Major Causes of Industrial Dispute

Economic Causes:

Economic causes of industrial disputes relate to interest disputes. These include wages, bonus, allowances, benefits, incentives, and working conditions. His­tory of industrial disputes reveals that the most of industrial disputes arise out of the economic reasons. Further, wages has been the major economic reason causing industrial disputes. There are two reasons attributed to this.
First, the demand for wages has never been fully met because of continuously rising inflation and high cost of living. These result in never-ending demand for upward revision of wages from the trade unions.
Second, wage differential among industrial sectors, regional levels and geographical levels, also become the bone of contention between the workers and the management. To quote, it was the wage differentials prevailing at different plants of the TELCO that made the Lucknow plant of TELCO pitch tents demanding parity of wages. This led to violence and lockout in the TELCO, Lucknow.

Management Practices:

Instances are gallore to report that the management practices too, at times, lead to industrial disputes.
These include:
(i) Management’s threat of use of coercion in exercising the rights of workers to organise them­selves in the form of union as per the legal provisions.
(ii) The management’s unwillingness to recognize a particular trade union and its dilatory tactics in verifying the representative character of the trade union.
(iii) Its unwillingness to talk over any dispute with the employees or refer it to “arbitration” even when trade unions want it to do so.

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(iv) Forcing workers either to join a particular trade union or refrain from joining a trade union,
(v) To discharge or dismiss workers by way of discrimination, victimization, or any other subjec­tive ground.
(vi)The management’s denial for consulting workers in the matters of recruitment, promotion, transfer, merit awards, etc.
(vii) The benefits offered by the management to workers are far from satisfactory.
(viii) Violation of norms by the management such as Code of Discipline, grievance procedures, agreements entered into between workers and management, etc.
The above management practices enrage the workers and lead to industrial disputes.

Trade Union Practices:

Just like management practices, trade union practices also cause industrial disputes. Most of organisations have multiple unions. To quote, Durgapur Steel Plant has 15 unions in exist­ence. Such multiplicity of trade unions, among other things, leads to inter-union rivalry. Each union tries to show its greater concern for the workers’ cause so as to attract more and more workers to its folds.

Legal and Political Factors:

Last but no means the least, the legal and political factors also cause industrial disputes. Like multiple trade unions, we also have multiple labour laws, totaling 108, to regulate IR in our country. While there exists, contradiction among these laws with regard to IR, on the one hand, most of the labour laws enacted long back have by now outlived their relevance to a great extent in the changed industrial environment, on the other. Consider just one contradiction.








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