Rajeev Dubey is national president of the Employers' Federation of India focussing on skill development, inclusive employment – and smooth labour conditions. Speaking with Srijana Mitra Das, Dubey discussed labour-management tension recently impacting a major automobile plant, how such disputes can be avoided – and how India can actually start developing its tremendous labour potential:
Are labour troubles like we've seen recently at Maruti, Manesar, shaking the confidence of foreign investors looking at India?
I don't think so. This is an incident confined to one unit in a particular location. I'd be surprised if it has a long-term impact on the confidence of foreign investors. One thing is certain though – what happened ought never to have happened. What's critical to going forward is quickly creating conditions for production to resume and ensuring that such violence doesn't recur. This will involve bringing the guilty to justice at the earliest and creating an atmosphere of trust and understanding through continual dialogue.
As important as punishing the guilty here is also to draw upon the strength and goodness of the large majority, which was not directly involved but is suffering the consequences.
Please suggest three concrete steps to ease tension between employers and employees.
Firstly, it's important to initiate continuous dialogue where both employers and employees, with other stakeholders like government and civil society, listen to each other with an open mind, without past prejudices, to create an atmosphere of trust. Next, there should be agreement on a code of conduct where all stakeholders take the responsibility of creating a competitive, fair and inclusive workplace. And finally, there needs to be great focus on skill formation and capability building.
Are employers' interests generally opposed to workers' interests?
On the contrary, there's large commonality between employers' interests and workers' interests. Employers want sustainable and profitable businesses. Employees want security of employment and decent wages. There's a moving equilibrium there which gets settled through collective bargaining and hopefully, proactive measures taken by both management and workers.
How has the decline of traditional trade unions and employing labour contractors instead impacted workers and employers?
Traditional trade unions perhaps failed to attract the imagination of modern workers. Also, the rigours of inflexible labour laws and capital-intensive modular technology made it possible to do outsourcing. The use of contract labour's increased to gain flexibility in deployment – however, we need to address the twin issues of wages and working conditions for contract labour. Incidentally, the government sector is the largest employer of contract labour.
On a wider scale, analysts see China losing its low-wage dividend soon. Can India use thistoitsadvantage–without exploiting labour?
Yes. India can do so by focussing on innovation and productivity. Unleashing human potential and tapping the Indian genius through empowerment and inclusion – the only sustainable route – is much easier in a democracy than in a totalitarian society.
However, this will not happen automatically. This needs huge investment in infrastructure, including education and basic health, and much higher standards of governance right through the value chain.
Despite recent prosperity, why hasn't India seen massive investment in improving human resources, both in skilled and manual work?
Well, this tends to happen in periods of rapid growth but becomes a major limiting factor for future growth. We've reached the stage for human capital formation, both for manual and knowledge workers, to become a major national agenda.
What are employers' top threeinterestsinIndiatoday?
Creating global competitiveness through increased productivity and innovation, addressing people's issues with equity, fairness and transparency and being a good corporate citizen.  |
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