Abstract
This article narrates the conditions with which industrial workers in India have to contend with when bargaining for labour rights. It trains attention on restructuring of automobile manufacturing processes in India in the neoliberal phase and the erosion of labour rights through the recently introduced labour codes. The framing of labour action and protests as law and order problems in the public sphere, primarily through the news media, aided delegitimisation of unions and securitisation of labour relations, which, in turn, mounts steep challenges for workers’ strategies to start a social dialogue and force negotiation around labour rights and social security. The article scrutinises the political economy of media attention and the impact this has on the politics of protest. It argues that neoliberal processes and the discourse of national industrial development have inscribed tensions into the choice of protest strategies, making collective bargaining ineffectual.
Keywords
The primary impetus of this article came from instances of labour actions at prominent car and two-wheeler manufacturers in Delhi-National Capital Region (NCR) in the last decade. 1 In order to counter the dominant corporate news media framing of workers’ actions (strikes) as causing public inconvenience and against national interest which marred their attempts to negotiate labour rights, the workers’ re-strategisation of their protest to conduct non-violent padyatra (foot march) is examined critically. I argue that protest strategies have embedded moral economies which are intertwined with the transforming nature of the state–subject or state–citizen relationship.
The first section of the article contains a discussion on the restructuring of labour relations in India owing to the changed state policy of industrial development focussed on the automobile manufacturing industry. This section traces the emergence of the automobile manufacturing industry in Delhi-NCR, asserting that the policy environment in which the automobile manufacturing in the country flourished was not just a historical inevitability driven by uncontrolled economic forces or the forward march of technology, but carefully crafted ideas to achieve specific national development objectives. The second section discusses labour action and protest strategy by workers at marquee automobile manufacturing brands, Maruti Suzuki India Limited (MSIL), Manesar, Haryana, and Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India (HMSI), Tapukara, Rajasthan. It shows how public perception shaped by discourse-setting of corporate media leaves little space for the workers to choose effective strategies that can help negotiate better work conditions and security. The neoliberal ideological bias in these limiting discourses is couched in framing of capitalist interests as national interest and workers’ action as detrimental to national development goals. The workers’ struggle to devise protest strategies that can counter this nationalist charge leads them to also adopt nationalist frames of moral and non-violent protest tactics.
Restructuring Labour Relations in India
Alongside the ebb and flow of India’s development trajectory with respect to employment, the circumstances of the workforce also went through several changes. In the early post-Independence period, workers’ rights, particularly formation of unions, were accommodated by the state in accordance with the values of social justice enshrined in the constitution of the young country. The slowdown of the 1960s saw the trade union movement losing steam. A largely centralised industrial relation system, built upon the basic notion of working- class solidarity, slowly assumed a decentralised form and characteristics defined variously by political parties and ideologies, region, sector, or factory (Bhowmik, 1998; Mishra, 2012). With the definite shift in the economic policy orientation towards setting the stage for neoliberal reforms in the 1980s, the state began its retreat and the workers could not adequately defend their hard-won rights against the many-headed adversary in the form of privatisation, liberalisation, and globalisation.
The reforms increased the pressure on Indian companies to be competitive in the global market. The Indian capitalists demanded that the state, one, protects them from external competitive pressures and, two, deregulates labour to make them more competitive. India, along with other developing countries, resisted the inclusion of labour rights in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) agenda (WTO, 1996) that effectively left it out of purview of global consensus or benchmarks. An undated post on WTO website regarding labour standards reports that the developing countries argued that:
The campaign to bring labour issues into the WTO is actually a bid by industrial nations to undermine the comparative advantage of lower wage trading partners, and could undermine their ability to raise standards through economic development, particularly if it hampers their ability to trade. They also argue that proposed standards can be too high for them to meet at their level of development. These nations argue that efforts to bring labour standards into the arena of multilateral trade negotiations are little more than a smokescreen for protectionism. (WTO, n.d.)
