Labour Reform

The Politics of Labour in a Global Age: Continuity and Change in Late-Industrialising and PostSocialist Economies edited by Christopher Candland and Rudra Sil; Oxford University Press, New York, 2001; pp xv + 353, price not indicated.

This paper argues that the bilateral nature of labour-management relations is being obfuscated today by a unitarian management project. Democracy in the business organisation and the workplace in particular has to have an organic evolution and not through a motivation plan from above. Institutions of industrial relations including the union and collective bargaining can be the best via media for bringing in new institutions that are genuinely imbued with a participative and cooperative character. The paper reviews a sample of contemporary writings that focus on why unions still matter, new possibilities for unions and union-participatory approaches to management.

This paper attempts to assess the changes in workforce structure and the system of governance associated with macroeconomic reforms and their impact on the rate and pattern of urbanisation in India. The analysis of development dynamics in the 1990s shows that there has been an all-round decline in the growth of employment. Income growth and incidence of poverty have been extremely uneven across states. Thus a slowing down in the rate of urbanisation and concentrations of demographic growth in developed states seem to be the logical outcome. The process of urbanisation has also become exclusionary in nature, as only a few large cities with a strong economic base are able to raise resources for development, leaving out small and medium towns.