Maruti Manesar Case

Maruti Suzuki,Manesar, Case Analysis

India’s largest passenger car company Maruti Suzuki India Ltd (MSIL) has recently been facing turmoil of emotions. Being the largest and one of the most trusted automobile manufacturing companies in India, nobody ever thought that it would face a situation of such crisis, distrust, and violence.

As described the live situation by Yogita, when she interacted with the associates in Maruti’sManesar plant, it was very clear that the workers were full of distrust, anger, and dissatisfaction with the management.

This violence has given rise to many questions, like:

Ø  Why did such situation arise?

Ø  What was the root cause?

Ø  Why is there a need for union?

According to my understanding after discussion about this case with Anil sir and Yogita ma’am, I believe that no small issue can give rise to such a big act of violence. As describes by Yogita ma’am, the workers were highly dissatisfied and upset with the management not fulfilling their demands and apart from this, the basic facilities, as washrooms, water coolers etc. were also not available to the workers. In the Manesar plant was mainly headed and run by Japanese counterparts of the company and this lead to a huge gap in communication between the management and workers.

Few points that I feel were main stimulants for this situation to happen, were:

Ø  communication gap between Indian management and workers, and also among Japanese management and Indian management

Ø  Lack of distrust among the workers for the management due to lingering of their demands

Ø  Average age of the workforce is 24 yrs, they are young and too ambitious, aggressive and not that mature

The Japanese management being more focussed on productivity and result were pressurising the Indian management to increase productivity and give results. This led the workers to work overtime. They were enthusiastic to work but not comfortable in working overtime. They told their demands to Indian management but Indian management failed to communicate the working style to Japanese. This lead to a non-clear communication due to cultural gap as Japanese did not know about how Indians work so they kept on pressurizing to increase the production.

All the major manufacturing contracts were loaded on Manesarplant, which increased the pressure.

As the management failed to communicate the problems to Japanese, the problem was untouched for a long time. This led to distrust among the workers.

The basic facilities like water coolers were kept far away from the working area and the workers were given only seven and a half minute break to use washrooms and drink water, so they had to literally run across the huge halls to get a bottle of water. Indian management failed to communicate this to Japanese. This increased the dissatisfactionamong the workers who were suffering for the necessities.

The workforce was young, too aggressive, and ambitious. Most of them had this as their first job so they were lacking maturity. They compared their wages and working hours with that of Honda plant workers near Manesar. They compared their working conditions with that of Maruti’s Gurgaon plant where focus was more on peoplerather that performance. This inequity in wages worked as oil in the fire.

According to me the root cause of this unrest is lack of proper communication, distrust among the workers for the management and too much time taken to address the problem.

Union leadership is a part of the social context to which people belong, or in which they work and they play a very important role in a company. The role of Union leader includes negotiations, bargaining, policing the union, handling grievance process work and of course managing the internal life of the union.
In short, the local Union president works to make the union an active and beneficial presence in each member’s mind and so it's very important that who is the person and is he/she the right person to be there. 
Some companies prefer an external Union leader, who is a third party person, totally unbiased. The advantage being that he/she will take an unbiased and balanced decision which will be beneficial both for the companies and the employees but on the other hand the person being the outsider may not know about the real issues or can't reach to the bottom of the problem. Internal Union leader on the other hand is tend to be biased in his/her decision as they are themselves the employee of the company but the positive thing is that they know their people and their problem. So the actions taken by them may be more effective for the employees than the external union leader.

Earlier during British rule, the workers were tortured and exploited. This gave rise to the need of labour union, to end exploitation of workers at factories and other work places like mines etc. after the end of emergency in India the worker union became active. After the first wave of economic liberalization, the thinking of worker unions started to shift towards adopting a collaborative approach rather than a confrontationist approach. The unions recognized the significance of market forces and started working with the management to increase competitiveness. In 2000, again the young workforce entered the market. They were young, ambitious, and aggressive and lacked maturity. This led to rise of union as they wanted their representatives to talk to management and get them their rights. They wanted short-cut for success.

All these led to high unrest situation at Maruti Manesar plant and led to such voracious act of violence. As said by someone, “there is no good kid or bad kid there is only good parents or bad parents, similarly there is no good union or bad union, there is only good management or bad management”.

Texas Instrument is an anti-union corporation because they believe that they can take care of their workers so they do not need a union for the same. Hence, if the management is determined to take care of their workforce then there is no need for such unions to be formed.