In August 2004, a team of mostly trade union leaders visited the Tehri Dam site, where 29 workers were killed in a mudslide accident in the underground tunnel. While preparing the report, a debate occurred whether the anti-dam struggles by the oustees and environmental groups should find a place in the report or not. Finally, the team opted for its exclusion on the technical ground that it was outside the mandate as per the terms of reference.

A question arises whether the concerns raised by environmental groups on the safety of a dam have a bearing on the safety of workers engaged in the construction or maintenance of the dam. Or in general, whether a ‘labour perspective’ is constrained from adequately accommodating the concerns of environment and ecology? An equally relevant question is whether an environmental perspective necessarily approach labour from an adversarial angle presuming that the organised labour has a self- interest in perpetuating the current paradigms of development.

Legitimate organisations of workers in the form of trade unions are the great social inventions of the industrial society, which even today perform as the main instruments that guarantee workplace democracy and economic justice against the absolute control and ravenous appropriation by the capitalists. These important concerns were taken forward to the political arena in the form of demands for state policies that ensure representative democracy, respect for human rights and distributive justice.

The significant contribution of the environmental movements has been in emphasising the concept of ‘limit,’ the limit to economic progress, development and extractive industrialisation and the ‘impact’ that these will have on human beings, environment and ecology. It also raised issues of ‘intergenerational justice,’ ‘consumptive growth’ and challenged the concept of ‘anthropocentric’ approach to the universe and its resources.

As István Mészáros reminds us in one of his articles on sustainable development, ‘Our existing social order is built on the structural antagonism between capital and labour, and therefore it requires the exercise of external control over all recalcitrant forces. Adversariality is the necessary concomitant of such a system, no matter how great the human and economic resources wasted for its maintenance.’

The capitalist system also views nature as a “free gift” to capital and exploit it for short-term gains and immediate growth.

Nature is not just an essential part of the creation of wealth but the ultimate source of all wealth. John Bellamy Foster citing Paul Burkett argues that capitalism’s ecological crises, take two forms. The first arises from capital’s tendency to increase the flow of commodities and hence the throughput of materials and energy, with little concern for natural limits, resulting in imbalances between capital’s material requirements and the natural conditions of raw material production. The second pertains to the general crisis in the quality of human-social development history, which capitalism addresses through sheer productivity and abundance—that is, quantitatively. Technology was also supposed to address the qualitative problems of human development, but it has created nuclear bombs and genetically modified seeds that have the potential to annihilate life forms including the human race.

In the current neo-liberal regime, the capital has become more abrasive about the observance of distributive justice that the trade unions stand for or the intergenerational justice the environmental movements stand for. Capital has succeeded in making a wedge between the two by obfuscating the short term and long term goals of human development. Global systems and organisations of production are not only leading to an unprecedented increase in the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few but are also meant to be exploitative and extractive despite the existence of international conventions on labour standards and national labour legislations intended to protect the rights of workers. At another level, capital has been efficient in converting even the concept of ‘sustainable development’ (after Rio 1992 and Johannesburg 2002) into tradable goods by way of, for example, the Clean Development Mechanism that justifies pollution at source in lieu of forest conservation elsewhere.

In developing countries like India, communities like adivasis, fishworkers, dalits (agricultural workers) and forest workers are the worst sufferers of this system because of structural inhibitions with regard to collective bargaining capabilities and heightened vulnerabilities to alienation from nature and natural productions settings.

As Mészáros argues, a successful struggle against alienation production and nature requires the constitution of a culture of substantive equality, with the active involvement of all.

This issue of Labour File invites the attention of readers to this urgent task. We have explored in detail the case of ‘Gwalior Rayons’ in Mavoor, Kerala, a much-discussed case of closure of a factory consequent to the struggle by environmental groups, as to how labour, environmental groups and community react and experience the current situation. We have two articles on the confluence of the interests of labour, environment and community in relation to the Narmada Dam struggle. We also examine how in mining, forestry and fisheries, the interests of these groups are intertwined.