100 million workers join India’s September 7 general strike

[Hannah Bell]

An estimated one hundred million workers participated in a one-day all-India strike Tuesday to protest soaring prices, privatization and public sector disinvestment, the casualization and contracting out of work, and the failure of India’s governments to enforce even the inadequate protections accorded workers by the country’s labor laws.

The strike was called by nine major union federations under the umbrella of the Coordination Committee of Central Trade Unions and crippled much of the country’s economic life.

Recent months have seen a mounting wave of militant worker struggles in India—strikes for union recognition in India’s expanding auto sector, including a two-day occupation of a Hyundai plant, a wildcat strike by Air India personnel, and walkouts by telecom workers and coal miners against the central government privatization plans.

According to union and media reports, Tuesday’s strike was joined by large numbers of contract workers in the engineering, power loom (textile), fertilizer, chemical, and ship-building industries, as well as in the hospital and transport sectors. There was also widespread participation by workers in the unregulated “informal sector,” which employs 90 percent of the workforce and where unions traditionally have had little presence. In some cities, including Delhi, many auto-rickshaw drivers walked off the job. Some construction laborers, brick-kiln workers and domestics also joined the protest.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/sep2010/indi-s09.shtml

[Vinca]

1. Time to outsource jobs to Bangladesh.

Sorry, workers. Greed rules.

[sabrina 1]

5. What we need are Global Unions so the greedy Capitalists

have nowhere to go. This is impressive, that many people could organize like that. I think it could go global and imagine the impact of a world-wide strike?

[leveymg]

2. "casualization" of work - doesn't that have the same root as "casualty" of war?

"Militant worker struggles" - now, there's a term we don't hear much in the U.S. But, I have the feeling our understanding about such things will improve.

[burnsei sensei]

3. I hope that globalization blows up in the faces

of our corporate overlords.
When they find out that people in "other countries" can unionize and be every bit as militant as Americans were in the mid-20th century, we'll see heads explode.
Defy the unjust law, Taft-Hartley, 1947, the law that silenced labor and sympathy strikes.
Re-empower workers.
And then attack!

[Starry Messenger]

4. k & r

[Better Today]

6. If only we could get people here to do that, everyone making under $50K, not just unions.