Democracy at Work in an Indian Industrial Cooperative: The Story of Kerala Dinesh Beedi

• Preface, ix
• Note on the spelling of Indian place names, xv

1 Beedi workers and the Kerala Model, 1

• Malabar, Kannur, and KDB
• The benefits of KDB
• KDB and The Kerala Model
• The crisis of the Kerala Model
• KDB and the Kerala Model: past, present, and future

2 The making of the beedi working class, 22

• The growth of the beedi industry in Kannur
• The social background of the beedi workers
• Deteriorating labor conditions
• From caste to class
• Beedi workers in the national independence movement
• Growing industrial tensions
• The general strike of 1937
• The culture of self-study
• From congress socialism to communism
• The war period
• Industrial expansion after independence
• The unions' response to decentralization
• The counteroffensive of the employers and the union crisis

3 Solidarity versus retrenchment: The birth of KDB, 54

• The history of the cooperative movement in Europe and North America
• The background to KDB
• Formation of the Kerala Dinesh Beedi Workers' Cooperative
• Toward a new culture of development action
• From Ganesh to Dinesh
• The politics of consumer choice
• Twenty-five years of growth
• KDB--the standard bearer of improvement in labor conditions
• The cooperative that succeeded

4 From mobilization to efficiency: The role of the central society, 86

• The structure of KDB
• The management of the central cooperative
• Economies in large-scale raw material purchases
• Marketing beedis
• Financial management
• Regulation of output of the primary cooperatives
• Monitoring output quality
• Ensuring uniform labor conditions
• Emerging issues

5 The dynamics of shop floor democracy: Empowerment versus supervision in the beedi primary cooperatives, 118

• Rolling beedis
• The wage system
• The management staff: secretaries, foremen, and maistries
• Worker-staffed, worker-elected director boards
• The functions of trade unions in the primary cooperatives
• Trade union rivalries
• Commitment or supervision?
• Emerging issues

6 Efficiency and profit in the primary societies: KDB's market dilemma, 156

• Production and profit
• Primary society trading profit: the measure of efficiency and the dependent variable
• Political causes of inefficiency
• The infrastructure of efficiency
• Organizational components of efficiency: primary society size and management staff as percentage of employees
• Worker characteristics and efficiency
• Female workers and maternity benefits
• Multiple regressions on the variables
• Implications of the statistical analysis
• Emerging issues: women, efficiency, and social justice

7 KDB and the international movement for workers' cooperatives, 182

• The general structural requirements of a workers' cooperative
• Equality and democracy
• KDB, degeneration, and the Kerala Model
• State sponsorship and worker solidarity
• Socialist debates on workers' cooperatives

8 Afterword: Diversification and the ethics of tobacco production, 217

• The ethics of tobacco production
• Declining market for beedis?
• Economic and political aspects of diversification
• 1996: New initiatives in diversification

Notes, 225
Bibliography, 233
Index, 249

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