ILPC 2027

Based on the findings of an ongoing study focusing on job insecurities of print and television journalists in India, the paper will discuss various dimensions of declining trade unionism and mounting representation-insecurities in the media sector. It will also explain the eroding frame of labour protection in the sector, by specifically focusing on the ongoing stalemate of `wage-boards’ for journalists, which had been an effective statutory mechanism for ensuring decent wages and welfare provisions, till recently.

To begin with, the paper will capture the overall temporal changes in media production and business structures in India. In an age of growing penetration of corporate business interest in the media sector, duly facilitated by neo-liberal policies, the `public service broadcasting’ profile of media is quickly waning. The past few decades witnessed a `Murdochisation’ of Indian media, where the viewers are treated as mere consumers and the broadcasting as a system of supplying `media goods’.  Along with this, there has been engagement of new business strategies (e.g. extreme localization of viewership; `manufacturing’ of news in the newsrooms) and increased use of new advertisement strategies (e.g. `paid news’; `private treaties’). The recent decades also witnessed a gradual and steady descend in the protective policy environment provided by the state, which in earlier times ensured a strict demarcation between editorial freedom and business interests of the media houses.

Subsequently, the discussion will link the above transformations in the media industry/culture to the deteriorating working conditions and growing insecurities of journalists of modern times.  It will be established that a host of factors (including new possibilities offered by technologies, changed production organisations and engagement of new human resource management practices) together determine a situation where the workers are totally subjugated and largely dictated by the terms of capital.  The process of deskilling being experienced by media workers, along with increased use of new production forms and technologies is an aspect that will be highlighted.  It will be shown that new technologies provide more scope for the firms to control and coordinate media work, which inter alia relegates some of the workers as redundant and dispensable at workplace.  The ever growing trend of contractual work in the sector and its extended version of widespread engagement of stringers, at the core of the workforce, will also be elaborated in the discussion.

Eventually, the discussion will focus on the decline of trade unions and to the waning protective cover to the employees (especially referring to the existing stalemate in terms of implementing the awards of statutory `wage boards’). The paper will conclude with a note that both the decline of trade unions and the erosion of legal protective measures are two sides of the same coin, as the ultimate determinants of these changes are the transformations in production organisation and labour processes (aided by technological possibilities and new norms of business) that cumulatively weaken the relative positioning of labour vis-à-vis capital.