More pay equals less business: CPM Inc to workers

• Businesses can’t survive if workers keep asking for more wages and push up production costs.

The party has now cracked the whip on its branch secretary in a Kannur panchayat for doing what it had been doing to the bourgeoisie in Kerala.

T C Valsan, branch secretary in Shankaranelloor and vice president of Mangattidam panchayat, had organised out-of-work Kerala Dinesh Beedi workers and their kin—all CPM followers—and inaugurated their protest sit-in at the cooperative head office. This was after the trouble-torn company clamped hefty job cuts, threatening the livelihood of thousands.

Valsan has been banned from all party positions and activities for the next six months, while the party mulls his punishment.

Kerala Dinesh Beedi is now also planning an ‘‘awareness drive’’ to make its 17,000 workers accept substantial wage cuts, too. ‘‘We need to cut wages too, if we are to remain competitive. We have been paying our workers much more than they would be paid elsewhere. So we will now launch an awareness drive to make them accept the reality before going for the cuts,’’ says C V Kunhiraman, KDB chairman.

The 36-year-old Kerala Dinesh Beedi was once a massive federated initiative with over 42,000 beedi workers under it, offering year-round employment. Today, it is struggling to provide work even three days a week to the 17,000 remaining workers who have nowhere to go. A big chunk of its earlier workforce had left and many are now unorganised labourers.

With anti-tobacco laws in place and many Keralites opting for cigarettes, Kerala Dinesh Beedi’s decline began in the 1990s. By 2002, it was no longer viable. CPM’s in-house experts, and others like Richard W Franke, a US professor who was brought to look it up, prescribed immediate diversification.

So some Rs 12 crore went into building a air-conditioned auditorium in Kannur that mostly remains empty, and more crores were diverted to make pickles, umbrellas, curry powders and assorted stuff. However, Kerala Dinesh Beedi found that there was a difference between pushing beedis and other highly competitive consumer goods. At one point, pickles and curry powders lay rotting in the godowns, with some Rs 25 crore worth of beedis that had no takers. Things haven’t changed much since.

‘‘I would say much of this is because we didn’t keep wages down. We can’t wish away facts any longer,’’ says the KDB chairman.

Kerala Dinesh Beedi is now also the first of the CPM’s many initiatives to draw the wrath of its own workforce, which kicked off an agitation in Pinarayi, home turf of party state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan, and then blockaded their head office in Kannur town, demanding better income, and livelihood.

While the party has since brokered a tenuous truce offering 5 per cent relaxation on the 50 per cent work cut, it was shaken enough to dispatch almost all its senior leaders to Kannur for a door-to-door campaign, explaining its version of Kerala Dinesh Beedi facts.