Delhi: Solidarity meeting demanding justice for Maruti workers,

Nov 25

 Join us for a Solidarity meeting demanding justice for maruti workers 

with the Provisional Committee, Maruti Suzuki Workers Union at Occupyugc site on 25th November, 5 pm onwards to ‘Mazdoor Nyay Adhikar Convention’ on 27th November organised by the provisional committee.

{As you all know since 18th July 2012 in the Maruti factory in Manesar-Haryana-India, as per the nexus of management-police-administration-government, Maruti workers have had to face the heavy hand of injustice and repression, which continues to this day. 215 of the workers have baseless fabricated cases on them, 147 workers have been jailed, 2300 workers have had their jobs terminated including 546 permanent workers. Today, more than three years later, 35 workers continue to languish in jail without bail. The last stages of debate on the trial are approaching. The company management and state are in full preparation to set an example by handing the harshest sentence on workers, so that workers fear to raise their voices in struggle.For last one month, an All-India campaign for justice for Maruti workers is going on. Solidarity programs, demonstrations, rallies, meetings, seminars have been organized by different workers unions, organizations and progressive sections of society. Struggling Maruti workers have traveled in different parts of the country to advance this campaign. Meetings and demonstrations till now have been organized in different industrial belts and cities like Pune, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Jind, Kaithal, Gohana etc.}

We the struggling students of various universities who have occupied UGC site for more than a month now, marched to MHRD in hundreds, faced brutal lathi charge and have been questioning and resisting the anti-student educational model. These questions, voices of dissent from different struggles will not only grow louder but shall also come together at different

Life after Maruti Suzuki factory clash

Anjali Puri

During a week in late September, when almost every newspaper splashed
on its front pages the news that Maruti Suzuki had raised the salaries
of its permanent workers by Rs 16,800 a month, Narender, 31, a trained
mechanist who worked for five years at the car manufacturer’s Manesar
plant in Haryana, was refused a Rs 9,000 a month personal chauffeur’s
job.

“I applied for 15 jobs,” he says, “after I came out of jail in May
this year, with no luck. Finally, I steeled myself to take up this
driver’s job — and then I failed the police verification.” This week,
Narender, married with a child, still had no job. He works as a daily
wage driver for taxi companies when he gets a call.

At their small Gurgaon home, a world away from the district’s
glass-and-steel office blocks, his father, Daya Ram, a Class X pass
security guard in a shabby safari suit, produces, unasked, his son’s
Industrial Training Institute (ITI) diploma and testimonials.

“He got a joining letter from the company when it restarted after the
trouble in July 2012,” he says, pulling out yet more papers from
bulging files. “Look,” he says, tracing with his finger the printed
sentences on a company letter, “he was asked to rejoin duty on August
27, 2012. And then, when they learnt he was in jail, they withdrew the
call. Tell me, would they have wanted him back, in the first place, if
he hadn’t had a clean record?”

This faceless former worker for India’s largest car-maker is part of a
case etched in public memory, not least because it involved the death
of a general manager, amid arson and violence. Narender was one of the
150 workers jailed after this episode of industrial strife on July 18,
2012, at Maruti Suzuki’s Manesar plant.

Like all the others, he was charged under as many as 18 sections of
the Indian Penal Code, including murder. Another 60-odd workers were
named as absconders and nearly 2,500 were dismissed amid an avalanche
of negative media publicity for the workers.

Those picked up by the police — from their parents’ homes, from shared
rented rooms in worker’s tenements, from the streets — soon
disappeared into Bhondsi Jail, leaving behind shell-shocked families.
As 2012 turned into 2013, and then 2014, they remained in jail, their
bail applications rejected.

Famously, a Punjab and Haryana High Court judge cited foreign
investors while turning down a plea for bail in May 2013. “The
incident is most unfortunate occurrence which has lowered the
reputation of India in the estimation of the world. Foreign investors
are not likely to invest the money in India out of fear of labour
unrest,” the judge observed.

Rahul Roy’s 2015 film, The Factory, is a graphic, moving,
worker-centric telling of the Maruti-Manesar story. Roy juxtaposes
different accounts of the July 18, 2012 violence to paint a far more
complex, contested and grey picture of the episode than the one drawn
by the police and prosecution.

However, the dramatic centre of The Factory is not those events, but
an agonising wait for bail. As the trek from sessions court to high
court to Supreme Court proves fruitless, the screen explodes with the
tears and rage of families brought to their knees. “Shall we eat mud
to fill our stomachs?” a woman screams at the camera. The young men
themselves are shadowy figures behind wire-mesh.

But no longer. Of the 150, 114 managed to secure bail this year, after
two-and-a-half to nearly three years in prison, and they are now out
in the world, engaged in a desperate, unnoticed search for employment.
Defence counsel Vrinda Grover says they are targets of indiscriminate
arrest by a state machinery strikingly eager to help a significant
business player.

