1. Introduction
Public Policy, most laconically, is defined as “whatever governments choose to do or not to do” (Chakravarty & Sanyal, 2017, p. 4). The recently released draft national labour and employment policy, the Shram Shakti Niti, makes for an interesting case study on why “not doing something” is an equally, if not more important aspect to be explored in public policy research. Particularly, I mean so on account of the virtual silence on unionization in the draft policy except mentioning its constitutional basis (MoLE, 2025).
Trade unionism may be easily defined as the single most essential yet contentious issues of labour in India, nay, globally. If on the one hand, in their seminal work from the end of the 19th century, History of Trade Unionism, the Webbs had found a “spiders’ web” when they tried to understand the trade union, economically, stretching to conditions of labour, infinite technical variety of productive processes, and moral values (Webb, 1920); on the other hand, another seminal work later in the next century, in What do Unions Do? Freeman and Medoff declared that trade unions have two antagonistic “faces” which do not lend themselves neatly for economic analysis (Freeman & Medoff, 1984, pp. 3-25). Methodological ambiguity, in fact, expresses its phenomenal ambiguity with the jury still divided on whether it is the single-most deleterious economic institution or the pinnacle of modern, industrial democracy—“a state within a state”.
Admittedly, the de facto omission of unionism from the draft policy is keeping in sync with a longee durée tendency that was inaugurated with the LPG reforms, and one does not find its mention in the many recent exhortations by scholars demanding for a labour and employment policy for India (Mehrotra, 2020, pp. 3-30; Basole & Kapoor, 2025; Mishra, 2025; Sundar, 2019). However, despite such normalization, that trade unionism has not gone out of favor with the Indian workforce can be gleaned from some recent examples. Be it the Samsung India Industrial dispute (Mathews, 2024), the recurring struggle of the tea plantation workers of West Bengal over bonuses, which took a militant turn at the end of last year (Samik, 2024; Singh, 2024), the anti-privatization protests by the power sector employees in many regions of India (Desk, TOI, 2025; Kapoor, 2025; Newsclick Desk, 2025; The Hindu Bureau, 2025) or the general strike of July, 2025, which counted almost 25 cr workers under the joint platform of central trade unions (The Wire Staff, 2025)—trade unionism has not merely held a sway over its traditional loci but also extended to newer sectors such as the IT or the digital gig economy sector, and with newer strategies (Bisht, 2010; Bhat, 2023; Elizabeth, 2025; Barik, 2023; Ananya, 2024; Salauddin, 2025; Ray & John, 2025).
The omission raises an important question on whether the government should reconsider its position in the days before the draft policy gets adopted for, after all, if India’s core pillar—her demographic dividend—adjudges unionism as one of their representative institutions for their interests and voices, a de facto silence runs the risk of becoming a de facto marginalization. In this paper, however, we are not interested in making a case for either argument. Rather, we ask —how and why could that institution, which holds such a historical and contemporary pedigree in the life of modern societies, be written off in our recent draft labour and employment policy? And what implications does this hold for the future?
In what proceeds, I trace the history of the labour and industrial relations policies in post-independence India and argue that, apart from other reasons, this omission owes itself to the record of political unionism in India. At the center of my arguments, inadvertently, is the manufacturing sector which has seen the highest density of trade unionism in India (Labour Bureau).
