It has been just a month since the violence that erupted in the Maruti Suzuki plant in Manesar, Haryana. Facing the wrath of the worker cadres, management personnel got injured, equipment was destroyed, offices were on fire and most unfortunately, one senior manager lost his life.
Exactly two hundred years back, in the town of Nottingham, an unprecedented incident happened in the then rapidly industrializing England. A few workers smashed textile machinery in protest. They were led by a young Ned Ludd. The ‘Luddites’ as they were quickly branded as, were protesting not just against the powerloom that was taking away their jobs…they were protesting against pathetic living conditions against a rapidly emerging rich class [supported amply well by colonial loot] and a growing alienation from all development and prosperity.
Two hundred years later, in the jewel of the British crown, a band of workers, both permanent and contract, took up iron rods, suspension parts and any other object they could use as a weapon to stage an hour and a half of carnage.
After a month of protracted investigations, 500 workers have been suspended, and the plant has been re-started, under police protection befitting a ‘Z’ category VVIP. The Haryana government wants to ably demonstrate how business-friendly it is and to what length it can go to ensure its industrial temples are safe and secure.
Given the number of such temples in the state, very soon the entire police force would be busy protecting business houses or would need to be nearly doubled. For the other businesses would not like the fact that only one has been given such royal treatment…most would want to be in the elite club, just like once our politicians wanted to be in the ‘Z’ category status.
While many have written and raised accusing fingers at the young, hot-blooded, brazen workers, including casting aspersions of Maoist influence, few have ever asked what made them do it. Why did they take up arms? What set the spark? Why should someone with a prized job of working in India’s leading automaker walk towards his own dismissal or suspension?
Behind every worker working in the Maruti Suzuki plant in Manesar, there are possibly a 100 waiting in the wings for him to take one wrong step. To fill in his shoes. In fact there is a job racket recently uncovered in that area! The worker who picked up that iron rod that day knew this truth very well. There are too few respectable jobs for the millions of youth coming out of our villages and small towns. Statistics say that 50% of India’s population would be below 25 years of age by 2025, and even if 25% of them are ‘employable’, we need to create an equal number of jobs to ensure there is no impending social unrest.
So I come back to my basic question – what made them do it? Why did they, like lemmings, race towards their socio-economic death?
Three factors, according to me.
Lack of empathy.
Lack of engagement.
Lack of a humane ecosystem.
Our 7% rate of growth has brushed these three factors under the carpets of malls, multiplexes and mansions.
It is sad but true that the ‘globalisation’ of India over the last 2 decades has, while taking us into the exalted club of BRICS, also dragged us back into the era of the 1960s and 1970s when workforce exploitation was the rule of the day. Just that the scenarios have changed – then it was for squeezing out that last rupee before a promoter declared his industry sick, now it is to ensure global cost competitiveness by squeezing out that last bead of sweat to earn that extra euro!
The demand and supply anomaly leads to this lack of empathy. Businesses are misusing archaic labour laws and contract worker laws to keep their costs down while the central and state governments create glossy brochures and presentations on India and her states as ideal investment destinations. A contract worker gets roughly 40% of what his / her permanent counterpart get, on the same shopfloor, at the same work station, for the same job. The contract worker agrees to this anomaly as he / she needs the job badly. Over a period of time as there is no hope of becoming a permanent worker [as the business has no such intention, to show a leaner organization and lower manpower costs on its annual report], the restlessness and frustration is bound to grow. He / she will surely look around for a permanent job, but if the entire working environment is exploiting such a labour law, it is not to be found. And with a rapidly growing ‘employable’ workforce, waiting outside the gates for someone to trip, one is caught in a vicious trap of chasing one’s own shadow. It is time the labour and law ministries alongwith experts got together to reframe the contract worker laws in at least making them time-bound, in the sense that the % of contract workers have to gradually reduce every year in a business, ensuring least possible exploitation. The businesses, especially in manufacturing, will always want to exploit the situation…only social pressure and government policies can keep them in check.
The moment you are a contract worker, you are an ‘outsider’. You are not part of the organization in its essence, decision making and sense of ownership. There is no semblance of engaging with the contract worker as the business believes that the lesser the people to directly deal with, the better. You are clearly segregated from the permanent workers, in your clothing, your social benefits and also the planned detachment. This deliberate lack of engagement and ‘recognition’ of being part of the business and its ups and downs eats psychologically into the contract worker. He / she is an uprooted being, far away from the comfort zone into a land where he / she is a persona non grata. I just shudder to imagine myself in this state, being both economically as well as psychologically exploited.
The exploitation does not limit itself within the gates of the industrial enterprise. The entire ecosystem around the contract worker does. The business does not take any steps of basic housing with clean water, electricity and sanitation, for the contract worker belongs to none. Also that would be a dent in the balance sheet. Therefore the towns and villages close by play their role in making a quick buck, again exploiting the demand and supply anomaly. Just have a look at the living conditions of the workers in Manesar and you will think it is a movie set made to capture 19th century industrial England, with its filth, squalor, grime and utterly unhygienic living conditions. Rooms, 8 feet by 7 feet, costing Rs.2000 a month, without the very basic facilities are what lie in store for this persona non grata. It is interesting to note that only after the July 18th carnage have the management started talking of housing for the workers. It needed this sad conflagration to force this response.
But the low point of global India’s high-handedness was when the chairman of Maruti Suzuki, on being questioned whether the 500 suspended workers would be taken back, remarked, “If you have 3 servants at home and 2 of them misbehave, will you retain them or throw them out?”
Servants, ladies and gentlemen, not workers, forget colleagues or team members. That is, unfortunately, the attitude of a globally competitive India.
Till the basic business ethic in this country does not improve and emerge out of this urge to exploit, and that of the governments grow out of Davos and creating vote banks out of the working class, the worker cannot be solely held responsible for what happened on July 18th in Manesar. Or what can happen again in any part of the country.
Let us be clear…Ned Ludd never ever enjoyed what happened in Nottingham.
Or, 200 years later in Manesar.