Of Work Riots, Political Prisoners, and Workers Refusing to Leave the Factory—Translated Through the Pages of Faridabad Workers News (2005–2015)

Since October 27, 2005 workers have walked the streets with placards. When we stand on paths that lead to factories at the start of the morning shift, many stop.

We exchange stories, ideas, and glances; the restlessness of management rises.1

The labyrinthine paper trails of the cloth mill where I, Ram Sagar, worked for thirty years and, like thousands of others, thought myself to have been a worker, have revealed themselves as belonging to seventeen different companies. This started in 1992 when, a year after having been dismissed, I filed a case with the labor court. I won in 1999, but the company didn’t comply with the court’s order. In 2001, the labor commissioner issued a summons against the chairman-managing director. It’s 2005 now, and sixteen summonses and a nonbailable arrest warrants haven’t managed to produce a soul in court. We have learned that factories belong to no one; no one owns them; names keep multiplying in documents.

The masthead of Faridabad Workers News as published in issue no. 325.

Ownership is only a masquerade; owners do not exist.2

There are 2,500 of us in our factory, which produces auto parts. Hired through four contractors, we are all of a similar age. We make up 90 percent of the factory’s workforce, and get along very well with one another. In January 2007, we gathered at the gate and refused to enter the factory. Production stopped for two days. The management singled out those amongst us who they decided had incited the strike, and dismissed them. We stopped work again in August.

It isn’t a question of a few instigating many.3

On Friday, December 17, 2010, workers—permanent, casual, those hired through contractors—stopped the production line in a two-wheeler production factory. The scooter line, motorcycle line, welding shop, and machine shop came to a standstill. Workers from B-shift joined A-shift workers. 1,800 permanent workers and 6,500 workers hired through contractors gathered inside the factory. While many workers left in company buses that afternoon, many stayed inside the factory through the night. Around midnight, the company declared the next day a holiday. Buses didn’t arrive the next morning with those who had left for the night, and 150 to 200 policemen entered the factory. A few months later, on April 8, 2011, workers on the night shift in a health care–product factory stopped work. When morning shift workers weren’t allowed to enter the factory, the 300 to 350 workers who were inside refused to come out. Workers outside the factory gates passed them food over the walls. On June 4, 2011, at shift change, workers on A-shift didn’t leave, and workers on B-shift entered the factory but didn’t begin work. They phoned C-shift workers. Permanent workers, trainees, apprentices, and workers hired through contractors—around three thousand workers—gathered inside the factory. Ten days passed. The company hemmed in the factory by raising miles and miles of tarpaulin sheets around it.

The front page of issue 199 of Faridabad Workers News, January 2005.

Workers refused to leave the factory.4

A few months later, on October 7, 2011, at 4 p.m., workers from the A- and B-shifts in this same factory gathered inside the factory yet again. Workers at around ten affiliate factories that make car engines, motorcycles, and other automotive parts also stopped work and refused to leave the factories. While work resumed the next day in some of these factories, workers in four factories did not resume production and stayed inside the factories. Kitchens were set up, since companies had shut down the canteens. There was no work tension. No agonizing about the hour of entry or exit. No stress over catching a ride on a bus. No fretting about what to cook. No sweating over whether dinner had to be served at 7 or at 9 p.m. No anguishing over what day or date it was. October 7­–14 was the best time. We talked a lot with each other about things that were personal. We became closer to each other during those seven days than we’d ever been.

It was as if we were seeing each other for the first time.5

Workers at a die-casting factory didn’t turn up for work on October 16, 2011, a Sunday. The next day they came to the factory, stayed inside the entire day and night, and didn’t work. On October 21, workers at a footwear company stopped work at midday. On October 24, 250 workers in the rotary, dyeing, sampling, and finishing departments of a dying and printing factory stopped work and gathered at the gate.

The front page of issue 325 of Faridabad Workers News, July 2015.

The riddle of “what is it that workers want” keeps deepening.6

It was a clear day in February 2012. “Do you know,” the official from the fire department asked, holding up the fire extinguisher, “what gas is inside this?” When no one responded, the officer answered his own question, “CO2 gas. This gas can extinguish any fire, whether caused by electricity, or an accelerant like petrol or thinner. This gas can act on anything that can catch fire, be it rubber or cloth. If you hear the hooter, stop work and run towards an open space immediately.” The next day the hooter, which usually sounds at the start and end of a shift, or at lunch break, sounded at an odd hour—at 10 a.m. Everyone stopped work and rushed out of the factory. HR called security, and security assured them there was no fire. Workers stood where they were, whispering and chatting. They stopped work again at midday the next day, and again at 10 a.m. the day after that.

Everything, everywhere is flammable, and anything can be a spark.7

Over the years, thousands of workers from industrial areas in and around Delhi have been arrested and are today’s political prisoners. On July 18, 2012, after their actions in June and October of the previous year, workers in the automobile factory attacked factory buildings and managers. The government responded by stationing six hundred commandos in the industrial town. The number of political prisoners rose: 147 workers were arrested without bail and, further, arrest warrants were issued for sixty-five workers. The company fired 546 of its permanent workers and the 2,500 workers it had hired through contractors. And, as if conceding finally that the situation wasn’t one of “few and many,” in a letter that management sent each permanent worker they fired, they wrote, addressing each one by name: “We can no longer employ you because you have acted both as instigator and participant.” In the words of a worker:

“It would have been quite something if what workers did in one factory on July 18 had happened across the entire industrial town.”8

It’s July 2012 and while the management of our factory, which makes medical and surgical equipment, has been missing for a few months, there are other factories where the management may as well be missing. There’s a metal factory where workers don’t argue anymore: they just stretch the ten-minute tea breaks that the company gives them at 10:30 a.m., 3:30 p.m., and 6:30 p.m. to half an hour each. Supervisors and managers hover around, but they keep their distance. On November 9, four hundred men and four hundred women workers in a footwear factory encircled the managing director at the factory gate. Two hundred police personnel looked on, and finally retrieved him by using batons and water canons at 9 p.m.

