Threats To Political Trade Unions And Models Retaining Its Democracy

Aayushi Goyal, BA LLB (Hons), National Law University, Delhi

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the history of trade unions in India and across the world. Political trade unions (PTU) were created with an aim to streamline demands of the workers and to enable them to project their grievances in a systematic and efficient manner. However, with passage of time PTUs became conservative in nature with their approach turning state conforming. It aims to establish the shortcomings of the Political Trade Unions that were the oldest and the most traditional form of Trade Unions which failed its people in its multitude of agendas, hope for political gains and decentralisation of power reducing the members to passive participants. Consequently, Independent political Unions came up that suffered from its own pitfalls like state targeting, state is quick to suppress any new group with stringent recourses that spring up to protest against the State hegemony and the employer’s interest, which is in turn is state’s interest. Hence due to structural weakness, lack of strong leadership and a far-sighted vision, these cannot emerge as an alternative movement to the PTUs. The alternate movement, as seen in the case of South Africa, needs the structure and the backing of a PTU and the grassroot level action of the independent trade union. Structural amendments must be made to accommodate such a system of trade unionism. A labour court parallel to the Supreme Court is also essential to the labour rights discourse.