Unions, Strikes, and the Fight for Fairness
Bombay, January 1982.
Datta Samant stood before a crowd of textile workers. The air was thick with the smell of cotton dust and sweat. Over 250,000 workers from more than sixty textile mills had walked out. It was the largest industrial strike in Indian history.
The workers' demands were not extravagant. They wanted better wages — wages that had not kept pace with inflation. They wanted a bonus that had been promised and withheld. They wanted to be treated as something more than hands that fed machines.
The strike would last eighteen months. It would break the workers.
By the time it ended, most of the mills had closed — not just temporarily, but forever. Over 100,000 workers lost their jobs permanently. The great mill lands of central Bombay — the beating heart of the city's working class — fell silent. Over the following decades, those mill lands would be redeveloped into shopping malls, luxury apartments, and corporate offices.
The workers? Many drifted into the informal economy. Some went back to their villages in Maharashtra and Karnataka. Some drove taxis. Some broke stones at construction sites. A generation of skilled textile workers — people who knew the difference between a warp and a weft, who could hear from the sound of a loom whether the thread was true — simply disappeared from the economy.
Was the strike a mistake? Was it heroic? Was it both?
To answer that, we need to understand why workers organize in the first place, what unions actually do, and why the balance of power between labor and capital is one of the most important questions in all of economics.
Look Around You
Do you know anyone who is in a union? Your parents? Your neighbors? A bus driver, a bank employee, a factory worker?
If you live in India and you are young, the answer is probably no. Union membership has been declining for decades. Most new jobs — in IT, in the gig economy, in small businesses — are non-unionized.
But the things you take for granted — the eight-hour workday, the weekend, paid leave, minimum wages, the prohibition of child labor, workplace safety rules — were all won by unions. Every single one.
You are living in a world that unions built. You just don't know it yet.
Why Workers Organize
Imagine you are a worker in a cotton mill. You work twelve hours a day. The air is filled with cotton fibers that lodge in your lungs. The machines are dangerous — you know workers who have lost fingers, hands, even lives. You earn barely enough to feed your family. You rent a room in a chawl — a crowded tenement — shared with three other families.
You want higher wages. You want shorter hours. You want a machine guard so the loom does not take your hand.
You go to your employer and ask. He says no. If you do not like the terms, you can leave. There are a hundred people waiting outside the gate who will take your place.
This is the fundamental problem of individual bargaining. When labor is abundant and capital is scarce, the individual worker has almost no power. The employer can replace you. You cannot replace the employer — there are only a few mills in town, and they all pay the same.
But what if all the workers went together? What if all 500 workers in the mill said, at the same time: we will not work until our demands are met?
Now the equation changes. The employer cannot replace 500 workers overnight. The machines sit idle. The orders go unfilled. The losses mount.
This is the logic of collective action. What an individual cannot achieve alone, a group can achieve together. The union is simply the institutional form of this insight.
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
| BARGAINING POWER: INDIVIDUAL vs. COLLECTIVE |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| INDIVIDUAL WORKER vs. EMPLOYER |
| +--------+ +--------+ |
| | Worker | -------> Request | Owner | |
| | | <------- "No. | | |
| | (one | Take it or leave | (owns | |
| | person)| it." | factory)| |
| +--------+ +--------+ |
| Power: LOW Power: HIGH |
| Options: Few Options: Many replacements |
| |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| UNIONIZED WORKERS vs. EMPLOYER |
| +-----------+ +--------+ |
| | Workers | --> Collective | Owner | |
| | | demand | | |
| | (500 | <-- Negotiation | (cannot| |
| | together)| | replace| |
| +-----------+ | all) | |
| Power: HIGHER +--------+ |
| Options: Strike Power: REDUCED |
| Options: Negotiate or lose |
| |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
The Eight-Hour Day: How It Was Won
Today, in most countries, the standard workday is eight hours. We take this for granted. But for the first century of industrial capitalism, workers routinely worked twelve, fourteen, even sixteen hours a day, six or seven days a week.
