[Reader-list] MRZINE 15.2 2014 Come Together: Maruti Suzuki Workers' Solidarity March by Bernard D'Mello

[Asit Das]

MRZINE
15.2 2014
Come Together:
Maruti Suzuki Workers' Solidarity March
by Bernard D'Mello

All the leaders and many of the active members of the Maruti Suzuki Workers
Union <http://marutisuzukiworkersunion.wordpress.com/> (MSWU) --
arbitrarily held responsible for the violent 18 July 2012 incident in the
Manesar works of Maruti Suzuki India Ltd in the province of Haryana -- 148
of them, repeatedly denied bail, are in jail since August of that year.
Some 2,346 workers --
contract,1<http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2014/dmello150214.html#_edn1>temporary
and regular -- have been thrown out of their jobs without a
proper inquiry.  The MSWU has been forcibly removed from the Manesar
factory.  The province's labour department has overlooked the company's
imposition of its "good conduct undertaking", which is an unfair labour
practice, and the deployment of contract labour for regular work.  The
Congress Party-led Haryana government has been extending full support to
the management of Maruti Suzuki India in its drive to crush the MSWU.  The
laid-off workers and their families have faced severe police harassment.
The Punjab and Haryana High Court has refused the jailed workers bail
saying that "foreign investors are not likely to invest . . . in India out
of fear of labour unrest".  And yet, the Maruti Suzuki workers, alongside
their comrades whose services have been illegally terminated, have fought
on, with a provisional working committee (PWC) now leading the union.

 In the latter half of January this year, PWC members Ramnivas, Mahabir,
Rajpal, Katar, Yogesh and their associates brought together the terminated
workers and their families alongside those of the jailed workers to
participate in a *jan jagaran yatra* (public vigil journey) against the
injustices of the Maruti Suzuki management, the Haryana government, the
state's labour department, the police and the courts.  This march against
injustice covered some 300 km in Haryana, from Kaithal to Jind and onward
to Rohtak, then to Jhajjar and Gurgaon, and onward to Delhi, forging
solidarity all along the route.  It raised my spirits when I was told that
a number of women participated in the march, this because a number of them
were beaten up for participating in the *dharnas* (peaceful demonstration
at the offender's door until the victims' demands are granted) earlier.
It's not hard to unravel what keeps these women going!

The PWC has been reiterating three demands, one, release of the 148 jailed
workers, two, reinstatement of all the terminated workers, and three, an
impartial judicial inquiry into the violent incident of 18 July 2012 in
which the Manesar factory's 'human resource manager' Awanish Dev, who had
helped the workers in the official registration of the union, died of
asphyxiation.

*Reaching Out*

The *jan jagaran yatris* (public vigil fellow-travellers) organised *nukkad
sabhas* (street-corner meetings) all along the route from Kaithal to Delhi,
spreading the message of their struggle against exploitation, drawing the
attention of not only other workers, employed or unemployed, but also
peasants and students.  People all along the way came out in support, even
arranging for food and accommodation for all the *padyatris* (marchers),
even as CID (Criminal Investigation Department) and police personnel
constantly followed the marchers, at times threatening some
*sarpanchs*(heads of the village councils) who offered support.
Worker solidarity
came not only from manufacturing-sector workers and their unions but also
from those of the Haryana Roadways and the electricity board and school
teachers and anganwadi & ASHA workers (women workers of the Integrated
Child Development Services [ICDS] programme and the "accredited social
health activists" [ASHA] of the National Rural Health Mission [NRHM]).

It is a shame, a disgrace, that the government, instead of being a model
employer, refuses to treat a large section of those who are at the
forefront of delivering certain social services -- a large proportion of
whom are women -- as regular workers.  Indeed, there are hundreds of
thousands of anganwadi workers and their assistants providing pre-school
education and nutrition to children below the age of six, who are paid
honorariums of Rs 3,000 and Rs 1,500 per month (around $50 and $25 per
month, at Rs 60 per $).  Those workers who cook and serve the mid-day meal
in the schools are paid honorariums of Rs 1,000 per month ($16 to $17 per
month).  'Para' teachers in the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (the "education for
all" programme), graduates with a B.Ed. degree, are paid between Rs 3,000
to Rs 5,000 per month ($50 to $83 per month), which is roughly one-tenth of
a regular teacher's salary.  And, even the ASHA in the NRHM, who have
helped bring down the country's pathetic maternal mortality rate, are paid
a pittance.2 <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2014/dmello150214.html#_edn2>
Taken together, more than a million government service-delivery jobs
have
been created over the last two decades, but all these workers have been
denied employee rights by the government, and hence it's so comforting that
the Maruti Suzuki workers have reached out to this disregarded section of
the working class.