If there ever was a consensus, it has been broken. This isn’t the time to make petitions; it’s the time to make proposals.9

On February 21, 2013 at 10 a.m., in an industrial area thick with garment-manufacturing units and printing presses, a handful of workers stepped out from their factory and started shouting slogans. This drew out around fifty workers from surrounding factories. Within moments, another 1,200 joined them. By 10:30 a.m., the frightened managers of twenty-four factories declared the end of the workday. Within the next half-hour, as more and more factories across the industrial area shut down one after the other, workers gathered outside factory gates. Across the entire industrial area, thousands pelted stones at factory buildings and broke car windshields and placed boulders on their seats. In the words of a worker:

“Who’s to say what spurred the women on more than it did the men, or where the laughter on every face that day came from.”10

On April 16, 2013 at 10 a.m., tailors working on the second floor of a garment factory stopped work, came down, turned the guards out and locked the main door of the factory from inside. Then they switched the power supply off, shutting down work on all four floors. In August, when banks sealed one of the production units of a footwear company, the chairman and the director of the company asked the hundred workers they had shifted out of that production unit to help them break the lock and resume work there. The workers refused. Starting on August 30, guards employed by a security company started a sit-in at the company headquarters, as well as outside their work sites—the Australian embassy, the offices of UNDP, UNICEF, and the World Bank. At 8 a.m. on September 22, workers in a factory that produces plastic injection molding components gathered outside the factory. Workers from two other automotive-parts factories supported them. They resumed work at 1 p.m. Four days later they stopped work again and gathered outside the factory. On the morning of January 23, 2014, groups of workers went from one factory to another. Workers poured out of factories. They even went into the directors’ office and asked them to come out. Factory after factory closed. Workers went back into the factories when police arrived. When the police left, they came out again.

A simple laugh at the correct moment can produce a crack in the strongest of edifices.11

In 2014, friends came with lots of stories. Around the end of January, a charge sheet from an auto factory in Pune, Maharashtra circulated. In it, the management had charged its workers: “You were laughing, singing, dancing on the production line, changing your position on the line at your own will, stopping the production line on purpose, and you refused to listen to supervisors. This is a violation of the terms of agreement between the company and the union.” In March, another trend was being praised: workers in garment factories across Bangladesh stopped work suddenly and routinely. Production stopped for many days. There were no leaders; there was no one to negotiate and come to an agreement with. In May, we gathered over tea to listen to a friend who had returned after three years from a construction site in Saudi Arabia. “There are constant tussles at the construction site,” he said. Skirmishes are routine—between workers and foremen, as well as between workers and engineers and managers. Workers, whether we are from Bhagalpur or Gorakhpur, Delhi or Karachi, Lahore or Ludhiana, Dhaka or Pokhra, live together, and we talk to each other all the time in the dormitories—about the lateness of wages, minutes snatched away from a break, the arrogance of an engineer, the shortcomings of the director, an argument following an increase in work speed, an accident, a warning letter issued to a coworker, nonpayment of overtime, or the cooling in the dorm. The tipping point is uncertain, unknown, but always near. Things can spiral out of control any moment. One day, we suddenly decided we wouldn’t leave the dorm and go to work. The vehicles that came to pick us up went back empty. Managers arrived a few hours later and asked us to return to work. No one agreed; no one went. One day turned into ten. On the eleventh day, police arrived and fired shots in the air. No one left the dorm. The same thing happened the next day, and the next. Such refusals happen around six to eight times a year. Sometimes for a few days, and sometimes for an entire month, workers refuse to leave the dormitories.

With every story, trends multiply. Factory rebels on the move are joined by those who do not leave the factory, and then by shop-floor revelers, and soon by those who do not leave their dormitories to go to work.12

On November 4, 2014, all of us workers in an electronics factory who had been hired through contractors gathered outside the factory at 6 a.m. Police, security guards, contractors, and managers blocked our path to the factory. We set up a tent 150 meters away from the factory gate, and we were shown a court order forbidding us from going any closer. Upon being approached by leaders of political groups with different dispositions, we gave them the stage, but with this caveat: “We’ll listen to everyone, but we’ll do what we want.” One leader stood at the microphone and invited us to join his political group. “It’s nice of you to have come,” we said, “but we have seen, and understood well, what you did in another factory. Goodbye.” Another leader spoke at great length about the need to change the government. “We respect your age,” we said, “but not this talk about deferring change to the future.” When groups objected to a speaker who came on stage next, we countered, “This stage is ours. We will decide who can, or won’t, speak.” As the protest stretched on and continued into March 2015, many among us joined different factories. We have active linkages between us. And we have decided, wherever we work, we’ll keep discussions open between us and won’t let any middlemen come into the relations we engender.

Whether alone, or in a cluster, or as a crowd, we become nodes that both relay and occasion the new in entire industrial zones.13