorb 100% of the existing staff after Videocon took over its Bengal unit.
The emerging sectors, mainly sponge iron units in the Durgapur-Asansol belt, or IT companies in Salt Lake's Sector V, have no room for dissent. Workers in all the 34 sponge iron units are on hire, have no fixed working hours and security benefits and cannot form unions. In fact, Bengal IT minister Manab Mukherjee boasts of these "no-union" IT shops to rope in investments. And the government's IT brochure showcases Bengal as home to creative brains on offer at the cheapest rates.
Bengal is changing fast under Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee. So much so, that the government's most trusted employees' wing, the State Coordination Committee, has recently come out with an article in its mouthpiece Sangrami Hatiyar (literally, Weapon of Struggle), urging Bhattacharjee not to walk the N Chandrababu Naidu path.
Such docile warnings are unlikely to faze Bhattacharjee. He is committed to put Bengal back on the industrial map and has come to terms with the rules of the game. He argues that a broke state can't make a dramatic turnaround without private investments and foreign investments. The CPM state headquarters at Alimuddin Street has got over its old ideological moorings. Emulating China, it has given free rein to "capitalist reforms". Gone are the days when hardliners like Niren Ghosh or Chittabrata Majumdar would scuttle development projects. CITU now has a liberal, Shyamal Chakrabarty, as its president, who sees nothing unfair in closing down five loss-making Webel units on one month's notice.
Japan is well aware of these facts. Bengal has a chief minister who's keen to tell the world that Mitsubishi Corporation which has invested in a Rs 2,000-odd crore petrochemicals plant in the state has been operating without losing a single man-day since its inception. That doesn't mean Bengal shuns protests. The Left Front still takes to the streets, it still calls bandhs, but on broader issues — national and international — that don't get investors' backs up.
Copyright © 2005 Times Internet Limited.