Revision summary
Indian workers organised first in textiles, railways, and jute. AITUC (1920) nationalised the union map; communists and Girni Kamgar radicalised Bombay. The 1926 Act recognised unions; Meerut and dispute laws showed colonial fear. Gandhi’s Ahmedabad TLA offered arbitration against class war. Caste, migration, and the national movement limited a single class politics before Independence.
Model answer
Introduction
The pre-Independence workers’ movement grew with mills, railways, and plantations. It was at once a fight over wages and hours and a stream inside the national movement, with early unions, communist organisation, and colonial labour law.
Body
Beginnings and organisation
- Bombay and Ahmedabad textile strikes, railway unions, and jute labour in Bengal were the first mass sites, from the late nineteenth century into the 1920s.
- The All India Trade Union Congress was founded in 1920, with Lala Lajpat Rai as the first president, linking labour to the Congress political calendar.
- M. N. Roy, the Communist Party, and the Girni Kamgar Union under S. A. Dange and A. A. Alwe radicalised Bombay mill politics.
- The Trade Unions Act, 1926, gave legal recognition. The Trade Disputes Act, 1929, and later wartime rules tried to contain strikes.
Politics and split
- The Meerut Conspiracy Case (1929–33) prosecuted labour leaders and advertised communist influence to the colonial state.
- AITUC split in the 1930s between moderate nationalists and the left; the National Trade Union Federation and later the Indian Federation of Labour showed the fracture.
- Gandhi’s Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association practised trusteeship and arbitration with Ambalal Sarabhai and Anasuya Sarabhai, a non-class-war path.
- ILO membership (1919) and Royal Commission on Labour (Whitley, 1931) put Indian labour on an international and inquiry map.
Analysis
- The movement won limited legal personality and public visibility. It did not become a nationwide class party before 1947.
- Caste, migrant labour, and communal riots repeatedly split the mill-gate.
- Nationalism often set the horizon: swaraj first, socialism later, which Ambedkar and communists both criticised from different sides.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD W[Pre-1947 workers] --> A[AITUC 1920] W --> C[Communists Meerut Girni Kamgar] W --> G[Gandhi TLA Ahmedabad] W --> L[1926 Act colonial limits]
Conclusion
Pre-Independence labour was mill and rail unionism, AITUC politics, communist organising, and Gandhian arbitration, under colonial restriction. It was a real movement with a fragmented class and a national question it could not postpone.
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Did workers get a labour code before 1947?
They got partial statutes, not a complete code. Factories, mines, and plantation rules remained uneven.
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