A case study in labour vs management

Anjali Deshpande and Nandita Haksar's book examines the 2012 violence at Maruti Suzuki's Manesar plant and offers a rare worker's perspective on labour management practices in India

Japanese Management, Indian Resistance – The Struggles of the Maruti Suzuki Workers

Author: Anjali Deshpande & Nandita Haksar

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

Pages: 366

Price: Rs 499

On July 18, 2012, the Manesar factory of Maruti Suzuki, India’s largest car manufacturer, witnessed unusual violence. Jiya Lal, a Dalit worker, had an altercation with his supervisor during the morning tea break. Allegations of a casteist comment from the supervisor led to a heated exchange of words.

By the time the morning shift ended, Jiya Lal had been suspended. Not surprisingly, the suspension order soon snowballed into a major dispute between the management and the trade union. Leaders of the trade union were ready to settle the dispute if, along with Jiya Lal, his supervisor was also suspended. The management was in no mood to accept the compromise formula. By the end of the day, a section of the factory was on fire, claiming the life of one of its human resources managers, Awanish Kumar Dev.

The management held an internal inquiry into the violence and the manner in which Dev died. The services of as many as 2,500 workers, of whom over 500 had a permanent job, were terminated. The police crackdown too was unprecedented. It arrested 146 workers and filed court cases against them.

After five years of court proceedings, as many as 33 workers were convicted by the court and 13 of them were sentenced to life imprisonment. Jiya Lal was one of them. By 2022, all the workers who were sentenced to life imprisonment were released on bail because their appeals were pending in high courts. Workers who lost their jobs because of the 2012 termination order continued to seek justice and get compensation or reinstated.

This is the backdrop that Anjali Deshpande and Nandita Haksar create in this book in order to highlight what many dismissed workers of Maruti Suzuki believed was gross injustice meted out to them by the company’s management. The book is a commendable initiative as rarely do episodes of industrial unrest and violence get recounted with so much detail and analysis from the perspective of the dismissed workers. It is also a book that largely relies on a series of interviews that the authors conducted with these workers, some of them fighting court cases and others suffering the pangs and ignominy of spending days in police custody or jail. Some of the workers gave interviews on the condition of anonymity.

A job in Maruti Suzuki was seen by most of these workers as a prized achievement. But when some of them were either found unfit for the job’s gruelling requirements or dismissed after the 2012 violence, their families suffered not just a financial shock but also faced a sort of social stigma for the manner in which their members were thrown out of a big company like Maruti. Understandably, the book presents the workers’ recounting of the violence, labour management practices and their charges against the management. But these are also stories that the media largely ignored in its coverage of what was certainly the biggest industrial unrest in recent years in a factory run by India’s largest car maker.

What these interviews also reveal is a  less known aspect of the big change the Maruti factory brought about in India. The rise of Maruti contributed to the rapid expansion in India’s automotive components sector. With a steady rise in Maruti’s indigenisation efforts, the backward integration of the Indian automotive industry was achieved in a relatively short time. Along with that came the Japanese style of labour practices (punctuality, common eating areas for all, uniforms, etc) and an assembly-line manufacturing protocol that enforced relentless focus on repetitive work over long sessions with only a few short breaks in between. Many of these workers did not enjoy such a work schedule and those who failed to adhere to it simply fell by the wayside.

A few of these interviews reveal how the July 2012 incident started the process of the Japanese taking charge of the company’s labour management practices. The management, which in the past seemed to be more understanding of the sensitivities of Indian workers, got tough towards the employees. There is even a suggestion that the violent turn to the industrial unrest that had been brewing for some time was an outcome of this change in the style of management. It was a classic case of Japanese management facing up to an Indian resistance.

A special attraction in the book is the reprinted pamphlet produced originally by Mainstream, a weekly, in March 1977. This pamphlet narrated the story of how the Maruti project was conceived just before the Emergency and how Indira Gandhi’s son, Sanjay, had many rules bent to ensure funding of the project by banks. That project, however, was junked in 1978 by the Janata Party government, but revived after Gandhi returned to power in 1980. Maruti Udyog was born in 1982 with a joint venture agreement between the government and Suzuki Motor of Japan. In 2003, Suzuki took majority control of Maruti. The timeline provides an excellent context to the arguments put forward by the two authors.

A major shortcoming of the book, however, is that the management response to the charges levelled by these workers is completely missing. But note that this is a book that is primarily aimed at telling the story of these workers. Indeed, the narrative presents a new perspective on the idea of labour management practices or even labour reforms that are becoming popular and gaining acceptance by different state governments.

The book, therefore, should be an important document to be studied by those governments that are at present busy framing business-friendly labour laws. The workers’ story on what could go wrong with the famed Japanese labour management principles should be instructive for policymakers both in the states and at the Centre.