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10/25/2007.... Unions needed to fill “democratic deficit” in Indian companies
- Labour news from UNI global union - for trade unions in a global services economy. -
UNI's Philip Jennings and Christopher Ng with Prof Phil Taylor (centre)
Eve of Executive press conference |  | Indian workers and companies need the partnership of trade unions in the fast growing services and IT sectors to end a democratic deficit and tackle common issues, says UNI global union.
Global cooperation between unions is also necessary to ensure that the increasing number of foreign multinationals arriving in India - like Group 4 Securicor and Wal-Mart - become good corporate citizens.
In an independent report BPO companies are accused of failing to listen to their staff, of breaching conventions of the International Labour Organisation in order to keep out unions and are warned that half their staff are concerned about pay levels.
The UNI-launched IT Professional Forum is calling for initiatives to improve “soft skills” training in India to ensure that more new entrants have the ability to deal with customers and business needs as well as technical knowledge.
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“Nasscom have got it all wrong - they need unions as much as the staff do if they are to get effective feedback and tackle common issues like high turnover and training deficits,” said UNI’s Philip Jennings, who is General Secretary of the Swiss-based global union for skills and services.
“UNI has helped launch unions for IT, BPO and call centre, security and commerce workers - and plans new unions for private sector finance, mobile phone and courier workers.
“All workers in India are entitled to union representation and - once companies realise that Human Resource Management is no substitute for independent employee representation - a genuine and constructive dialogue can begin.”
UNI’s World Executive is meeting in Delhi this week for the first time to see at first hand the global union’s growing investment in one of the world’s fastest growing economies.
Arbitrary and un-listening managements are spotlighted in a report from Strathclyde Business School, Scotland (Prof Phil Taylor and Dr Dora Scholarios) and the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (Prof Ernesto Noronha and Dr Premilla d’Cruz) on union formation in call and back office processing centres.
“Management was seen as most unsuccessful in listening to employees’ ideas about how the service could be improved (73%), in involving employees in target-setting (68%) and in decisions affecting them (65%).”
Researchers looked at the work of UNITES - the union launched by UNI global union to organise in BPOs, including those with jobs off-shored from European and American companies.
In spite of Nasscom’s confidence that pay rates are right, pay was seen as a very important issue by almost half of the workers surveyed and high turnover is a big issue.
BPO staff work long hours - the report identified 216 hours a month as average - with two thirds of staff surveyed reporting being ‘very’ or ‘quite pressurised as a result of work under the pressure of targets. The report concludes that: “The evidence is unequivocal that there is a constituency for UNITES in Indian BPO”.
“We are making progress on a new frontier for organising trade unions,” said Mr Jennings.
This week UNICOME, the new unions for commerce workers, held its launch conference; the ITPF held a workshop on offshoring; workers in private sector mobile phone operators like Vodafone discussed union organisation and security workers presented their campaign to win union rights in companies like G4S.
UNI has 15 million members worldwide - nearly one million of them in 27 Indian unions.
Please contact:
Philip Jennings, UNI General Secretary, philip.jennings@uniglobalunion.org
Noel Howell, UNI Press & Information: press@uniglobalunion.org
Executive Summary of the Strathclyde/Ahmedabad report:
Full report
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UNi-Asia & Pacific (UNI-Apro)
http://www.uni-apro.org - uni-asiapacific@union-network.org |