Trade Union Movement in India: AITUC, INTUC, the Splits and the Labour Codes

INTUC, the Indian National Trade Union Congress, is the central trade union formed in May 1947 as the labor wing of the Congress, and it sits at the midpoint of the trade union movement in India. Before it came AITUC, founded in Bombay in October 1920; after it came the socialist, RSS-linked and Marxist federations of 1948 to 1970. Between them, these bodies carry the story of how Indian workers organized, from a mill hands’ petition in 1890 to the four labour codes that took effect on 21 November 2025.

Most readers walk in with one of two wrong ideas. The first is that INTUC was India’s first union, when it was actually a breakaway: the Congress set up a federation of its own while the older one was passing under communist leadership. The second is that AITUC was communist from birth, when its first president was Lala Lajpat Rai, a nationalist. This note settles both and dates each central union the way the sources date it.

Trade Union Movement in India at a Glance

A trade union is a lasting association of workers formed to bargain with employers over wages and working conditions. In India the movement moved through three phases: welfare associations before 1918, federations tied to the national movement from 1920 to 1947, and party-linked central unions after independence.

What a Trade Union Is and How the Law Treats It

A trade union exists for collective bargaining, which means workers negotiate as one body instead of one by one. A single mill hand asking for a raise can be replaced by the next person at the gate. Five hundred asking together can’t, and that difference in bargaining power is the whole reason unions exist.

The right to form one is a fundamental right. Article 19(1)(c) guarantees citizens the freedom to form associations or unions, subject to reasonable restrictions. The right to strike is a different matter. In All India Bank Employees’ Association v National Industrial Tribunal, decided on 28 August 1961 and reported in 1962, the Supreme Court held that even a liberal reading of Article 19(1)(c) doesn’t give unions a guaranteed right to effective collective bargaining or to strike.

Registration is what turns a group of workers into a legal body. Under the Industrial Relations Code, 2020, seven or more members may apply, and a union is registered only if 10 percent of the workers or 100 workers, whichever is less, are its members. Registration then brings three protections:

• legal status as a registered body that can hold property and sue;
• immunity from civil suits in certain cases arising out of a trade dispute;
• protection from a criminal conspiracy charge for agreements made in furtherance of the union’s lawful objects.

Above the plant-level union sits the federation. A Central Trade Union Organisation is a federation that the Ministry of Labour and Employment recognizes after verifying its membership, and that status decides who speaks for Indian workers in national and international bodies.

Which Was the First Trade Union in India?

The answer depends on what you count as a union, and that’s why two names turn up in textbooks. The Bombay Mill Hands Association of 1890, led by N. M. Lokhande, is the starting point of the movement. The Madras Labour Union of 1918, formed under B. P. Wadia, is the first organized trade union.

Lokhande’s body was an association, not a union. It drafted a memorandum of mill workers’ grievances, organized a mass meeting in Bombay in April 1890 and ran a newspaper, Dinabandhu, to put those grievances before the authorities. IGNOU’s unit on the subject says plainly that it was “in no sense a trade union”. Workers weren’t passive before it either: Bombay and Madras saw 24 strikes between 1882 and 1890.

The shift came with the First World War. Three pressures pushed workers from petitions to permanent organization:

• the wartime rise in prices, which made wage demands collective;
• the Russian Revolution of 1917, which spread ideas of class consciousness;
• the founding of the International Labour Organisation in 1919, which gave workers an international platform.

About 14 more unions followed Wadia’s in 1918 and 1919. The same year, 1918, Gandhi intervened in a dispute over the working conditions of Ahmedabad’s textile mill workers, one of the three local campaigns (with Champaran and Kheda) that made his name before the mass movements. The Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association, with which Gandhi was closely associated, applied non-violence to industrial disputes and stayed independent of the rival federations in the early 1930s.

How AITUC Was Founded in 1920

AITUC began over a question of representation. For the first ILO conference in Washington in 1919, the colonial government nominated India’s workers’ delegate without consulting the unions. In response, 64 workers’ associations with 1,40,854 members met in Bombay and set up the All India Trade Union Congress as a central body.

