Introduction

During my field visit, an automobile worker in Manesar, Haryana said, 

"Ever since my younger brother Arvind Nath (17 years old) had his fingers injured on the power press, I have lost the will to operate the machine. However, the factory owner compels me to run it. The machine does not discriminate between young and old; it poses the same danger to anyone who operates it, regardless of age. Even if I refuse, the owner scolds and sometimes physically abuses me. He says, ‘Even after eating mine, you refuse me, Bihari bastard!’ If I also lose my hand, what will happen to my mother?" - Gaurav Nath (19 years old, manufacturing auto parts for Maruti in Manesar, Haryana, migrated from Bihar).

Under the contemporary global capitalist production regime, the dynamics of the labour process in multiple industries across the global South have posed grievous challenges for wage labourers, such as their workplace safety. The capital-labour relations and the conditions of work have undergone several changes, and informalisation, rapid contractualisation, segmented workforce, feminization, and the vast reserve army of labour are a few notable aspects of the last few decades. Most workers, including a “significant proportion of women” (Singh, 2023), are employed in hazardous work, such as operating heavy machines are hired on contractual employment and are informal, even within the formal sector. Multiple scholarly works problematize these changes for different sectors in the global South. However, these changes have not been historically traced for the automobile sector, particularly in India. This study proposes to locate the “labour question” historically and the regimes of production in the late twentieth (since the start of the auto-component manufacturing industry) and twenty-first-century automobile industry in India. In alignment, it aims to comprehensively map out the [recent] changes in the [dominant] modes of production, class formation, feminization, working-class movements, and state-capital-labour relations. Such a comprehensive historical account of the auto-sector workers is absent in the labour historiography. 

Research objectives

1. Examine critically the formation, growth [/accumulation], production regimes, and structure of the Indian auto-component industry from 1980 to the present. 

2. To historically trace the class formation, labour process, and working conditions of labour employed in the automobile industry.

3. To study the development of modes of labour control and state-private apparatus of ‘violence’ in the factories of deeper supply chains.

4. To map the auto-sector workers’ movements, resistance, and patterns of opposition in the automobile industry.    

Review of Literature

1. Informal in the [Formal] Automobile Industry 

In India, post-liberalisation, the workforce participation in the informal sector is huge, around ninety-three percent. However, in the remaining seven percent (in the formal sector), almost half of the workers are “informally” employed; therefore are “informal within the formal sector,” as noted by Sanyal and Bhattacharyya (2009, p.39). Within the global capitalist production framework, a large proportion of formal work is increasingly becoming informal (Breman, n.d). Post 90s phenomenon of informalisation along with flexible specialisation of the workforce, evades the entitlement to employment benefits, workplace safety protection, social safety measures, and other labour laws. In the neoliberal regime, the safety measures and social security schemes on employment hold only for a small proportion of workers. Parry (2013, p.45), in his work, The ‘Embourgeoisement’ of a ‘Proletarian’ Vanguard? writes, 

Organised sector employees are (at least theoretically) the beneficiaries of employment laws governing enforceable minimum wages, hours, and conditions of work, job security, safety, union recognition, and the like. Unorganised sector labour is unprotected. (Parry, 2013, p.45)

In terms of social protection and safety entitlements, the elite and “privileged labour aristocracy” (like supervisors and managers in the automobile industry) are sealed from the vast majority of workers, who are hired informally (Ahuja, 2019), even within the formal sector. Parry (2020), in Classes of Labour, Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town, followed a Weberian approach and brought out the socio-economic differences of the industrial labour employed in the Bhilai Steel Plant (BSP, hereafter). The conceptualization of “industrial labour,” according to Parry (2020), is a “sizeable and socially heterogeneous segment of the town’s population.” His principal attention was in studying the similarities and differences among “major ‘fractions’ of labour” (Parry & Ajay, 2020). In the phrase, “major ‘fraction’ of labour,” he particularly addresses the different segments in the manual workforce of BSP, which places them in different social classes and implicates them based on inequalities like gender, caste, and regional ethnicity (Parry & Ajay, 2020). However, in the Indian auto-component industry (which is a part of macro-automobile industry includes sub-contracting and are a part of global value chains), the employed workers are highly vulnerable. [Policy and advocacy-driven] Studies by Khanna (2020, 2021) and Singh (2022, 2023) have shown that different segments of workforce, should not be understood as different “classes of labour” by this definition, are equally vulnerable. For instance, the average number of fingers lost in the auto-component manufacturing industry is “equal” for permanent and non-permanent workers, around 2.5 fingers on the power press machine. Operators and helpers are “equally” vulnerable, as the latter are forced to operate machines by their employers or contractors. Therefore, these differences, although existing, appear to be evading when workers are working on a malfunctioning machine [for example] and are exposed to such bodily violence. A similar argument can be drawn from Sen’s (2011) and Sehgal’s (2012) study on resistance and violence at Maruti-Suzuki, where permanent workers were resisting alongside the non-permanent workers against contractualisation in the main branch plant. This debate requires serious (and comprehensive) academic engagement on class formation in the automobile industry.  

