From the Honda unrest in 2005 to the Maruti strike in 2011, industrial relations in Haryana have gone from bad to worse
Shop No. 19 is a dark, dingy cubby-hole near Gaushala market on Mata Road in the heart of Gurgaon, the capital’s gleaming satellite city that is home to the plush offices of Indian and foreign multinational corporations and luxury gated communities that house the executives working in them. A table stacked with papers and files hides two chairs behind it. Three walls of the room are pockmarked by peeling plaster and the fourth is covered by a huge photo poster of police trying to disperse a crowd with lathis. Beneath the photo is a slogan in Hindi that loosely translates to ‘Let’s come together to make this bandh successful’. It is the Gurgaon headquarters of the All-India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), India’s most powerful trade union.
Anil Kumar, the dark, burly general secretary of AITUC, Gurgaon, is dressed in a frayed white shirt with the first two buttons off, black trousers and no footwear. He speaks with a strong Haryanvi accent and spends most of his time at Shop No. 19 as he doesn’t really have a job. Kumar has a criminal case against him. A few years ago, he was accused by the Haryana police of killing a worker during the Rico Auto labour strike. He says he didn’t do it. As things turn out, a 13-day labour strike at Maruti Suzuki’s Manesar plant has made Kumar an important man.
Between June 4, when the strike started, and the night of June 16, when it was officially called off, Kumar and his comrades at AITUC also provided the muscle power and rallied support from workers in other companies. Ask him the reason behind the strike and he answers almost half asleep (he says he hasn’t slept for days), “the labour department of Haryana is working together with the manufacturers to stop workers from forming a union.” The flashpoint for the strike was the dismissal of 11 workers by Maruti Suzuki. The company did not officially respond to Forbes India’s telephone calls, text messages and email questionnaire. The company’s human resources head, S.Y. Siddiqui, says that no one in the company will be available for comment until June 27 as there is an annual maintenance shutdown. However, speaking on condition of anonymity, a Maruti official said that the 11 workers were sacked on the ground of indiscipline. “As the shift ended at 4 o’ clock these workers, without provocation, instigated other workers to start the strike. There was no warning, no charter of demand or anything. These guys just went on strike,” he said. However the workers have a different version.
Curbing A Constitutional Right?
Kumar’s allegation is only one among a plethora of reasons, such as low wages and overuse of contract labour threatening to undermine this burgeoning garments-to-cars hub that has been an integral part of India’s industrial growth and globalisation story ever since Maruti Udyog set shop here to produce the iconic Maruti 800 in the 1980s. However, this seems to be the main sore point.
“If one were to isolate one single factor [contributing to industrial strife], it is the [resistance to the] right to organise,’’ says J. John, executive director of Centre for Education and Communication and editor of Labour File a bimonthly journal on worker issues. “In many cases, there is no demand for even a wage rise; just to form a union.’’
Almost every strike at the numerous factories in the Gurgaon-Manesar region in the past decade has started with companies refusing to recognise the demand of workers to form a union. From the strike at Maruti in 2000 to the one at Honda Motorcycles and Scooters India (HMSI) in 2005 and the one at Rico Auto in 2009, the one common demand was to form a union.
“It is a constitutional right,” says D.L. Sachdev, a secretary of AITUC. “Nobody can prevent the workers from forming a union.” Statistics, however, tell a story of effective prevention.
The number of registered factories in Haryana nearly doubled from 5,652 in 1991 to 10,474 in 2010, while the number of registered (permanent) workers grew from 3.5 lakh in 1993 to more than 7.7 lakh in 2010. (The increase in the number of contract workers has been vastly more.) In comparison, in the past two decades, the number of registered trade unions have grown by merely 400 to 1,540, says data from the State Labour Department.
AITUC strongly believes that Haryana has lured huge investments with an unstated promise to keep the region free of labour unions. Maruti has stated publicly that it does not want to deal with more than one union. The company says it already has a union, the Maruti Udyog Kamamgar Union (MUKU), at its Gurgaon plant and if workers at Manesar want a union, they should come under the MUKU umbrella. Plant-specific unions are, however, not uncommon in the industry. Several companies such as Ashok Leyland or Apollo Tyres work with separate unions at each of their plants.
Hooda finally directed Deputy Labour Commissioner J.P. Mann to personally be a part of the negotiations and bring about an amicable settlement. In spite of the high level intervention, the final agreement thrashed out between the management and workers did not mention anything about allowing the workers to unionise. It merely reinstated 11 workers who were sacked. AITUC’s Sachdev says it does not matter. The registration of the union is pending with the government. And once the union is registered, there is little that the company management can do. Earlier this week, CEO Osamu Suzuki said, at a news conference in Tokyo, that he was not surprised at the short lived labour strike and that Maruti would not recognise a second labour union for its plant at Manesar.
“This is unjust and unsustainable in the long run,” says the CEO of a large two-wheeler maker who did not want to be identified. But somehow the whole eco-system has been perfected to make it work. According to the law, a company cannot employ a contract labour for more than six months. To get around this rule, the worker is discharged every six months for three days and reinstated as a fresh employee.
(This story appears in the 15 July, 2011 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)