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the workers can have contact with their representatives. This
therefore underlines the need and importance of communication
and contact between the workers and the workers representatives.
Failure of the Workers’ Council to take into account the views
and interests of the ordinary workers lead to the Workers’ Council
becoming another layer of management divorced from the
workers thus frustrating the aims of the Workers’ Council. In
Friendship Textile Mill, the workers do not generally participate
fully in decision-making. First of all, in all the two Workers’
Council meetings, the ordinary workers did not participate in
proposing the agenda for the meetings in spite of their desire to do
so. Again the workers’ representatives themselves did not take
much trouble to get the views from the workers they represent.
Only two of the seven workers’ representatives I talked to did take
trouble to go around asking the people they represent whether
they had anything to present to them for discussing in the
Workers’ Council. This shows a lack of understanding by the
workers’ representatives of their function. Hence decisions passed
in the Workers’ Council did not really reflect some of the worker’s
views. For example, there was little consultation of the workers on
the question of abolishing the canteen. Most of the workers I in-
terviewed were not in favour of abolishing it. It was initiated by
the management and the Workers’ Council just endorsed it. If
workers’ views had been taken into account, the outcome might
have been different.

Besides the workers being denied the chance of participating in
giving their views on how to run the enterprise through their
representative, they had no chance of knowing everything
discussed and decided in the Workers' Council meetings. Of the
twenty workers interviewed only a few knew vaguely what had
been passed in the Council meetings. There was no general
meeting of the enterprise in which the workers could be informed
of the decisions reached in the Workers’ Council. Those decisions
which needed the compliance of the workers, like the abolition of
the canteen, were communicated in a form of a Circular to the
workers. However, in some sections, the workers’ representatives
took the effort to tell the workers they represented the minutes of
the Workers’ Council meetings. In other sections, the workers had
not been informed of the Workers’ Council meetings. In fact the
minutes of the Workers’ Council meetings were stamped ‘Con-

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