Cooperation in India on the right track

Recently, the film “Slumdog Millionaire” brought the fate of the slums and the lowest caste in India fully to our attention. India is still a country with huge contradictions between the rich and the poor and where trade unions thus have an important role to play.

SETCa has been supporting the rising unions in India for several years now. Since November 10 2008 we support UNICOME. At that date, SETCa president Erwin De Deyn signed a partnership with them, together with UNI.

UNICOME is a very young union, which concentrates on organising both female and male workers in the Indian commerce sector.

Meanwhile, UNICOME has set its targets and outlined a strategy based on a study carried out by order of UNICOME, SETCa and UNI on trade practices in 3 Indian cities.

The newborn union movement will focus its activities for 2009 on 3 major cities, namely Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad.

In these cities, specific employers such as Big Bazaar and Subisha in Delhi will be targeted. For Bangalore and Hyderabad, we have Metro and Big Bazaar in mind.

The acknowledgement of a new union in the Indian commerce sector is not that easy and generates fierce opposition from the commerce employers’ side. That’s why first the development of union activities in each branch of multinational companies such as Metro will be attempted, allowing to conclude national agreements for these companies. This will hopefully relieve pressure on the local union activities. This means union activities will have to be set up  from scratch.

The project plans the recruitment of 2 so-called “organisors” in each city. These people get fully trained by UNIDOC (UNI training center) before they go out on the streets.
They go to the malls to address employees about UNICOME.
They will try to convince people to play an active part in union work. No easy task, but the UNICOME team is very enthousiastic and has the support of SETCa and UNI.

Two spontaneous strikes, one in Delhi in a Subisha store and a 3-day strike in a Metro subsidiary in Hyderabad under the wings of UNICOME, underline the necessity of a union like UNICOME in the commerce sector.

The first signals we receive from India reveal that UNICOME took a good start and is busy “organising” people.

As the project goes on, we will expand our working radius to other chains in the commerce sector.