Class Collision in India’s Automotive Industry
“Japanese Management, Indian Resistance” recounts the painful battle of Indian automotive workers against a coterie of partisans to capital — from management and police to the judiciary and political elites.
Book: Japanese Management, Indian Resistance by Anjali Deshpande and Nandita Haksar: The Struggle of the Maruti Suzuki Workers, Speaking Tiger Books, 2023; pp 368. Book cover, Japanese Management, Indian Resistance.
Workers, like any other citizens, are entitled to a fair hearing and equal justice in the courts. Frequently at stake is workers’ livelihoods, their bodily integrity, and financial sustenance for their families — in other words…everything. Judges are expected to recognize the labour-welfare aspects of the judicial machinery, as well as be intimately cognizant of the history of the dispute at hand. This history, in an Indian context, will have many dimensions, including unequal caste power in the Indian workplace. Judges must hence be sensitive to social issues as well as the unequal bargaining power of both parties. The judge is further required to “provide transparent and public reasoning to back up their decision, or any other observations that they have to make about the case.” A quick review of judicial decisions show, however, that these minimal expectations are possibly too high for the current Indian courts. Judges tend to discipline workers.
Recently, a judge of the Bombay High Court opined on penalizing what he called “one of the gravest forms of [worker] misconduct”:
The learned Presiding Officer [of the Central Government Industrial Tribunal] ought to have been mindful of the fact that …. the purpose of imposition of penalty is to enforce discipline amongst the staff. Viewed from this objective, if an employee slapping his superior in front of others is retained in service, the same would encourage similar acts by others. Slapping his superior by the workman is one of the gravest forms of misconduct, which ought to be visited with penalty of discharge/termination.
In fact, the workman had been penalized in 1996, when the incident took place, with an immediate suspension. Sixteen years later, the Presiding Officer, finding his dismissal as a disproportionate punishment, had reinstated him with 20% of back wages along with seniority. In the Appeal, heard another twelve years later, the reinstatement was considered by this Hon’ble Judge as completely wrong-headed. He felt, rather, a pressing need to demonstrate severity so as to instil discipline and prevent “similar acts by others.”
That the Court should assume so openly and casually its role of disciplinarian for an employer is noteworthy. The Court provides little context, nor does it feel the need to do so. We are not told if there are other such “similar acts” and if there really is a crisis of “insubordination” in that workplace. We are given a bare rendering of the facts surrounding the slap. The supervisor had apparently asked the workman to change a temperature recording on a chart (from 26 to 27 degrees), which he refused to do, leading to an exchange of sharp words and then a slap on the supervisor’s right cheek. There must’ve been a much lengthier history between these two men (and others, not named): rising tension, caste or gender specific name calling, technical coverups, not to leave out a charged history of industrial relations conflict. We are not told any of this, and the judge himself may not have known what had actually occurred and why. To the judge, the act of slapping a superior stood for itself.
While this is just one case among thousands heard daily in India’s labour courts, it struck me as I had just read Anjali Deshpande and Nandita Haksar’s Japanese Management, Indian Resistance: the Struggles of the Maruti Suzuki workers. Deshpande is an activist, a journalist and a Hindi novelist, and Haksar is a seasoned trade union lawyer, and a prolific writer on current Indian issues.
The book recounts the attempt of workers from the 1990s till 2012 to register an independent union in a Maruti-Suzuki company plant in the town of Manesar, Haryana state. Once registered and recognized, this union, unaffiliated with any political party, could make demands for decent working conditions and living wages, housing, safety, regularization of contract workers, and so forth. But the struggle for recognition was long, bitter and violent, and the authors take great pains to document workers’ memories of those years to build their story.
Image: Mehnat Kash.
The story, and the incredible value of this book, is that it takes us deep behind the scenes of, not a slap, but the death of a manager in the Maruti-Suzuki plant in 2012. Through the book’s artful narrative, we become educated about what is actually transpiring on India’s industrial factory floor under neoliberal capitalism.
“Through the book’s artful narrative, we become educated about what is actually transpiring on India’s industrial factory floor under neoliberal capitalism.”
