“Union Regimes”: Discipline and Punish in Three Indian Maritime Trade Unions

This critical study stands at the intersection of two prominent themes within the studies of industrial relations and the sociology of labour respectively, namely, the decline, renewal, and transformation of trade unionism in the context of neoliberal globalization on the one hand, and labour process theories pertaining specifically to labour discipline/control on the other. Illustrated with ethnographic snapshots of three prominent maritime trade unions in India, this paper conceptualizes the “union regime”—a labour disciplinary regime based on the trade union's perceptual and attitudinal conditioning of its members, which ends chiefly in benefiting the employers and the unions. Furthermore, the paper describes the specific mechanisms of union disciplining from a Foucauldian theoretical perspective. The complicity of trade unions in the “discipline and punish” of the very workers that they represent leads to the alarming speculation that, at the perplexing crossroads of transformation, trade unionism is at the risk of becoming an extension of the ideological arsenal of global capitalism.