Rahul Roy's film “The Factory” explores the violent 2012 Maruti auto workers' strike and its aftermath.
by John Wyman (UCLA 2017)
UCLA International Institute, October 12, 2015 – “The Factory,” a documentary directed by Rahul Roy, explores the perilous state of labor relations in India through a violent uprising of Suzuki Maruti auto workers. The screening of the film was sponsored by the Center for India and South Asia on October 5.
Maruti is an auto manufacturer that was 74-percent owned by the Indian government until 2007, when Suzuki purchased full control of the company. It produces the popular Alto and Dzire cars at a factory in Manesar, northern India, where the cost of labor is low and the supply is high. The automobiles are sold widely in Central Asia.
A job with Maruti is considered a prominent, well-paying position in the region. On July 18, 2012, however, violence broke out between workers and management that resulted in the death of human resources general manager Awanish Dev and left 96 others wounded. The chaos was said to be linked to an altercation between a supervisor and a line worker, but as still-ongoing legal proceedings and the explosive nature of the workers’ reactions make clear, the reality appears more complex.
Workers struggle to form and keep a union
In 2011, workers at the factory decided to unionize. They were tired of oppressive attendance policies, unrealistic expectations of hyper-efficiency, unfair treatment that pitted contract against permanent employees, and an overall culture of disrespect for workers.
After the company attempted several times to block the workers from organizing, the latter were finally able to draft a statement of grievances and officially form a union. The company responded by requiring all employees to identify whether or not they’d joined the union. When 11 workers refused, the company suspended them. The newly-formed union called its first strike over the suspensions until the 11 were returned to work. However, the victory came at a cost: shortly after the end of the strike, the company locked the doors of the factory, refusing to allow the workers to enter unless they signed an agreement not to strike again.
Events escalated over the course of the next year, alternating between strikes and thinly disguised retaliation by Maruti. As the union gained strength, the company countered its influence by offering large severance packages to union leaders to leave the company or by suspending key workers in the union hierarchy. Workers retaliated by locking themselves into the factory and preventing production or by striking outright. At the peak of the tension, the company hired a private security company to monitor workers. Many setbacks left the workers feeling helpless and the violence of July 2012 appears to have erupted out of desperation.
As a result of the death of Awanish Dev and the damage done to the Maruti factory, the Indian government declared that over 100 workers involved in the violence would be charged with murder. The accused workers were arrested and held in prison without the possibility of bail, awaiting trial. Meanwhile, Suzuki Maruti terminated 2,500 workers at the plant.
A story of distrust and despair
Roy’s documentary takes us through the buildup of distrust between the company and its workers, while detailing the evolving plight of those imprisoned. Through Roy’s camera we follow former employees marching to Delhi to petition for the right to protest Maruti’s actions and blink in disbelief at the government’s denial of their request. We see the pain on the faces of the families of the imprisoned, whose loved ones remain in jail more than a year after the violence, and see the frustration of the defense team as they tell one petitioner after another that the chances of bail are slim.
Roy closes his film with a recent summary of successes in appealing the charges against the imprisoned auto workers. The statistics shown provide a small glimmer of hope, but come against a backdrop of the painfully slow process at which these gains were achieved. Overall, the film leaves us with a sense of the futility felt by those fighting for improved working conditions at the factory, and serves as a warning about the fragility of workers’ rights in rapidly industrializing nations such as India.