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Unorganised Workers of Delhi and the Seven Day

 Strike of 1988

Indrani Mazumdar

Introduction         

Delhi has never been considered significant in the history of labour or its movements. And yet below the surface of documented history, the city has been one of the most powerful magnets for migrant labour in independent India. Periodically, a hue and cry is raised by the vocally and politically dominant sections of the middle class in the city about the dirt and filth spread by the poorer sections of the city and their consumption of the amenities of the capital. But the lives of this vast mass of workers, who are today numerically dominant, are mostly unrecorded even in the statistics of the administration.

In 1988, Delhi was the site of a major 7-day strike of industrial workers, whose spread far outstripped the strength of the unions that had given the call. The magnitude and duration of the strike set it apart from other similar industrial actions of preceding and later years.  It’s scale and impact may be gauged from the fact that it forced the government to bring about a major revision of minimum wages in Delhi, and introduce the variable dearness allowance (VDA) within the minimum wages. As a result, Delhi has among the highest minimum wage rates in the country today.

Apart from its sweep and scale, its electrifying effect on the industrial workers, and its impact on the administration, the 7-day strike was unprecedented, due to the fact that perhaps for the first time in the country workers in the small scale sector banded together across industries in a protracted struggle to, by force, raise the fundamental issues of the unorganised among them, and fairly succeeded in wresting major concessions. It roused many in the otherwise somnolent middle-class of Delhi to come in support of the struggle, including white collared employees, teachers, students, artistes, etc.  It subsequently inspired several strike struggles all over the country and also brought into focus the conditions obtaining in the small scale and unorganised sector – both for trade unions as well as labour bureaucrats. One of its special features was the active participation of women, drawn not from the factory floor level, but from the working class bastis by new generation women’s organisation.

The reasons why documentation of a significant event like the 7-day strike is necessary need not be emphasised. Delhi was never a major industrial centre – its industrial workforce largely comprised, and was led by, the textile workers’ movement for decades. However, even as the textile industry slowly declined and its workers fought ever more desperate battles to survive, a steady growth in the small-scale sector was occurring which turned into a veritable explosion by the end of the seventies. Drawing upon, and often actively fuelled by, powerful political patronage which permeates even the interstices of this vast city, entrepreneurs flocked to the capital to avail of the multiple benefits of cheap infrastructure, concessional taxation and access to a huge market (in the city as well as with most of north India, through trade). Delhi, it must be remembered was also home to a gigantic bureaucracy and the biggest wholesale trade centre in north India for several goods. This lodestone attracted immiserised peasants from all quarters who sought, and often found, some kind of gainful employment, some relief from the harsh realities of the rural hinterland. These immigrants, willing to work for nothing, for they had nothing to lose, provided the cheap labour on which the industrial boom flourished. Industrial activity was always on the fringes of legality – it violated land use laws, stole power, bribed its way through tax authorities and, needless to say violated labour laws. The workers were scattered in small units, and lived in either jhuggies, resettlement colonies or in kacchi (unauthorised) colonies. Inevitably the need for space in a city where their existence remained unrecognised by planners, brought about links with political overlords and practices which led them into the grey world of illegality. Aliens in a strange land, they adapted to the new urban order through a quiescent acceptance of their domination by oppressive class and caste practices and subhuman living conditions. The story of the 7-day strike is the story of the first major outbreak against such domination, where the call of a small political force led to a spontaneous upsurge of mass anger.

Embedded in this larger picture, there lie thousands of almost identical tales of individual workers or for that matter individual factories which upon scrutiny, reveal in shocking vividness, the sweated conditions of industrial workers, and the shifting continuum between industrial work and the multifarious uses that the metropolis can put any cheap labour to - in the form of informal relations. It was only a fraction which ended up in secure jobs with minimal facilities in the medium sized factories.

All that was required to ignite this tinder-box was to convince the workers that something could be done about the key issue of wages and organise/direct the anger. In other words, sustained propaganda by an apparently powerful organisation, and militant picketing at crucial points – led to a spectacular response and a memorable upsurge. Related to and feeding into such events and experiences lies the context – the growth and characteristics of the giant metropolis of Delhi, the ascribed and actual part played by labour in this process, the domination of unorganised employment relations in modern organised production, the interweave of the economic, political and  administrative processes which shaped the lives of workers, and the impelling course of the trade union movement in determining the form and characteristics of the industrial action observed in the 7-day strike.

