On February 12, at least 300 million people took to the streets in India for a one-day strike. They were taking organized action in opposition to changes to labor laws and recent trade deals with the U.S., New Zealand, and European Union (E.U.). The strike brought together farmers and a diverse range of workers to close workplaces, including coal mines, refineries, banks and factories.
The Indian government recently made sweeping changes to labor laws that will weaken workers’ rights and protections on the job. The laws will make it easier to fire people, extend the workday, reduce wage regulation and social security provisions. The strikers also opposed large-scale privatization of state-owned businesses. The new laws also attack unionism, making it harder to legally strike and imposing harsh penalties for so-called illegal strikes. The government justifies these attacks on workers as necessary to make the country more attractive to international investors, citing the need for “ease of doing business.” This is the way imperialism works in its less war-like phases: banks and other financiers in countries like the U.S. use the promise of investment to drive down wages and worsen the exploitation of workers in the countries they have kept underdeveloped. Despite the promises of both governments and the foreign investors, foreign investment won’t improve the situation of Indian workers – their conditions will become worse. The profits foreign investors make will be quickly sucked back into the global financial system and maybe further enrich some powerful people in India who’ll serve as middlemen or deal-brokers.
Agricultural workers and small farmers were on strike because they oppose the new trade deals India recently made with the U.S. and the E.U. These deals are just another arm of imperialism, whereby powerful countries use their wealth to strong-arm poorer ones into agreements that enrich the powerful while devastating ordinary workers. The deals will allow wealthy countries with industrial-scale agriculture, subsidized by their governments, to dump their cheaper products on the Indian market, squeezing out small farmers and making life impossible for agricultural wage laborers. This is a familiar pattern in our own neck of the woods. The NAFTA agreement signed in the 1990s immediately allowed U.S. agribusiness to dump their subsidized corn, produced on massive industrial farms, onto the Mexican market. Small farmers producing their traditional staple crop weren’t able to compete and rural Mexico was devastated. People lost their land and started one of the many waves of displaced people coming north into the U.S. to try to survive.
The massive scale of this strike and the support it received from broad segments of the population beyond just the working class showed the massive discontent that exists among many layers of India’s population. When viewed in the longer context of other mass strikes in recent years, it is clear that this strike is not an outlier. Even if these one-day work stoppages have been limited in duration and for limited goals, hundreds of millions are well organized enough to coordinate strike activities and stay out of work.
The one-day strike in India should be considered a warning to the Modi government and its capitalist supporters. If attacks on workers and peasants continue, and conditions for hundreds of millions do not improve, the strikes of the future could be larger and far more ambitious.
