Massive worker participation in three-day India Coal strike
Last week’s three-day strike of Coal India Limited (CIL)
workers had a huge impact on coal production at the Indian government-owned
company, indicating that a large majority of its more than 500,000 regular and
contract workers joined the walkout.
The miners and ancillary workers mounted the walkout—which
ran from Thursday, July 2, through Saturday, July 4—in defiance of management
threats that they would be punished for joining an “illegal” job action. CIL
reportedly deployed large numbers of personnel from the paramilitary Central
Industrial Security Force (CISF) with the double aim of intimidating the
workers and preventing striking permanent workers from persuading precariously
employed contract workers to join them in walking out.
On the first day of the strike, CIL management claimed that
it was having no impact on production. This transparent attempt to demoralise
and confuse the strikers manifestly failed.
Earlier this week, CIL said that during the three-day work
stoppage, average daily production fell by 56 percent to 573,000 tonnes, as
compared with an average daily production of 1.29 million tonnes during the 10
days prior to the strike. A company executive who spoke to India’s Economic
Times stated that lost revenue amounted to at least Rs. 4 billion ($US54
million). In the 2019–2020 fiscal year, CIL’s total revenue was about Rs. 1.24
trillion (US$16 billion). The company accounts for 80 percent of the country’s total
output of coal, which is the primary fuel used in electricity generation in
India.
The company has now also said that there was on average 36
percent worker attendance during the three days of the strike. While
management’s claims should not be taken at face value, given CIL’s previous
lies and obvious interest in understating support for the strike, this would
mean almost two-thirds of the workers were off the job at any time during the
walkout.
The miners were protesting against the latest privatisation
measures of India’s far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government. In
mid-May, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP made a “quantum jump” in
pro-investor “reforms” the centrepiece, alongside forcing workers back-to-work
amid a surging COVID-19 pandemic, of their post-lockdown “economic revival”
plan.
As part of this plan, Indian Finance Minister Nirmala
Sitharaman announced that coal mining, which has been the exclusive preserve of
CIL and other central and state government-owned enterprises since Indira
Gandhi’s Congress party government nationalised the Coal Industry in 1975, will
now be thrown open to private bidders.
Henceforth, private companies, both foreign and domestic,
will be able to bid for coal blocks. In the future, they may even be permitted
to export coal despite India currently importing 20 percent of its coal
requirements, costing about Rs. 300 billion (US$4 billion) annually.
In opening the coal industry to the private sector, the BJP
government is realising a longstanding aim of BJP- and Congress Party-led
governments alike. Last November, Reuters reported that government sources had
said they intend to make coal mining in India attractive for “global miners
such as Glencore PLC, BHP Group, Anglo American PLC and Peabody Energy Corp.”
In announcing the government’s privatisation plans,
Sitharaman said, “We have been suffocating the [coal] sector by regulating it,
and preventing it from producing what is required by industry.” In other words,
the environment and miners’ jobs and working conditions are to be ravaged in
the interests of private profit, while the government justifies the enhanced
exploitation in the name of “efficiency” and “self-sufficiency.”
The strong support for the strike reflects an awareness
among the CIL workers, who already labour under brutal conditions, about the
threat this poses to their jobs and wages, and to the environment.
The entry of giant transnational mining companies will inevitably
herald a further increase in the contractualisation of labour. Already at CIL,
as at most other Indian public sector enterprises, the past two decades have
seen a massive increase in the proportion of lower-paid, precarious contract
workers. Currently, more than 200,000 workers, or some 40 percent of CIL’s
workforce, are supplied by “body shops” or labour agencies
The workers are also opposed to CIL’s plan, adopted under
pressure from the Modi government, to hive off the company’s design, planning
and exploration arm, Central Mine Planning & Design Institute Limited
(CMPDIL), into a separate entity. This move would allow CMPDIL to perform work
for private companies so as to generate profit. It would also pave the way for
CMPDIL’s privatisation and open the door to CIL employing private mining
consultancy companies.
Despite last week’s strike, the BJP government is pushing
full-steam ahead with its plans to open the coal industry to the private
sector. It is currently soliciting bids for the first round of coal-block
sales.
Meanwhile, Mahanadi Coalfields Ltd., CIL’s Odisha-based
subsidiary, has announced it will dock workers who participated in the
“illegal” July 2–4 strike eight days’ pay.
The company and government have been emboldened by the knowledge
that the five trade union federations that called the July 2–4 strike are
adamantly opposed to an indefinite strike that would paralyze electricity
production across the country and, above all, to a working-class political
challenge to the Modi government and to the ruling class agenda of austerity,
privatisation, and a “global comprehensive partnership” with US imperialism
that it is implementing.
Were the coal miners to make their struggle against
privatisation the spearhead of a working-class counter-offensive, there is no
question but they would win mass support. In the months prior to the BJP
government imposing its ill-prepared anti-COVID 19 lockdown, there was a
mounting wave of militant worker struggles and anti-government protests. This included
a one-day all-India general strike against the BJP government’s big business
policies in which tens of millions participated and countrywide mass protests
against the Modi’s anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act.
The pandemic has only intensified the social crisis facing
India’s workers and toilers. The government’s hastily organised lockdown left
tens of millions without jobs or income. Now the government, with the full
backing of the ruling class, is seeking to exploit the crisis to ram through a raft
of socially incendiary anti-worker measures, even as India emerges as one of
the world’s main COVID-19 epicentres.
The five union federations that called last week’s strike
against Coal India include: the Indian National Trades Union Congress (INTUC),
the union affiliate of the Congress Party, till recently the Indian
bourgeoisie’s preferred party of government; and the Centre of Indian Trade
Unions (CITU), the trade union wing of the Stalinist Communist Party of India
(Marxist) or CPM. For decades, the CPM has functioned as an integral part of
the political establishment, supporting and implementing “pro-investor”
policies, while systematically containing and suppressing working class
opposition. It has responded to the Indian ruling elite’s embrace of Modi and
his Hindu supremacist BJP by shifting still further right and redoubling its
efforts to tie the working class to the Congress Party and the Indian state.
The strike call was also endorsed by the Bharatiya Mazdoor
Sangh. The BMS is the trade union arm of the fascistic RSS, the shadowy
organisation that founded the BJP and to which Modi and the top BJP leaders
continue to pay homage.
In an attempt to contain workers’ anger, the five union
federations have announced plans to hold a further day of strike action on
August 18. That day is the deadline the Modi government has set for private
companies, including the transnational mining giants, to submit their
coal-block auction bids.
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