The Indian experience with industrial strikes can be summed up in two words?violent and unproductive. The two key causes of Indian labour problems have been the misplaced reluctance of governments to allow flexibility in hiring and the consequent enthusiasm among employers to use contract labour to get around the problem. All the big strikes of recent years spring from this policy muddle. The 13-day-long strike at Maruti Suzuki was predicated on the same issue, though the overlaying drama was the right of the workers at Manesar to have a separate union. With this sort of history, the key aspect of the Maruti strike was the pragmatism displayed by both labour leaders and management. This demonstrates an important difference from earlier strikes. We seem to have progressed quite a bit from the violent Honda strike in Gurgaon in 2006 to a still belligerent one at Hyundai Motors in Chennai to the peaceful termination of the dispute at Manesar. This also mirrors the trend of industrial relations in India. While the number of strikes in the country dropped from 227 to 79 in the last six years up to 2010, the number of lockouts too fell from 229 to just 20, with the total number of mandays lost from strikes and industrial disputes dropping from 297 lakh to 17 lakh over the period. These trends also coincide with changes in the pattern of unionisation, where the focus has shifted from an industry or statewide approach to independent unions operating at the enterprise level, and being more concerned with employee issues rather than being simple surrogates of political parties.
At Manesar, neither labour leaders nor the management approached the strike as an either-or strategy, a sharp differentiator from the previous dispute a decade ago when work almost came to a halt over a three-month strike. This time, the Maruti management agreed to reinstate the terminated workers and reduced the penalty, even as it held out against allowing a new union at the Manesar plant. This is a workable template.