Mumbai Textile Strike Proves CJI Was Right
Mumbai’s textile collapse is often discussed as an urban planning story or a tale of economic transition. It is rarely examined honestly as a labour relations failure. That is precisely why the recent remarks by the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, struck such a raw nerve. When the head of the judiciary says trade unions have historically blocked industrial growth and cost jobs, Mumbai’s textile mills stand as the most statistically grounded proof that this is not ideological rhetoric but lived economic history.
In 1982, Mumbai was still India’s textile capital. Around 65 composite cotton textile mills operated across central Mumbai, employing between 240,000 and 300,000 workers directly. The sector was already under pressure from ageing machinery, power costs, and competition from decentralised mills in Gujarat and Tamil Nadu. But it was still viable enough to employ a quarter of a million people. That changed with the Great Bombay Textile Strike, led by Datta Samant, which began in January 1982 and stretched for roughly 18 months.
The scale of the disruption was unprecedented. More than 250,000 workers stopped work across dozens of mills. Production collapsed almost overnight. Mills that operated on thin margins lost months of output, while fixed costs continued to mount. By the time the strike ended, the industry was financially crippled. According to documented post-strike assessments, at least 58 textile mills never reopened. Employment in the organised textile sector in Mumbai fell by an estimated 150,000 jobs within a few years. What unions projected as a fight for worker dignity ended with the permanent erasure of worker livelihoods.
This was not a temporary loss measured in “man-days”. It was a structural collapse. Entire mill ecosystems vanished. Workers who once earned stable wages with housing and medical benefits were pushed into informal labour, security jobs, vending, or long-term unemployment. The land did not stay idle; it moved into real estate redevelopment. The capital survived. The jobs did not.
National labour statistics show that this was not an isolated anomaly, only the most dramatic example. Industrial dispute data over the decades consistently records hundreds of disputes annually, with production losses running into hundreds of crores of rupees in peak years. Each prolonged stoppage creates two measurable effects. First, immediate output loss and wage loss. Second, an invisible but more dangerous effect: investor recalculation. Firms respond by relocating, automating, or exiting sectors entirely. Labour pays the price last, but permanently.
What makes the Mumbai case especially instructive is that unions did not just lose a negotiation. They lost the industry itself. Even sympathetic labour economists now acknowledge that the maximalist strike strategy ignored financial viability. Wage demands were raised in an industry already losing competitiveness. The result was not redistribution; it was destruction. By the early 1990s, Mumbai’s share in India’s textile production had collapsed, while states with more cooperative labour environments absorbed new investment and jobs.
This is the context in which the Chief Justice’s comments matter. He was not speaking as a policymaker but as an institutional observer of long-term consequences. From the perspective of the Supreme Court of India, labour rights exist to protect workers, not to institutionalise economic suicide. When union action repeatedly leads to shutdowns rather than settlements, the constitutional promise of livelihood is hollowed out.
The uncomfortable truth is that capital is mobile, but labour is not. Investors can move factories across states or countries. Workers cannot move entire labour markets with them. Every prolonged industrial confrontation increases the probability that the factory never returns. Mumbai’s textile workers learned this the hardest way possible.
None of this is an argument against unions as a concept. It is an argument against confrontational unionism detached from economic reality. Countries that industrialised successfully did not eliminate unions; they redefined them. Productivity-linked bargaining, skill upgrading, and dispute resolution mechanisms replaced strike-first politics. Where unions became partners in growth, jobs expanded. Where they became instruments of permanent agitation, industries withered.
Mumbai’s mills are silent monuments to this lesson. They prove, in numbers and outcomes, that trade union militancy can destroy precisely what it claims to defend. When the Chief Justice says unions must introspect, he is not attacking workers. He is warning them. And history suggests that ignoring this warning carries a cost far greater than any single wage dispute.
