LOVE THY LABOUR

Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.” This rallying cry of the ‘Communist Manifesto’ is credited with spawning not only the Russian and Chinese Revolutions but also a whole host of regimes claiming adherence to numerous shades of ‘socialist’ doctrine. In India, the 42nd Constitutional Amendment of 1976 added the word ‘Socialist’ to the Preamble.

History however has generally been less than kind to socialist movements the world over. The erstwhile USSR fragmented into a number of independent nations while the Warsaw Pact of the East European communist states was dissolved by 1991. Post-Mao China saw the advent of free enterprise with Deng Xiao Ping’s ‘Socialist Market Economy’ of 1978. In South East Asia and Latin America also, ‘socialist’ regimes accommodated capitalist enterprise. ‘Capital’ and ‘Enterprise’ have been ascendant and ‘Labour’ on the backfoot thereafter. What happened?

Many analysts ascribe this trend to a commonsense axiom – scarcity imbues value. Capital is scarce; don’t most of us know it? As for that rarity, ‘enterprise’, that collective concoction of risk-taking and innovation which seeks to realise or exploit a thought or idea, we all know the familiar adage, - no force on earth can stop an idea whose time has come. The time had come for socialism in the last century, now it seems to be the turn of capital and enterprise. Labour’s majority, seen earlier as a strength, has turned out to be its greatest vulnerability. ‘Ease of doing business’ practices the world over have made the movement of capital and enterprise easier, while labour, residing in large traditional location-bound communities, remains largely immobile. In any bargaining between the two therefore, labour strategically remains the underdog as inability to strike a profitable deal at one location often leads to the flight of capital and enterprise to another location with more salubrious circumstances.

The dizzying pace of mergers and acquisitions, (M&A), in contemporary business practice, coupled with nation states and regions competing with each other to offer ever more attractive conditions for capital and enterprise to flourish, reinforces this strategic imbalance. If you can’t set up in Singur in West Bengal, set up in Sanand Gujarat. Shut down your existing plant where there are labour problems and migrate elsewhere, internationally, if need be. Declare bankruptcy in one enterprise with an eye to an opening somewhere else, perhaps through the M&A route using different business entities; the possibilities are seemingly endless. How does labour, bound to its local roots compete?

Legislative and judicial dispensations have also cemented this imbalance in bargaining strength. To take one example, the ambit allowed to the word ‘industry’ under the erstwhile Industrial Disputes Act of 1947 by our Supreme Court, (SC), was an expansive one. Workplaces like hospitals, universities, trusts and charitable institutions and even some government departments were included. Parliament reacted to this with an Industrial Disputes (Amendment) Act, (1982), seeking to exclude, among others, hospitals, educational and research institutions, charitable and philanthropic bodies and certain governmental activities. This law was never notified and remained a dead letter, perhaps a reflection of the spirit of the times. The newly enacted Industrial Relations Code, (IRC) 2020 again specifically excludes charitable and philanthropic institutions, domestic services and certain governmental functions from the protective ambit of ‘industry’. It bears mention in this context that in a recent pronouncement, the SC, while ruling that presently pending disputes will continue to be adjudicated under the now superseded 1947 law, decreed that in future disputes, the presently applicable IRC 2020 will have to be interpreted independently as per its own text. Ardent advocates of greater rights for labour understandably see this as opening the gates for removing a large number of activities from the protective fold of ‘industry’. Only time will tell if their worst fears are realised.

Meanwhile, the advent of new manufacturing and service technologies continues to exacerbate ‘Labour’s’ bargaining disadvantage further. Earlier, skilled craftsmanship, always a rarity, would command better returns for its services to capital enterprise, but with the introduction of automation in almost the complete range of manufacturing and routine service enterprise, this limited bargaining leverage has all but disappeared. Automated processes usually achieve the multiple goals of uniform quality coupled with the high productivity of continuous operations unaffected by human relations. No wonder, even ‘skilled’ personnel are but a poor substitute!

There was a time, not so long ago, when many people believed that the ‘thinking’ professions would survive the onslaught of automation. The whirlwind entry of ‘Big Data Analytics’, (BDA), and Artificial Intelligence, (AI), have shattered this illusion. It now appears clear that at least the more routine descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and even prescriptive functions of ‘thinking’ humans can be very efficiently performed by BDA and AI systems which will need very few humans to run them. A recent BBC vlog succintly describes how the ‘great resignation trend’ of 2020 amongst the relatively better-placed Western labour force has transformed into a ‘great hunkering down’. For all ‘Labour’, unskilled , skilled and ‘thinking’, it’s ‘slim pickings’ when it comes to jobs.

E.F. Schumacher, in his seminal ‘Small Is Beautiful’, written over fifty years ago, argued that modern society has not solved the ‘problem of production’, moving towards ever greater centralisation and automation accompanied by irredeemable depletion of critical natural resources. He advocated a somewhat utopian philosophy of ‘enoughness’ in which appropriate technologies could be used for self-sustaining decentralised production while retaining the dignity of labour. Periodic Gallup polls in the West have repeatedly established that around 70% of those surveyed feel the need to work even if they don’t have to, for economic reasons. There is also no dearth of anecdotal evidence that periods of ‘labour-distress’ often lead to social disturbance, including spikes in criminal activity. The ‘costcutting’ of automation is set at nought once the incalculable cost of losing the social stability underpinning industry and enterprise is considered. For this reason, if nothing else, the leadership of our polity needs to remember the dictum – ‘Love Thy Labour’.

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY THE AUTHOR ARE PERSONAL

Anirban Mukhopadhaya, Retd. IAS officer