A Delhi professor's thesis reveals how the Japanese lean production system ends up reducing permanent employment and denying workers a better life
In 1936, Charlie Chaplin released his movie Modern Times. The film starts with the shot of a herd of jostling pigs followed by a frame that captures a swarm of workers entering a steel factory. It makes a telling statement on the similarity in the behaviour of animals and humans. The movie then goes on to tell the story of Chaplin, whose job as a factory worker involves tightening nuts on a piece of machinery on the assembly line. After a few hours, as the line accelerates and work picks up a frenetic pace, Chaplin suffers a nervous breakdown, creates terror on the floor and ends up in hospital. Three quarters of a century later, nothing seems to have changed.
A case in point is Maruti Suzuki. At the carmaker’s Gurgaon plant, the number of contract workers increased from about 40 percent of the workforce in 1983 to 70 percent (4,000) in 2007. Bose says the rest of the workers, about 1,800, were old and under pressure from the management to accept voluntary retirement. At its new plant in Manesar, the company had 85 percent contract workers in 2007. Two other automobile companies also have similar proportions—while Ford India has 75 per cent contract workers, the figure at Hyundai stands at 82 per cent.
(This story appears in the 14 September, 2012 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)