Wages

Using primary and secondary data this paper shows that the origins of the phenomenon of independent unionism in the Bombay mill industry were embedded in the dynamics of technological transformation within the industry as well as in the struggles of the workers at the mill level over time. The evolution of both the structure of collective negotiations and the structure of textile unionism occurs simultaneously. Thus not only does the bargaining structure result from prior union-management negotiations and varying capital intensities within firms in an industry, but the type of unionism is transformed during these processes. Examining the opposing forces of the law in preserving the status quo in the form of the BIR Act and the role of the 1982 strike in breaking down the state-imposed industry-wide bargaining structure in the industry, it is observed that the strike was partially successful.

It was in 1946 that Bombay textile workers won the right to a minimum wage for the whole industry, a wage that was supposed to be related to the needs of a worker (rather, of the worker's family) and not to the capitalists so-called capacity to pay. The 1946 Award based the minimum wage on the diet recommendation of Dr Aykroyd, the then Director of the Nutrition Research Laboratories at Coonoor, which laid down a minimum daily intake of 2.600 calorics for an adult working six hours in India. Even at that time this recommendation was regarded as being too low. Given that (he League of Nations Nutrition Commission had recommended 2,400 calories the energy requirement for basic diet (i e, without work) for workers in temperate countries and 75 calories per hour of moderate work, 3,000 calories would be the requirement for eight hours of moderate work. 

Textile unionism has been, like unionism in the railways and coal mines in India, industrial unionism, characterised by long drawn out general strikes. Today, as Bombay textile workers have entered into a seemingly indefinite strike, they do so in the context of fundamental changes which have occurred in the last 20 years in the industry; changes which could transform the nature of textile unionism. From the 1918 general strike, which covered 80 mills and involved one lakh and forty thousand workers, up to the present, Bombay textile workers have launched industrial actions which have drawn together workers from the whole industry. These strikes have thrown up different forms of organisations like the Girni Kamgar Union and the mill committees; which were formed as a result of the general strikes of 1924-25 and the six-month long struggle of 1928. These represented the coalescence of two tendencies

In recent months several industrialists and economists have been trying to persuade us that organised industrial labour is the new privileged class in the country. Relative to unorganised labour, rural and urban, and given the level of industrial wages, permanence of employment and dearness allowance pegged to the price index, this would seem to be so.

The sudden sparking off of what has been described as the Bonus War in the Bombay cotton textile industry took by surprise not only the management but also th e INTUC-affiliated Rashtriya Mill Mazdoor Sangh which is the representative union of textile workers in Bombay under the law.