MEDIATING A LABOUR UNREST
A Fauji’s Dilemma
The note was terse, “Please come to the admin block and pacify the workers – We need your help. Tom.” Scribbled on office stationery, it was delivered to me by the company doctor, who had extricated himself out of the fracas going around the admin block, which housed the company offices. Trouble has been brewing around the office complex for more than an hour, where a vast number of company workers, mostly manual labourers had gathered that afternoon and virtually laid siege to the complex. I had been out since morning on some liaison work with the transport authority of the city of Riyadh, at the outskirts of which the company’s offices and the living accommodation for personnel were located, and returned only by late afternoon. Therefore, I had only a vague idea of what the crisis was from what little I gathered from the drivers of the transport department I was the operations manager of.
Tom was my boss, an affable Englishman, whom I got along very well with. I knew he trusted me a lot for my handling the fleet operations seamlessly, leaving him free to focus on policy and planning matters with the higher-ups, and treated me more like a friend than a subordinate. However, from what I had assessed the situation was so far, his request for me to step in and pacify the workers at that stage put me in a quandary. Tension has been building up for a while between the management and the labourers, who constituted the largest manpower segment of the company. Either due to a communication gap or lack of transparency by the company during its recruitment of labourers from India, a sense of betrayal seemed to have gripped the labourers at large that they had been misled about their nature of work and living conditions. The company had the contract for garbage collection and disposal of the city, whereas many labourers seemed to have joined under the impression that they were being recruited for some kind of construction work. Racist behaviour of some of the British and American low-level officials aggravated the resentment.
Past noon that day, an altercation occurred between a labour foreman and a young British official, triggered by a racial slur by the latter. It had led to a scuffle, with the Britisher punching the foreman and the latter hitting back with an iron pipe he got his hands on. While the British guy, with a broken arm, was rushed to the hospital, the foreman was left to mend his bleeding nose himself. As word spread around from the labourers who witnessed the incident, their comrades gathered around the admin block in vast numbers and blockaded it. Armed with discarded construction material like logs or pipes, they were refusing to let the 100-strong managerial and secretarial personnel, half of them British or Americans, from leaving the building. They ransacked the telephone lines, putting the trapped personnel in a state of incommunicado. An Indian clerk, who had stepped out to find out what their demands were, was roughed up. No one knew what their demands were and no one dared to step out and face the angry mob. Tom was relying on me to diffuse the situation on the strength of the popularity I enjoyed among my drivers. He found it a safe bet to send out the Indian doctor, who happened to be at the admin block at the time, as his courier to me. Fortunately, the labourers recognized the doctor and let him pass unharmed, and he found me at my normal workstation, the transport office adjacent to the vehicle park and away from the main office.
My instinctive thought was to comply with Tom’s request, but my secretary, a Goan gentleman, older and worldly wise, who had been following the development closely, counselled caution. While I commanded fair amount of respect among our drivers, most of the labourers, numbering almost 2000, hardly knew me. There was no telling how they would behave if they suspected that I was acting on behalf of the management. I was flawed in my perception that it would be akin to handling a bunch of mutinous soldiers. I was no more in the army where my rank and military discipline could prevail. This was absolute rabble and I was hardly deft at playing the pacifist negotiator. Yet my soldierly instinct made me feel uneasy being a mute bystander, when I could possibly help. Reason, however, dictated that I was not bound by any regimental loyalty to the company to take a risk that one would gladly take as a soldier.
My dilemma was soon solved by a delegation of my drivers calling on me. Word had got around the department that I had been requested to intervene, but was hesitating. The drivers painted an aspect of the situation that I had not thought of. The Saudi law expressly forbade labour unrest of any kind and enforced it ruthlessly. If a labour unrest took place in a company, the entire labour force would be deported and the company’s business licence cancelled. If word of the disturbance going on reached the ears of someone in authority, it was kaput for the operations of the company. The entire work force would be shipped back to India and the company itself made to down shutters. The company’s location far out of the city might have helped news of the commotion not leaking out, but with occasional visitors from the city, that might change anytime. That also explained why the management had not called for police assistance.
Some of my drivers had worked with other companies earlier and I was surprised to learn that there were instances in the past of companies being closed down. The government did not bother about the financial loss, the country was rich enough to sustain it. Its rigid laws brooked no compromises. The drivers urged me to act in any manner if I could, to diffuse the situation. We could all be back in India overnight, if the trouble persisted, they pointed out to me. Most of them came from poor families and a deportation would be catastrophe for them. While the labourers did have some genuine grievances, the crisis had essentially been manipulated by some troublemakers among them, guys from Bombay with militant trade unionist past. The former, majority of them rustic folk hailing from UP or Bihar, had been incited by these villains, who sought to extract as much more from the company as they could, as was their wont. The uneducated, often illiterate lot the labourers were, did not comprehend the implications of what they were indulging in. “Pagal hai Saab yeh, marvadenge hum sab ko. Kuch karo ji – These guys are mad; they will ruin us all. Please do something, Sir.”