The fight for the eight-hour day is one of the great stories of labor history.
The idea first appeared in the early 1800s. Robert Owen, a Welsh factory owner turned social reformer, proposed a simple formula in 1817: "Eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest."
It took seventy years of struggle to make this a reality.
In 1886, American labor unions called a general strike for May 1st, demanding the eight-hour day. Over 300,000 workers walked out across the country. In Chicago, police fired on striking workers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company. The next day, a bomb exploded at a rally in Haymarket Square. Eight anarchist labor leaders were arrested; four were hanged.
May Day — International Workers' Day, celebrated on May 1st around the world — commemorates this event. Ironically, it is not a national holiday in the United States, where the events took place.
In India, the first May Day celebration was held in Madras in 1923, organized by the Labour Kisan Party. The Indian labor movement had its own battles. In 1918, Bombay textile workers struck for higher wages. In 1920, the All India Trade Union Congress was founded.
The eight-hour day was finally established in most industrialized countries in the early twentieth century. In India, the Factories Act of 1948 set the working day at nine hours and the working week at forty-eight hours.
But here is what you should remember: no employer ever voluntarily gave workers an eight-hour day. It was demanded, fought for, and won — sometimes at the cost of lives.
"The only effective answer to organized greed is organized labor." — Thomas Donahue
A Brief History of the Labor Movement
The story of labor organizing is as old as industrial capitalism itself. Let us trace its arc.
Britain, 1799-1824. Workers who tried to organize were criminals. The Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 made trade unions illegal. Workers who formed unions could be imprisoned. These laws were repealed in 1824, after decades of agitation.
The Chartists, 1838-1857. The Chartist movement in Britain was not strictly a labor movement — it was a political movement demanding universal male suffrage, secret ballots, and payment for Members of Parliament. But its base was working-class, and its demands were fundamentally about giving workers political power so they could change economic conditions.
The International, 1864. Karl Marx and others founded the International Workingmen's Association — the First International. For the first time, labor movements across countries tried to coordinate. The idea: if capital crosses borders, labor must too.
The American Federation of Labor, 1886. Samuel Gompers built the AFL into the most powerful labor organization in the United States. Its approach was "pure and simple" unionism — focused on wages, hours, and conditions, not revolutionary politics.
India, 1918-1947. The Indian labor movement grew alongside the independence movement. Leaders like N.M. Joshi, B.P. Wadia, and later, communists like S.A. Dange, organized workers in Bombay's textile mills, Calcutta's jute mills, and the railways. The labor movement and the freedom movement were often intertwined — strikes were sometimes acts of economic protest and sometimes acts of political defiance against colonial rule.
Post-independence India. The Indian Constitution guaranteed the right to form unions. Multiple central trade unions emerged, often affiliated with political parties: INTUC with the Congress, AITUC with the Communist Party, BMS with the BJP. This political affiliation was both a strength (it gave unions access to power) and a weakness (it made unions instruments of party politics rather than purely workers' organizations).
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
New York City, March 25, 1911.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory occupied the top three floors of the Asch Building in Manhattan. It employed about 500 workers, mostly young immigrant women — Italian and Jewish — aged 14 to 23.
The factory was a fire trap. Fabric scraps littered the floors. The doors were locked from the outside — the owners did this to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks or stealing cloth.
When fire broke out on the eighth floor, there was no way out.
One hundred and forty-six people died. Some burned to death. Others jumped from the ninth floor, their bodies hitting the sidewalk as horrified crowds watched below. The youngest victim was fourteen years old.
The owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, were charged with manslaughter. They were acquitted. Their insurance payout exceeded their losses. They later reopened under a different name.
But the fire changed everything.
Within four years, New York State passed thirty-six new laws regulating workplace safety, fire prevention, working hours for women and children, and factory conditions. These laws became models for workplace regulation across the country and, eventually, the world.
