Involved as they necessarily are in the social and economic contexts of literary publishing, authors can cater to the “dictates” of the market or set out to subvert these dictates. As Graham Huggan has argued with regard to Arundhati Roy, for instance, an author – in this case, an Indian or “postcolonial” author – may seemingly cater to the expectations of a Western audience by providing an “exoticist” description of a far-away country, but she may at the same time weave into her text a questioning of the politics of exoticism.1 At the same time, the reception of a given literary text may be informed not only by the politics of the literary marketplace or a mass audience, but also by the academic reception of this text. Here, too, authorship and scholarly criticism have often worked in tandem: literary authors have taken up, responded to, or resisted certain “turns” in criticism. Much has been made of this “symbiotic” relationship between literary writing and academic analysis, and it has often remained unclear whether writing precedes new developments in literary criticism or whether academic discussion in turn inspires new conventions of writing.

In the previous chapters, we have enumerated the factors that have influenced the bargaining between labour and capital in West Bengal (WB). It has been underlined that economic conditions along with the role of trade unions and the state through their interactions determine the nature and outcome of bargaining. While Chapter 3 provided our observations from the field with regard to collective bargaining in WB, Chapters 4 and 5 enumerated the economic conditions and the role of trade unions and working class politics, respectively. In this chapter, we look at the role of the state in collective bargaining.

The state has an intrinsic role in capital–labour bargaining because of its historic claim to legitimacy enabling it to play the mediating role in the relationship between social groups to facilitate common development and welfare. In the production system this intervention between capital and labour is institutionalised through the Industrial Relations (IR) system. The tension and fluidity in capital–labour relation in a capitalist system arises primarily from three distinct but interrelated factors: indeterminacy of labour contract (since the performance of labour cannot be perfectly observed and therefore monitored); inequality between labour and capital; and the dynamic nature of workplace with coexistence of conflict and cooperation (Colling and Terry 2010). Since such contestations and inequality of power and wealth between labour and capital exist, the need for an institution that is relatively autonomous to the dynamics between labour and capital arises in order to provide a stable IR framework. Industrial Relations as the institutional framework of capital–labour affiliation manage such relations according to political–economic dynamics.

The role of the state has varied across countries and time depending on the dynamics of the state–market relationship. Many states, such as Germany, Sweden and India, have had significant involvement in collective bargaining, while countries such as the UK and the US have been marked by minor and non-decisive role in IR. In all countries, however, the state has a role in IR through legal enactments and institutions that establish the context and standard of IR (Streeck and Thelen 2005).

In the last chapter, we have discussed the various strands of literature on collective bargaining, delineating the two contradictory strands of argument—one pointing out that collective bargaining is a relic of the past, while the other indicating its increased relevance, albeit with a change in its form. In this chapter, we look at the processes of collective bargaining in West Bengal (WB) and try to see how these two trends play out in this context. Our interrogation of collective bargaining in WB, however, is rather on a different plane as compared with the existing literature. On the one hand, the literature on collective bargaining has largely been outcome-based, studying agreements between management and trade union or labour and capital, as the mechanism to understand the nature of collective bargaining. On the other hand, the study of labour has focused on labour activism—organising the workers in protest against the management or the state. Between these two spectra lies the entire terrain of the everyday—a space which has largely been ignored in the study of collective bargaining (for example, Sen 2009).

We argue that collective bargaining cannot be understood simply as a moment in time actualised through an agreement. Rather, the agreement can be thought of as the end of a process of everyday negotiations and struggles between capital, labour and its unions, and the state. Indeed, a study of these agreements, the issues they raise, the concessions granted to labour and the commitments of the management are important sources of information to understand the issues on which bargaining happened between labour and capital. But in order to understand the processes, the negotiations, and the struggles between labour and capital, we need to move beyond the agreements and study the everyday processes that shape collective bargaining and the resultant agreements. Moreover, to treat the agreement as the end of the collective bargaining is also incomplete. Often, their actual implementation remains a source of constant dispute between labour and capital, as we will see in this chapter.

Motivation and the context

This book primarily examines the status of trade unions and the collective bargaining institutions in the urban labour market of West Bengal (WB) within an analytical framework that views capital–labour relations as an outcome of the interplay of the triad of market, technology and the state with its collective bargaining institutions. The framework that we have adopted here is sufficiently general in the sense that it is capable of explaining capital–labour relations elsewhere as well. West Bengal is the only state in India that had been, until recently, under left rule for more than three decades, and has long been known for its pro-worker stance. The analytical strategy that has been adopted in this book allows us to move back and forth between the general context of weakening of trade union power as a consequence of the changing scenario in the national and global economies on the one hand, and the specific context of a subnational region like the state of WB within the federal system of India, on the other. The regional focus of the study is motivated by the understanding that distinct differences in labour market conditions and in the associated complexities of labour institutions do exist across subnational units in a large developing country like India. Differences at the subnational level in economic prosperity, degrees of urbanisation, structural changes as reflected in the changing shares of primary, secondary and tertiary sectors in total output, and employment—all influence the labour market, labour organisations and collective bargaining outcomes. It can be argued that trade union organisations largely derive their characteristics, heritage, identity and strategic options from the specificities that characterise the region in which they function. This diverse array of influencing factors, which can roughly be called ‘economic’, influences and is further influenced by the political, social and historical factors. Understandably, the way all these factors are supposed to interact to produce the trajectory of capital–labour relations in a subnational context is not easy to delineate, as they pose difficult methodological challenges.

The bargaining power of trade unions depends on a complex set of factors. In the last chapter, on the basis of our field-level data, we have underscored the importance of the triad of market, technology and the state in determining the outcome of the bargaining between labour and capital. In this chapter, we focus on the issue of the market, both labour and industry, in the context of West Bengal (WB), at the macro level.

The macroeconomic context within which the trade unions operate determines to a large extent whether the trade unions are successful in negotiating with the management in terms of fulfilling their demands. Marx had elaborated on the idea of the reserve army of labour and postulated how the varying size of the reserve army of labour results in variation in the wage rates. With a vast reserve army of labour, the wage rate is lower compared to a situation where the reserve army of labour is smaller in size. In the words of Marx, ‘the general movements of wages are exclusively regulated by the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army, and these again correspond to the periodic changes of the industrial cycle’ (Marx 2010). Thus, the Marxian argument postulates a negative relation between the wages and the size of the reserve army, which, in turn, depends on the ‘periodic changes of the industrial cycle’.

If we consider workers to be organised into trade unions as collective agents, then the wage rate of the workers becomes a negative function of the unemployment rate in the economy. In other words, if the unemployment rate, or the size of the reserve army of labour, is high, the bargaining power of the workers is low (Rowthorn 1977). Assuming that the unemployment rate is positively linked with periods of industrial stagnation or decline, it follows that the bargaining power of trade unions is negatively correlated with periods of industrial stagnation or decline. Therefore, if the macroeconomic environment within which the trade unions are functioning is that of the presence of a large reserve army of labour and a stagnant industrial situation, then it can be inferred that the bargaining power of the trade unions would be low in such an economy. It is well known that the state of WB has witnessed a steady relative industrial decline.