Essentially, the capitalists wanted to have more and more power to hire workers on short-term contracts and fire them as and when they please; not have to pay for social security of the workers; constrain opportunities for collective bargaining and labour action; exit businesses that they no longer consider viable for a variety of reasons; and have less and less state oversight and compliance requirements. Through the four Labour Codes that were introduced and passed in the parliament in 2019 and 2020—three during the pandemic—without prior tripartite deliberations, the State and the incumbent government seem to have given the capitalists, more or less, the powers they wanted. Though law-making comes under the legislative domain, the codes worryingly leave out a lot of areas unaddressed in their bodies that are now subject to the discretion of the central and state executive at the level of rule-drafting (Sood, 2020). The current set of labour law reforms also formally signal an end of era where capital–labour relations were mediated by the state to achieve a balance between its economic goals and human development goals. They also mark a reversal of workplace rights—not only for the workers in the organised sector but for all citizens—that were secured after decades of struggles.
Labour in Automobile Manufacturing Industry
Right next to the capital city Delhi and well inside the NCR is the city of Gurugram, earlier known as Gurgaon. It is the destination of choice for multinational corporations to set up their country headquarters, foreign and homegrown Information Technology (IT), and IT-enabled Services giants to run their backend operations, and ambitious investment banks, public relations outfits, and law firms looking to net the next big deal. The city also packs in hundreds of upscale housing projects, gleaming shopping malls, and spaces of leisure. Just beyond Gurugram lies the vast industrial sprawl encompassing several rapidly urbanising areas of Haryana and Rajasthan where millions of workers are employed in industries manufacturing clothes to cars. These areas—Manesar, Dharuhera, Bhiwadi, Bawal, and Neemrana—are also aligned to the ambitious 1,483 km Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC, see Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, n.d.). The corridor project will connect the state of Uttar Pradesh, at its northernmost node, to Maharashtra on the western coast with high-speed, high-capacity, multimodal freight corridor, traversing Delhi-NCR, Haryana, Rajasthan, and Gujarat, with the latter two forming the bulk of its ‘influence area’. According to the Japan Bank for International Cooperation, the corridor will ‘serve to develop infrastructure in this region, while leading to an increase in the opportunities for Japanese companies to participate in infrastructure business’ (Japan Bank for International Cooperation, 2013).
Alongside capital-intensive mega-infrastructure projects exist the sobering reality of little planning for the wellbeing of the workers. They not only live amid meagre and unsanitary conditions in unregulated/informal pockets but are also weighed down by a pervasive nexus of surveillance and disciplining, comprising of management representatives, small vendors, and service providers to larger companies in the area, landlords, labour contractors, and local strongmen (Cowan, 2015). In this regard, these areas are not very different from Gurugram in that the industrial and urban development is taking place unevenly around agricultural land and existing rural and semi-rural settlements.
The area’s automobile sector, a dense and complex cluster of several hundreds of small and large manufacturing units, has been one of the prominent sectors to develop in the country following the liberalisation of the economy. The role of the State in shaping markets is often given a short shrift in popular discourse on industrial development and the successes of a sector or specific companies are attributed to entrepreneurial genius. Several factors have led to the emergence of this automobile cluster, mainly policy changes that resulted in opening up of the automobile sector to foreign investments. Under the first wave, early 1980s, the state allowed foreign companies to enter into joint ventures with their private Indian counterparts. In some of these joint ventures, the state too participated as a stakeholder. Several companies like Suzuki, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Mazda, and Nissan entered the Indian market to make passenger and light commercial vehicles. The Phased Manufacturing Policy, under which such ventures were required to make use of locally manufactured components over a stipulated time period, set up the stage for the industry to take deep roots and expand. Under the second wave of reforms, in the next decade, the automobile sector was delicensed, tariffs substantially reduced, and automatic Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) route opened, subject to a cap of 51 per cent. Starting 2001, the sector was fully delicensed, 100 per cent FDI was allowed in it, and import of components was also allowed. A careful perusal of the policy for the automobile manufacturing sector shows that much of its growth comes from the affordances state extended to it at various points in time by protecting the interests of domestic entrepreneurs, building their capacities, keeping the sector financially attractive for foreign investors, public investments in training and infrastructure, and so on (Miglani, 2019).