Sources differ by a day on the date. The Archives of Indian Labour gives 31 October 1920, the date most textbooks use, while an IGNOU unit gives 30 October. Either way, the founders were nationalists: Lala Lajpat Rai was elected the first president, with Joseph Baptista, N. M. Joshi and Diwan Chaman Lall among the founders. Congress leaders such as Motilal Nehru, C. R. Das and Vallabhbhai Patel backed the move.

The timing matters. AITUC was born in the same months as the Non-Cooperation Movement, and Gandhi’s support for workers’ demands during 1920-21 influenced the young labor movement. By 1924, AITUC’s own records counted 167 unions with about 2.23 lakh members.

The Trade Unions Act, 1926 and the Splits of 1929 to 1941

The Trade Unions Act, 1926 was India’s first union law. It received assent on 25 March 1926 and came into force on 1 June 1927. It gave registered unions legal status and immunity from civil suits and criminal prosecution for legitimate union activity, and registrations rose once it was in place.

Then came three blows in quick succession. The Royal Commission on Labour, chaired by J. H. Whitley, sat from 1929 to 1931 to examine working conditions. In 1929 the government arrested a group of communist and trade union leaders, three Englishmen among them, in the Meerut Conspiracy Case, charged them under Section 121A of the Indian Penal Code with conspiring against the King-Emperor’s sovereignty, and convicted 27 when the trial ended in early 1933. The trial gave the accused a public platform and strengthened the position of the Communist Party of India in Indian politics. The third blow came from inside AITUC.

The splits and reunions

Ideology split the federation twice in three years, and wage cuts brought it back together. The sequence, as IGNOU records it:

• 1929, Nagpur session: the moderates walked out and formed the All India Trade Union Federation under N. M. Joshi (the Archives of Indian Labour names V. V. Giri as its leader). AITUC was left with 21 unions and about 94,000 members.
• 1931, Calcutta session: the communists left to form the Red Trade Union Congress under B. T. Ranadive and S. V. Deshpande.
• 1933: the moderate federation and the railway unions merged into the National Trade Union Federation.
• 1935: the Red Trade Union Congress returned to AITUC.
• 1938 to 1940: through V. V. Giri’s effort, the National Trade Union Federation affiliated to AITUC at Nagpur and merged fully in 1940.
• 1941: M. N. Roy’s radicals, who backed the British war effort, left to form the Indian Federation of Labour.

The pattern is worth remembering. Division cost workers dearly: in 1933 more than 50,000 workers lost their jobs in Bombay city alone and wage rates fell sharply. Unity came back because a divided movement couldn’t protect wages.

Why INTUC Was Formed in 1947

INTUC was formed because the Congress wanted a federation it could rely on. The communists had been gaining ground in AITUC since the 1920s, and IGNOU describes AITUC as communist-dominated by 1949. After a 1945 Congress Working Committee resolution, the party’s labor leaders set up their own center. The founding conference met at the Constitution Club, New Delhi, on 3 and 4 May 1947, with Vallabhbhai Patel presiding and about 200 unions represented. The INTUC full form is the Indian National Trade Union Congress.

After independence, each new party built a union of its own, and each party split produced a union split. The founding years below are the ones the unions and IGNOU give, and the political links are stated as the sources record them:

CITU’s first conference met in Calcutta from 28 to 31 May 1970, with B. T. Ranadive as president. In 1972 INTUC itself divided, when the group led by Morarji Desai, S. Nijalingappa and K. Kamaraj formed the National Labour Organisation. IGNOU sums up the period in one line: in India, a split in a political party has led to a similar split in the union it controls.

How Central Trade Unions Are Verified and Counted

Membership is counted through a general verification run by the Chief Labour Commissioner (Central) on the ministry’s direction. Its purpose is practical: the result decides each federation’s representation on national and international councils, committees and conferences.

Only three general verifications have been completed. Their reckoning dates were 31 December 1980, 1989 and 2002, and the results were published in 1985, December 1996 and January 2008. To qualify as a Central Trade Union Organisation, a federation needed at least five lakh verified members spread over at least four states and four industries. Thirteen federations qualified in the 2002 round.

