Trade Unions: Concepts and Theories, the Evolution of Indian Trade Unionism, Problems of Trade Unions in India, Recognition, the Trade Unions Act 1926 and its Place in the Industrial Relations Code, and the Emerging Role of Trade Unions

Sidney and Beatrice Webb, in The History of Trade Unionism (1894), defined a trade union as "a continuous association of wage-earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the conditions of their working lives". The Trade Unions Act 1926 defines it more widely as any combination, temporary or permanent, formed primarily for regulating the relations between workmen and employers, or between workmen and workmen, or between employers and employers, or for imposing restrictive conditions on the conduct of any trade or business, and includes a federation of two or more unions; in law, therefore, an employers' association can be a trade union. Unions perform militant or protective functions (securing better wages and conditions, protecting jobs), fraternal functions (mutual help, welfare, education), political functions and, increasingly, social functions.

Organised labour in India began with the social reformers. Sorabji Shapurji Bengali campaigned for factory legislation in the 1870s, and N. M. Lokhande, who organised meetings of mill workers and founded the Bombay Mill Hands Association in 1890, is called the father of the Indian labour movement, though the Association was a welfare body without members or funds. The first unions in the modern sense appeared after the First World War, when prices rose and wages lagged: the Madras Labour Union was founded by B. P. Wadia in 1918; Gandhi led the Ahmedabad mill strike of 1918, fasting to hold the workers to non-violence, and the Textile Labour Association (Majoor Mahajan Sangh) followed in 1920; and the All India Trade Union Congress was founded in October 1920 at Bombay, with Lala Lajpat Rai as its first president and N. M. Joshi as a founder. The injunction granted against the Madras Labour Union in the Buckingham and Carnatic Mills case (1920), which exposed union leaders to damages for a strike, was a major reason for the Trade Unions Act 1926.

The movement then split along political lines, and every split produced a new central trade union organisation. The communists came to dominate AITUC; the moderates left it in 1929 to form the Indian Trade Union Federation. After independence the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC) was formed in May 1947 under Congress leadership; the Hind Mazdoor Sabha (HMS) in 1948 by socialists; the United Trade Union Centre in 1949; the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) in 1955, founded by Dattopant Thengadi; and, after the split in the communist movement, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) in 1970. There are now about a dozen central trade union organisations recognised by the Ministry of Labour and Employment on the basis of verified membership, among them BMS, INTUC, AITUC, HMS, CITU, AICCTU and SEWA; the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA, 1972, Ela Bhatt) was the first to organise informal women workers.

• Multiplicity and rivalry: several unions in one establishment, each linked to a different party, compete for members and undercut each other in bargaining.
• Political affiliation: unions serve party ends, and splits in parties become splits in unions.
• Outside leadership: office-bearers who are not employed in the industry, which the Royal Commission on Labour and the National Commissions criticised; the law now limits them.
• Small size and weak finances: most unions have a few hundred members and low subscriptions, so they cannot employ full-time staff or build strike funds.
• Low membership and narrow coverage: unions are concentrated in the public sector and organised industry, while the informal majority is largely unorganised.
• The absence, until the Industrial Relations Code, of a central law on recognition, and employers' hostility and victimisation.

Recognition is the employer's acceptance of a union as the representative of the workers for collective bargaining; registration under the 1926 Act gives legal status but not recognition. The Trade Unions (Amendment) Act 1947 provided for compulsory recognition through labour courts but was never brought into force. The Code of Discipline (1958) set the criteria most widely used: a union should have been registered and functioning for at least a year; to be recognised in an establishment it should have a membership of at least 15 per cent of the workers, and to be recognised as representative of an industry in a local area at least 25 per cent; where several unions qualify, the largest is recognised; and once recognised it should remain so for two years. Membership is verified, where disputed, by checking membership records (the "check-off" of dues from wages) or by secret ballot, which several states and the Industrial Relations Code prefer. Maharashtra's Act of 1971 made recognition compulsory in that state, and the Industrial Relations Code 2020 now provides the negotiating union (51 per cent) or the negotiating council (20 per cent each) described in the previous chapter.

The Trade Unions Act 1926, which came into force in 1927, provides for the registration of trade unions and defines the law relating to registered unions. Any seven or more members of a trade union may apply to the Registrar of Trade Unions for registration (section 4), and since the 2001 amendment no union of workmen can be registered unless at least 10 per cent of the workmen, or 100 workmen, whichever is less, engaged or employed in the establishment or industry with which it is connected are its members on the date of application, with a minimum of seven. The application must be accompanied by the rules, which must provide for the name, objects, the purposes of the general fund, membership lists, admission of honorary members, the subscription (raised by the 2001 amendment to a minimum of one rupee a year for rural workers, three rupees for other unorganised-sector workers and twelve rupees for others), the manner of amending rules, the appointment and removal of office-bearers, the custody and audit of funds and dissolution. A registered union is a body corporate with perpetual succession and a common seal, able to hold property and to sue and be sued (section 13). The Registrar may withdraw or cancel registration, with an appeal to the courts.

The Industrial Relations Code 2020 repealed the Trade Unions Act 1926 along with the Standing Orders Act and the Industrial Disputes Act, and carries its scheme forward: registration by seven or more members with the 10 per cent or 100 membership condition, the general and political funds, the immunities from criminal conspiracy and civil suit, registration by a Registrar, and the limit on outsiders among office-bearers. What it adds is recognition: the sole negotiating union or negotiating council at the establishment level, and the recognition of central and state trade unions by the governments, which the old Act never provided. It also provides for the adjudication of disputes between unions and their members, or between unions, by the Industrial Tribunal.

Unions face a workforce that is mostly informal, increasingly on contract or fixed terms, spread over small units and platforms, and younger and more female than their traditional base. Their emerging role has several strands: organising the unorganised (SEWA's model of union-cum-cooperative, the unions of construction, domestic and home-based workers, and the associations of app-based drivers and delivery workers); social-movement unionism that allies with community, gender and environmental causes; a role in skill development, productivity and the joint management of welfare boards (construction workers' boards, for instance); representation in the tripartite bodies that the codes create, such as the social security boards for unorganised and gig workers; and international solidarity along global supply chains. The recognition provisions of the Industrial Relations Code, by making verified majority support the basis of bargaining rights, may also push unions towards consolidation.