Both MSIL and HMSI were set up in the early 1980s. MSIL was a joint venture between state-led Maruti Udyog Limited with the Suzuki Motor Corporation (SMC), while HMSI was a joint venture of privately owned Hero Cycles and the Honda Motor Company (HMC). These investments were until then, the largest Japanese direct investments in India. On the technology front, the Japanese companies were to facilitate rapid and significant indigenisation of the production process within five to seven years of commencing operations (Hamaguchi, 1985). This led to the establishment of several domestic suppliers who would manufacture automobile components for the main factories. The main factory/brand, or the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), would largely assemble the vehicles. MSIL alone has a supplier base network of over 500 units. This was a significant change for the India automobile industry where companies would often make all the components themselves and assemble them all at one place (Kathuria, 1987).
Over the last two decades, the supply base fragmented into several layers wherein an automobile part finally landing up at the OEMs for assembly would have, in all likelihood passed through several global and domestic, large and small, formal and informal manufacturing units. For illustration, a large supplier for a particular car part system like lighting or steering sources sub-parts from another specialised supplier, who in turn has several more suppliers who manufacture the smallest constituent components that make up the said system. While the top tiers of the supply network are dominated by male workers, there is some participation of women in downstream suppliers and manufacturers. Such backward linkages in the automobile manufacturing sector in Delhi-NCR extend all the way to small-scale and informal home-based manufacturing units (Annavajhula & Pratap, 2012; Chakrabarty & Nayanjyoti, 2018). This has included setting up of pilot downstream supplying units in prisons, engaging convicted inmates, and creating disturbing foreshadows of Prison-Industrial Complex like in the US (Ullah, 2014).
On the other hand, these are plugged into global value chains feeding components to automobile manufacturers in various other parts of the world. It is a trickle-up system where most value accrues to the large top tiers companies, as they possess both technological knowledge as well as global linkages, while the position of those downstream is literally akin a small cog in a large and complex machinery. To keep things running on schedule, all of these linkages work in tandem with each other, adhering to the ‘lean’ production norms, without running the risk of under or oversupply. Lean production, also known as the Toyota Production System, is the preeminent model followed in the automobile manufacturing sector. While lean production is presented as a popular and universal model for large-scale manufacturing, it has come under severe criticism for the relentlessness it engenders. As far back as the late 1980s, the lean production regime in automobile manufacturing had given it the reputation of being ‘hard, dirty, and dangerous’ work in Japan (Berggren, 1993). Many of the Japanese automobile giants, including Toyota, carried out changes to make their lean production practices more ‘worker friendly’ (Benders, 1996). Three decades later, workers in other parts of the world, including India, continue to find it insensitive and demeaning (Annavajhula & Pratap, 2012; Matthew & Burgess, 2018).
It is important to point out here that although automobile manufacturing is considered a part of the formal sector, most workers engaged in automobile manufacturing work in conditions of rampant informality. The automobile manufacturing cluster in NCR is an apt illustration of how large parts of the jobs in the formal sector are being increasingly informalised. Such fragmentation and restructuring of the production process also has challenging consequences for the collectivisation of workers. Mobilising solidarity becomes challenging for the workers, who while being part of the same production system are placed both vertically and horizontally away from each other. In addition to the restructuring and fragmentation of the production process, there are other changes that have had serious repercussions for the workers, both in terms of their working conditions as well as possibilities of questioning these conditions collectively by the workers (Chakrabarty & Nayanjyoti, 2018).
Both MSIL and HMSI have seen immense growth in the last two decades. They are highly profitable and market leaders in their respective segments. As brands, they are almost the byword for the product categories they operate in. But their industrial relations policies have seen workers asserting their workplace rights for the basic minimum—to form unions, to demand equitable and living wages, and humane working conditions. The workers have had to initiate tool-down strikes, stoppage of production, factory occupations and strikes, and public protests as a last resort. The company managements and the representatives of the state neither afforded them much space to articulate their views nor engaged with them in good faith. Over the last decade, the managements have become more militant in their approach—confrontational and aggressively union-busting.