There are two features of struggle of the Manesar workers of Maruti Suzuki
that need to be emphasised.  One, despite the insistence of the
multinational corporations in the auto sector that their investment plans
will materialise only on condition that independent unions are eradicated,
and the Haryana government's full support on this score, the MSWU has
persisted against all odds in keeping alive the workers' struggle to win
their rights, the very ones that are inscribed in the labour laws and the
Constitution of the country.  Two, there has been an unprecedented unity of
the regular workers with the temporary and contract workers; indeed, all
along, among the principal demands of the MSWU has been the regularisation
of the temporary and contract workers.

*Wretched of the Indian Earth*

This solidarity march of the Maruti Suzuki workers through the villages,
towns and cities of their province has, in many ways, been such a wonderful
happening in bring together working people from so many different sectors
of economic activity.  Nevertheless, in rural India, some forms of
exploitation and oppression are not even spoken of when one meets members
of the *panchayats* (village council) and the sarpanchs.  The mainly
*Jat*big landowners, both the "traditional" and the "modern", who
control these
village councils, besides being able to summon the state's repressive
apparatus at the district and bloc levels, unduly benefit from access to
not an insignificant part of the state's expenditure allocated in the name
of "development", from cheap public-institutional credit to various state
contracts.  They have also gained political legitimacy through the *panchayati
raj* (village council governance) institutions.

The reality of dalit and most-backward caste wage labourers in districts
such as Jind, Rohtak and Jhajjar (which the padyatris passed through), as
well as the actuality of migrant wage labourers from eastern Uttar Pradesh
and Bihar, needs to be comprehended.  In the context of endemic
underemployment together with seasonal unemployment, forms of labour
attachment are still prevalent, besides, of course, the intertwining of
such relations with caste oppression, dependence stemming from essential
consumption-related debt, etc, which together lay the ground for (a sort
of) involuntary servitude of the labourers.  A small section of the Maruti
Suzuki workers of the Manesar factory do come from such dalit and
most-backward caste social backgrounds, and a significant section are from
poor and middle-peasant social upbringings.  With some of their comrades
having lived in such social circumstances, the padyatris could connect with
the oppressed and the exploited in the villages.

*Unregulated, Predatory Labour Relations*

More pressing though for the Maruti Suzuki workers of Manesar is unity with
the workers of the company's Gurgaon factory, and beyond this, an alliance
with workers in the hundreds of auto-component supplier factories -- the
first- and second-tier subcontracting auto-component suppliers -- and also
those in the small-supplier workshops that form the third tier in the
auto-components supply chain.  All of these workers have been/are
organising and fighting against "unregulated, predatory labour relations"
and, indeed, the "industrial terrorism unleashed under neo-liberalism", as
Annavajhula J C B and Surendra Pratap put it in their two-part essay "Worker
Voices in an Auto Production Chain: Notes from the Pits of the Low
Road"<http://www.epw.in/special-articles/worker-voices-auto-production-chain.html>(*Economic
& Political Weekly*, 18 and 25 August 2012).

Maruti Suzuki's "lean manufacturing" -- the production of the number of
sellable cars demanded at the lowest operational cost -- involves measures
to extract the maximum effort from the workers.  In July 2012, contract and
temporary workers comprised more than 75% of the total number of workers at
the Manesar factory, this in order to render the workers vulnerable and
therefore pliable to the management's dictates.  Chapter 2 ("Dehumanisation
of Workforce") of a recent People's Union for Democratic Rights' report
entitled "Driving Force: Labour Struggles and Violation of Rights in Maruti
Suzuki India Limited"<http://www.pudr.org/?q=content/driving-force-labour-struggles-and-violation-rights-maruti-suzuki-india-limited>provides
a vivid account of the work schedule, the intensity of work, the
conditions of employment, including wages and promotion, the plight of
contract workers, mechanisation, supervision and management at the Manesar
factory.  To resist such a highly exploitative labour regime what was
required was an independent -- *not* a stooge -- labour union, but the
management actively prevented the workers from organising themselves,
resorting to suspensions, terminations and registration of false cases, and
worse, once such a union got registered.

