This week we are observing the first international workers' day, or May Day, since the April 1 imposition of the Modi government’s new labour codes. Instead of elevating the quality of labour rights and expanding their applicability, and improving compliance with labour laws, the new codes are subjecting vast sections of India's workers to a veritable corporate jungle raj, a state-enforced dictatorship of employers. The eight-hour work day is no longer a universal right, in the era of contractual work and the gig economy it is now increasingly a luxury. Extended work hours do not bring any overtime payment, they simply mean overexploitation. Unionisation is now more difficult than ever, collective bargaining power is vastly eroded, while employers can issue arbitrary exit orders to employees with even greater ease.
The enforcement of these new codes of slavery coincided with a period of sudden economic crisis and disruption caused by the US-Israel war on Iran. Hit hard by the fuel crisis, many enterprises have started scaling down or even shutting up shop. Migrant workers are once again being forced to return from states like Gujarat and Maharashtra to their homes in UP, Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand and West Bengal. Massive protests of contract workers are erupting in the NCR region and in industrial centres across India demanding urgent increase in wages. It is not difficult to understand why the extremely underpaid and insecure workers in the NCR region are now having to fight for sheer survival, but for the 'double engine' Modi-Yogi dispensation of UP the workers' protests are an 'anti-national conspiracy'! Activists taking up the workers' cause are being framed and arrested as 'masterminds' who are allegedly instigating workers and defaming India. While the government did not dare to unleash brutal repression on the farmers' movement it is trying to crush workers' protests by applying brute force.
It took the international working class decades of determined struggles and great sacrifices to win basic trade union rights and force some semblance of a rules-based order in the brutal world of capitalism which expanded its tentacles worldwide through colonial plunder and imperialist aggression. The eight-hour work day was no civilisational gift from the capitalist order, it was a hard won right achieved through major upheavals, sustained struggles and the supreme sacrifice of the Chicago Haymarket martyrs (May 1886). Preceded by the rise of international coordination and solidarity among workers' struggles under the banner of the First International or International Workingmen's Association (1864-1872) directly led by Karl Marx, Frederick Engels and other contemporary socialist pioneers across Europe and America, the Haymarket massacre and execution of worker leaders gave a huge impetus to international working class struggles. By 1889 May Day came to be recognised and celebrated as the international day of workers.
In India too the struggle for an eight hour work day began around the same time. From railways to textile industry, workers started going on strike and forming unions. By 1918 India had the first organised labour union in the form of Madras Labour Union and by 1920, the first national centre emerged under banner of the All India Trade Union Congress. The labour laws that took shape against this backdrop - from the 1881 Factories Act to the 1923 Workmen's Compensation Act and 1926 Trade Unions Act - were also influenced by this growing organisation and assertion of the working class. The process acquired added momentum in the 1930s and 1940s with the rise of the Communist Party, Ambedkar's Independent Labour Party as well as a powerful left socialist stream within and around the Congress.
With the imposition of the new labour codes and intensification of anti-worker repression and anti-communist witch hunt, the Modi government is trying to undo the historic gains made by the Indian working class movement. Revolutionary communists must foil this design by drawing the growing struggles of contract workers and various segments of the working class, especially youth and women workers, into a powerful political current and forging closer organic solidarity involving farmers, students and workers. Like the collaboration between Hindutva communalism and British colonialism in the pre-independence phase, the pro-imperialist character of the Indian fascists today once again stands blatantly exposed with the Modi government and the RSS caught red handed in their serial acts of capitulation to and collusion with the US-Israel axis. The fight for workers' rights must grow into a decisive strand of anti-fascist anti-imperialist resistance and take India ahead in this new phase of the freedom movement.
