(On the 17th of this month, 77 of the 147 workers accused of violence at the Maruti Suzuki plant in Haryana nearly three years ago were granted bail. The 2012 arson, which killed the company’s human-resources manager and injured many others, eclipsed the stories of the workers’ year-long struggle for a union and better working conditions. In this reportage for our latest quarterly Labour and its Discontents, Anumeha Yadav traces the lead-up to this unrest – and its aftermath. More web-exclusive articles from this issue here in the days ahead.) On 23 February 2015, the Supreme Court of India granted bail to Sunil Kumar and Kanwaljeet Singh. The two are among 147 workers of Maruti Suzuki India Limited (MSIL) in jail since July 2012, after a senior manager died in arson at the car manufacturer’s plant in Haryana, on the outskirts of Delhi. The workers’ repeated strikes over a period of a year preceding the arson and rioting at the factory had found their way into the news cycle, where questions related to labour are usually articulated as a question of creating jobs, or improving the ‘business climate’. Maruti Suzuki is no sweatshop. A job at MSIL, India’s largest automobile manufacturing company, was coveted by the workers’ peers. What then were they resisting exactly? Financial press tracked the dip in the company’s market share in India from over 45 percent to 38.9 percent as the workers, most in their twenties, struck work thrice that year. The workers’ grievances, first articulated in 2011 as a demand for an independent union, seemed almost beyond comprehension to the management. In July 2012, the conflict took a violent turn as a senior manager died and several others were injured in an incident of arson. There were more than 2000 workers in the factory at the time. The police rounded up and arrested 147 workers over the next few days from their nearby rented rooms, and homes. The effect of the Maruti strikes on investment and their impact on industry confidence has been the central focus of the press and political circles since the day after the July incident. The effect of this massive industrial unrest on investor confidence has even been emphasised by the highest court in the state of Haryana, the High Court of Punjab and Haryana. The court rejected the workers’ bail petition last year. Even as the Supreme Court granted bail to two of the workers in February 2015 for the first time, the jailed workers’ colleagues have kept their struggle on. It is their continuing solidarities, inside the jail, the courts, and in the industrial area around Manesar, which may signal a turn in the answer to the question which has refused to go away – what do the workers want? Is there anything the present labour-industrial structure can give them at all? It was a busy weekday at the Gurgaon district court. After a break for lunch, lawyers in black robes made their way back to the court rooms. Through the afternoon, visitors gathered, and streamed in and out of the brick-red court buildings. In room 169 on the third floor of the lawyers’ chamber, two men in their twenties sat at a large wooden table, preparing an application to be submitted two days later. Every week for over two and a half years, Satish Dalal and Imaan Khan, both former workers of Maruti Suzuki, have worked out of this room in the lawyers’ chamber, using it as a makeshift office. The two, along with six of their former colleagues dismissed from Maruti’s Manesar plant around the same time – Khushi Ram, Ram Niwas, Rajpal, Mahaveer, Jitendra and Sunil Kaushik – act as a support group for 147 of their colleagues who have been in jail since July 2012. “Sunil and Satish usually organise the documents related to the trial, to bail applications. Every week, I visit the workers in jail and sometimes their families in the village too,” explained Khushi Ram, who worked at MSIL for five years till 2012. A small room with a single desk and chairs, their office has 20 large shelves stacked with documents related to legal proceedings against the workers. The day for the completion of cross-examination of a total of 102 witnesses is drawing close. The arguments from both sides will begin afterwards. Fifteen kilometres from Gurgaon’s glass high-rises and gated colonies, Manesar village, along National Highway-8, was transformed into an industrial area in the 1990s. The Industrial Model Township (IMT) Manesar, set up to decongest Delhi of industrial units and factories, now holds more than 1000 industrial units employing nearly 1.5 lakh workers. Gurgaon and Manesar, along with Dharuhera and Rewari, at least another 40 kilometres away, form a hub of automobile factories in Delhi’s neighbouring state, Haryana. IMT Manesar is set to be developed as part of a large industrial area spread over 200 square kilometres, stretching over six states, from Delhi to Mumbai. MSIL, a subsidiary of Japan’s Suzuki Motor Corporation, is India’s largest automobile manufacturer. At its manufacturing facilities in Manesar, set up in 2006, it makes five of 14 models of cars produced by MSIL – Swift, Swift Dzire, A-Star, SX4 Sedan, Celerio – at the rate of over 1000 cars a day. The company was set up as Maruti Udyog Limited (MUL) in 1981 and a joint venture was initiated between the Government of India and Japan’s Suzuki Motor Corporation in 1982, with the government owning 74 percent of the share. Initially, both the