In the larger context of the always-unfolding labour policy reforms, whether by stealth or making changes in law, the working class has their back against the wall. They are today far more vulnerable than ever. While the material conditions have deteriorated, even the semblance of legal protection the workers have relied on occasionally is now being taken away. On the other hand, the state seems more taken in with an economic policy orientation that is clearly weighed in favour of the company managements. 2
Because of the excesses of the company managements, either ignored or facilitated by the state, workers’ assertions, in the absence of institutional mechanisms, are getting sharper and unpredictable. The lower courts and the law enforcement bodies, in such events, have usually been found to be eager to oblige the managements by passing orders favourable to them and bringing down the might of the law—ordering workers to move out the factory premises, enforcing a radius of no protests, sending armed constabulary in large numbers—on workers who merely wanted a discussion on their workplace. The managements are also spreading their risks around—along parts of the supply chain and across factories in different states. Along DMIC, for instance, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Maharashtra have already carried out significant reforms in their respective labour policies since 2014.
In 2014, SMC established its fully owned subsidiary, Suzuki Motors Gujarat Private Limited (SMGPL), and 2017 onwards began producing vehicles for the domestic as well as the export markets from its Hansalpur, Gujarat factory with a capacity to produce 750,000 vehicles per year. SMGPL and MSIL’s current combined capacity stands well over 20 lakh vehicles per year. While SMGPL is planning to build and operate another factory in Gujarat, MSIL is planning to add a factory in Haryana. On the back of continuous double-digit growth, HMSI established two more factories after establishing the Tapukara, Haryana factory in 2011—Narsapur, Karnataka, in 2013, and Vithalpur, Gujarat, in 2016. With its 11 production lines spread over the four factories, today it can produce 64 lakh two-wheelers every year.
While industrial relations at MSIL had long been vexed, they became particularly volatile in 2011 and 2012 over the workers’ demand to form an independent union. The quest for continuous cost reduction and increasing productivity had put the workers on the edge and they demanded that they be allowed to be form an independent union to represent their particular concerns. The working conditions at MSIL was characterised by fast and relentless production, poor pay, lack of benefits for contract workers, disproportionate deductions for turning in late by even a minute and for leaves of absence, and abusive supervisors. The factory at the peak of production in 2010–2011 was producing a car every 45–48 second. It is important to note that the workers did deliver over and above the production capacity of the factory, and in their speeches and media communication repeatedly stressed the point that they were on the side of the management, often echoing the management’s patronising discourse of company as a family, but what they needed was an independent voice and the management to listen to them. Their protracted peaceful struggle took a dramatic turn on 18 July 2012—triggered by a dalit worker’s abuse by a supervisor—as violence erupted on the factory premises, claiming life of a human resources manager and leaving hundreds injured. The management and the state held the workers responsible for manager’s death. The workers, however, pointed to the management’s role in stoking violence and arson through hired instigators. Over the next few days, more than 2,000 workers were summarily dismissed. Hundreds of them, including the union office-bearers, were indiscriminately arrested. Public statements by politicians and business leaders demanding ‘exemplary punishment’ and ‘ruthless action’ against the workers made clear the intent of the state and the industry to crush the workers’ struggle.
The workers at HMSI started the process of union formation in August 2015. The management however seemed determined to put a swift stop to any efforts of the workers towards collectivisation. The management raised objections to the process through slowing the paperwork at the labour office through various means and when that did not work got a stay order from a local court without the workers even getting to know about it. The workers thereafter decided to approach the management with their charter of demands nevertheless. The management refused to engage with the workers. It instead began to coerce the workers by retrenching 700–800 contract workers and suspending some of the permanent workers. The active leadership of the workers who were at the forefront of the union formation process was especially targeted. It also increased surveillance of the shop floor through bouncers. On 16 February 2016, a contract worker who was unwell was manhandled by his supervisor when he refused to put in forced overtime. When the news of the incident spread, the workers collectively decided to address this. They stopped work and demanded that the management takes disciplinary action against the abusive supervisor. They also reiterated their demand to reinstate their colleagues suspended or terminated over the issue of union formation. Instead of negotiating with the workers the management closed the gates, neither did not it let the workers whose shift had ended leave, nor allowed the workers coming it to work. The police were called in, who by sundown unleashed a violent attack on the striking workers. Several workers’ skulls were found to be cracked and around 50–60 had sustained major injuries. Worker claim, that their leadership was ‘abducted’ by the management and the police. Workers also claimed that the management’s bouncers damaged the machinery in the factory. This damage was later used by the management to claim that the workers had caused destruction of company’s property. Over the next one week, the workers would be chased, beaten up, or detained by the police. Many workers were charged for rioting and attempt to murder.
