Building a Wider
Horizon With Labour
Interview with Honda Takhupera workers on their exploitation and state repression The surprising thing about Honda plant at Takhupera, Rajasthan is that it has not been in the news lately. On February 16th, it was a scene of an attack on striking workers by police and hired bouncers. Over a 100 workers got severely injured and in all 44 were arrested and were accused of attempting to murder policemen, causing rioting by stone pelting. Last week we spoke to three of the permanent workers in Delhi. All three were between 22 and 24 years of age and told us in great detail about the hardships all the workers faced at the factory, their attempt at forming an Union for all the workers at the factory and the subsequent attack on them by the Management and the State Government. The names of the three workers are withheld for consent reasons and we will just refer to them as K, U and A. Q : Can you briefly tell us about the factory and your involvement in the production? U : This plant was formed in 2011. The total workforce was approximately 4000 workers out of which a mere 472 were permanent and the rest were contract workers hired through various agents. Including all the allowances, permanent workers salary currently stands at 22,000 and salary of contract workers has been around 10,000. Even though they did exactly the same job as us. A : Most of the permanent workers like the three of us joined in 2011 when we were directly recruited from various technical institutes. We joined as trainees and worked for 3 years. After which for 6 months we were made provisional workers and finally made permanent. We had a remarkable rise in our salaries when we became provisional workers from trainees. 20 rupees per month was increased!