Government of India and Suzuki had joint control over the management, with both taking turns to appoint the chairperson and managing director of the company. The company produced the Maruti 800, a hatchback, associated with being India’s first affordable car. In 1987, the government allowed Suzuki’s shareholding in the company to be increased to 40 percent. Suzuki’s share went up to 50 percent and control passed to the company in 1992, giving them control over the company. In 2002, the Government of India disinvested its majority share in MUL to Suzuki. At that time, MUL contributed INR 2500 crore (USD 400 million) to the national exchequer. By 2007, the government had relinquished its entire stake in Maruti. The company had witnessed conflict between workers and management through 2000 and 2001. The workers had opposed disinvestment while demanding better working conditions for themselves. In October 2000, the workers at the Gurgaon plant, organised as Maruti Udyog Employees Union (MUEU), stopped work for 89 days. The strike ended with MUEU’s leaders being arrested and over 2500 permanent workers being removed from service. Maruti Udyog Kamgar Union (MUKU) was formed to replace the older union at the Gurgaon plant. In the summer of 2011, more than 4000 workers at the company’s Manesar plant, set up in 2006, began agitating to form a union to fight for better working conditions. While the management encouraged them to join MUKU, at Maruti’s older plant at Gurgaon, the workers rejected the suggestion citing management’s control over that union. The workers occupied the plant for 13 days in June and continued the protest by sitting outside the plant for 33 days starting in late August. The sit-ins and lockouts that went on for over five months resulted in losses of over INR 2500 crore (USD 400 million) for the company and a fall of eight percent in its market share. The management finally agreed to the formation of a new union, the Maruti Suzuki Workers’ Union (MSWU), but only after it had 30 of the workers who had led the strike at the plant resign. The new union (MSWU) was allowed registration by the government in February 2012. Over the next few months, while MSWU and the MSIL management were still negotiating on a number of issues, including a wage increase, privilege leave and reduced duration of the training period of two instead of three years, the uneasy settlement broke down. On 18 July 2012, the management suspended a worker after an altercation between the worker and a supervisor on the shop floor; the worker alleged the supervisor had made a casteist remark against him. The confrontation between the management and MSWU over the union’s demand to reinstate the line worker turned violent. In the rioting that followed, more than 90 managers, including MSIL’s Japanese staff, were injured. Human resources manager Awanish Kumar Dev died of burn injuries with multiple fractures in his legs. The Maruti management accused the workers of having planned the violence. It terminated the services of over 1800 contract workers and 546 permanent employees. Twelve main functionaries of the MSWU and over 140 other workers were arrested from nearby villages in the days following the incident and were charged on 18 counts, including murder, attempt to murder, and rioting armed with deadly weapons.

In an op-ed in the Hindu, researchers Prasenjit Bose and Sourindra Ghosh calculated that in the period preceding the strikes, MSIL had emerged as the most productive and profitable subsidiary of the Suzuki Motor Corporation. Based on data from annual reports of the Suzuki Motor Corporation, they calculated that in 2010-11, while its car sales were falling in Japan, they increased by 18.8 percent elsewhere. MSIL contributed significantly to this with a sales growth of nearly 25 percent between 2009-10 and 2010-11. According to their calculations, “The contribution of the Indian subsidiary of the Suzuki Motor Corporation to its global net sales of automobiles (in monetary terms) has grown from 12 percent in 2005 to 27 percent in 2010, and the contribution to its global operating income from 42 percent in 2005 to 55 percent in 2010.” At the Manesar plant, 65 percent of the workforce was non-permanent, and were paid about 40 percent of the wages paid to the permanent staff. The combination of an expanding domestic market with high productivity at the plants helped Suzuki Motor Corporation increase profits substantially. Both Gurgaon and Manesar plants were operating above capacity. MSIL has three plants in Gurgaon at the same location, with an installed capacity to produce 750,000 cars annually. In 2011, its production was 1,000,000 cars. At the Manesar plant too, with an installed capacity of 500,000 cars per year, the production was above capacity at 600,000 cars per year. In 2010, as the company faced a sudden increase of 30 percent in the demand for cars, it put in a series of measures to increase production in the existing assembly line capacity. The Economic Times reported that between 2010 and 2011, the cars produced at its Gurgaon facility rose by 17 percent. At Manesar, there was a 40 percent jump in production between 2010 and 2012. The workers’ experience reveals the underside of this story. Inside room 169 at the lawyers’ chamber, 28-year-old Imaan Khan recounted that he began work as a trainee technician in the Manesar plant in November 2007. Working