The workers were highly skilled technicians recruited two years ago from training institutes all across India to work at a factory in Gurgaon, Haryana owned by the Japanese auto company Honda. It was supposed to be a dream job but they ended up working long shifts for less-than-average pay and under humiliating conditions where they couldn�t even use the toilet when they needed to. Finally 2000 workers were told that they would not be taken on when their two-year training period was up; new trainees would be hired in their place. The workers decided to form a union. The company fired the four workers who were leading the organizing drive and suspended 50 more as troublemakers. When the workers responded with a slowdown to try to get their coworkers� jobs back, the company locked them out.
On July 25 a group of over a thousand workers marched from the factory gate to the district administrative center to ask the chief minister there to intervene. Police tried to stop the march but couldn�t hold it back. So they called in reinforcements from neighboring cities and got ready to teach the workers a lesson.
Because the factory happened to be located in an industrial hub right next to the media center of Delhi, there was a local television camera following the march. Without the images it captured of what happened next the story might never have spread beyond the local papers, and certainly not to the front page of The New York Times. Under national and international pressure, Honda agreed to take back all the workers, but only after they had signed a pledge agreeing not to raise any demands for a full year. Outrageously, 63 workers who were charged with crimes before being dumped in the hospital still have charges pending. Indian labor should demand that those cases be dropped and that compensation be paid to the families of those workers still missing, as well as to injured workers like Govind, thirty years old and the sole earner in his household, whom doctors say won�t be able to walk for months (NDTV.com, July 26).
The left in India blames the murderous cop riot in Gurgaon on �globalization,� but workers would get no better treatment from either management or the cops in a factory owned by native investors rather than foreign ones. Haryana state, which is notorious for the use of caste-based bonded labor in its countryside, has a history of particularly vicious labor repression going back to the early 1970s (Praful Bidwai, Frontline, August 13-26). In 1996 sanitation workers across the state went on strike not for any increase in wages but simply to receive them--they had often gone months without being paid. The Congress state government fired 6000 of the workers and used the anti-labor Essential Services Maintenance Act to send nearly 700--all women--to jail. page 3 (of 4) |