The book begins with the murky initial involvement of Sanjay Gandhi, son of the Prime Minister, in obtaining land through large-scale eviction, and establishing the Maruti car factory as a vanity project. Maruti Suzuki India Ltd. was subsequently established as a public sector enterprise called Maruti Udyog Ltd. in Gurgaon, Haryana in 1981. At the time, Suzuki owned only 10% of the shares. But by 2007, the company was fully privatized, and owned primarily by Suzuki. The government bowing to foreign capital, as it did in this case, is a strong theme that runs throughout the book. It even comes up, as we will see later, in a chargesheet against one of the union organizers.
Maruti was a modern auto plant, to which workers flocked for the promise of a good work environment and wages, and for the status associated of being a Maruti worker. The workers recount that it was considered lucky to snag a Maruti husband. For the first many years, most of the workers were permanent employees. Those with the means also signed up, in the hundreds of thousands, to buy a Maruti car. Working for Maruti, or owning one, signalled middle-class status.
The initial promise of Maruti was steadily betrayed, in good part through its absorption by Suzuki. The book offers a valuable firsthand account of this from a former manager at the Maruti plant. He asked to remain anonymous, as did a few of the workers (the sense of fear is palpable throughout the book). The manager first details the background:
Whether he is an industrialist or a big businessman or a trader, or a Japanese company… all have a similar mindset. They all want a direct line of communication with the top guy in government…. The fact that the prime minister would meet with Suzuki whenever they wanted was one of the key elements when it came to the company’s decision to work with Maruti.
He goes on to outline the process of absorption:
First, Maruti got the land. It sold it to Suzuki. Then Suzuki set up a factory on it and made cars in it. Suzuki sells those cars to Maruti. Suzuki makes a profit in that deal. Then Maruti sells the cars in the market and makes a profit. Then Suzuki takes 60 percent of that profit because it owns 60 percent shares in Maruti. Double profits on the same products! This was the situation in 2014…Now, Maruti Udyog Limited has become a one hundred percent subsidiary to Suzuki. So, Suzuki is no longer making vehicles there, Maruti Udyog Limited is making vehicles there. Maruti now pays rent to Suzuki for its factory on that land which was originally Maruti’s land. So again, Suzuki is making profit twice. It gets rent for the factory in which cars are made and then when those cars are sold it makes a profit.
All this happened before the change in regulations on corporate governance, which prevent such transactions.
The manager also details how the company maneuvered in the matrix of labour regulations on contract labour, subcontracting, retrenchment, unionization, productivity; how it created a range of wages and ranks so as to continuously fragment the workers; and how it used wide areas of discretion on promotion and firing in order to control workers’ resistance to inhuman laboring conditions.
By the 1990s, most plant workers were on contract and temporary, though some were permanent. Of significance to this story is that the workers’ struggles attempted to bring about a dangerous unity between permanent and contract workers. If this struggle had been successful, this could have re-set industrial relations throughout India. The heavy hand of the Japanese management urgently sought ways to break that growing unity.
Matthew Abraham was a well-remembered union leader from the 1990s. He was elected President of the Maruti Udyog Employees Union in 1987, despite not speaking great Hindi, as he himself admits. He led Maruti’s first long strike in 2000, garnering wide-ranging respect, from the workers all the way to the then-Prime Minister Deve Gowda. Abraham too suffered the fate of being eventually dismissed by Maruti, through a coerced Voluntary Retirement Scheme. The authors interviewed him at length, and gained glimpses, among other things, into the many absurdities that characterized the police as they tried to confront the union. They recount a charge sheet served on Matthew that included the following quote from one of his gate speeches: “Indian culture is better than Japanese culture”! This was considered sufficiently threatening to the Japanese owner to find mention in the official charging document.
In 2006, the Maruti-Suzuki company established the Manesar plant, the second unit after the Gurgaon plant. As in the latter, workers here made multiple attempts to form unions.
“Across the industry, management recognized that this united struggle could change the course of industrial relations in that belt, and intensified their opposition. ”
The next wave of strikes, a decade after the first big strike, began in 2011 in the Manesar plant. This time it was led by the Maruti Suzuki Employees Union, a formally unrecognized union. Abraham, no longer with the company, counselled the workers: “be logical, keep your arguments strong. The management will break.” The workers demanded recognition of their union and the regularization of contract workers, demands supported by the permanent workers. Across the industry, management recognized that this united struggle could change the course of industrial relations in that belt, and intensified their opposition.