“Not one of them was identified in court,” she stresses, “by a single
witness.” Even workers, she says, who by prosecution’s own version,
only damaged property, stand charged with murder. “If more than 200
people had a common intent to murder, as claimed, would they,” she
asks, “have stopped at one man?”
Tin shack where provisional committee of Manesar plant’s sacked workers meet

Among the sheaf of case papers on Grover’s desk are the near-identical
statements of four star prosecution witnesses, labour contractors who
between them criminally implicated nearly 90 workers, not one of whom
they were able to identify in court. Collectively, the statements seem
to advance a unique proposition: that the mob organised itself in
alphabetical order.

One of these four witness, according to his statement, claims to spot
rioting workers whose names run from A to G (“Amit Prasad, Anup Kumar,
Anup Kumar Dubey, Ashok, Baljinder, Bunty Kumar, Bharat Singh…”);
another names workers from G to P; a third from R to S and a fourth
from S to Y. “I haven’t seen statements like these in 25 years of
criminal practice,” says Grover. “These names have been taken from
muster rolls. On the very face of it, the statements have to be
false.”

Guilt or innocence will, of course, be decided in court. Defence
evidence is currently being presented, and final arguments are
expected to begin in a month or two. But prospective employers seem to
have made up their minds. Those out on bail, and even those merely
dismissed by the company, are being turned away by carmakers, by
automobile component makers and by employers in the informal sector.

These are workers with ITI diplomas and, in most cases, significant
work experience. But even as “skilling” is nationally valourised,
being skilled appears to provide no advantage if you carry the
Maruti-Manesar taint. Maruti Suzuki did not respond to questions from
Business Standard on the case and the situation of its former workers.

There are two or three days every month when a wide corridor at the
Gurgaon district and sessions court looks like the site of a college
reunion, teeming with young men in jeans and non-branded trainers,
with cheap backpacks. At some point, these ex-Maruti workers out on
bail will queue below a sign that reads, “This is a temple of justice,
keep it clean.”

They will file into a small courtroom, mark attendance, and then they
leave quickly for the homeward journey to rural districts in Haryana
and other parts of the Hindi heartland. Being interviewed helps to
pass the hours, though they do ask, with rough humour, “Will this help
get us jobs?”

“If you don’t mention your Maruti-Manesar experience, you are asked
about the gaps in your resume, and you have no answer,” explains
Brajesh Kumar, who has just arrived after a 200-km train journey from
Rajasthan. “But if you tell the truth, which I did when I was
interviewed at an auto part company in Rudrapur, nobody will touch
you.”

“Road-building, weight-lifting, packing clothes in a garment factory,”
says Raj Kishen, a young Haryanvi who was an apprentice on the chassis
line, listing the jobs available to him. “I didn’t study for 15
years,” he retorts, “to do what an unlettered man can do.”

But those with families to feed took up modest jobs that they found
hard to hold down because of the frequency of court hearings. Sharma,
a trained plastic processing operator with six years of experience,
became a salesman. Pradeep Kumar, after seven years at Maruti, became
a security guard. Kanwarjit Singh, with a three-year diploma in die
and tool making, now works for a courier company.

“I always wanted to teach at an ITI,” says Amarjit Singh, 29. “But
Maruti selected me; I got 54 out of 60 in its test. I was the kind of
worker who corrected defects in other people’s work, ask anybody. I
would have only blamed the police for this case, had the company not
dismissed me as well. When I was terminated, I realised, company kisi
ki nahi hai (the company is nobody’s).” Amarjit has now joined an
instructor’s course. “It is on borrowed money, I am zero,” he says.
“But I have to erase Maruti from my record, start again…”

Several of those waiting on concrete benches dressed in the uniform of
urban youth are the sons of modest rural workers: tailors, masons,
security guards at agricultural warehouses. It is clear from the
police chargesheet, which astonishingly lists castes next to names,
that quite a few are from socially vulnerable communities. Most seem
to belong to families with a few bighas of land, or none. They all
tell near-identical stories of enrolling at ITIs to escape rural
stagnation but many are now staring it in the face.

Mritunjay Dubey, an ITI trained electrician from Ghazipur in eastern
Uttar Pradesh, does a 36-hour round-trip by train for every court
hearing. Sometimes, he returns in less than a week for the next
hearing, because he has nowhere to stay in Gurgaon, where he tried,
but failed, to get his next job. “So I just help in the fields,” he
says, “when I am not in court.”

Conversely, Rajesh (not his real name) lives in Gurgaon, but has no
hearings to attend. When the police arrived at workers’ tenements
shortly after the Manesar violence, and took them away for “enquires”
that later turned into arrests, he took to his heels. Named as an
absconder, he now leads a below-the- radar existence as an
auto-rickshaw driver.
An earlier picture of a worker soon after being granted bail

He wears a nondescript kurta-pyjama with a gamchha (cloth towel) slung
around his neck. When he meets his family, he does so stealthily. “I
managed to send a few thousand rupees home every month when the others
were rotting in jail,” he says. “My brother is studying at an ITI, my
sister has to be married.” His own engagement was called off, he
mentions in passing, before the end of July 2012.

“We have an office near the district courts, given to us by our
lawyer,” says Ram Niwas, a member of the provisional committee of the
Manesar plant’s sacked workers. The office turns out to be a tin shed
in a rabbit-warren of notary publics’ offices and shops, its few
occupants instantly recognisable from The Factory.