The strike itself was called for by only one of the central trade unions, the CITU, with all other major unions either opposing or distancing themselves from the call. And yet, it remains the most widespread and sweeping action of the industrial workers of the capital city. How was it that but a small force and a minority contingent of the organised trade union movement was able to ignite the unorganised industrial workers across Delhi in the teeth of opposition from within and without? What were the conditions that led to such an explosive outbreak of mass anger upon which the scale of the strike was necessarily predicated? What were the methods by which this anger of an essentially migrant and unorganised workforce was harnessed into industrial action? What were the compulsions that forced the administration to concede the workers’ demands, if only partially? This is not merely a matter of historical curiosity alone, but also of relevance to the future where globalised industrial policy is increasingly taking recourse to informal and semi-formal relations in order to break working class unity and disempower the organisation of labour.

In documenting the events that led to this historic strike, and outlining its course in industrial areas in north, south, east and west Delhi, this study attempts to arrive at some answers to the above questions. Through recording and recovering  the experiences of participants in this struggle, it also seeks to observe and describe the life processes and experiences of individuals and communities within the metropolitan working class of Delhi, stretching beyond the events to probe into recesses of social and economic conditions and subjective processes that often remain hidden from recorded history.

Unorganised small scale industrial workers

It should be clear at the outset that the section of unorganised workers that form the subject of this report are those who work in the small scale industries in Delhi. Although, the shifting nature of the forms of work that characterises the lives of urban unorganised workers  has emerged in many of the interviews, the focus has remained on industrial workers. For, the seven day strike took place in the industrial estates of Delhi, each of which houses hundreds of factories. Why and how this section of workers are termed unorganised, is based, not just on their exclusion from the regulating force of labour laws, but also the economic and social and even political relations that generate unorganised conditions and relations of employment.

Casual, contract or even regular but unprotected and impermanent conditions are the common characteristics of small scale industrial workers. In an era when we are witnessing the dismantling of many of the protective structures for labour, and the reintroduction of unregulated employer-employee relations in the regulated centres as well, it has become increasingly necessary to understand the dynamics of unorganised and informal relations of production, and from within the trade union movement evolve practices which will strengthen the organisation of labour. For such purposes, the method of clubbing all forms of unorganised work within a single omnibus category of the informal sector, has proved to be of little use to workers themselves, since it rarely, if ever, addresses the concrete nature or form of class exploitation which dominates their lives. Implicit in the failure to do so, is the absence of the necessary slogans and demands around which workers can be organised in movement towards eradication of the worst forms of exploitation and becoming greater masters of their own destiny.

As emerges in the story of the seven day strike, other atomised members of the family of workers in the city of Delhi, including those who work outside direct industrial production, are magnetically drawn to the power of mass industrial action. For in such industrial action can be seen an assertion of working class power that offers inspiration to others. Action through which, the abject subjugation that they all suffer at the hands of the rich and powerful, can be demonstrably and dramatically reversed, even if temporarily. This only highlights the potentialities of industrial workers and industrial action in advancing the struggles of other sections of urban unorganised labour, and therefore, the need to pay specific attention to industrial, yet unorganised labour.

Methodology

Much of the methodology involved in collecting the material for the archival submission and preparing the report suggested itself from the objectives outlined above. There was an advantage in addressing an event of only a little more than a decade past. Many of those involved, who organised or participated were accessible in the city, and the rich resource of their memories and observations was therefore available. These have been recorded through a series of taped interviews which include those of workers who worked, participated or saw the strike in a number of industrial areas, namely Wazirpur and GT Karnal Road areas in north Delhi, Mayapuri in west Delhi, Okhla  in south Delhi, and Shahdara-Jhilmil-Friends Colony located east of the river.

The interviews themselves, were not confined to the events of the strike alone, but were also directed towards eliciting information and observations about the individual lives and experiences of the workers. This was done in order to achieve insight into the various objective and subjective processes that shaped the social and economic relations within which the unorganised workers of Delhi live and work. Generally the interviews begin with their backgrounds, and move through the process of entry into Delhi, towards the nature of their working and living conditions and the various changes experienced therein. Through this pathway, their experiences in the strike were approached. The interviews themselves, thus open up avenues of investigation and interpretation, of which only a few are touched upon in this report.