The Triangle fire did not create the labor movement. But it showed the world what happened when labor had no power and capital faced no rules.
What Actually Happened
The Bombay textile strike of 1982 is remembered as a defeat for labor. And in one sense, it was — the workers lost their jobs, their industry, and their place in the city.
But the real question is: why did the mills close?
The common narrative says the strike killed the mills. But the evidence tells a more complicated story. Many of Bombay's textile mills were already uncompetitive. Their machinery was outdated. Their owners had not invested in modernization for decades. The mill lands in central Bombay had become far more valuable as real estate than as industrial sites.
The strike gave mill owners the excuse they needed to close. Many of them were happy to shut down production and sell the land. The workers did not just lose a fight with management. They were caught in a larger economic transformation — the shift from manufacturing to services and real estate — in which they had no voice and no stake.
By 2020, the old mill lands of Bombay had been transformed into some of the most expensive real estate in the world: Phoenix Mills, High Street Phoenix, One Indiabulls Centre. The workers' chawls were demolished. A way of life was erased.
When Unions Go Too Far
Honesty requires us to say this: unions, like any institution, can become corrupt, self-serving, and harmful.
In some cases, unions have protected incompetent workers at the expense of the public. Government unions in India have sometimes resisted accountability — teachers' unions that protect absent teachers, railway unions that resist efficiency improvements, public sector unions that demand benefits that bankrupt their organizations.
In the United States, some unions became vehicles for organized crime. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters was infamously corrupt for decades. In India, union leadership has sometimes been captured by political operators more interested in votes than in workers' welfare.
In the post-independence Indian public sector, powerful unions sometimes contributed to inefficiency. The "inspector raj" culture — where labor inspectors could harass employers — was real and damaging, particularly for small businesses.
These problems are real. But they should not be used — as they often are — to argue that unions are unnecessary. The question is not whether unions are perfect. No institution is. The question is: what happens when workers have no collective voice at all?
When Capital Goes Too Far
And the answer to that question is visible throughout history.
When workers have no power, wages fall to subsistence. Hours lengthen. Safety deteriorates. Children are sent to work. Women are paid less. Workers are discarded when they are no longer useful — no pension, no insurance, no severance.
This is not a theoretical prediction. It is what actually happened in early industrial England, in the Gilded Age United States, in the factories of East Asia in the 1970s and 80s, and in the gig economy today.
The balance between labor and capital is one of the most fundamental tensions in any economy. When it tips too far toward capital, workers are exploited. When it tips too far toward labor, productivity can suffer. The goal is not to eliminate the tension but to manage it — through laws, institutions, and the countervailing power of organized workers.
"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground." — Frederick Douglass
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
| THE BALANCE OF POWER |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| CAPITAL TOO STRONG | LABOR TOO STRONG |
| ======================|============================ |
| - Low wages | - Inefficiency |
| - Long hours | - Resistance to change |
| - Unsafe conditions | - Corruption |
| - Child labor | - Overstaffing |
| - No benefits | - Loss of competitiveness |
| - Workers disposable | - Public services suffer |
| | |
| <--- HEALTHY BALANCE ---> |
| | |
| - Fair wages | - Workers have voice |
| - Safe workplaces | - Disputes resolved peacefully |
| - Reasonable hours | - Productivity grows |
| - Social security | - Innovation continues |
| - Dignity at work | - Both sides share gains |
| |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
The Decline of Unions
Since the 1980s, union power has declined across most of the world.
In the United States, union membership has fallen from about 35% of the workforce in the 1950s to under 10% today. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher broke the miners' union in 1984-85 — a deliberate act of political warfare against organized labor. In India, the share of organized-sector employment has shrunk as the economy has grown — most new jobs are in the informal sector, where unions barely exist.
Why the decline?
