Labour in the lower tiers of Automobile Value Chains: A Case Study from Gurgaon-Manesar Industrial Cluster in India

India is the seventh-largest manufacturer of commercial vehicles in the world, and the auto sector contributes as much as 49% to India’s total manufacturing Gross Domestic Product. The sector is deeply embedded with the Global Value Chains and is characterised by the spatial dispersal of production and supply networks. While the auto factories are witnessing a consistent decline in the proportion of permanent workers to casual and temporary workers, the sector is also linked with a vast network of informal workers who work in small workshops and their homes, far away from the big factories, and supply this or that component of the final product to the factory through various subcontracting firms. With this, the neighbourhood is literally becoming an extension of the factory, thereby augmenting significant socioeconomic changes in the neighbourhood, with important implications for questions of the effectiveness of existing labour laws, ensuring trade union rights and identification of the employer-employer relationships.

This study deals with the automobile sector in the Gurgaon Manesar industrial cluster in India, with a special focus on the lower tiers of the value chain. While there have been many recent studies on the automobile industry in the country, especially with regard to factory-based labour militancy and unrest, the lower tiers of the automobile value chain remain under-explored, in striking parallel to the invisibilised workers who labour in these lower but crucial nodes of the value chain. The study brings to light how the big factories and the firms are complexly articulated with the equipment suppliers and how decent work remains a chimera in these segments of work in terms of access to social protection, occupational safety, transparency in job contracts and labour rights.