The seven day strike was not and could not be a purely spontaneous action of a leaderless mass, although the spontaneity of the upsurge of workers marked its every step. Both its protracted nature and sweep across industrial areas, required planning and organisation. Successful documentation of the strike and its various threads, therefore, required collection of material from the organisers and leaders of the strike and their perceptions as well. Here too, interviews formed a preliminary basis of acquiring information at various levels. Interviews of the leaders of the  CITU and other organisations involved in the strike, at the state and local level have been recorded as part of the oral record. However, this oral record forms only one aspect of the documentation process, and written documents, published and unpublished have been collated, which provide many forgotten details, correct faltering and even sometimes confused memories. Unexpectedly, for so recent an event, much has been lost. Many of the filed leaflets, posters, press releases, etc., were found to have been destroyed by damp and termites. However, detailed minutes of important committees that planned, implemented, and reviewed the strike, at the state and local level were available and constitute one of the most valuable elements of the record of the strike. At the same time, newspaper reports, provided the frame of events during the actual course of the strike.

One of the problems of even the written records is the fact that many of the important characters involved are unknown, their backgrounds and positions shrouded in obscurity. While personal  knowledge of many of them has obviously been an important aid to understanding, referencing and contextualising statements and records, life stories of a few were also recorded in archival interviews. It requires some mention here, that such personal knowledge and, perhaps a certain experience of association and comradeship with them, gave access to many of the workers interviewed and laid the ground of trust for a degree of informal frankness. Similar knowledge, as well as cross checking with both people and written records provided the basis for discounting (in the report) some of the mythification of events, the mixed up memories and observations that are but natural.

In the writing of the report, some of the  descriptions, particularly in relation to the form of the strike, are also perhaps influenced by personal observation and experience as a mass worker and participant in the strike action. But this has played a limited role, as research of the minutes of the committees and the various interviews revealed so much that was unknown to me. Generally, field participants in such actions have a view of only one slice of the events, and it is only when all the various pieces are put together that the larger picture and even the complete storyline becomes clear. For the record, it must be stated that the story of the preparations for the strike, its background, and the course of events as outlined in the report, emerged from the written and oral documentation, and it is only in the case of the description of the strike in Mayapuri, that one’s own personal memories were also drawn upon. However, general familiarity with the organisational structures, practices and even individuals involved, no doubt, made perusal and understanding of the various documents much simpler than would perhaps be the case for a complete outsider.

The study outline

The study report begins with on overview of the part played by workers in the making of the modern day metropolis that is Delhi (Ch 1). The scale of migration, the nature and development of industry, the information on the settlements of workers, and the changing contours of the city, have primarily been drawn from secondary sources. But many of the generalised descriptions of the working and living condiitions of workers, the analysis of paths traversed by them individually and as a class, and some of the related political processes, have been culled out from the interviews. Such an overview was considered essential in order to understand the background objective conditions in which the strike took place.

The overview is followed by a brief account of the trade union context (Ch 2), foregrounding the continuities of experience of militant action, the emergence of the key demands of the strike in the united trade union movement, the breakdown of this unity and the forerunner of the seven day strike—the CITU’s 72 hour strike of 1987. This chapter is the outcome of attempts to trace the roots of the experience and imagination that propelled the form of action observed in the seven day strike. From interviews with senior trade union leaders, links were discovered between organised and unorganised workers, between movements of textile and engineering workers, stretching back to the period before the emergency of 1975-77, and are outlined in the report. Similarly, the breakdown of trade union unity on the question of protracted strike in 1987, and the experience of the CITU in independently organising the 72 hour strike, have been looked at to gain insight into some of the subjective trade union processes. The focus here, is on those processes involved in the development of new organisational strategies and tactics of working class action, required by the emerging dominance of unorganised small scale industries in the city of Delhi. The archival interviews, minutes of joint trade union meetings and conventions, reports and minutes of CITU conferences and committees provided the principal sources for this chapter.

The report on the seven day strike itself has been divided into two chapters. The first (Ch 3), details the various preparations for the strike. It describes the manner of the decision to give the call for the strike, the campaign details, the involvement of sections other than the trade union, the forging of a broad front of workers’ and other mass organisations, and also looks at the various internal processes and discussions among the organisers. These aspects have been principally derived from the written archival documents collected of minutes of various committees of the CITU and the CPI(M). The minutes themselves provided rich details of the internal discussions among the organisers of the strike, and were a most important source for comprehension of the process by which a small organisational force was able to engage with the task of implementing such a widespread strike.