2. Indian automobile industry and labour in the late 20th century: A shift from Fordism to post-Fordism

In the mid-20th century, Gramsci (1971) brings out the economic component in the hegemonic rules, which involves consent and dominance. For the establishment of this hegemonic regime, the crucial functions of economics, “production,” and “consumption” were hegemonized, like the United States rising to become a dominant player globally (post-war), had to institutionalise their production mechanism and labour process, which was known as Fordism. Fordism as a labour process, was regulating and organising work, particularly during the “Golden Era” of capitalism in the western societies. This Fordist process along with the welfare state’s notion of ensuring social safety nets and social minimum of welfare, laid the foundations for this new model of capitalism in the global North, which transcended in the global South. Uchikawa (2011) and Chakraborty (2012) identifies the elements of fordist production regime in the birth of automobile industry, a decade before Maruti started its operation in 1983. However, in the 1980s and 90s, there was a growth in small and medium auto-component manufacturing enterprises, and the inhouse production following the Fordist regime was no longer the dominant mode of production (ibid, 2011, p.51). This research proposes to historically monitor such development from Fordist to a highly segmented and market-dependent Post-Fordist production regime of the automobile sector in the global South. 

The work carried out in the firms in the Fordist regime was extremely intensive and monotonous. The products produced in these firms were interchangeable, as were the workers producing these on assembly lines. As Braverman would call this, “deskilling,” one worker performing just one job, like screwing bolts, arranging products in a straight line, etc. These tasks required physical and psychic efforts, and thereby, consent was needed in these coercive practices (Gramsci, 1971). 

Workers who would not imbibe the virtues of morality laid down by their employers, as mentioned by Gramsci, and would oppose the new form of production by solely focusing on conserving their muscular and nervous energies, will have to let go of higher wages and better living standards. This clearly explains a choice of workers between the first aspect, which includes living a life with higher wages that would lead to a better living standard in the firm, getting intensively exploited every day, engaging in social reproduction, regaining labour power, and getting back to work the next day; and the second aspect that is leading a life being cognizant about one’s physical and psychic capabilities, and not getting exploited by the Fordist firm. In the latter case, such individuals will be thrown into the peripheral or unregulated sectors of the tripartite economy (Bluestone, 1970). In the former, there is a situation where the employer requires consent to dominate. Hence, Gramscian notion of Fordism being “a trade-off between higher wages and better living conditions on the one hand, and labour process demanding an unprecedented expenditure of muscular and nervous energy on the other” holds true for this former case, where hegemony plays an important role. Although Gramsci identifies these tendencies for American corporations, Fordism, has discernible manifestations across all western (Littler, 1982) and non-western societies (Amsden, 1990). In Indian automobile industry, these tendencies have not been historically mapped out. 

3. Indian automobile industry and labour of twenty-first-century

“I am lucky to have pulled out in time,” was the statement of Lokesh Kumar (21 years old), a migrant worker who lost half a centimetre of his thumb while operating the power press machine in a factory producing components for automobiles in Manesar, Haryana. The article was published by Scroll.in (December 2014), “Your car has been built on an assembly line of broken fingers,” brings out the most devastating realities of mass production in the contemporary automobile sector of neoliberal India. The account of a worker migrating from Bihar, working in one of the factories producing automobile components, revealed that in “every factory,” there are “at least ten” workers with “broken fingers,” and almost half of the workers migrating from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, employed in the supply chain “have lost their fingers.” The doctors in the ESIC [public] hospitals reported that they see almost “twenty cases of crush injuries, everyday,” which includes finger(s) lost or hand(s) lost.

