Transformational IR_
Maruti Manesar Case_ Shruti Mishra
Maruti Suzuki’s Manesar plant has
been under lockout since July 18 when a deadly riot involving the workers and
management left a senior HR manager dead and many others severely injured. On
August 16 2012, India’s largest car-maker company announced its decision to
resume production at the plant from next week after throwing 500 workers out of
job due to their involvement in the July 18 violence at the plant on the basis
of police charge-sheet against them. The major cause for discontent and
violence at Manesar were the concerns of contractual workers.
To begin with Manesar plant was
built with the aim of achieving cost effectiveness and increased production and
was under the control of Japanese management. The Japanese used to take close control
over the day to day activities held at Manesar plant. Moreover, at Manesar the
age difference between the supervisors and workers was very less as many
diploma holders with only three to four years of experience were hired to cut
the costs. Due to this workers had less respect for their supervisors and
preferred to treat them as equal. It was evident that the Japanese management
only focussed on meeting the growing demand of the market rather than building
a shared culture. The reason was that Japanese are patriots and they prefer
working for their nation overtime and take pride at it.
A large part of the worker’s
population was contract workers and they always felt that they were paid less
and are treated differently as the rest rooms and the work areas were not up to
the mark and the family related issues were ignored. Subsequently, there was a lot of focus of Japanese
management was on meeting targets due to high demand of hot selling models of
the cars which resulted in building a lot of pressure on the workers. Lack of
internal equity between the Gurgaon and Manesar plants which included low
incentive as percentage of total salary of workers at Manesar than in Gurgaon ignited
the fire of outrage between the workers. Moreover, the mediclaim policies were not
employee friendly as only specific hospitals and clinics covered under the scheme
and it did not include dependent parents which stayed with the employee.
There was communication gap
between the Japanese management and the workers as the associates were not able
to surface the issues. The grievance redressal mechanism for Associates was not
uniform as MUKU union did not have regular communication and did not address
the issues faced by Associates. The associates did not have a clear
understanding of Union’s functions and there was an influence of outside forces
on associates due to lack of internal support. The Japanese management did not
paid heed to the needs and issues that supervisors and workers faced and even
preferred delaying elections of unions for months. This feeling of disconnect between
Japanese management and lack of internal equity between workers at Manesar
plant and Gurgaon plant led to the unrest between the workers and management.
Thus this case illustrated the
need to have employee friendly policies, internal equity and regular
communication between the management and employees. Moreover, it is important
for the management to realize the cross cultural issues that exists between the
Japanese and the Indian workers.
