Not bothered by ITI workers’ plight? One day soon, it could be yours, too

Most people probably do not know about an ongoing sit-in at the Indian Telephone Industries (ITI) Ltd. Protesting workers have been sitting outside their factory gates for nearly 50 days, in the middle of a pandemic. The reasons are not particularly unusual. The ‘contractual’ workers had attempted to unionise to collectively bargain to demand wages for the duration of the previous lockdown, which was seen as an affront by the management, leading to the arbitrary termination of 80 workers. Though they are called contract workers, many of them have been working long term at ITI, some even going back to the early 1990s. This arbitrary layoff is in clear contravention of the Industrial Disputes Act. Despite an intervention from the Regional Labour Commissioner, the management has refused to take the workers back in.

This story has not received much attention from media and the broader civil society. Probably because our attention is too divided to think of 80 workers fired. Their demands seem isolated, or probably way too ubiquitous. The progressive contractualisation of labour has only meant that such arbitrary retrenchments are an everyday reality. In ITI itself, around 250 workers were laid off at the beginning of the lockdown in April 2020.

ITI, one of the biggest Public Sector Undertakings in India, is probably a case in point to see how PSUs have transitioned from shining emblems of technical prowess in the Nehruvian political economy to being considered burdens to the national exchequer. Hit by disinvestment, ITI, along with several other PSUs have gradually moved to contractualised forms of labour. From Voluntary Retirement windows to complete hiring freezes, the strategies have not been very different from one PSU to another. It is also not surprising news that contractualisation has led to a higher concentration of Dalits and women in such precarious jobs. Of the 80 terminated, 40 are Dalits, 50 are women.

As Bengaluru developed into India’s Silicon Valley, with multinational corporations and technology giants setting up shop in the city, the slow, sad demise of PSUs like ITI and HAL got overshadowed by their hubris. The city’s character began to transform. It became a hi-tech city where ‘working classes’ began to seem irrelevant. Though invisibilised, workers’ protests have continued to rock the city every now and then. Bengaluru has been witness to similar struggles erupting, such as in NIMHANS, where several women workers were terminated for demanding safe transport. Foxconn and Toyota Kirloskar have also seen workers’ protests recently. The huge march staged by sanitation workers or the ‘covid warriors’, most of them Dalit women, demanding proper wages and dignity of labour was also barely covered anywhere.

We would be mistaken to understand contractualisation as a ‘working class’ issue alone. It is at the same time a caste and a gender issue. Increasingly, jobs across both public and private sectors are being contractualised, with no safety nets. Doctors, teachers, engineers, software professionals, all of us find ourselves dealing with precarities of work in different ways. But the march of finance capital has also meant a constant demonisation of strikes, dharnas and protests. Strikes and sit-ins are increasingly seen as a hindrance to ‘growth’ and ‘development’, and not a way for workers to secure their rights. Protests have begun to mean unruly hordes of troublemakers. In fact, this imagery of protesting workers as trouble-makers has increasingly been expanded to all social movements. In the recent past, we have seen a similar kind of castigation of both anti-CAA and NRC-related protests and the farmers’ protests, blamed for blocking roads.

Political theorist Wendy Brown writes that the success of neoliberal political rationality lies in producing both a common sense and governance around the criteria of productivity and profitability. This has led to both privatisation of welfare and State services but has more importantly popularised a notion of a privatised and radically depoliticised citizen.

This democratic deficit has been a long time in the making. We see the democratic deficit play out in the suspension of Parliament sessions or through the weakening of institutions, but the most significant victory of neoliberalism has been in generating this new notion of citizenship which allows us to fragment big events from the quotidian struggles of the working classes. As Neerja Jayal Gopal would put it in the Indian context, it encourages us to see ourselves as clients of the State rather than citizens with rights. To my mind, the central problem is that while neoliberalism and finance capital have always feared collectives and strikes of any kind, civil society has come to embody this fear and distaste as well. So much so that the pandemic-induced layoffs by big corporations were barely met with any collective public resistance.

It probably may be a good time to rethink the relationship between social movements and public action. In many ways, sit-ins, dharnas, chakka jams are all public forms of protests that demand our attention. But if we are to think of the crisis in democracy today, we cannot de-link it from the ways in which neoliberal politics has in some ways successfully convinced us that ‘legitimate’ political collectives can only be of a particular, de-politicised kind.

It is crucial to not think of ITI workers, the Swiggy and Zomato delivery partners, Anganwadi workers, even software professionals who faced salary cuts and lost jobs due to the pandemic as separate entities, but to see them all as part of the same continuum of exploitative working conditions. And maybe, it is these ongoing struggles for social justice that go on to teach us a thing or two about the future that we should build together.

(The writer teaches Political Science at National Law School, Bengaluru)