Labour actions at both MSIL and HMSI, and many other companies in Delhi-NCR, illustrate several important issues concerning the state of industrial workers in contemporary India. Workers’ efforts to exercise their fundamental right to form associations and demand dignity continue to be frustrated by company managements with the connivance of the authorities. The incidents also reveal that protests have been suppressed by use of intimidation and force, and law enforcement and provisions of the criminal justice system have been misused to harass the workers as the case of MSIL workers particularly shows.
Securitisation of Labour ‘Unrest’
In the 2013 India Risk Survey, an annual report published by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI), ‘strikes, closures and unrest’, curiously leaving out the category of lockouts, was regarded as top-most risk of businesses in India. The report noted that this particular set of risks ‘did not surface among the top five risks in the “Overall Risk Rating”’ (Pinkerton & FICCI, 2013, p. 1) in the previous year.
The erosion of labour rights—even when that does not quite contain the labour ‘unrest’—The suppression and erosion of labour rights has become the key to competitiveness between countries in attracting and retaining global capital. Now, the same competitiveness, or the race to the bottom, is pitting even sub-national regions against each other. Several states had, in fact, already started diluting their labour laws much before the Labour Codes were passed in the parliament, with some, like Uttar Pradesh, going as far as suspending much of their labour policies for specific periods of time to ‘stimulate’ the economy in the face of challenges aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic. If annual investor summits are a reliable indicator of policy orientation, then development through industrialisation is not only a key policy plank for states—especially those with comparatively low urbanisation rates—but also serves the populist promises of rapid job-creation.
The four Labour Codes on wages, industrial relations, social security, and occupational safety, health, and working conditions, have replaced 29 labour laws, ostensibly to simplify and update the existing labour laws. Broadly speaking, these codes allow the capitalists ways to reduce their labour and compliance costs. They also, on the other hand, threaten to take away from the workers potentially their very legal status that of a worker and places them in a situation where they might not be able to even contest irregularities in wages, workplace mishaps, overtime benefits, and so on, as a collective (Sood & Nath, 2020). This, apparently, is the prominent way in which businesses can become more competitive within both national and global economic contexts.
What was essentially an industrial relations issue that could have been resolved by having a protocol for communication, that is, a union, over a period of time became a matter of law and order aggravated by the unyielding stand of the company managements. The dominant discourse of the news media, by and large, either did not acknowledge the underlying causes, or even when they did, remained largely biased in the favour of the employers. Very few of the news media reports covering the two instances of labour action examined, seemed to be aware of the connotations of the term militancy as its used and understood within the context of industrial relations, and none seemed inclined to explain the difference, if they were indeed aware, between what it really means and its popular usage. Militancy in the context of industrial relations means a range of activities undertaken not only by the workers and unions but also by the employers, against the background of the larger capital–labour relations, to achieve their respective goals, that of profit accumulation and fair wages, among others, respectively. For example, strike is widely considered to be a militant approach on the part of the workers and the unions. On the other hand, unionbusting is also a militant approach that employers use very often. The more aggressive they are in their unionbusting efforts, the more militant they are considered (Gall, 2017). While the workers’ and union militancy were invoked and debated by the news media, the employers’ militancy was not even acknowledged in the contexts that warranted it. This discourse aided the company managements and the State to securitise the issue rapidly. Large parts of the industrial sprawls in Delhi-NCR began to see some temporary as well as permanent presence of the Rapid Action Force (see Dutta, 2012).
Securitisation (Buzan et al., 1998), as a consequence of media framing (Vultee, 2010) and narratives (Tagliapietra, 2021), is emerging as a significant area with regards to the study of the media. It helps one discern linkages between speech acts and how they transform various topics of political concerns into those of security, calling for extraordinary measures from the State. This allows for various dominant actors—whether political, economic or from civil society—involved to either work around extant legal and institutional frameworks or even aggressively call for rapid reforms favouring themselves. In effect, media representation produces a ‘state of exception’ which, following Agamben (2000), constitutes a situation otherwise extraordinary, but one in which securitisation and suspension of law is normalised through use of techniques of modernity. The exception appears as a rule so frequently that Agamben asserts this is the ‘nomos of the modern’. It is achieved by a sleight of hand in which it is ‘modern’ technology which produces the logic for abandoning the political rationality of modernity, and excuse for totalitarian violence in democracies.
