By Krishna Jha
The technological progress harnessed by the corporate sector has created an eternal thirst to have more. To get more surplus, exploitation rate has been raised to its summit. There has also been efforts to reducing jobs and raising unemployment rate. The workers are always in uncertainty about their own sustenance and this has created confusion. There are the informal and organized labour with their own unique features. The workers seem confused. Every government keeps following liberalization.
The root cause of this general understanding is that everyone wants privatization and in the process if the working class has to bear the brunt of such devastating step, they do not have any care. And now post liberalization phase is known as the phase of jobless growth. Despite all the anti-labour steps taken by the employers and their supporters that the worker has to accept in silence, it is very difficult to risk one’s own job.
All these complexities have been part of life for the worker, who had dared to fight back the injustices, even two centuries back. But now there are hardly any jobs, unemployment is getting all pervasive. The new century is facing complexities in the issues faced by common masses. There is technological development and their impact on means, ownership of production processes, services and workers. There is also change in the character of globalization. Individualistic profit oriented or human advance directed empowerment leads from equitable to inequitable distribution.
The challenges posed in 21st century are formidable. They are mainly from anti-labour approach of the employer, including MNCs, pro employer approach of the powers that be, organising the unorganized. We had great hopes from the technology and its advancement which could be harnessed towards general welfare. But reality was not as it was seen. With challenges in store, the transition days have their own woes.
The very fact that the toilers have to slog for twelve hours instead of eight hours, a right that the workers in the world got only after a long and bitter struggle was unceremoniously taken away. It is the result of the implementation of four labour codes. It reminds one of the colonial system. Slaves are supposed to have no consciousness, hence no evolution. The worker becomes an extended part of machine, and has to toil on predetermined formula, and that too for twelve hours. Alienation grips the individual worker. The evils of capitalism come alive. They have to be fought as the new labour code lifts the protective measures built for workers. Long working day, the absence of safety measures, crowded work rooms, and the accumulated dirt become a threat to life.
According to the Factories Act, 1948, workers cannot be forced to work more than nine hours a day or 48 hours per week without overtime compensation. The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020, has now allowed the option of four 12-hour shifts alongside the standard schedule of six eight-hour days. Thus, while formally maintaining the 48-hour weekly limit, the codes permit employers to stretch daily working hours significantly beyond traditional limits through flexible rostering and overtime provisions. On the face of it, the provision seems to be a flexible arrangement meant to benefit both employers and workers – employers can adjust to production demands, workers can earn overtime pay.
In practice, however, the new codes will allow employers to pressurize workers to accept extended hours, particularly fixed-term and contract workers desperate to have their contracts renewed. The new labour regulations have the way in which the workers will have no option but to opt for working 12-hour a day. Such a “choice” becomes no choice at all. And even if compensated, a 12-hour workday is physically and mentally exhausting in ways that undermine workers’ health, family life, and human dignity. There has emerged the strong need for unity of working class, at national level and also international level. It is true that the global consensus on 8-hour work day arrived after a long drawn struggle of the working class. The struggle that opened the gates for the Workers Day and brought the first May Day initiated in the United States in the second half of nineteenth century.
In his preface to the fourth German edition of the Communist Manifesto, which Engels wrote on May 1, 1890, while reviewing the history of the international proletarian organizations, he wrote about the significance of the first International May Day: “As I write these lines, the proletariat of Europe and America is holding a review of its forces; it is mobilized for the first time as One army and fighting One immediate aim: an eight-hour working day, established by legal enactment. The spectacle we are now witnessing will make the capitalists and landowners of all lands realize that today the proletarians of all lands are united. If only Marx were with me to see it with his own eyes!”
The significance of simultaneous international proletarian demonstrations was appealing more and more to the imagination and revolutionary instincts of the workers throughout the world, and every year witnessed greater masses participating in the demonstrations.
The demonstration on May First for the 8-hour day must serve at the same time as a demonstration of the determined will of the working class to destroy class distinctions through social change and thus enter on the road, the only road leading to peace for all peoples, to international peace. (IPA Service)
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