Tamil Nadu: Why hundreds of Samsung workers are protesting in India

Millions of Indian workers join trade unions – often backed by leftist parties – who use their political clout to enforce labour laws and negotiate better conditions. “Foreign companies set up in India but resist following local laws on workers’ rights to association and collective bargaining,” alleged Mr Soundararajan.

Many prominent multinational companies, including Apple and Amazon, have set up factories in India. But labour rights activists allege that many of them underpay and overwork their Indian employees and collude with state governments to clamp down on workers’ rights.

Shyam Sundar, a labour economist, said multinational corporations use various “human resource strategies” to prevent workers from forming unions in developing countries like India.

For one, they fiercely oppose workers joining external, politically-backed unions and encourage them to form “worker-led” internal ones. “This ensures that the management has some control over the union’s activities,” Mr Sundar said.

Mr Soundararajan alleged that management at the Chennai plant had also approached workers with this solution, which they refused. The BBC has reached out to Samsung India for a response.

The second way, Mr Sundar said, is by hiring young, unskilled workers, especially from rural areas, by attracting them with a good starting salary. “These ‘trainees’ are promised to be made permanent employees after a couple of months, but this doesn’t happen. The salaries too stay stagnant or have very low increments.”

The rapid growth of “flexible workers” – employees hired on contract – has become a key strategy of multinational corporations to stop unionising by ensuring a pliant workforce, he added.

According to the latest government statistics, every two in five workers employed in factories, external in India in 2022 were contractual labourers, making up about 40% of the workforce in industrial establishments.

“Companies use the threat of re-location or non-expansion to discourage state governments from enforcing labour laws,” Mr Sundar said. “But workers can leverage global labour unions to pressure companies to abide by international labour laws,” he added.

*Name changed to protect the worker’s identity

With inputs from Vijayanand Arumugam from BBC Tamil and Nikhil Inamdar from BBC News