"The World's Most Modern Management"... with no union?

On Friday, CNN Money reported on an Indian IT company, HCL Technologies which practices some rather progressive managerial policies. Check this: workers can publicly rate and provide critiques of their management, and submit grievances on anything from benefits to office furniture, and managers are judged by how much workers are giving - the more the better. Sounds pretty good, right? The trouble is, I kept waiting to see which Indian union had the foresight to bargain for these contract clauses... but there wasn't one.

And there was no mention in the article about that other primary concern of working people... pay. Where was the company's stance on benefits and salary scales? Here we get the interesting caveat of "worker-friendly policies" in the globalized IT sector - white-collar and other professional workers typically don't see a need for a union, thinking themselves different from unionized industries. Oddly, this kind of unorthodox management style reinforces that idea, suggesting that worker input is valuable in company operations, but individually, and not with regards to compensation.

Interesting note -After a little bit of research, I saw that HCL has actually "outsourced" some of its operation to Ireland, going in the opposite direction of most sourcing trends. Unlike their Indian counterparts, these Irish workers benefit from a union contract with Connect, a UK-based communications workers' union.

Any thoughts?

tags:labor union labor union india india labortech hcl technologies outsourcing