They are among a clutch of exceptionally articulate explainers of the
larger story told in Roy’s film, of a worker’s movement at the plant
from 2011, to register an independent union, to protest a punishing
shop floor culture and end wage discrimination between permanent and
contract workers.

“I was very surprised when I met the ex-workers at Manesar,” the
film-maker confessed in an interview. “They were a new kind of young
Indian worker, intelligent and confident. The situation at the plant
was centrally a problem about dignity. This is a case-study in how not
to deal with a young, educated workforce. In fact, it is today being
studied as one.”

Roy emphasises that when he began filming in July 2013 (until July
2014) , the ex-workers had their backs to the wall. Their union
leaders were in jail, their movement had peaked and there were “no
grand victories on the horizon”.

“Yet, they were able to keep going, with a new set of leaders that
arose from the ranks of dismissed workers.” The young men on the
ex-workers’ committee liaised with lawyers, organised protests, got
backing from national trade unions, raised funds for legal cases and
jailed workers’ families, and were able to influence union elections
at the plant, once it reopened. “When I showed the film in Mumbai,”
says Roy, “people asked, ‘What is it about these Haryana boys?’”

That sparkiness comes through when they tell you that the new salary
scales for Maruti workers (but only permanent workers, they point out)
are a culmination of a process that they put in motion. “We changed
the environment, we brought in a culture of negotiated settlements,”
says Ram Niwas adamantly. “This was our sacrifice.”

The word “sacrifice” is telling, however. The draining effect of a
drawn out battle, in the criminal courts, and a parallel one, in the
labour courts over the mass dismissals, is hard to miss. Most members
of the committee have dropped off because of “family pressures”.

Those that remain are cash-strapped, even if they have been able to
raise contributions for legal expenses through the workers’ union at
Manesar. Ram Niwas, for example, largely manages on Rs 7,000 a month,
paid to him by a worker’s cooperative.

His wife and children have left Gurgaon for their village in Kaithal
district in Haryana. While they live in the ancestral joint family
home, they eat separately, because other family members object to his
continued involvement with the Maruti-Manesar case.

Sunil Kaushik, an arresting presence in Roy’s film, with his sharp
explanations, accompanied by charts and drawings, of the layout,
assembly line and working conditions at the plant, has quit the
committee. “I gave my time to this struggle to clear our names, but I
could not do it indefinitely,” he explains on the phone from Rohtak.

After failing to get more reputable jobs, the dismissed worker is
retraining as a garage mechanic. “You can’t wash off this stain,
however much you argue that everyone is not to blame for what
happened,” he says, frustration in his voice. “Public perceptions are
set.”

The mood is lighter in a one-room home in Gurgaon, where Sushma,
another striking face from Roy’s film, finally has her husband,
Sohanlal, by her side. In the film, the vulnerable yet poised young
woman takes up work as a data entry clerk after her husband is jailed,
rather than go home to her parents.

She lives in a one-room home on the rough edge of Gurgaon, amid
symbols of a rural couple’s emerging middle class dream — a fridge in
a corner, a bedspread with cartoon characters, wedding pictures with
hand-drawn hearts in the margins — and never misses visitors’ days at
Bhondsi jail. Recalling her first meeting with her husband, she says,
“Boys usually exaggerate what they own, he told me he had nothing. I
thought to myself, this man tells the truth.”

Looking back, now, she says: “I couldn’t have managed for nearly three
years without the support system created by the committee. For three
days after he was taken away, I had no idea where he was locked up, I
had no money to fight the legal case, I had never visited a jail.”
Sohanlal, 30, sitting on the bedspread with the cartoon characters,
shows you his unused Casio watch, awarded for good work at Manesar,
and his trophies for inter-departmental cricket.

He expects his name will be cleared, but wonders whether his career
can ever recover from the lost years at Bhondsi. Yet, he is one of the
lucky ones. He has a workplace to go to, a wedding banquet hall, where
he handles petty administration for Rs10,000 per month.

A sorry saga

Maruti Suzuki’s second factory opens in Manesar in 2007

A car is rolled off the assembly line every 50 seconds

According to figures cited in the film, The Factory, the CEO earned Rs
47.3 lakh annually in 2007 and Rs 2.45 crore by 2010. A senior
permanent worker got Rs 2.80 lakh a year in 2007 and Rs 3 lakh by 2013

Workers at the Manesar plant strike work thrice in 2011. Key demands:
they be allowed to register an independent union and contract workers
be given same salary and perks as permanent workers

Leaders of the struggle to form a union exit the same year after
accepting generous severance package from Maruti Suzuki

Workers finally register an independent union with new leaders in late
February 2012 and the union subsequently submits a charter of demands,
including a substantial salary hike

Violence erupts in the factory on July 18, 2012, amid many unresolved
issues. A general manager dies, several others injured; 147 workers,
including union leaders, arrested and jailed (three more arrested
later); 2,500 workers dismissed

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points.

Workers-students unity long live!
Maruti workers union ki ladai ko lal salaam!

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