The following chapter (Ch 4), addresses the events as they unfolded during the seven days of the strike in five industrial areas. Here, the chronological frame has been primarily drawn from the newsaper reports of the time. But both the generalised and particular descriptions of the strike and  its form have emerged from the experiences of the participants. Within the common experience of overwhelming participation of the mass of workers, there were uneven levels of the strike in the different industrial areas. Clashes with the police which marked the strike in Wazirpur, GTK Road and Mayapuri, were not a feature in Shahdara-Jhilmil and Okhla. Similarly, the extent of actual strike varied from 90% in Wazirpur and GT Road to 25-30% in Mayapuri. These have emerged from newspaper reports, interviews as well as the internal organisational reviews of the strike, and the day to day course of events in select industrial areas have been described. This chapter also includes the public record of reactions to the strike, and some of the events in the aftermath.

In the concluding chapter (Ch 5) of the study, an attempt has been made to look back at the events from the context of the present situation and analyse some of the more longterm and wider trajectories and implications of the seven day strike.

Ultimately, this is the story of a strike. Of a strike of unorganised workers. Not just a formal strike as a tactic of the negotiating table. Not just a token strike. But a more widespread, protracted, bitter and more realised strike. The hows, whys and wherefores as much as the whos and the whens are, in the final analysis, the background of a universal story. It is not a new story. It is not a unique story. But it must be told again and again for any of us to comprehend its meaning for and in the life of a worker.   

Chapter 1 : Workers in the making of the Metropolis

In its spectacular leaps in population since 1941, Delhi is known to have outpaced all million plus cities in India. From somewhat more than 9 lakhs in 1941, the population almost doubled at over 17 lakhs by 1951 and thereafter continued to maintain a decennial growth of over 50%. In 1991, the population in Delhi stood at over 94 lakhs. Within these bare statistics is represented the lives and aspirations of lakhs of people who have been drawn to the capital by its promise of infinite advantages, for economic and social advance.

Table 1: Decennial rate of growth in Delhi’s population  

ource: Delhi Statistical Handbook, 1999, Bureau of Economics &  Statistics, Govt. of the National Capital Territory of Delhi

Generally, accounts of the making of Delhi in independent India have, no doubt  legitimately, focussed on the huge influx of Punjabi refugees during partition, their fortitude, enterprise and role in the economic development of the city. And yet, alongside the official refugees, for whose rehabilitation five arms of the Government [Ministries of (i) Rehabilitation, (ii)Works, Housing and Supply, (iii) Railways, (iv) Defence and (v) Health], and the local municipal authorities  went to work, there was a parallel and expanding movement of non-refugee migrant workers who also contributed to the broadening and diversifying of a labour force base necessary for such development.

Along with their refugee brethren, these migrant workers too displayed fortitude, resilience and enterprise, if of a somewhat different order. They too were making a transition from their earlier, traditional occupations and living patterns in movement towards the construction of a metropolitan working class. Unlike the refugees who were predominantly of urban origin (95%)[1], the majority of the migrant workers came from rural backgrounds. For them, there were no arrangements for settlement, and no organs of Government working for the establishment of their place in the metropolis. And while the root causes for their influx may be located in the continued process of  agrarian immiserisation in independent India, the myriad tales of their adaptation to and survival in the capital also encapsulate ambitions and aspirations for social advance beyond the realm of the purely economic. By the 1980s, the sheer numerical dominance of these migrants began to determine the electoral fortunes of the dominant political parties of the capital city.

Among the migrant workers who entered the city in ever swelling waves, (4.45 lakhs in 1951-61, 5.25 in 1961-71, and 12.29 in 1971-81, and over 19 lakhs in 1981-91)[2], a significant feature has been the  drawing in of the most socially oppressed sections. This is evidenced from the rising proportion of dalits or those belonging to the scheduled castes in the population of Delhi, from an initial 12% in 1951 to 19% in 1991. Yet another feature has been the increasing number of women representing the settling down process through which male migrant workers have brought in their families to become an intrinsic part of the people of the capital city. Many of these women were to enter the labour force of the capital, in forms of work that would have been unacceptable to them in their native areas.

Table 2: Decennial growth and % of SC population, and sex ratio in Delhi  

Source: Census Hand Book, 1991.

