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ICCTU held a workshop on ‘Organizing Unorganized Workers’ in Chennai on 06.07.03. Working class vanguards from Chennai, Kanchipuram and Thiruvallore districts participated in the workshop. At the workshop Comrade B Sivaraman presented a paper on ‘The crisis in the trade union movement and how to overcome it’, followed by a discussion of the issue by the participants.

It was stressed that it is important to understand capitalist restructuring in order to confront it. While adopting certain tactics in today’s TU movement to escape the blows of LPG(liberalization, privatization, globalisation) or to mitigate its effects, it is all the more important to draw a strategy to beat back LPG, to defeat capitalism itself. Capitalist restructuring has led to a massive growth of unorganized workers, on the one hand by employing capital in newer industries and by restructuring production on the other. In India it is cheap labor that forms the main source for increased profit rates and it is exploited thoroughly. Thus in these globalized days, unorganized labour is not a fringe phenomenon, but the emerging mainstream one. The ruling class has no option but to appease this mainstream section of today’s working class, and SNLC and the Unorganized Workers Bill, 2003 are some moves in this direction. But these moves of the ruling class provide enormous scope for the TU movement to expose the empty promises of SNLC and the betrayal of Unorganized Workers Bill, 2003. The workshop discussed the challenges in organizing unorganized workers, which call for a departure from the institutionalized ways of TU functioning and demand a change in work style and methods of organizing.

On the basis of discussions on the above mentioned aspects, certain concrete proposals were made.

In Ambattur, a Workers’ Rights Movement will be launched on August 15, in a pledge-taking meeting of the workers,along with a proclamation of ‘Charter of the Toiling Masses’. Organisers will focus on the living areas of the workers, and the emphasis will be on forming ward level committees and branches. The membership target will be 10,000, and a signature campaign with a target of 50,000 will be taken up on the ‘Charter of the Toiling Masses’. Stuggles will be organized not only against the government but also against AIEMA(Ambattur Indusrial Estate Manufacturers’ Association). A conference on the demands on unorganized workers will be held.

Of Chennai’s 1 lakh hotel workers, only 5,000 are unionized. A campaign among the hotel workers who are outside TU will be taken up by our vanguards the hotel sector. Campaigns to organize construction workers have also been planned.

— Bhuvana