on the assembly shop floor, Khan’s job over three years of traineeship was to remove two side doors off the car frame every 48 seconds, the time it took for one car to roll off the assembly line. Work-shifts were usually eight hours and forty-five minutes long, and alternated week to week between day and night shifts. “We got two tea breaks of seven minutes each in which we would rush to the canteen 150 metres away and back, and use this break to go to the toilet too, holding the teacup and snack in one hand even inside the toilet. There was a 30-minute lunch break. We would walk 300 metres to queue up for food, and rush back to the work stations to be there a minute before time. Three years later, in 2010, I was confirmed as a permanent junior associate technician,” said Khan. Khan had finished high school and a two-year training at Industrial Training Institute (ITI) near his home in Hisar in Haryana before coming to Manesar. From ITI, he was placed as an apprentice at Maruti’s Gurgaon plant. He did not have a job after completing his one-year apprenticeship and had approached a placement agency in Gurgaon. “At Om Placement Agency, I got information about a test scheduled at a hotel near Manesar. I appeared for the test and an interview conducted by MSIL staff, and was placed at the Manesar plant,” he recalled. Satish Dalal, sitting nearby, described what he saw as the logic of the tests and the interview process: “They want to hire only those of us as staff who appear docile. The managers on the shop floor told us as much later. ‘We have tested that your jaws contain no teeth,’ they would tell us.” Like Khan, for 25-year-old Dalal, MSIL Manesar was his first job. He had completed ITI from Rohtak in Haryana after finishing class X. He did a one-year apprenticeship at Maruti’s Gurgaon plant in the research and development division and began work at the Manesar plant as a trainee in November 2007, a day after Khan had joined the factory. From 2007 to 2010, he worked as a trainee in the paint shop, mechanically painting two car doors every minute, standing alongside robots doing the same work. The work got more difficult during the summers, he recounted, as he had to stand for long shifts in the heat with remnants of paint all around. In 2007, a permanent worker at MSIL got INR 17,000 (USD 270) a month, while a casual worker got INR 7000 (USD 111). Of this, a part was fixed while the rest was a variable component which got deduced depending on the number of leaves taken by the worker, a system meant to serve as an incentive for full attendance. According to Bose and Ghosh, pay slips of the workers from 2011 show that for most permanent workers, INR 8000 (USD 127) was the fixed component of the wage. Of the ‘variable component’, INR 1500 (USD 24) was deducted per day of leave. This meant that “if a permanent worker took more than five days of leave in a month, the entire [variable] component was exhausted and he received a wage of Rs. 8000 [USD 127] only.” Among trainees, INR 800 (USD 13) per day of leave was deducted from the variable component of the trainee’s wage. For contract workers and apprentices, two days of leave in a month exhausted the entire variable component. The workers say they found this ‘incentives system’ exploitative. “Irrespective of whether we had accumulated casual leave, sick leave or paid leave, any leave led to a pay cut,” said Satish Dalal. However, Factory Head and MSIL Vice President Vikram Khazanchi denied the company followed such a policy. “It is incorrect to suggest that our company has the policy to penalise workers by deducting their incentives for remaining absent,” Mr Khazanchi stated while deposing in the Gurgaon district court on 15 November 2013. Bose and Ghosh calculated that MSIL profits after taxes had increased by 2200 percent since 2001-02. On the other hand, between 2007 and 2011, while MSIL workers’ yearly earnings increased by only 5.5 percent; the consumer price index (for the Faridabad centre, Haryana) went up by over 50 percent. Workers from all categories were experiencing a severe squeeze in their real wages. “There is so much work, if my leg itched, I do not have time to even scratch it… After we produced one crore cars, the company gifted us a mobile phone, but no time for conversation.” “They say the wage is Rs 17000 [USD 270], but actually they give us Rs 12000 [USD 191]…” “They don’t change the shifts. Being in the C-shift, working from 12:30 in the night till 8:30 in the morning regularly is very difficult. During the C-shift, in lieu of the meal, they used to give us Rs 44 [70 US cents] and now that has been reduced to Rs 22 [35 US cents], and still they want us to stay back and work overtime.” These are excerpts from workers’ testimonies from July 2011 in the Faridabad Mazdoor Samachar, a workers’ broadsheet published from Haryana. The workers say all categories of workers had begun pooling in INR 2000 each to form a union. On 4 June 2011, after an argument on the shop floor between managers and workers, the workers in A-shift stopped the machines, even as workers in both A-shift and B-shift gathered inside the plant. The workers made phone calls to the workers in C-shift, and soon, they reached the plant too: trainees, apprentices, contract and permanent workers, numbering 2000 to 2500 had gathered inside the plant. They stayed inside for 13 days and halted production.