The 2002 result is the latest verified count:

• BMS came first with 62,15,797 members, a figure the BMS and the ministry table reproduced by IGNOU both give;
• INTUC came second with about 39 lakh;
• AITUC, HMS and CITU followed, each between roughly 26 and 35 lakh.

Tables that reproduce the ministry’s figures disagree on some numbers by up to a lakh, INTUC’s among them, though the ranking holds. Treat the first-place BMS figure as settled and the others as approximate.

A fresh round, with 31 December 2011 as its reckoning date, raised the bar to eight lakh members in eight states and eight industries, and the unions were asked to file claims by 31 January 2013. The Chief Labour Commissioner’s published record doesn’t include final results for this round. Figures reported for it in the press were the unions’ own claims, which is why 2002 remains the reference year.

Trade Unions Under the Labour Codes Today

The legal ground under every union changed on 21 November 2025, when the government brought the four labour codes into force and replaced 29 central laws, according to the PIB release of that day. The Industrial Relations Code, 2020 repeals three of them: the Trade Unions Act, 1926, the Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act, 1946 and the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947. Unions registered under the 1926 Act are deemed registered under the Code.

The Code’s biggest change for unions is a statutory route to recognition. Until now, recognition at the plant level rested on the voluntary Code of Discipline, ratified at the Indian Labour Conference in Nainital and in force from 1 June 1958, not on a central statute. Section 14 sets two thresholds:

• a union backed by 51 percent or more of the workers on the muster roll becomes the sole negotiating union;
• if no union reaches 51 percent, a negotiating council is formed from every union backed by at least 20 percent.

Section 27 lets the Centre and the states recognize a union or federation as a Central or State Trade Union, with the criteria left to the rules. The Industrial Relations (Central) Rules, 2026 were notified on 8 May 2026.

The strike rules tightened. Under the 1947 Act, only workers in public utility services had to give notice before striking; the Code extends the rule to every industrial establishment. A strike now needs notice within 60 days before it and can’t begin within 14 days of that notice. PRS noted that the parliamentary Standing Committee had wanted the restriction confined to public utilities.

The unions have answered on the street. A joint platform of ten central trade unions that included INTUC and AITUC called a nationwide general strike for 12 February 2026 to demand the codes’ rollback; BMS was not part of that platform. In the courts, a nine-judge Supreme Court Bench ruled on 20 August 2026 that “industry” under the Code must be read in the Code’s own terms, as the current-affairs note on the judgment explains, while the 1978 test still governs cases under the old Act. The wider debate over the codes is covered in the note on the four labour codes.

What the Movement Achieved and Where It Fell Short

The movement’s gains are on the statute book: union registration and immunity in 1926, tripartite consultation through the Indian Labour Conference from 1942, and a workers’ seat at the ILO from its first conference in 1919. Unions also work as pressure groups, which is why governments consult them on labor policy even when they disagree.

The weakness is just as clear. Party affiliation and factionalism multiplied unions, so a single factory could host several rivals, each answering to a different party. Work has changed too: the Code on Social Security, 2020 now extends social security to gig and platform workers, a group the plant-level union model of 1926 was never designed to reach.

How to Study Trade Union Movement in India for Exams

The topic sits in three places. GS Paper I covers it under the national movement and the rise of the working class; GS Paper II under Article 19 and pressure groups; GS Paper III under labor reforms.

The History optional tests it directly: Paper II in 2020 asked candidates to comment on “The Trade Union Movement in India not only supported the call for national struggle at critical junctures, but also impacted its course and character in several ways,” and Paper II in 2021 on “The rise of the Communist Movement in India in the 1920s lent a militant and revolutionary content to the Trade Union Movement.” Mains 2024 GS Paper III took the modern end, asking about the merits and demerits of the four labour codes (question 1 in the Mains practice below). In the Prelims question bank, History accounts for 184 of the 1,403 questions, and founding dates and first presidents are the usual targets.