The drivers’ appeal put me in a further dilemma. My soldierly honour might not be at stake even if I did not intervene, but I did owe a moral responsibility towards my drivers and even towards the laborers, who were all my countrymen. I could never forget the pitiable sight of the 60-odd labourers in their pajama-kurtas and chappals, who had boarded the Riyadh-bound flight from Bombay with me, the task of guiding their lot through the journey assigned to me by the management. I had to spend hours to get them through the immigration, filling the forms that they couldn’t read, with only a couple of clerks who had accompanied me to assist. They were so bewildered by the Arab customs officials, who picked up beedi bundles from their baggage and threw those away, cursing those were narcotics, and smashed the pictures of Hindu deities many of them carried. I knew that the drivers were right, they had been manipulated.
Personally, it should not have made a difference to me what the outcome of the crisis or the fate of the company would be. Freshly out of the army, I was disillusioned with the drab existence in a country void of any entertainment avenues and, though happy with my job, had already made up my mind to resign and return to India. And logic again dictated that I was no more bound by the officer’s credo of putting the welfare of my men above mine. Nevertheless, I felt torn between a moral obligation to all those men and the illogic of plunging myself into unwarranted trouble. Eventually, the inherent sucker for trouble in me won, and I told the drivers I’d do it.
Together with my secretary, foreman and some of the drivers, I worked out a modus operandi. I could not just walk into the crowd and talk to them. More than likely, I would get beaten up if I did that, and I didn’t fancy being so humiliated. My foreman and the drivers had already thought about it and devised a plan. We would take out one of the ambulances in our fleet and carry a portable PA system we had on board. Apart from the driver of the ambulance, the foreman and a dozen drivers will travel with me in the vehicle, a virtual bodyguard. We would drive into the crowd with the siren wailing and light flashing on top. The crowd, unsure what was in the offing, was bound to clear a path. We would halt the vehicle at a point in the middle of the crowd, and I would climb on top of the vehicle with the foreman for company. I would then address the crowd using the cordless mike and we hoped like hell they would listen and not jeer at me.
It was nightfall when we set out on our mission. As it happened, the agitators did listen. A hush fell over after the ambulance halted and I spoke. “Doston – Friends”, I began and continued in Hindi in a composed manner. I explained to them that I fully understood their resentment over what has happened and was in absolute agreement with them that the management ought to bear responsibility. However, I pointed out that the turmoil that was going on was not going to achieve anything. We were in a foreign country where the laws were different and stringent against labour unrest. If the government got the word of it, all of us would be arbitrarily deported. Was that what they wanted? I reminded them that their families back home were dependent on the money transfers they sent. There was a bit of a hustle and bustle initially when I began speaking, with some guys trying to push their way across to the ambulance, shrieking expletives and demanding to know who the hell I was, but they were soon restrained by their less excited comrades and my drivers, who formed a ring around the vehicle, and I carried on. I guaranteed them that their grievances would be duly addressed if they would only cooperate with me in facilitating a discussion between their representatives and the management. I urged them to nominate a few representatives to join me, and the rest to disperse and retire to their living quarters. There was a certain amount of shouting match among the supporters and opposers of my suggestion, but eventually they relented and, and although not all of them dispersed and too many of them wanted to be representatives, I was able to restrict the nominees to a team of five.
Once I sent word to Tom through one of the petrified security guards outside the admin block, a meeting was swiftly arranged, which was attended by the entire top management, including the CEO and the Director HR. I had declined a request from the labour representatives to be their spokesman, since I could not be an officer of the company and a labour leader at the same time, and made it clear to them that I would only act as their interpreter. However, the management lot insisted that I double up as a mediator as well, a role I deemed myself absolutely ill-equipped for.
As soon as the discussions began, it was clear to me that the entire top management was shell-shocked and in no state to handle the crisis rationally. They were desperate to diffuse the situation, no matter what concessions they had to grant the labourers. And the latter, sensing the mood, began making unreasonable demands. To my soldierly perspective, it was abject surrender, which would terribly undermine the discipline of the whole organization. I tried to reason with them that accepting all the demands in toto would jeopardize the entire functioning of the company. Ironically, I found myself persuading the labour reps to moderate their demands, even when the other side was inclined to accept those, especially grossly outrageous ones like they should be served hot meals, wherever they were engaged in the city. I knew that the catering department packed extremely nutritious meals for all workers, since my drivers carried the same on round-the-clock shifts. Since the nature of work demanded constantly mobile operations, there was no way such a demand could be met. At one stage, one of the labour reps who sensed what I was up to, was riled enough to ask me whether I was mediating or speaking for the company. It took all my persuasive skills to convince him of the necessity of being reasonable.
It was midnight by the time the two sides arrived at a compromise. Some of the conditions agreed by the management were positive, like stringent action against racial slurs, including sacking of any white employee found guilty, while some others, like freedom of the labourers to swap shifts between them without concurrence of the foremen, sounded ridiculous. I knew things were going to dogs in the company with the management folding up so feebly. The workers, who were already somewhat unruly, were now going to get more belligerent. Or maybe, I was being paranoid. Probably the corporate culture wasn’t the same as the army’s. Here profit was the main concern, damn the discipline!
I wasn’t unduly concerned either. I was quitting anyway. This latest development strengthened my resolve to leave. It gave me a saner reason than just quitting because I couldn’t have a drink or watch a movie. The respect that your rank gave you in the army was no more guaranteed here. Leave, when the going was good! All my drivers, who were off duty, were at the airport to see me off. I would miss them.
