Building Social Alliance for Labour
NTUI believes in building up resistance. For this, the accumulated experience of passivity in the working class movement needs to be addressed. Different unions and sections of the working class have different experiences and even different temporal sequences of these experiences. The NTUI believes that workers have to acquire political experience that shows the necessity for nation wide struggle and resistance. The Assembly of the Working People is a mechanism to provide this political experience while taking into account the different experiences and unevenness of activity of different sections of working people. In a way it is also a tool for developing an acceptable framework for relating action with policy change.
This strategy of mobilisation must aim at creating an overall environment in favour of trade union movement and respectability to the working class in its role as a creator of wealth and thereby the progress of the society. The globalisation process has built in huge profits in the hands of the capitalists often used to vitiate the industrial relations climate totally against the working people. The media is used increasingly to do this and the opinion makers in this country and the judiciary play into their hands.
In order to institutionalise this mobilisation, both within the NTUI and as a mechanism for building social alliance with other organisations, the Assembly of the Working People should be viewed as a distinct process. In a sense, it is an effort of the NTUI to build up a notion of working peoples’ representatives that come into a regular process of interaction, articulation and defining the needs of the different sections of working people. It is also a mechanism for enabling the local level self-organising initiatives to relate to, and integrate into, a national framework, which is shaped and defined by them individually in an interactive process. The institutionalising of this Assembly as a regular feature will provide a continuity of the process and thus, providing ground for a large-scale political mobilisation and nationwide resistance.
The Assembly will enable articulation of needs, making of policy demands, and developing a framework of negotiation with government. Each articulation will provide the elements for developing a framework of economic justice, democratic and social rights, as concrete goals of development around which struggles can be launched to force the government to change policy, political and social structure that actualise these goals. It will also map the needs of the working people and capacities of different sectors and make this a basis for policy in these directions.
In effect the struggle of resistance should be combined with evolution of new labour policy to support and uphold the rights of various sections of the working people. This framework for economic justice will be built around the notion of human dignity, fair exchange, participation of the working people along with distributive and social justice.
The cumulative experience of the Assembly will provide a tool to evaluate the political programmes of parties and contribute a framework for developing a Common Minimum programme (CMP) for the social movement. An independent process of shaping and articulating CMP needs to be developed, which is complementary to the political process but not entirely dependent on it. This is a mechanism for actualising the founding resolution wherein the NTUI envisaged that,
“The focus and gravity of labour’s opposition has to shift away from being limited to a parliamentary engagement with government. Asserting rights in a democracy requires that not just representatives of people, but people themselves in direct relationship to the forces of capital have to build a sustained and in-depth opposition, in every factory and every field, in every industry and in every sector, and at the national level.”
This Assembly will be a direct engagement of the working people with the forces of capital on the terrain of policy making in the government. The CMP should be viewed as an outcome that arises out of this process of contention with the government, reflecting the actual balance of forces.