An indefinite strike by 800 workers at the Madras Rubber Factory (MRF) plant in Tiruvottiyur, located in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, was brought to an abrupt end by the MRF Employees Union (MEU) on September 30 after 19 days.

The MRF is a tyre manufacturing company with ten manufacturing plants spread across India. The MRF workers at various plants, especially in Tamil Nadu, have been striking against an utterly dictatorial management. For the past 25 years, the company has constantly victimized and harassed workers fighting for union recognition, decent pay and working conditions.

The Tiruvottiyur plant workers were making minimal demands: a halt to hiring apprentice workers at slave wages instead of employing permanent workers, and the continuation of the company’s longstanding practice of paying annual health-insurance premiums upfront on behalf of the workers. Workers essentially pay the company back through deductions from their paychecks over the space of six months. 

The company management with the support from the fiercely pro-business DMK (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) party state government was able to force the cave-in by MEU officials. The MEU is closely allied with and for all practical purposes takes its instructions from the bureaucrats of the Stalinist Centre for Indian Trade Unions (CITU). The CITU, which has a large presence in Tamil Nadu, has a long-history of isolating workers’ strikes to a single plant, without the participation of contract and trainee workers, and furthermore confines the workers to make toothless appeals to the goodwill of the anti-worker DMK government and the courts.

The CITU’s rotten strategy flows naturally from the fact it is the trade union arm of the Stalinist Communist Party of India, Marxist (CPM). The CPM is closely allied with the DMK party government and promotes the latter as a progressive regional party concerned with the welfare of the workers and the poor. The DMK which has ruled the state on and off for decades has transformed the state into a profit-making haven for multinationals. As a result, the state has become a preferred choice for global investments.

The strike commenced on September 11 after workers opposed the deliberate practice of MRF management hiring what are termed as apprentice workers under the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government’s National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme (NAPS). Management then announced a lockout of the striking workers while continuing production using contract and temporary workers.

Under NAPS, a program promoted as being designed to generate “employment for the youth,” the young workers receive what can only be described as slave-wages ranging from Rupees (Rs.) 5,000 to Rs. 9,000 (US$57 to $103) per month. The amount of stipend depends upon a worker’s educational qualification ranging from 5th to 9th grade pass to a college degree. Under NAPS, Indian government compensates the company by up to 25 percent of the monthly stipend with a ceiling of Rs. 1,500 (US$17) per month.

NAPS apprentices are paid far less than what a trainee at MRF used to get. The reported monthly stipend for a MRF trainee was Rs. 16,500 (US$187) for graduates of high school and technical schools and Rs. 18,000 (US$206) for a college graduate.

As the workers opposition to NAPS hiring grew louder, the vindictive company management announced they would no longer pay the annual health insurance premium of the workers. Its total insurance outlay for MRF is Rs. 10 million (around US$115,000), a miniscule amount of its reported after-tax profit of Rs. 18.2 billion (US$208 million) and cash reserves of Rs. 185 billion ($2.1 billion) for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2025.

In any case, workers bear the full cost of health insurance coverage as previously noted since the total annual premium of Rs. 12,000 (US$136) per worker is deducted from their paychecks over six monthly installments.

The workers understood that the company’s sudden decision to cut upfront the health insurance premium was aimed a blackmailing them into accepting the NAPS program to undercut their wages. This only increased the defiant and militant mood of the workers, compelling the MEU, in close coordination with the CITU, to call an indefinite strike.

Despite being formed initially as an independent union, MEU did not even take minimal steps to unify permanent workers with the contract and temporary workers, who normally outnumber their permanent counterparts. This greatly weakened the strike as management, after declaring the strike “illegal,” used the vastly underpaid contract and casual workers to keep production lines running.

On top of this, MRF workers are divided into separate unions, undermining workers’ efforts to carry out a companywide strike. At the MRF Arakonam plant located about 95 km west of the Tiruvottiyur plant, workers waged a bitter 125-day struggle in 2009 to win formal recogntion for their MRF United Workers Union (MUWU). Despite this, the Arakonam plant management created a stooge union in opposition to the MUWU.

After the strike at MRF Tiruvottiyur erupted, the Madras High Court, which has become a legal enforcer of management diktat during strikes in Tamil Nadu, ordered the workers not to hold their protests near the factory gate. The Stalinist CITU bureaucracy then instructed MEU officials to shift the venue of the protests to the CITU office in the nearby neighbourhood of Wimco Nagar.

In his address to striking workers, the CITU state president A. Soundararajan appealed to the DMK-led state government to “intervene immediately, adding that “The Labour minister and officials must call the management to the table.” He then asked rhetorically: “Why this silence when management locks out workers?” 

Indeed, the DMK state government did act! On September 30, MEU leaders were called by the state Additional Labour Commissioner for talks with the plant production and HR managers to impose a “settlement” entirely in favour of the company.

The commissioner ordered that “both workers and management should maintain the status quo as it prevailed on September 9. Workers should work amicably and should not engage in strike actions. The management should not engage in any victimisation actions. Finally, both sides should work amicably to find a settlement.”

“I get Rs. 60,000 (US$686) gross pay and after deductions, I receive Rs. 40,000 (US$457)” a month, Ariya, a striking permanent employee with 32 years at MRF told the World Socialist Web Site. “My wife takes care of home and looks after our two girls. They have completed their higher studies and now are working in IT companies.”

Ariya was furious about the “return to work” order from the MEU. “It is nothing but zero, zero and zero. The vast majority of workers are not happy about what union leaders have agreed to maintain the status quo. Union leaders were shaken by militant mood of the workers and capitulated to the treacherous terms imposed on them by the union leaders and JCL [Joint Commissioner of Labour].”

The MRF Tiruvottiyur plant currently employs 820 workers, including 61 trainees, Ariya said, and another 300-400 are contract workers.

It is a wide belief among workers that when permanent workers retire, their place will be filled by NAPS apprentices. “We are opposed to it, because NAPS workers don’t receive proper training,” Ariya said. “They could be badly injured when they engage in production.”

For workers at the Tiruvottiyur and at other MRF plants, the key question facing them is how to take the struggle forward. This is only possible if workers forge new instruments of struggle, rank-and-file committees that they control themselves, to unite workers at all MRF plants. These committees will provide the means for MRF workers to link up with the tens of thousands industrial workers in Tamil Nadu who are facing the same unrelenting attacks by management, the DMK government, the courts, and their accomplices in the union bureaucracy.