Padyatra as a Strategy: Spatiality and Moral Political Economy of Media Attention
There were many reasons as to why the labour action at both MSIL and HMSI caught the news media’s attention as much as they did to varying degrees. For one, both were located not very far from where the news media companies were and remain concentrated in New Delhi and Noida. Several labour actions of comparable scale have taken place in the last decade in other parts of the country, including the automobile manufacturing clusters in Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Karnataka, among others, but the ‘national media’ have not assigned as much resources to their coverage from their ‘regional’ bureaus. A senior editor and prominent television news anchor ascribed this to what he called ‘the tyranny of distance’; he added that ‘if there is a reasonable geographical proximity to Delhi then there is a greater chance for the newsroom recognising the story and going for it. The moment it is in Jharkhand or Chhattisgarh it does not get registered on the mental map’ (Personal Interview, August 2014).
Further, most news media outlets do not have exclusive news workers assigned on the ‘labour beat’. It has been largely been subsumed under the larger economy and business reporting in most places. But what all the news media companies do have, barring some exceptions, are dedicated resources in the broader automobile-related content verticals that keep track of new product launches, road test reviews, and general ‘lifestyle’ content related to cars and two-wheelers. Broadcast media have dedicated shows and newspapers and magazines have dedicated supplements, if not an entirely separate branded publication. The economy and business reporting—former based largely out of Delhi and the latter Mumbai—along with the automobile review content vertical form the main linkages between the automobile manufacturing industry and the news media and their sustenance rests primarily on continuous goodwill between the two. It needs to be highlighted here that both MSIL and HMSI are industry-leading marquee brands with hefty advertising and marketing budgets.
In the case of both MSIL as well as HMSI, there was a long build-up to the days when there were outbreaks of violence. Even if the structural violence of the backbreaking work for extremely low wages and poor working conditions at the two factories is disregarded and so is the company managements’ denial of workers’ fundamental right to form a union, the physical violence in both the cases had been initiated at the behest of the two companies by supervisors, bouncers, and the police. At MSIL, a worker was being disciplined by a supervisor during the short tea break and at HMSI, a worker was assaulted by a supervisor for refusing to do overtime work because of illness.
However, the coverage of the two labour actions picked pace only after violence broke out. A senior editor and anchor confirmed the endurance of conflict and violence as a news value, particularly for the Indian television news media. He shared,
Our problem is that, in our mind, we have put these hierarchies that ‘yeh story bikegi, yeh story nahin bikegi’ [this story will sell, this story will not sell] so unless there is violence at the Manesar plant you will not cover it. And in TV—a medium that needs dramatic content—the dramatic content only comes from if there is violence. It is a terrible thing…in a way it is almost a trap which TV finds itself in. (Personal Interview, August 2014)
Both in the cases of coverage over violence at MSIL as well as HMSI, the violence perpetrated by the company managements’ bouncers as well as the police were given a short shrift. In the days following the violence, for example, each and every worker of the MSIL and HMSI was a potential suspect, and treated as such, because the police, while filing the FIR (First Information Report) in the two incidents had given themselves a wide berth by including the mention of over 500 and 40 ‘unnamed’ suspects, respectively. It also appeared that it was much easier for the news media to do as the victims were ‘unworthy’; there was little attempt to humanise or extend empathy to them (Herman & Chomsky, 1995). The news media augmented the discourse linking the wider category of workers to violence by variously foregrounding frames such as the figure of the new ‘intolerant’ and ‘aggressive’ worker and the influence of the ‘Ultra-left’ and ‘maoists’ among the workers (see Goyal, 2012; Bhalla, 2013).
