After a month?s standoff between the workers at Maruti Suzuki?s Manesar facility and the management, the company said on Saturday that a common ground has been reached and production would finally resume from Monday.
The stir ended after over 1,000 protesting workers agreed to sign the ?good conduct bond? and a commitment that production would not be disrupted in the future. The compromise on part of the workers ended one of the worst labour troubles for the country?s largest carmaker, which cost it an estimated production loss of close to R1,000 crore. ?Yes. The strike has ended. The workers have agreed to sign the good conduct bond,? a company spokesperson said.
Sources said the workers had agreed to sign the bond over a fortnight back, however, they wanted 62 workers the company had suspended and dismissed since the stir started on August 29 to be immediately taken back. But this demand was unacceptable to Maruti Suzuki. The company said it would revoke the suspension of 18 trainee engineers but refused to take back 44 dismissed workers immediately. As per the understanding reached on Saturday morning, the workers had to reconcile as the company agreed to take back 44 regular employees after they serve a suspension period.
Industry experts who have been following the unfolding saga at Manesar said that the workers had been steadily losing their bargaining power. An auto analyst with a global consultancy firm, who did not wish to be identified, said that the Manesar labour strike in June this year had prepared the company to deal with such problems.
?It seems that this time round Maruti was much better prepared. Within a week the company started recruiting temporary manpower from ITIs and apart from that made a prompt decision to shift production of Swift out of Manesar,? he said. He added that when workers of three more Suzuki factories joined the strike last month, it threatened to snowball into a major crisis. ?However once the workers of Suzuki Powetrain India suspended their strike, it weakened the position of the Manesar workers,? he said.
The two sides have been negotiating to reach a common ground for over three weeks. After a series of failed talks on Saturday, finally a resolution was reached. Top officials of the Haryana government were also present at the time the talks were successfully concluded. These included labour and employment minister Shiv Charan Lal Sharma, deputy labour commissioner J P Mann, assistant labour commissioner Nitin Yadav and Gurgaon district commissioner PC Meena. The company said that the workers would not be paid for the last 30 days.
The labour stir broke out when Maruti Suzuki found that a section of its 2,500 workers at Manesar were purposely sabotaging the finishing of vehicles apart from going very slow on production. After many of the company?s vehicles failed the quality test, Maruti asked its entire workforce to sign a bond before entering the factory premises to resume production. This is the second time the company has imposed a bond. In 2001, after over a month?s labour strike, the company had asked its workers to sign a similar good conduct bond.
Over the last one month, the company recruited over 1,000 temporary workers from various ITIs.
Last month owing to the long waiting period for its hatchback Swift, the company was forced to shift a chunk of its production to Gurgaon. The models that has suffered a loss in production include SX4, A Star and Ritz.