WORKER COMMITMENT OR COMMITMENT TO WORKERS?
Peter Waterman
Industry and Labour: An Introduction by E.A. Ramaswamy and Uma Ramaswamy Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1982, 234 pp., 35.00
March-April 1982, volume 6, No 5

This new Indian textbook on industrial labour and labour relations is divided into nine independent chapters: labour recruitment; labour commit¬ment; industrialization; union theory; Indian unions; indus¬trial conflict theory; collective bargaining theory; Indian industrial relations; and the theory and practice of workers’ participation and control. The preface asserts that the major problem with Indian industrial studies is their reliance on out-of-date facts and their failure to relate Indian experience with a ‘comparative theoretical pers¬pective’. It further asserts that the two major such theoretical (or ideological) approaches which need to be considered are those of ‘pluralism’ and ‘radicalism’. Although some of the major theoretical/comparative chap¬ters contain Indian references or cases, they concentrate on Anglo-Saxon theory, history and cases; there are occasional references to continental Europe and one or two to Japan and the communist world.

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