BSNLEU and BSNL Casual and Contract Workers Federation are making all efforts to organise the casual and contract workers in India. In this connection I am reproducing some excerpts from the speech of Comrade Prakash Karat in a seminar recently.
” In our country we have had economic growth for the last one-and-half to two decades after liberalisation. That economic growth has been of benefit to the big capitalists, the big corporates, the foreign multinationals and the urban and rural rich – only they have benefited.
So India can now boast of the highest rate of billionaires. Today there are 55 billionaires in India, and one billionaire means somebody having at least Rs. 5,000 crores of property. So you have 55 people in India owning one lakh crores or two lakh crores in property and assets. So we can claim that we have increased the number of billionaires in India; that is one product of liberalisation.
On the other hand, class exploitation of the working people has increased. I have the latest figures, which show that in the 1980s, before liberalisation, the total share of profits as part of the net value added was lower than the share of wages. The total share of wages, which was there in the value produced was more than the share of profits, share of profit was only 20 % of the net value. In 1990, the first decade of liberalisation for the first time the share of profits was more than the share of wages; it went up to 30 %. And now, from 2001 to 2008, the profits share has gone up to 60 percent. From 20% in 1980s, it has now reached 60%. The share of wages has come down accordingly.
This is the rate of exploitation and this is a challenge we are facing. Neo-liberal policies, have created new types of exploitations and new differentiations among the working people. When we talk about the working class, today everybody knows 86 % of the working people are in the unorganised sector – either contractual, casual or self-employed people. The Arjun Sengupta Commission’s report gave those statistics.
Now this section which is not there in the organised sector, they are the most exploited by neo-liberal capitalism. Neo-liberal economics and capitalism creates a section of the working class which is outside the sphere of any protection, outside the sphere of any legislation or labour laws. They have no income security, no job security, no social security. Now this has become the bulk of your working class today and it is up to us to organise them.
This is the first challenge – under neo-liberal capitalism, to organise the working people, the bulk of whom are not in the organised sector, who are subject to the most ruthless exploitation. For them there is no question of protecting their social security benefits because they never had those benefits.
Organising them by trade unions, bringing them into the fold of the organisational movement – this is a big task before us. Because of the nature of this employment because it a scattered, because it is casual, because it is precarious – the jobs that they have – we have to find ways to organise them and bring them into the working class movement.
The earlier we do it, the more effectively we can fight these neo-liberal policies. We cannot do it with organising the workers in the organised sector alone. Of course we have to organise the working classes in the organised sector, but this large section of people who are today in various forms of contractual and casual work and who are not easily brought under the purview of the benefits are rights legally there for workers, how do we organise them? This is going to be the major issue for us in the coming days.
Here there are some positive developments. For the first time the central trade unions in our country, ranging from the INTUC to the BMS including the CITU, AITUC, Hind Mazdoor Sabha – all these trade unions have for the first time forged a joint platform. There was a general strike in September 2010, in which INTUC participated but BMS did not participate. Now we are going to have a strike in February 28 in which all trade unions have given the call jointly. One of the demands of that platform and that strike is exactly this demand to protect the rights of this contractual labour, to end this contractualisation of labour this process of casualisation of labour.
This is a movement not only in India, you go to any capitalist country in the world today, go to Japan, go to Germany, go to the United States – the working class is fighting against this major attack on its livelihood and their rights by this contractualisation and casualisation of labour. And this applies not only to industrial workers, it applies to all sections – service sector workers, etc.
This fight against neo-liberal policies and neo-liberal capitalism requires first of all this major urgent task of bringing into the organised movement all these sections of the working people.”
I think this is what we have to do for the Casual and Contract workers in BSNL.
