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The MSIL workers are subjected to despotically harsh shop-floor discipline and

must produce a car every 50 seconds. The situation resembles the oppressive
conditions of super-mechanised production immortalised in Charlie Chaplins film
Modern Times. MSIL workers must labour hard for eight hours, with only two 7.5minute toilet breaks and a 30-minute lunch break. Both the canteen and the toilets
are half-a-kilometre away.
The Suzuki management has taken the cult of compulsory attendance, obsessive
punctuality and a relentless search for ever-rising productivity to new extremes.
Work has been speeded up to ultra-stressful levels, where the limits of mental
alertness and physical endurance can be easily crossed. The management has
imported its practices and mantras straight from Japan, and has imposed them on
local managers in Japanese through formulas (such as the 3-K sutra for
interpreting and obeying shop-floor orders strictly and exactly, with no room for
difference, originality or creativity).
It has been said that some of Japans most successful corporations domestically
practise samurai capitalism, under which their managers have undivided loyalty
to the company: they must be available at all hours and for all the tasks specified
by the chief executive officer (CEO). At MSIL, samurai capitalism has been
extended to blue-collar workers.
The terrible intensity of work at the Manesar plant, now measured in actions per
minute, would embarrass even Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific
management and industrial engineering, who conceptualised modern assemblyline production a century ago by analysing, breaking down, and then synthesising
workflows to dictate to workers the mechanical, repetitive movements they must
make to maximise productivity.
However, MSIL scores poorly on materialistic issues too. Twothirds of its workers are contract employees who earn Rs. 6,000
-7,000 a month, of which one-half goes into rent. Their wage is
less than one-half of what permanent workers earn although
they do the same work and are needed around the year. This, as
former Union Labour Secretary Sudha Pillai says, violates the
principle of equal pay for equal work. Such contract employment
is a pernicious practice and the root cause of a great deal of
industrial unrest in India.

Maruti Suzuki is an exemplar of some of Indias most profitable and fastestgrowing industrial companies in a cutting-edge technology sector, which thrive on
similar anomalies and contradictions and on squeezing their workers. Thus, real
wages in industry have fallen since the mid-1990s by 15 per cent even while the
net value added per worker has more than doubled.
Over the past three decades, the share of wages in the net value created by
manufacturing firms has declined sharply from 30.3 per cent to 11.6 per cent, while
the share of profits has increased by 140 per cent to 56.2 per cent.
These adverse trends are part of a severely non-inclusive, unwholesome and
warped pattern of industrial growth at the heart of which lie multiple and rising
iniquities. These are bound to lead to greater distortions in income distribution,
wider inter-class and -group disparities, and greater social degradation and
retrogression, besides more industrial unrest and intensified social strife.
All this will have extremely unhealthy, indeed sordid, consequences for our
society, for our industrial and work culture, and for our politics. It should shame us
all that the most ultra-modern sector of our economy is mired in the worst of
squalor, inequality, obscurantism, despotic authoritarianism and injustice to be
found in our society.
We need a different industrial growth and industrial relations paradigm, in which
the workers basic right to what the International Labour Organisation (ILO) calls
decent work and to a living wage is respected, and the right of association and
collective bargaining is made inviolable without exception.
This means effectively outlawing and abolishing the demeaning practice of
contract labour employment, tightening labour protection, promoting job security,
upgrading wages and working conditions across the board, and lightening the
burden of work to humane levels.
This will need amendments to many laws, which govern minimum
wages, payment of wages, the physical environment in factories,
working conditions, redress of workers grievances, conciliation
and arbitration mechanisms, termination of services, and
industrial relations. That would be best brought about through a
new National Commission on Labour, which bases itself on ethical
norms and the imperative of equitable development, besides
international best practices.

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