“Thousands of workers continue to lose their hands/ fingers every year in the Indian auto sector just in the Delhi-Gurugram-Faridabad industrial belt” (Singh, 2022, 2023). The working conditions are highly precarious in factories in deeper supply chains producing automobile components for Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) like Maruti, Honda, Hero, etc. Although work in Indian automobile manufacturing is largely classified as ‘formal,’ many jobs in these small industries (largely MSMEs) are hired on a contractual basis. During my multiple interactions with workers on-field, I discovered that female migrant workers hired contractually as ‘helpers’ are more likely to be asked to operate a machine without formal training by their supervisors and employers. This differs from conventional literature on industrialisation, which suggests marginalisation of women from the industrial labour force, as a result of nexus between capitalism and patriarchy. My advocacy-related work (2023) principally focussed on how women is a significant majority in the auto-component manufacturing industry. The control of sexuality of women by men is an essential criteria for controlling women’s labour. However, serious academic engagement is required to better understand the labouring lives, motivations of capital and specificities related to identities of workforce employed in the automobile industry.

Uchikawa (2011) describes the structure of the auto-component manufacturing sector and the increasing “tierisation,” as shown in figure 01. After reform there was the tendency of “tierisation” of subcontracting spread due to the operation of Maruti and shift from value chain governance to rational value chain. The work Global Production Networks and Labour Process by Jha and Chakraborty is a detailed analysis of the production process at the core plant of Maruti Suzuki in the Gurgaon-Manesar belt. In the production network of Maruti Suzuki, the Manesar plant is one of the leading nodes (Jha and Chakraborty, in Nathan et al., 2017), and preeminently the tiers one, two, three, and four industries of Maruti (and other OEMs) are established in a dense network in Manesar. Khanna (2020, 2021) and Singh (2022, 2023) have identifies a similar trend of tierisation and supply chain in top ten Original Equipment Manufacturies (OEMs, hereafter) based on their economic valuation in the same region. This tierisation process requires a critical inspection with the capital movement in the industry.

Figure 01: Structure of Auto-component Industry (See below)

The academic literature on the Global Production Networks (GPNs, hereafter) and the conditions of work and well-being (Harvey, 2005) claim that the working situation has worsened with the rising global capitalism and rapid transnationalisation of the production process, or as stated by Jha and Chakraborty (in Nathan et al., 2017) in the “functionally integrated but geographically dispersed” system. Through manufactured consent and forms of control, workers were exposed to coercive practices and violence. With the evolution of regime of production, from Fordism to post-Fordism, these tendencies have not withered away, rather got worsened. To answer these questions, one requires to historically engage with the development of labour process and modes of control. 

The dynamics within the historical temporality require an inspection of “the political” instead of a mere objective chronological orientation. In particular, context, studying politics is to capture its “shifting modes and meanings” concerning the post-colonial formations in the twentieth and twenty-first-century production regimes.  

4. Politics of Production- Force and Control

The class of industrial labour requires an in-depth historical analysis because of structural challenges faced by the development of the industry itself. M.N. Roy’s challenge in understanding the class in a classical paradigm lies in the foundation of India’s incomplete transition to capitalism: 

“The normal course of industrial development was obstructed in India. [The] Industry did not grow through the successive phases of handicraft, manufacture, small factory, mechanofacture and then mass production. So the Indian worker has not been trained in industry. He lacks the proletarian tradition.”

This transition is central to understanding the working class culture; if the discourse is dependent on the belief that with mature forms of consciousness, the pre-industrial consciousness about religion and caste would get displaced. Nonetheless, several historians, particularly Marxists, had to confront the persistence of multiple identities of caste, religion, and region among the working class. Several forms of labour that were partly proletarianized appear to be existing. In classical terms, a class consciousness among the working class seemed illusionary. Decoding the realms of structures and culture was important to understanding the hindrances of a proper proletariat culture. In this context, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar’s historiography captured a more holistic view of the urban industrial working class. His concrete examination of the networks with the local leaders, credit and property dealers, and the functions of the labour market located such connections being formed based on caste, religion, and region. Studying social institutions as a site of transformation, alongside the working lives became important. 

Even in the contemporary global economy, including manufacturing activities, one of its features, as mentioned by LeBaron and Philips (2019), is the persistent use of exploitative practices of “forced labour” and different forms of “modern slavery” in the workplace. Brass (2011) mentions that labour power increasingly becomes unfree with the maturity of capitalism. In the “outsourced” labour work and within the “product supply chains” in both developing and developed worlds, unfree labour exploitation is most apparent. Among different forms of  exploitation of unfree labour, one of the central themes is the use of “coercion or compulsion” to work. The debates on unfree labour in the capitalist regime focus on “capital-wage labour relations.” The assumption that most of the contracts are ‘voluntary’ in nature and are based on the actors’ decisions is grounded in the belief that ‘freedom to choose’ exists. Kelman (1987) describes how the contracts (even in the case of employment) float “descriptively” from the domain of “choicelessness” and “freedom.” Nevertheless, his attempt to draw a clear distinction (descriptively) between freedom and choicelessness can not be placed in all the situations, and this work will focus on highlighting some of those situations. 

