The Maruti Story is about the historic struggle of the workers of the Maruti Suzuki Manesar plant, India’s largest automobile manufacturing unit, over the past two decades. It started on the shop floor, but quickly spread to the entire industrial belt and the larger society. Originally a militant struggle for union formation against the factory management, it grew to resiliently confront the capitalist class and state machinery while fighting for justice. It is also a struggle against the intensification, degradation, and informalisation of work, caused by pro-capital changes in technology and production that were fully supported by the state. This is a unique and instructive working class struggle in contemporary industrial capitalism in India, carrying generalised significance. This book is an attempt to document, contextualise, and understand this movement and the possibilities it holds for the future of Indian labour.

Below you can find a link to the e-copy, and a short introduction to the book.

Introduction To The Maruti Story

This book is, in the first instance, the product of a militant, creative, and protracted ground struggle. The insights this book hopes to offer the reader have been drawn from the collective experience of thousands of workers and their families, of labour and trade union activists, over the last two decades. Any modest success this publication may enjoy owes its provenance entirely to these untiring and heroic efforts.

The mathematician David Hilbert once said: “The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.” Said differently, any attempt to understand phenomena, whether mathematical, natural, or social, must uncover examples of it that are adequately representative, so that particular investigations acquire a generalised significance. We believe that the Maruti story offers such an example. It teaches us lessons: on the strategies that may be employed by labour in their continuing fight for better wages and dignified working conditions; the array of counterstrategies employed by capital, chief among them the segmentation of the workforce and the push towards informalisation of labour relations; and finally, the challenges of organising against the backdrop of a rapidly evolving social and political consensus in which natural solidarities are fractured, and an increasingly immiserated working class finds itself battling the Hydra of big capital, a majoritarian state, and a pliant judiciary. 

The first chapter, titled The Factory that Put India on Wheels, opens with a discussion of the history of Maruti Suzuki and the development of its supply chains. The cultivation of a base of local vendor companies, today supplying more than 90% of the auto parts required to assemble a car, is a crucial development here. The number of workers engaged in the production of Maruti Suzuki’s cars, when taking into account these vendor companies, numbers in the few lakhs. Therefore, the consequences of these struggles have a wide impact, not limited to just the three assembly plants of Maruti Suzuki. Another feature of work on the shop floor is the progressive segmentation into a growing number of arbitrarily differentiated categories of non-permanent workers; while titles, tenures, and pay vary wildly, the nature of the work is very similar to that of the shrinking pool of permanent workers. Finally, Maruti Suzuki is an exemplar and leading proponent of the lean and just-in-time production techniques. The concept of takt time linking production to consumer demand means workers on the assembly line must finish a series of complicated and strenuous manoeuvres coordinated with robots, all in an absurdly short period of time. Chaplin’s prescient satire of assembly line production in the film Modern Times is today a miserable reality for the industrial working classes in India. Along with increasing automation comes the de-skilling of the labour force, which is the basis of a greater reliance on informal employment in the auto sector. 

The longest chapter — by far — is the second, titled The Struggle That Shook The Indian Ruling Classes. It is a detailed history of the most militant and resilient workers’ movement in contemporary India, spanning almost fifteen years. This attempt at documentation is divided into five different phases, each necessitating the deployment of novel and creative strategies to adapt to the changing circumstances. It is difficult to summarise this chapter, but let us underscore that this chapter is the workhorse of the text and much of the analysis presented in later chapters hinges crucially on the experiences documented here. 

Following this is a lightly edited transcription of a wide-ranging interview conducted with one of the leaders of the ongoing struggle, titled A Conversation With A Worker Leader. In addition to describing his own experience of participating in the movement, there are also insightful comments on, among other things: political consciousness in the working classes; the reasons for the intensity of repression faced by this movement; the experiences on the shop floor and the process of de-skilling; the wider issue of unemployment in Indian society; and the successes of and challenges facing the movement in the coming days. 

The fourth chapter, titled The Significance: Some Insights and Tendencies, is our attempt to distill some lessons from this long march towards dignity against the backdrop of changing production and labour processes and capital-labour relations. The recent efforts of non-permanent workers to consolidate and articulate class power is a particularly rich source of insights. Briefly, increasing automation of the labour process and casualisation of labour has limited the ability of permanent-worker based unions to control and impact production. Despite the permanent/contract worker unity displayed in the early phase of the movement, this unity has been difficult to sustain due, among other things, to a large wage gap between the two. Non-permanent workers, whose numbers dwarf those of permanent workers, face increasing precarity, degraded working conditions, near-starvation wages, and a future that seems foreclosed upon. They are, conversely, uniquely positioned to actually impact production, and in a way that has knock-on effects globally due to the distributed nature of production networks. If these non-permanent workers are united under one banner, they are objectively placed to be a motive force in the contemporary trade union movement. Indeed, one of the reasons the non-permanent workers have drawn the ire of the state is because of their ability to appeal to lakhs of workers across the industrial belt.

Capital and State have served up a deadly cocktail, whose ingredients are: (i) a steady increase in the extent to which the labour process is automated; (ii) the lowering of the skill barrier to work these jobs; and (iii) the shift that manufacturers have made towards a predominantly contractually engaged workforce. Mixing is risky business, and leaves one prone to headaches — in this case, a large and growing unemployment problem. Over the last decade, the Indian state has primarily responded to this problem by floating a large number of skill development programs under the umbrella of National Skills Development Mission, popularly known as Skill India. These programs claim to offer on-site training, internships, and certifications. The purpose of the fifth chapter, titled Government Schemes and Corporate Scams, is to argue that these government schemes have largely failed to achieve their stated goal of upskilling workers and thereby affording them the chance to secure regular employment. Instead, we show that these schemes have been used by manufacturers as a source of low-cost and disposable labour.

Three annexures containing, among other things, a timeline of the movement and further reference material are included. Class Notes is attempting a more extensive documentation and archiving of materials related to this ongoing struggle, which should become available steadily over the next few months. This exercise in the cartography of a people’s movement is a difficult task: Jorge Luis Borges, in his On Exactitude in Science, speaks of mythical cartographers who “struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” Our efforts may not reach such dizzying heights, but we are emboldened by the earnest hope that even an imperfect archive might serve to inform this struggle in phases yet to come.