Militant TradeUnionism

Violence at Maruti’s Manesar Plant
Anumeha Yadav

The year-long industrial conflict at Maruti Suzuki India Limited (MSIL), India's largest automobile manufacturer's Manesar plant turned violent on 18 July. At 3:30 pm on Wednesday afternoon, representatives from Maruti Suzuki Workers' Union and the Maruti management had met to discuss the reinstatement of Jiya Lal, a permanent worker who had been suspended that morning after an altercation with his floor supervisor. Lal is a Dalit and alleges that he had reacted when the supervisor made derogatory casteist remarks against him. The workers were protesting that the management had been unfair, suspending Lal from service while merely sending the supervisor home on leave for a few days.The afternoon meeting did not reach any resolution. By 7:30 pm the workers' discontent simmering since a few days back, turned violent. In the rioting that followed, forty managers including MSIL's Japanese staff got injured. Human resources manager Awanish Kumar Dev died of burn injuries. "Armed with iron rods and door beams of cars, the mob spread out in groups in the factory area and targeted supervisors, managers and executives rendering many of their victims bleeding and unconscious," Maruti said in a statement. Over 90 workers have been arrested from their homes in villages near Manesar. Many are on the run.

On Friday, there was stillness at the factory, except for an afternoon dust-storm. Police jeeps went in and out of the plant. From time to time, a TV news crews reported standing in front of the charred remains of the security post at Gate No. 2. The same gate has been the main site of several of the workers' protests between June and October last year when over 4000 workers of them had demanded a union independent of the management's influence and better work conditions.

While there is shock and outrage at the Wednesday incident, and there is despair too that what had been a powerful but non-violent agitation for workers' constitutional rights took a ghastly violent turn. Workers' groups such as the Bigul Mazdoor Dasta are demanding investigations as to what provoked this turn to violence by workers who had protested peacefully through strikes and dharnas for five months last year, including when they had occupied the plant 13 days in June and later when they protested sitting outside the plant for 33 days in September.

The FIR names 55 workers including the new union's Chief Patron Sandeep Dhillon, Secretary Sarabjeet Singh Pradhan Ram Meher, and other union functionaries. They have been charged under section 147, 148, 149. 452, 302, 307, 436, 323, 332, 353, 427, 114 of IPC which include charges of rioting armed with deadly weapons, murder, and attempt to murder. Maruti management accuses them of having planned this violence.

Since the incident all union functionaries have been unreachable. Speaking on the phone, some workers traced the sequence of events further back to Monday. Since March, MSIL management and the newly-formed Maruti Suzuki Workers’ Union (MSWU) have been negotiating a settlement on several issues including wage increase, reducing the duration of the training period from three to two years, improving transport facilities for workers. Workers say that on Monday, these negotiations reached a stalemate when the management announced that the wage increase will be a total of Rs 10,500 (Rs 6000 the first year, Rs 2500 and Rs 2000 the following years), not Rs 15000-Rs 18000 as, workers were demanding and thought comparable to their peers in companies like Honda.

At MSIL, a permanent worker gets Rs l7,000 a month, while a casual worker gets Rs 7,000. Of this a part is fixed, and the rest is a variable component which gets deduced depending of number of leaves taken by the worker. Regularization of leave benefits was one of the issues the management and the union leaders were negotiating. Workers were demanding wage increases commensurate with inflation. Last year researchers Prasenjit Bose and Sourindra Ghosh had demonstrated a squeeze in MSIL workers' real wages in an op-ed in The Hindu, calculating, that between 2007 and 2011 while MSIL workers' yearly earnings increased by 5.5 percent, the consumer price index (for the Faridabad centre, Haryana), went up by over 50 percent. They calculated that MSIL profits after taxes have increased by 2200 percent since 2001.
[Source : Kafila]

Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 6, Aug 19-25, 2012