A trade union activist who had been in touch with the MSIL workers throughout the first phase of their agitation was of the opinion that the workers will need to rapidly develop communications strategies and skills to be able represent themselves on their own terms. She strikingly described how and why the news media often manage to represent the workers and angry, unruly, and prone to violence:
every time labour has to speak because of the inequality of power, unhein itni zor se bolna padta hai ke log unhein paagal samajhte hain [they have to speak so loudly that people consider them mad]. You do not hear them until they have thrown a stone and broken your windshield or something like that…and then it has to be that these are deranged, ungrateful people who are out to wreck the story of…development of India’. (Personal Interview, August 2014)
The MSIL and HMSI workers were young and did not easily fit into the long-held image of the ‘working class’, nor did they carry the inherited divisions and political burdens of the trade-union led movement. They thought seriously about how to grapple with these broad and sweeping changes. They contemplated over issues of workplace or sectoral organisation, issues of bridging the gaps between various categories of workers, bridging gaps between various geographies, issues of finding common grounds with other social movements, and issues to engage the larger public in social dialogue. A significant part of this new thinking was their engagement with digital and online media. Worker groups have often had to level with the realisation that unsympathetic news media narratives have made it difficult for the workers to mobilise public opinion in their favour.
In January 2014, with the union leadership behind bars, a provisional committee of workers undertook a 170 km Jan Jagran Padyatra (public awakening foot march) from Kaithal, Haryana to Delhi in which several workers, activists, the workers’ family members walked over two weeks through various towns and villages of Haryana conducting public meetings and protests. Several civil society organisations, unions, and groups demonstrated their solidarity with the jailed workers by joining the march and hosting it along the route. I also joined the march for a day and was struck by the resolve of the protestors who had undertaken to walk during the peak of the north-Indian winter over such an extended period of time. 3 It was this moral resolve that the workers and their families wanted to convey to the state and the central governments that had so far refused to heed to their appeals for justice for the mass imprisonment of the workers and denial of bail to them. 4
One of the first activities that the HMSI workers carried out, after being beaten up by the police and locked out and retrenched by the company management, was a leafletting campaign, where they went to some of prominent public places in adjoining areas of their factory and distributed pamphlets. In the pamphlet, the workers had provided the context and chronology of events that led to their mass retrenchment and also raised some of their key demands that included an end to the continuing police action against the workers, registration of their independent union, lifting of the lockout by the company management, negotiations of the charter of demand submitted by the workers, permission to peacefully protest, and jobs for youth from the neighbouring villages. They concluded their demands by asserting that they were not against development but against the throttling of workers in the name of development.
With not being able to make any headway, and not being allowed to even get close the HMSI factory, the HMSI workers thereafter tried, in July 2016, to take advantage of the general leeway given to religious/devotional groups and processions by the civil administration and the police and tried to organise a kanwad yatra to be able to access their workplace. In a Facebook post on their group, the leadership of the workers had announced in relation to their ‘pilgrimage’ that they will use it to create awareness around their issues by going place to place, holding small meetings, and distributing their pamphlets. Dressed as devotees of Lord Shiva, they tried to get close to their factory but were turned away by the police. Taking exception to this disrespect to ‘pilgrims’, the workers tried to build pressure on the civil administration and the police to let them continue on their path. After a brief standoff, eventually they were let through. These exchanges, as per their practice, were shared with the wider online audience on the Facebook page of HMSI workers and engagement with such posts was driven with calls to group members’ strength of devotion and sense of piety.
Throughout their respective struggles, separated by four years, the workers of MSIL and HMSI had to contend with largely unsympathetic and often hostile coverage of their cause by overwhelmingly large sections of the news media. They were painted, in broad strokes, as recalcitrant, angry, violent, and unmindful of the national interest. Their disruptive though always peaceful protest strategies were represented as causing inconvenience to the public, loss to companies, and damaging to the country’s image as a global investment destination. Over the four years, the media attention to labour issues had dipped significantly as well. The news media reported extensively on the MSIL in 2011–2012, and also intermittently while the workers’ trial was going on, largely through reductionist frames. However, while the reductionist discourses around labour action remained, the quantum of the coverage around HMSI was far less. Anecdotally, while one did not come across any instance where a news worker was barred from reporting on the labour action at MSIL, one could find at least two to three reports where they were intimidated and even detained by the police while trying to investigate the HMSI issue and talking to the workers (Chaudhary & Bharadwaj, 2016). In the face of such hostility and increasing attempts of erasure, the workers were pushed to think of ways to reach out to the public at large with the hope to build an understanding of the assault on their democratic rights. While digital and online media tools and platforms—video documentation, social media groups, and campaigns—were thought of as useful to amplify various aspects of their struggles, there was also a growing realisation to think beyond the usual strategies tied to the factory—work stoppage, occupation of the factory premises, gate meetings, to name a few. Both the group of workers at different times in their respective struggles went on hunger strikes for varying periods of time. However, it was the long-distance foot marches that yielded them the elusive visibility in the public sphere, with sections of news media calling the choice of protest ‘unique’ and ‘different’. While the choice of walking/marching may not be seen as radical enough, as opposed to traditional militant labour actions, the workers’ decision to draw on a repertoire of practices and imageries—from the nationalist/freedom movement to religious pilgrimage—did get them a foot in the news media’s door. However, such changes also could be taken as an indication of workers’ continual assessment of the larger political environment and consequently as attempts to frame their struggles within the acceptable range of expression that will both be palatable to the media as well as the political class.