Revision facts worth fixing:

• Bombay Mill Hands Association, 1890, N. M. Lokhande; Madras Labour Union, 1918, B. P. Wadia.
• AITUC, October 1920, Bombay; first president Lala Lajpat Rai.
• Trade Unions Act, 1926, in force 1 June 1927.
• Splits: 1929 Nagpur (moderates), 1931 Calcutta (communists); reunions 1935 and 1940.
• INTUC May 1947, HMS 1948, UTUC 1949, BMS 1955, CITU 1970.
• IR Code: 51 percent for a negotiating union, 20 percent for a seat on a negotiating council, 10 percent or 100 workers to register.
• Codes in force from 21 November 2025; last completed verification reckoned on 31 December 2002.

The common confusions come in pairs. AITUF (1929, the moderates) is not AITUC, and neither is the later Indian Federation of Labour (1941, M. N. Roy). INTUC (1947) is the labor wing of the Indian National Congress (1885), not the Congress itself. Keep the three percentages apart by asking what each one decides: registration, sole bargaining or a council seat.

The laws that frame the topic are easier to hold side by side:

The trade union movement rewards the aspirant who reads it as political history, not a list of acronyms. Every split in the table above follows a party split, and every law in the last table answers a question the movement raised. If you can explain why INTUC broke away in 1947, you can write a Mains answer on the labour codes as well.

Frequently Asked Questions

Practice Questions

Prelims

1. Consider the following statements: 1. The Bombay Mill Hands Association was formed under N. M. Lokhande in 1890. 2. The Madras Labour Union was formed under B. P. Wadia in 1918. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

• (a) 1 only
• (b) 2 only
• (c) Both 1 and 2
• (d) Neither 1 nor 2

Answer: (c) Both are correct; the 1890 association began the movement and the 1918 union was the first organized one.

2. Who was the first president of the All India Trade Union Congress?

• (a) N. M. Joshi
• (b) Lala Lajpat Rai
• (c) V. V. Giri
• (d) Diwan Chaman Lall

Answer: (b) Lala Lajpat Rai was elected president when AITUC was founded in Bombay in October 1920.

3. Consider the following statements about the Industrial Relations Code, 2020: 1. A trade union supported by 51 percent or more of the workers on the muster roll is recognized as the sole negotiating union. 2. Where no union reaches 51 percent, unions supported by at least 10 percent of the workers form a negotiating council. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

• (a) 1 only
• (b) 2 only
• (c) Both 1 and 2
• (d) Neither 1 nor 2

Answer: (a) The threshold for a seat on the negotiating council is 20 percent, not 10 percent.

4. Arrange the following central trade unions in the chronological order of their founding: 1. Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh 2. Centre of Indian Trade Unions 3. Hind Mazdoor Sabha 4. Indian National Trade Union Congress. Select the correct answer using the code given below.

• (a) 4-3-1-2
• (b) 3-4-1-2
• (c) 4-1-3-2
• (d) 3-4-2-1

Answer: (a) INTUC 1947, HMS 1948, BMS 1955 and CITU 1970.

5. Consider the following statements: 1. The Trade Unions Act, 1926 came into force in 1927. 2. The Royal Commission on Labour in India was chaired by J. H. Whitley. 3. The Meerut Conspiracy Case trial ended in 1933. Which of the statements given above are correct?

• (a) 1 and 2 only
• (b) 2 and 3 only
• (c) 1 and 3 only
• (d) 1, 2 and 3

Answer: (d) The Act came into force on 1 June 1927, Whitley chaired the 1929-31 commission and the Meerut trial ended in early 1933.

Mains

1. Discuss the merits and demerits of the four ‘Labour Codes’ in the context of labour market reforms in India. What has been the progress so far in this regard? (15 marks, 250 words) Previous year: Mains 2024, GS Paper III.
2. The trade union movement in India grew alongside the national movement but divided along party lines. Examine this with reference to the period from 1920 to 1970. (15 marks, 250 words)
3. How does the Industrial Relations Code, 2020 change the recognition of trade unions and the conditions for a lawful strike? Assess the implications for collective bargaining. (15 marks, 250 words)
4. Why does the verification of central trade union membership matter for tripartite bodies, and what problems arise when it is not updated? (10 marks, 150 words)
5. Can trade unions organize gig and platform workers in India? Discuss the legal and practical obstacles. (10 marks, 150 words)