Braverman’s (1974) contribution to understanding the importance of capitalist control over the labour process is immense. Although capitalism has managed to transform for its survival, the dynamic nature of the production process is connected with a single thread of controlling the labour. Braverman (1974) writes about this capitalist control of the labour process and calls it a problem of management. This was later picked up by Burawoy (1978), who addresses this issue as “an uncertainty in the realisation of labour power in the form of labour” (pp. 254). 

The capital and labour relation in the capitalist social system is “antagonistic,” as highlighted by Braverman and further elaborated by Burawoy. In this contemporary time this antagonism is becoming increasingly transparent, with new bourgeoisie technology taking over, deskilling at a massive scale is apparent. However, this is just a brief example of this antagonism. The highlight of this antagonistic relation is that it is a zero-sum game, with higher capital gains, the labour, has to become more “precarious.” 

5. Resistance

India, in the last few decades, has witnessed a decline in trade unionism and industrial strikes. The persistent class struggle which never ends, appears to have changed forms. The form of labour politics has taken a more vernacular approach rather than following the classical paradigm, more sharply in the later 20th and 21st century. In addition to that, there is a weakening of trade union movements in India. Inspection through the classical paradigm on labour politics, suggests that there appears to be a loss of the historical vision on movements, universalism and the characteristic of proletarian internationalism. The vernacular form of labour politics drifted away from the language of class and raises concerns more pertaining to the local, social and occupational. The focus has centred largely around plant and unit level grievances. Sehgal’s work on understanding the critical event of violence in Maruti, brings out the struggle and resistance done by Maruti workers against increasing contractualisation (2012). Jha and Chakraborty (2017) traces similar events which unfolded in the factories of Hero and Bajaj. These studies on resistance follow a positivist approach and discuss only objective elements, which rather requires a higher subjective understanding. 

6. Labour historiography

It becomes crucial to locate empirics with the theories in history writing. J.F.C. Harrison (1984) emphasises locating such issues about labour through a historical perspective:

“transcend the perceptions of the contemporaries, suggest a pattern of interconnectedness of events and offer a tenable explanation. Most readers will find it acceptable to think about the history of the common people in terms of development and evolution [...] An alternative to some form of evolutionary theory is the idea of the people as an eternal presence.”

In addition, it is important to provide a link to the present, along with the explanation and discovery of the past. A challenge I identify with the existing historiography of labour (including that of industrialised countries) is its teleological and structural determinism, which hinders the complexities of social experiences, structures, class, and labour politics from coming out in true forms. In these terms, the complete negation of multiple identities and examining the limits and possibilities of working lives through the singular prism of class in explaining the past is a limitation of some labour historians. 

Understanding the division of labour is imperative to understanding the history of labour at all times. This division of labour embodies ideology, and requires a concrete and subjective take. Therefore, scholarship in this context also requires an inspection of gender identity in the composition of the industrial labour force. The classical labour history, in its theorization, fails to recognize the contemporary nature of the working class by putting the imagery of a free male-unionised worker, working in the modern factory at its core. Evidence from the twenty-first century suggests that the processes of informalisation and feminization in the automobile industry are expansionary. The patriarchal nature of supervisors and factory owners, along with the appropriated norms on domesticity by the working class families, led to the seclusion and oppression of women by imparting the virtues of morality. Women in factories are engaged in commodity production as well as social reproduction. The contemporary realities associated with the increased informal sector have witnessed the feminization of the workforce. This trend is to be examined along with the paradoxical crisis of male identities, which unfolded with the decline of the traditional industry which shaped the masculinity of the male working class. 

The state’s role has been pivotal in shaping and depicting working lives and should be reflected in the scholarship. Historical evidence which dates back even to colonial times. Pre-Independent India witnessed the appointment of the Royal Commission on Labour, which not just objectively overlooked the conditions of the working class in adequate depth but strengthened the capital and expropriating strategies of employers. The report established its colonial conventions while distinguishing the working class of the East from its Western counterparts by justifying the low wages of workers and lack of welfare provisions for the former on the criteria of their migratory nature and absence of collectivization. The historical accounts of labour during the colonial era, although limited, suggest that the colonial state’s interest in labour was with its concern of the labour supply. Concerns pertaining to labour in the Indian labour historiography, through a mere objective lens, could signal the evolution of a sectoral demand for labour and the challenges of labour supply. However, a good historical gist lies in subjective evolution, which includes the lived experiences, the making of the working class, and consciousness, which only a few scholars engage with. 

