Strikes and industrial Worker
V. B. KARNIK
Secretary, Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom.
A STRIKE is a time-honoured weapon in the hands of industrial workers. There was a period when they had no other weapon. There were no laws and no rules and regulations pertaining to their conditions of work and terms of employment. Employers would not listen to their representations or discuss with them their problems and difficulties. A stoppage of work was then the only course of action left open to workers which could secure for them a hearing and consideration of their demands. In the early years of the development of factory industry, workers resorted to that course on many occasions and secured improvement in their condition as well as the far more important right of organization and collective bargaining. Once the right of organisation and collective
bargaining was secured, it became leas and less necessary for workers to make use of the weapon of strike. The weapon could not be, however, thrown away or altogether discarded. In the last analysis the only guarantee for the successful outcome of collective bargaining was the threat of a collective withdrawal of labour. That being the case, the right to strike had to be kept intact as a safeguard against any encroachment on the gains made and as a possible instrument for securing further advances.
The right to strike is a concomitant of the abolition of forced labour which heralded the dawn of industrial civilization and the birth of a democratic society. In a democratic society, nobody can be compelled to work against his will. A worker is free to negotiate with his employer the terms and conditions of his work. If those terms and conditions are not acceptable to him, he is free not to work for the employer. A strike is a concrete expression of that freedom to work or not to work. It has therefore become one of the fundamental freedoms of every democratic society. A democratic society jealously guards that freedom as it is part and parcel of other freedoms which are the very basis and raison d'être of its existence. In common with other democratic constitutions, the Constitution of India has also recognised that freedom as one of the fundamental rights of citizenship, not by express words, it is true, but by necessary implication. Essentially, it is only industrial workers who can exercise that right, but the abrogation of that right will have such baneful consequences on the very structure of a democratic society, that all democrats value it and are at one with workers in preserving it as an ultimate weapon in their hands.