The process of migration into the capital began even prior to independence, from the decade 1931-41, during which the  population increase of about 5 lakhs was double that of the preceding three decades taken together. Came partition, and, within a few years, displaced Hindu refugees (more than 4.5 lakhs) flooded into the capital. Prior to 1951, Delhi drew its labour force mostly from the adjoining districts  of Gurgaon, Rohtak, Bulandshahr and Meerut,[3] but in the years that followed, migrants have entered the city from a widening radius, but ever dominated by the vast Hindi heartland of the country.[4] The state of Uttar Pradesh, consistently provided the largest contingent of migrants into Delhi constituting 41% of all migrants before 1961 and rising to 50% in the decade 1971-81[5]. However, the fact is that within U.P., the cultural divide between the east and the west is considerable, with the purabiyas (easterners) often being clubbed with Biharis in the perception of the westerners. Unfortunately, the distribution of migrants according to district of origin is not available. But there can be little doubt that from 1961 onwards, significantly increasing numbers of purabiyas and later Biharis have been coming in to Delhi.

Development of Industry and its workers

Unlike Bombay and Calcutta which grew largely on account of their industrial development, Delhi emerged first as an administrative city. Nevertheless, taking off from its location as a commercial and trade centre with access to an expanding internal and external market, industry grew rapidly. But whereas in Bombay and Calcutta, the industrial structure was dominated by large industries, industrial development in Delhi has been dominated by numerous small units. In fact, the setting up of large scale and heavy industries in Delhi was ruled out by the Master Plan for Delhi adopted in 1962.

 By the end of the ‘60s, Delhi had “emerged as the single biggest centre of concentration of small scale industries in the country” with  the small scale industries constituting 99.2% of the number, 76.3% of the employment, 53.50% of the investment and 55.62% of the production of all industries in the capital.[6]  In the same period, there were only 65 large scale industrial establishments which employed about 45,044 workers (in1969). Of these workers, the five textile mills of DCM, DCM Silk, Swatantra Bharat, Ajudhia and Birla Mills alone accounted for over 22,000[7]. It was the textile workers of these mills who laid the foundations of the trade union movement among the industrial workers in Delhi and who  served as a beacon of inspiration for the organisation of workers in the small scale industries as well.

Given the fact that small scale industries were so designated, solely on the basis of an upper ceiling on investment in plant and machinery[8], it is by no means true that all of them had small numbers of workers. For, at a time when designated large scale units such as Delhi Flour Mills employed about 250 workers[9] some of the units designated small scale industries employed up to 500 workers. Thus, the 1969 census of industrial units recorded 388 industrial units (of which only 65 were large scale) having more than 50 workers per unit, with 216 of them having more than 100 per unit.

Despite the existence of  a significant number of medium sized units in the small scale sector, it remains a fact that the vast majority of factories that came up even in organised industrial estates employed less than 30 workers. By 1988, an industrial survey revealed that about 30% of all industrial units in Delhi employed 4 workers or less[10]. This  is additionally confirmed by the three Economic Censuses of 1977, 1980 and 1990. It was this sea of units with small numbers of workers that eluded registration with the Factories’ Inspectorate, which accustomed  many workers towards the acceptance of the domination of unregulated, non-formal or informal employer-employee relations in Delhi’s  industrial scenario.

The number of industrial units in Delhi grew from 8,160 employing some 95,137 workers in 1951 to 26,000 employing  2.91 lakh workers in 1970-71. In the following decade, the number of industries jumped to 42,000 (by 1981), registering an increase of 16,000 industries, and then a further increase of 23,000 bringing their number to over 76,000 by 1988[11]. Various rounds of the NSSO survey also indicate that about 25% of the workers in Delhi were engaged in the manufacturing sector between 1977-78 and 1991-92. While not wishing to dwell on what are known to be unreliable statistics, nevertheless, they have been introduced here in order to show the explosive increase in the number of industries effected between 1971 and 1988 (39,000 in 18 years), the year of the strike. Through the seventies and eighties, these industrial units were spread all over the city, in 20 officially constituted industrial estates, as also in many other areas, predominating in 37 industrial areas, termed non conforming on the basis of the land use mapped by the Master Plan for Delhi. Most of the official industrial areas came up during and the period following the emergency.

Table 3: Growth of Industrial Sector in Delhi, 1951-91