Methodology

To understand the discourse of the international labour market, particularly for the global South, it is crucial to locate labour, beyond the conception of a process, in the international political economy. Studies focussing on the historical analysis of class and labour in the global North require subjective reflections and reversal of location for a comprehensive understanding and comparison of the development of capitalism in the global South. Although the concerns of the working class in the global South are increasingly becoming globally reflected in the scholarship, the labour history of the Indian automobile sector requires a clear distinction in location, temporalities, and concerns. 

Jha and Kumar (2021) mention four major clusters of automotive industries in India: Delhi-Gurugram-Faridabad-Manesar, Chennai-Bengaluru-Hosur, Jamshedpur-Kolkata, and Mumbai-Pune-Nasik-Aurangabad. These industrial agglomerations aim to reduce production costs and enjoys huge economies of scale. Out of the multiple economies of scale, the most significant benefit enjoyed by capitalists is the supply of cheap and abundant labour. Around 45 percent of the automakers and ancillaries are located in the northern region of India, where the industrial belt of Delhi-Gurgaon-Faridabad-Manesar is located (Dash & Chanda, 2017), as also shown as an increase in Gross Value Added (in figure 02). Particularly, the component manufacturing industries of auto sector brands are located in the northern and western regions of India, and this provides some insights into the uneven development in the country, and within the industry (Ibid, 2021). The precarious conditions of work at the shop floor is revealed in the just-in-time production process. Most of the accidents and injuries at the workplace take place in the “deeper” supply chains in Manesar, Gurugram, and Faridabad (Singh, 2022, 2023). Long-term fieldwork and oral history is required to understand the labouring lives of the auto-component manufacturing industry. 

Figure 02: Gross Value Added from different auto-component manufacturing hubs in India (See below)

The study will be delimited to the automobile industries in India because of two principal reasons: first, in the process of capitalist transformation of the production process, the automobile industry has undergone multiple changes in the labour process. In the dynamic labour process, the working conditions have also undergone several changes. In addition to this, globally the Indian automobile sector stands as “the fourth largest” (Jha & Kumar, 2021). Capturing these changes in the labour process of the Indian automobile sector, along with the threats of occupational safety in the shop floor, is significant and unfortunately absent in previous bodies of literature under similar themes. Second, the proportion of the number of accidents in the supply chains of the automobile sector to any other sector, is gigantic. Despite the automobile industry being a significant contributor to India’s economic growth and employment, the working conditions are highly unsafe and industrial safety is compromised. 

The field work will be carried out in the Dharuhera-Delhi-Gurugram-Faridabad industrial belt in the NCR, Haryana. The rationale for choosing this area of the study is the presence of one of the largest automobile industrial clusters in India (in size and valuation, latter shown in figure 02). The plant regulating the core production of Maruti Suzuki, Hero and Honda are located in Gurugram and Dharuhera, and other auto sector brands producing automobile parts are spread across the industrial belt. Along with the core production plants, these Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) have established a dense network of supply chains in Manesar, Gurugram (Singh, 2022, 2023), as shown in figure 03. Nearly 50% of the passenger cars are produced in Haryana, itself (Khanna, 2020). Literature has shown presence of first-tier, second-tier, and third-tier component suppliers in the Gurgaon-Manesar-Dharuhera region (Jha and Chakraborty, in Nathan et al., 2017). 

Figure 03: Manesar auto-component manufacturing hub in Gurugram-Manesar-Faridabad-Dharuhera belt (See below)

The study will use primary sources gathered from long field engagement, oral history and archival accounts of labour through unions and historical records in the Delhi-Gurgaon-Faridabad region. Historical accounts (late-20th-21st Cent.) of labour and labour movements will be gathered from the archives of trade unions, labour newsletter (for eg. Gurugram Workers News and Faridabad Mazdoor Samachar) and the Indian government. The auto-sector workers employed in the deeper value chains who had met with an accident or injury in the workplace will be interviewed. The objective reality should be examined with and within the subjective framework (through oral history and narratives, alongside), and it becomes impossible to understand capitalist control in the independence of the “subjective component of work” (Burawoy, 1978). 

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