Deindustrialization. As manufacturing moved from rich countries to poor ones, the factory — the natural home of the union — disappeared from many economies. You cannot organize a union in a factory that no longer exists.
The rise of services. Service workers — software engineers, call center employees, delivery drivers — are harder to organize than factory workers. They are scattered, their workplaces are diffuse, and many of them are classified as "independent contractors" rather than employees.
Political hostility. From Reagan in the United States to Thatcher in Britain to the economic reforms of 1991 in India, governments have systematically weakened labor protections in the name of "flexibility" and "competitiveness."
Globalization. When an employer can move a factory to a country with lower wages and weaker unions, the threat alone is enough to discipline domestic workers. "Accept lower wages, or the jobs go to China." This threat has been used — explicitly and implicitly — in every industrialized country.
The Gig Economy: The New Frontier
Today, millions of workers exist in a strange new category. They are not employees. They are not business owners. They are "partners," "associates," "independent contractors."
The delivery driver who brings food to your door through Swiggy or Zomato does not have an employer in the traditional sense. He has an app. The app assigns orders. The app sets the pay. The app tracks his location, rates his performance, and can deactivate his account — effectively fire him — without explanation or recourse.
He has no paid leave, no health insurance, no pension, no job security. If he is injured on the road, the cost is his. If the app reduces pay — as it routinely does — he has no one to negotiate with. There is no manager's office. There is only an algorithm.
This is the twenty-first century version of the same old problem: individual workers with no bargaining power facing a powerful employer. The employer has just changed form — from a factory owner to a technology platform.
Can gig workers organize? Some are trying. In India, delivery workers and ride-hailing drivers have staged protests and even strikes. But organizing gig workers is extraordinarily difficult. They are spread across cities. They never meet each other face to face. They can be replaced instantly. And the legal framework — built for a world of factories and offices — does not recognize them as workers entitled to protections.
The question for our time is the same question that faced the first factory workers in Manchester: how do we ensure that the people who create value share in the prosperity they create?
The form of the answer may be different. But the principle has not changed.
Think About It
If all the delivery drivers for Zomato and Swiggy went on strike for a week, what would happen? Would it change anything? Compare this to what happens when airline pilots strike.
"Unions made sense in the age of factories. They are outdated now." Do you agree? Why or why not?
The Bombay textile strike of 1982 destroyed the workers who called it. But the mills were going to close anyway. Was the strike a mistake? Or was it the last assertion of dignity by workers who had no other options?
Think about someone you know who works without a contract — a domestic helper, a construction worker, a street vendor. What would a union do for them? What are the obstacles to organizing?
The eight-hour day was once considered a radical, impossible demand. What demands being made by workers today might seem obvious and normal fifty years from now?
The Bigger Picture
The story of unions is not about unions. It is about power.
When power is distributed — when workers have a voice, when employers face accountability, when the state enforces fair rules — economies grow in ways that benefit most people. The great middle class of the twentieth century — in America, in Europe, in Japan — was not a natural phenomenon. It was built by the balance between organized labor and organized capital, mediated by a democratic state.
When that balance breaks — when unions are destroyed, regulations are gutted, and workers are atomized into isolated individuals competing against each other — the result is predictable. Inequality rises. Wages stagnate. The gains of growth flow upward. Working people feel abandoned — because they are.
This is not ideology. It is the historical record.
You do not have to romanticize unions to recognize that the alternative — a world where workers have no collective voice — is worse. Every improvement in working conditions, every protection you enjoy at work, every limit on what an employer can demand of you, exists because workers once organized and fought for it.
The fight continues. The form changes — from textile mills to tech platforms, from street marches to online campaigns. But the fundamental question remains: who has power, and how is it used?
"The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress." — Martin Luther King Jr.
The labor movement is not over. It is transforming. And whether it succeeds in its new form will shape the world your children inherit.
In the next chapter, we enter the world where most of India's workers actually live and work — the informal economy. No contracts. No benefits. No legal protections. And no choice.