The workers of Honda Motorcycles and Scooters India Ltd too faced a similar
management onslaught in 2005 when they formed an independent union.  One
recalls the brutal manner in which the Haryana Police subjugated their
protests on 25 July of that year, and in the aftermath of such repression,
the so-called captains of Indian industry blamed the workers and warned of
a "negative effect on 'investor confidence' and the flow of foreign direct
investment".   But worst of all are the conditions of workers in the third
tier of the auto production chain where, as Annavajhula and Pratap write:

Everybody is a temp . . . there is no appointment letter, and there is no
pay slip either . . . work is for two shifts of 12 hours each and workers
are paid only for eight hours a pittance . . . wages are cut against
rejects apart from workers being humiliated and beaten up . . . overtime is
mostly unpaid, if paid, it is single . . . there is no holiday . . . this
is the bottom of the production chain.

And, taking stock of the entire auto production chain they write:

. . . Tier 2 is a lot like Tier 3; Tier 1 is a lot like Tier 2; and the
main units are a lot like Tier 1 . . . the labouring conditions in the
entire chain are drifting towards homogenous, unregulated and predatory
labour relations.

One should nevertheless keep in mind that Tier 3 workers are not even
unionised, besides, of course, the fact that they face a greater threat of
being replaced by workers in the 'reserve army of labour'.  But Tier 1 and
main-unit workers face the threat of replacement, too, as well as the
possibility that capital will move to provinces (e.g. Gujarat) where a more
exploitative labour regime can be instituted.  Main units like Maruti
Suzuki India and Honda Motorcycles and Scooters India, and Tier 1
subcontractors like Gabriel India and Delphi, can be considered among the
most efficient capitals in their industries in India and even across
borders, and therefore it is imperative that their workers are protected by
powerful, independent unions.  Noteworthy in this context are the
expressions of solidarity from the Thai Suzuki Workers' Union to the MSWU.
In cases like this particularly, workers need to show solidarity across
borders.  Above all, however, it is heartening that the padyatra organised
by the MSWU did bring a number of unions of the Tier 1 subcontracting units
in touch with those of the main units in an expression of solidarity and
support, and this now needs to be extended to the workers of the Tier 2 and
Tier 3 subcontracting units too.

*Gurgaon's 'Cybertariat'*

Besides the auto and auto-components cluster, the Gurgaon-Manesar-Dharuhera
industrial belt also has an apparel/garment manufacturing hub and a call
centre cluster.  The January 2007 newsletter of *Gurgaon Workers
News*<http://gurgaonworkersnews.wordpress.com/gurgaonworkersnews-no1/>tells
its readers of the call centres located just across a motorcycle
factory, where call centre employees -- the "new proletarianised middle
class" -- work next to auto, auto-parts or apparel manufacturing workers.

In April 2006 some 4,000 Hero Honda workers occupied the factory where they
worked for five days.  They were protesting against the discrimination of
contract and temporary workers, paid one-sixth to one-tenth of the wages
that the regular workers got for doing the same job.  Obviously, the Hero
Honda management and their contractors were hand in league.  Right opposite
the factory, the *Gurgaon Workers News* reported, there was a call centre
that had hired around 1,000 young 'proletarianised' middle class employees
working ten-hour night shifts, earning Rs 12,000 to Rs 14,000 a month, a
fraction of what their counterparts in the US and Western Europe got; their
office work was subject to Taylorised principles, i.e., being subjected to
a continuous "assembly line" of calls; they were closely monitored by
sophisticated "management information systems"; and just like their
counterparts in Hero Honda, they were being subjected  to ruthless
exploitation.

