Trade union members in Kerala use strongarm tactics to extract wages without working
The CPI(Marxist) in Kerala wants to woo private investment. What stops Kerala from attracting investment, among other things, is a labour practice that the Marxists initially turned a blind eye to as an ode to a socialist approach for just wages and which now festers the economy as an incurable wound. The practice of hawker charges — ‘nokku kooli’ — means you have to hire only labour affiliated to trade unions for loading, unloading or supervision work. It has also come to mean, thanks to the brazen attitude of these workers, that you have to pay the charges they demand whether or not they are hired to do the work. In practical terms, it means that you can load or unload personal or commercial stuff by yourself, or by hiring your own labourers unattached to unions, but only after paying the union workers their fee. As soon as a truck lands at your home or company, the union workers come over to claim their exorbitant unloading fee and leave you to your means to unload the stuff. If you refuse to pay, they will threaten you. This is rank extortion. The Kerala Government knows it. With businessmen and the middle-class population angry with the organised blackmail, the State police issued an order against the practice in 2012. Six years later, the Government banned it. In 2021, the Kerala High Court noted that nothing had changed on the ground.
For a practice that is spread all over the State, only 11 cases were registered against union workers between 2018 and 2021. People generally try to settle the disputes locally for fear of reprisal. CPI(M) State secretary Kodiyeri Balakrishnan unveiled a vision document, Nava Keralam, at the recent party conference in Kochi. He said militant trade unionism goes against the party’s policy to woo investment. He asked the trade union leaders to reject wrongful practices in the labour sector. Balakrishnan knows well that it is an impossible task for the simple reason that the practitioners of the extortionist ‘nokku kooli’ are mostly CPI(M) cadres. The union leaders are accustomed to easy money coming their way for decades now. The party leadership cannot afford to tick them off. It can at best convince them to be not so brazen about it. But that hardly works because the workers know the leaders are at their mercy for votes. The illegal practice has roots in the skewed manner of wealth accumulation in Kerala. The cash crop economy and Gulf employment made people rich but it also widened the rich-poor gap. The labourers began to charge more as a way out of their misery. That soon turned into an organised business as the trade unions got involved. The parties never discouraged the practice because it suited their ideology and it got them votes. Now it has become a millstone around their necks. Last heard, Kerala was 28th in the ease of doing business index.