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Japanese Management, Indian Resistance is a collection of workers’ words. Through their short accounts, we are taken onto the shop-floor, to their villages, and to their homes and families. This is hugely refreshing. Workers’ voices are normally notable in their absence – be it in the courts, the media, any public debate, and in academic writing. These workers’ words are not of complaint or victimhood. Brilliant observations, reflections, and candid factual accounts predominate.
The bulk of the book presents the workers’ memories of the events of 2012 and the preceding decades in their struggle for unionization. We are given time to understand the depth of the anger and helplessness, in a very fast-paced work environment, rife with pressure and abuse.
One worker reflects:
Don’t ask me how bad the working conditions in Maruti were — they were indescribable. My work station was about 400-500 metres from the gate. Meaning I had to sprint to reach the work station, I used to work on the sub assembly. We had no time for family. When my grandmother died, I could not even attend her funeral. I could not get leave. There was no time to even drink water there; sometimes we did not get a minute or two to even go to the toilet. I have already told you about how I got a gash on my forehead and about the accidents that take place inside the factory and how callous the company is towards its employees. In such an environment, a union is necessary just for the safety of the worker…
We learn of several workers who died, at work or because of the intense work demanded. Lawyers were jailed as they defended the workers. In many instances, no case was registered and nothing ever happened.
Management put intense pressure on workers to increase productivity, which turned these men into machines. This was the fastest plant in Asia at a time. Workers wanted a union so that they could slow down the conveyor belt for a few minutes, and so that they could have breaks longer than seven and half minutes.
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The struggle intensified between 2011 and July 2012. On the morning of the day of the manager’s death, July 8, 2012, a verbal altercation occurred between Jiya Lal, a quiet Dalit worker, and a supervisor on the shop-floor, after the supervisor had used a caste-specific insult. Jiya was not known for making any trouble. He finished his shift that day, but at the end of it, was suspended. The union demanded that the supervisor also be suspended, pending an investigation. The management refused. The two sides became locked in a lengthy stalemate. After a few hours, goons dressed as workers were seen on the premises. Workers gathered, confused as to what was transpiring. A fire started.
Upper management themselves may have caused the death of the manager that day. Nobody witnessed his death. Nobody witnessed who set the fire which engulfed the factory and killed him. The management had brought 100-150 goons into the factory premises who were dressed as workers. The manager himself had been well-liked by the workers and only recently had supported their struggle to get a union registered. He himself had attempted to recently resign from the company, but the company had not accepted his resignation.
Police outside the Maruti Suzuki plant in Manesar following the clash between workers and management on July 19, 2012. Image: Rueters
The lack of any eyewitness did not prevent 55 workers from being named in an FIR, 148 workers being picked up, arrested and detained for five years without trial (before most being released on bail), and 2500 workers from being fired, of which 546 were permanent workers. Here, one should remember that blocking mass retrenchment is one of the last remaining defences workers have in the compromised industrial relations framework.
On 10 March 2017, an Additional Sessions Judge pronounced judgment and convicted 31 of those accused (13 with life imprisonment), and acquitted 117 others. The judgment flouted every rule of evidence and was roundly critiqued at the time by the People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) in a report called A Pre-Decided Case. The Report comments that “It is … noticeable that not a single worker was made witness by the prosecution, though hundreds of them were present at the time of the incident.’’ Nor did the judge himself comment on the brutal physical torture of innocent workers in the police station, on the harassment and arrest of family members, on deaths, and on impoverishment for years after. Meanwhile, the book notes that the event allowed Suzuki to “tighten its grip over the Indian subsidiary….”
The union survived, and continues to support many of the victimized workers and their families. This account is very touching:
After the election of this new team, a resolution was passed that notwithstanding who wins in the future, this union will give Rs. 2.5 lakhs every year to the family of each of the thirteen workers who have been imprisoned for life. This money is not to be given from the union fund. This money is raised separately. Only the workers of the union contribute towards this fund.
Not just money, but camaraderie and care between workers has continued for years after. Over 300 petitions for reinstatement are still winding their way through the labour courts.
“Judges are driven mostly by the need to enforce subordination, and also to please foreign investors. This is not hyperbole.”