 These young 'proletarianised' middle-class employees were naturally
curious about those Hero Honda temps occupying the factory and challenging
the police, but they just watched like they would any other spectacle --
the occupation, the mass gatherings of the workers on the factory premises,
the arrival of the police in large numbers. . . .  This leaves one
guessing.  One wonders whether it occurred to them that they could/should
come together, organise, stop work and occupy the place where they worked,
like the Hero Honda workers, protesting against the injustices they were
being made to suffer.  After all, objectively they are part of the new
"cybertariat" (see Ursula Huws, *The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work
in a Real World <http://monthlyreview.org/press/books/pb0882/>*, New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2003/Kharagpur: Cornerstone Publications, 2004), but
it's doubtful if even a fraction of these workers ever perceive themselves
in such terms.  Perhaps the cultural and educational chasm that separates
industrial workers from their call-centre counterparts can be bridged by
the students of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) who extended a
rousing welcome to the padyatris, and in this duty, we place our hope in
such student/youth organisations as the Krantikari Naujawan Sabha, All
India Students' Association and the Democratic Students' Union.

*'Satanic Mills' of the 21st Century*

But before the padyatris marched through JNU, they came to the
garment/apparel manufacturing cluster in Kapashera on the Delhi-Gurgaon
border.  Organised as buyer-driven global commodity chains, the
'oligopsonistic' (few large buyers with significant market power) firms
like Gap and Marks & Spencer -- among the big names on high street -- have
been at the centre of sweatshop scandals involving violations of Indian
labour laws and their own "ethical trading initiative" at their
subcontractors factories in the Kapashera garment cluster, which is home to
many a garment manufacturing sweatshop.  The term "sweatshop" conjures up
images of the conditions under which industrial labourers toiled against
their will (they had little choice) in 19th century England.  William
Blake's "satanic mills" were horrifying -- the workday was long, the pay
was abysmally low, and the conditions of work were unhealthy and unsafe,
but tragically, the existential condition of the Indian garment
manufacturing workers in Kapashera and Gurgaon in 21st century India are
not very different.

*State Turns a Blind Eye to Violations of Labour Law*

The central trade union federations of the left parties have come out in
solidarity with the MSWU on this jan jagaran yatra, promising to support
the Maruti Suzuki workers of Manesar until their demands are met.  But
considering the fact that the proportion of regular workers in the total
workforces of units in the factory sector has been on a downward trend over
the last decade or more, shouldn't these trade union federations give a
call for some concrete, joint forms of struggle at the level of the auto
industry and its ancillaries by all their member unions to demand the
fulfilment of the three main ultimatums of the MSWU outlined above?

It is high time an impartial judicial probe into the violent incident of 18
July 2012 at the Manesar factory of Maruti Suzuki India is instituted.  The
discrepancies in the management's version, the fact that the management
employed bouncers on that day, the reality that a number of workers were
injured, the piece of information that the workers considered Awanish Dev
to be sympathetic to them, as well as the detail that in the aftermath of
Dev's death his wife "told the NDTV that she didn't believe that the
workers were involved in the death of her
husband"<https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/01/21/maru-j21.html>(Interview
with Mahabir Dhimn of the MSWU, published on World Socialist Web
Site, 21 January 2014, who also said that Dev's wife's interview "has
disappeared from the NDTV archives"), all these elements need to be taken
into account and investigated further in any unbiased inquiry.

The Maruti Suzuki workers need mass solidarity and support in these times
when capital and the state seem to have an unwritten pact that the latter
will turn a blind eye to violations of labour law concerning the terms of
employment, wages, conditions of work, including occupational health &
safety and the labour process, as well as retrenchment and retirement.
 After all, haven't the Maruti Suzuki workers of Manesar been in the
forefront of the fight against one of the world's most exploitative labour
regimes, this in Suzuki Motors' most profitable subsidiary worldwide?



*Notes*

1 <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2014/dmello150214.html#_ednref1>
Workers supplied by a labour contractor to a firm who work at the site
of
the firm.  The contractor is paid by the firm an amount that includes the
wages and other labour-related costs plus a profit margin for the labour
supply services.  Here the firm is deemed to be the "principal employer" as
per the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970, but these
workers are usually subject to a much higher rate of exploitation than the
temporary and regular workers employed directly by the firm.

2 <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2014/dmello150214.html#_ednref2>
Sitaram Yechury, Politburo member of the CPI (M) and Rajya Sabha
member,
in his column 'Left Hand Drive' in the *Hindustan Times*, 19 November
2013<http://www.hindustantimes.com/comment/columns/health-and-education-must-be-country-s-central-agenda/article1-1152830.aspx>.

------------------------------
Bernard D'Mello is deputy editor, *Economic & Political Weekly
<http://www.epw.in/>*, Mumbai.