Industrial Disputes I: Factors, Forms and Trends, Strikes and Lockouts, Prevention and Settlement, and the Role of State and Central Labour Administration

Section 2(k) of the Industrial Disputes Act 1947 defines an industrial dispute as any dispute or difference between employers and employers, or between employers and workmen, or between workmen and workmen, which is connected with the employment or non-employment or the terms of employment or with the conditions of labour of any person. Because the definition speaks of collective difference, a dispute over one worker's dismissal was at first an industrial dispute only if a union or a substantial number of workmen took it up; section 2A, added in 1965, made a dispute over an individual workman's discharge, dismissal, retrenchment or termination an industrial dispute by itself. The Industrial Relations Code 2020 keeps both ideas in its definition. The causes of disputes are usually grouped as economic (wages, dearness allowance, bonus, hours, leave, retrenchment, lay-off and closure), managerial or institutional (recognition of unions, victimisation, discipline and dismissal, the violation of agreements or standing orders, working conditions, rationalisation and new technology), political (inter-union rivalry and party-led agitation) and psychological or social (poor communication, frustrated status, the problems of migrant and contract workers).

A strike, under section 2(q), is a cessation of work by a body of persons employed in any industry acting in combination, or a concerted refusal, or a refusal under a common understanding, of any number of persons who are or have been so employed to continue to work or to accept employment. The Industrial Relations Code adds that the concerted casual leave, on a given day, of fifty per cent or more of the workers employed in an establishment is a strike, closing the "mass casual leave" route. A lockout, under section 2(l), is the temporary closing of a place of employment, the suspension of work, or the refusal by an employer to continue to employ any number of persons employed by him. A lockout differs from closure, which is the permanent closing of the place of employment or part of it, and from lay-off, which is the inability to give employment because of shortage of coal, power or raw materials, the accumulation of stocks, the breakdown of machinery or natural calamity.

There is no fundamental right to strike in India. The Supreme Court held in All India Bank Employees' Association v. National Industrial Tribunal (1962) that the right to form associations under Article 19(1)(c) does not carry with it a guaranteed right to strike or to bargain collectively, and in T. K. Rangarajan v. Government of Tamil Nadu (2003) that government employees have no fundamental, statutory or moral right to strike. The right to strike is therefore a statutory right regulated by law: a strike may be legal or illegal (depending on compliance with the statutory conditions) and, separately, justified or unjustified (depending on the reasonableness of the demands). The Supreme Court held in Syndicate Bank v. K. Umesh Nayak (1994) that workers are entitled to wages for the period of a strike only if it is both legal and justified.

The Labour Bureau collects statistics of strikes and lockouts — the number of disputes, the workers involved and the man-days (person-days) lost — and these are the standard measures of industrial conflict. Man-days lost is the most telling, because it weights each dispute by its size and duration. Indian conflict rose through the 1960s and peaked in the 1970s and early 1980s, a period that included the railway strike of May 1974 and the Great Bombay Textile Strike that began in January 1982 under Datta Samant and lasted well over a year, ending in the closure of many mills. Since 1991 the number of disputes and of man-days lost has fallen markedly, and lockouts have accounted for a large share of the man-days that are lost, a sign of the shift in bargaining power towards employers. Economic causes (wages, allowances and bonus) have remained the most frequent reasons, followed by indiscipline and violence, retrenchment and closure. Much conflict now takes other forms: litigation, individual disputes, one-day nationwide general strikes called by the central trade unions against policy, and conflicts over contract labour and recognition in new industrial clusters.

Prevention rests on sound personnel policies and on the bipartite institutions: collective bargaining, works committees, grievance procedures, workers' participation, standing orders that make conditions of service known, and the voluntary codes of 1958. Settlement, when prevention fails, proceeds through four methods of increasing compulsion. In negotiation the parties settle between themselves. In conciliation (mediation) a third party, the conciliation officer or a board of conciliation, helps them reach agreement but cannot impose one; conciliation is compulsory in public utility services once a strike notice is given. In voluntary arbitration the parties agree to refer the dispute to an arbitrator of their choice, whose award binds them (section 10A of the Industrial Disputes Act; the National Arbitration Promotion Board was set up in 1967 to encourage it). In adjudication the appropriate government refers the dispute (section 10) to a labour court, an industrial tribunal or a national tribunal, whose award is binding; because the reference is the government's decision, adjudication is compulsory for the parties. India long relied most on adjudication, which was criticised for delay, legalism and the weakening of bargaining.

Labour is in the Concurrent List of the Constitution, so both the Centre and the states legislate and administer. Which government acts in a dispute depends on the "appropriate government" (section 2(a) of the Industrial Disputes Act, and the corresponding definition in the Code): broadly, the Central Government for industries carried on by or under its authority, railways, major ports, mines, oilfields, banking, insurance, the Reserve Bank and other scheduled establishments and central public undertakings, and the state government for the rest. At the Centre the Ministry of Labour and Employment works through the Chief Labour Commissioner (Central), whose organisation, the Central Industrial Relations Machinery set up in 1945, handles conciliation, enforcement and verification of union membership in the central sphere; the Directorate General of Mines Safety (Dhanbad); the Directorate General, Factory Advice Service and Labour Institutes (Mumbai); the Labour Bureau (Shimla and Chandigarh), which compiles the consumer price indices for industrial workers and statistics of disputes; the Directorate General of Employment; the V. V. Giri National Labour Institute (Noida), for research and training; and the social security bodies, EPFO and ESIC.

In the states the Labour Commissioner heads the labour department, with Additional, Deputy and Assistant Labour Commissioners and Labour Officers who act as conciliation officers and inspectors under the wage and other Acts; the Chief Inspector of Factories (in many states now a directorate of industrial safety and health) enforces the factory law; and the labour courts and tribunals, or under the Code the Industrial Tribunals, adjudicate. The labour codes change the inspector into an "inspector-cum-facilitator" who is expected to advise employers on compliance as well as to inspect, with inspections scheduled through a web-based, randomised system rather than at the inspector's discretion. The strengths of Indian labour administration are its reach and its long experience of conciliation; its weaknesses have been understaffing, delay, the multiplicity of Acts and registers that the codes aim to reduce, and weak enforcement in small and informal units.