Workers Solidarity Center, Gurgaon-Bawal
The struggle of 3000 Honda Motorcycles and Scooters India (HMSI) workers of Tapukara plant in Alwar, situated at the Haryana-Rajasthan border, in the face of brutal repression from the management-police-administration side, has emerged as an important and intense workers' struggle. As the workers saw commonality, forged unity across internal segmentation, initiated the process of Union formation on 6 August 2015, and submitted a collective Charter of Demands on 14 December 2015, they faced attacks in various forms. These included a criminal conspiracy by the Management to suppress the workers' collective and Union-making process using deceitful legal – and manifestly illegal – means via the Labour Department and the Court, transfer-suspension-termination of Union leaders, and retrenchment of around 800 active contract workers.
On 16th February, 2016 workers across categories of permanent-casual-trainee-contract came together to stop work and do a sit-in strike inside the factory. The immediate reason was an Executive Engineer physically attacking a contract worker in the Paint Shop, forcing the physically unwell worker to work overtime for the fourth consecutive day. Long standing demands of reinstatement of terminated workers and ceasing management attacks on Union formation were stated. The same evening, instead of any negotiation, the workers' leadership was immediately abducted and at the behest of the management, the assembled workers were brutally lathi-charged and repressed by Joint Police forces of Rajasthan and Haryana along with illegal bouncers.
This report has been prepared with inputs from interactions during the struggle and legal processes with HMSI's and other workers in the industries mentioned in the expanding industrial belt of the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC), as well as taking into consideration the management's responses as of 5th March, 2016.