Concluding Remarks
While it is difficult to tell whether the changes in protest and social dialogue strategies of sections of workers movement is tactical and temporary or symptomatic of a larger paradigm shift within the workers movement, a few things are definitely clear. It is undeniable that large sections working class are invested in or aligned to the hegemonic contemporary nationalist discourse. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-affiliated Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) is the largest Central Trade Union (CTU) in the country—almost twice as big as any of its peer organisations. In spite of this heft, the BMS has been equivocal with regards to new labour regime inaugurated by the passage of the labour codes. While other CTUs have been quite critical of the labour codes and have given calls for and organised many general strikes in the last few years, the BMS has neither strongly criticised the codes nor participated in the joint platform of the CTUs. Disentangling this contradiction—per Upadhyay (2018), ‘class interests of workers, as well as the limits and tensions in these efforts’ (p. 80)—is going to be key to understanding the direction of capital–labour relations in the country. Instances of such contradictions could also be clearly discerned in the struggles of both the MSIL and HMSI workers.
Invocation of idea of family by MSIL and the political class, its easy uptake by the workers and the news media is not new in the news media discourses of work and workplace around the world and most certainly would appear extremely mundane in the context of India, where the institution continues to wield immense social and cultural cache. Endorsing the discourse of the family at the inaugural of the 46th Indian Labour Conference (ILC) in 2015, the Prime Minster, addressing the industry and workers’ representatives, too ‘stressed the need for developing family bond like relations between employee and employer. He said this will not only strengthen economy of the country but will also ensure wellbeing of both entrepreneurs and workers’.
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Kumar (2005) has already drawn attention to this discourse in the context of labour action and news media through tracing its contours along the axis of ‘home, work, and the nation’ (p. 72). In her analysis of the media coverage of the 1997 UPS strike, she explicated the discursive construction of the relationship between the ‘nuclear family’, ‘corporate family’, and the ‘national family’ and concluded that
in each of the families discussed, the subordinated members were expected to forfeit their rights for the good of the family, and in each case, the parental figure was assumed to arbitrate in the interests of the entire nuclear, corporate, or national family. We also saw that, from reporters and anchors to government officials, business leaders, and business professors, the nationalist narrative was taken for granted as the natural way of framing the strike…. Thus while business interests were presented as being in the national interest, those of labor were marginalized and even subordinated to those of the national family. (p. 79)
HMSI workers, in making use of religious discourse and imagery in general, and kanwad yatra in particular, the workers had perhaps also unwittingly brought out a much-less discussed consequence of the pervasive sense of precariousness, uncertainty, and sense of powerlessness that the neoliberalism order perpetuates all around. Singh (2017) in his ethnographic study of young people taking part in kanwad yatra argues that their actions should not be seen so much as an attraction of religion in and by itself but as attempts to prove their moral worth that is otherwise subject to domination and humiliation in other realms, such as their working lives. This argument also raises urgent questions about the intersections of labour politics and religion, especially as they are mediated both through digital and online media where concerns about unchecked politics of intolerance are also becoming more and more serious. This particular dimension of the workers’ politics exemplified in some of their offline and online utterances had resonances of majoritarian discourses around caste and religion. This is an aspect which is clearly at odds with a broader, inclusive, and democratic agenda, which is often assumed as implicit in the commitment of workers to secure their own rights.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.