The book pauses to reflect a few times on the absence of constitutional values in the industrial relations world. Judges are driven mostly by the need to enforce subordination, and also to please foreign investors. This is not hyperbole. One such judge was quoted in the aforementioned PUDR report. In a bail hearing on May 22, 2013, Justice KC Puri, of Punjab and Haryana High Court, stated:
The incident [the death of the manager] is most unfortunate occurrence which has lowered the reputation of India in the estimation of the world. Foreign investors are not likely to invest the money in India out of fear of labour unrest.
He went on to deny bail. The actual modalities of what happens in a factory where there is foreign investment (and extreme productivity pressure) was of no interest to him, and not thought relevant to the case either. Reputation and the flow of capital alone mattered.
2017: Automotive workers held a protest in Gurgaon demanding the release of those convicted in the 2012 Manesar plant violence case. Image: Hindustan Times.
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“It is clear that management saw the united resistance and unionization struggle as class warfare...To them, the constitutional right to form unions and associations was irrelevant in such a war.”
Interestingly, it was the management who seemed to have the sharper instincts. Right from the outset, they viewed the workers’ resistance as political. Though the book’s authors do not explore this, it is clear that management saw the united resistance and unionization struggle as class warfare. It challenged their authority, it challenged their management theories of dividing and conquering, it threatened a decline in profits, and it could undermine their reputation. This is why they quickly involved the police, the courts, the bureaucrats, and the political class. To them, the constitutional right to form unions and associations was irrelevant in such a war. This was a clear premonition to today’s context, where state and business officials increasingly frame economic struggles as “anti-national activities.”
What the workers suffered in consequence has to repeated here:
They hang you from the ceiling and they hit you on the soles. Some people could endure it. They beat you in such a way that your bones don’t break. Some people cannot tolerate such torture. They suffer all their lives. Sohan was hung and beaten to a pulp. His hands hurt even now. Jiya Lal got cancer. Ajmer got a brain tumour.
Caste is a long thread that runs through the analysis in the book. Much of the leadership of the successive trade unions at the Maruti plant were Dalit. The trigger of the day long series of events that led to the death of the manager was a casteist slur against Jiya Lal.
The book also mentions that workers had a Scheduled Caste Association that gave input into union discussions. Caste distinction gave way to class struggle, again and again, as workers were united in their grievances against a common enemy, as well as in their friendships (maithri). One feels that we have come a long way since 1928 when Ambedkar criticized upper-caste Bombay mill workers and the communists for ignoring the issues of Dalit workers, who were relegated to the lowest rung of spinners (and could not be weavers).
However, on other fronts — like judicial sensitivity, and adherence to the law and the Constitution — it seems there has been no advance at all.
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All India Central Council of Trade Unions (AICCTU) protests against th dismissal of workers from the plant in New Delhi in August 2012. Image: Reuters.
What are some of the lessons learnt from these decades of struggle? It is obvious that workers’ own experiences and analyses must enter the courts, the statutory bodies, and the public sphere more forcefully. This is hardly a radical idea. It was suggested by the 1931 Royal Commission of Labour in its recommendation of a tripartite industrial council. Consequently, there are “workers” appointed to Welfare Boards today. However, it is also commonly known that many are bogus appointees.
On the judicial front, Dr. Muralidhar, a former High Court Judge, has recently stated:
Claims once thought unthinkable become reasonable not because of the new-found wisdom of judges but because of the ways in which social movement activism shapes popular and elite understandings of the meaning of constitutional values.
He gives the example of the recent tectonic shifts in thinking about LGBT claims.
Japanese Management, Indian Resistance attempts to shape this understanding by recounting the harsh and unconstitutional treatment of workers and unions in one of the most touted and advanced industries in the country. Commonly bandied about terms like neoliberal workplace, collective bargaining rights, union recognition, productivity, right to housing, and so forth are abstractions which frankly mean little to those not actively touched by them. These terms come to life in this fascinating book where workers observed, and were involved with, the rolling out of these abstractions.
Yet, while greater understanding can modulate the harshness, biases, and ignorance within the inherited political and judicial system, it is equally clear that the real or longer-term question for India is whether (domestic or international) capital (and not workers) can get disciplined. Or, will it continue to be given a free hand, the law be damned, twisted, slapped and bent.
Sara Abraham is a lawyer and researcher based in Chennai, India.