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In the 1980s the bureaucratic rulers of the Soviet workers state tried to appease imperialism by cutting back on aid to countries like India--aid which had formerly given those countries a measure of protection against neo-colonial exploitation. The Congress government in India responded by rewriting economic regulations to attract foreign capital and by starting to sell off the country�s large public sector, which still employs the great majority of its unionized workforce. As a direct result of the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, these programs of liberalization and privatization were intensified in the early 90s under the BJP government. When Congress came back to power in 2002 its prime minister, Manmohan Singh--an Oxford-trained economist who under the previous Congress government had been the architect of the liberalization drive--vowed, unsurprisingly, to continue it. Liberalization under the new government may have a �human face,� as the Prime Minister promised, but its hand still wields a policeman�s club. Aided by these policies, Indian capital has been on an anti-labor offensive. The labor economist Barbara Harriss-White writes that �since the 1980s, the corporate sector, determined to secure flexibility and to control pay, have worked their way down a �menu� of tactics to fracture the workforce, reduce numbers and erode workers� rights,� including plant closures, lock-outs, attrition, contract violations, moving production to dispersed locations, and outsourcing. As a result, the relatively small portion of the workforce that receives regular wages and has some degree of legal protection, as opposed to the huge number who are casually employed, was reduced in the years between 1977 and 1994 by as much as one-half (India Working, 2003). The workers movement in India has a defensive struggle ahead of it. Only about half of those in the shrinking sector of regularly employed workers are in unions, and those unions are fatally fragmented. Right after Independence the Congress party moved to split the workers movement and dilute the influence of the Communist Party in it by setting up its own trade union federation to rival the formerly unified, Stalinist-led All-India Trade Union Congress. Since then the unions have been parceled out among a growing number of political parties, including in recent decades regional, communal, and caste-based parties. There are even unions formed around individual charismatic leaders. (See Sharit Bhowmik, �The Labour Movement in India: Present Problems and Future Perspectives,� The Indian Journal of Social Work, January 1998.) Indian labor needs to reorganize itself (by a process of fusion) along industrial lines. It needs to fight to organize the great mass of industrial workers who are casually employed--and even those currently unemployed and looking for work, whose numbers, as the liberal columnist P. Sainath points out in The Hindu (July 28), �almost equal the population of South Africa.� Unemployed and casual workers are rightly seen not as competitors of the regular workforce, but as their allies against the bosses. And the Indian workers movement needs to take up the special oppression of women and low-caste workers, whose exclusion from regular work forces them into the swelling casual labor market.   page 4 (of 4)