Japanese Management, Indian the Struggles of the Maruti Suzuki Workers, (Paperback)

<p>A fire broke out at around 7 pm on 18 July 2012 at Maruti Suzuki India's</p><p>manufacturing plant in Manesar. It claimed the life of a manager. Within days, over</p><p>two thousand temporary workers and 546 permanent workers were dismissed</p><p>by the company, and 13 of them-including the entire leadership of the workers'</p><p>union-were later charged for murder, thus ending yet another independent body</p><p>for collective bargaining.</p><p>Unions are the last, and often only, line of defence workers have in modern</p><p>industries, especially when the management isn't averse to undermining their</p><p>rights, dignity and health in pursuit of higher profits. This was true of Maruti and</p><p>their Japanese partner, and later, owner-Suzuki. Workers would get a seven-and-ahalf-minute break from physically demanding work-precise to the hundredth of a</p><p>second-to run to the toilet half a kilometre away and force a samosa and piping hot</p><p>tea down their throat. But they were denied two minutes of silence in the memory of</p><p>a deceased colleague's mother.</p><p>The sabotage of their efforts at effective unionizing, generally in collusion with the</p><p>Haryana state government, had therefore come as no surprise to the workers. Yet</p><p>they struggled through and managed to form successive representative bodies at both</p><p>the Gurgaon plant, and the one set up in Manesar in 2007. But not only were all of</p><p>them crushed, some were never allowed to be officially registered.</p><p>The often misrepresented events of July 2012 were thus far from an isolated incident.</p><p>But few today, as then, are willing to see the matter from the workers' point of view.</p><p>Anjali Deshpande and Nandita Haksar tell the story of the biggest car manufacturer</p><p>in India through the voices of the workers, interviewed over a period of 3 years. As</p><p>they tell us of their resistance to being turned into robots by an uncompromising</p><p>management, it becomes abundantly clear that the Maruti revolution wasn't the</p><p>unmitigated success it was touted to be. </p>

• Japanese Management, Indian the Struggles of the Maruti Suzuki Workers, (Paperback)
• Author: Speaking Tiger Books
• ISBN: 9789354474187
• Format: Paperback
• Publication Date: 2023-05-01
• Page Count: 368