"Honda Workers’ Protest Enters 16th Day, Over 3,000 Camp Outside Manesar Plant", 20 November 2019

...the scale and duration of this agitation is unprecedented in recent times. It is being led by contract employees, one of the most vulnerable category of workers, and is being supported by unions from various other factories in the vicinity...

...Many of the workers now sent on ‘indefinite leave’ have been working at the plant for a decade or more but still haven’t been made permanent. Their contractors change every year and they are made to re-join through a different contractor and different employee IDs...Their salaries are also not revised regularly.

Workers are also suspicious of the company’s assurances that workers who are being let go would be hired again after three months. “Many of our colleagues were sent on leave in December 2018 as well. They were told that the company was giving them a short and temporary break and they would be rehired. Many of those workers had to stay unemployed for months as the company didn’t call them back,” Gautam Kumar, a migrant worker...told The Wire...

...“They rounded up around 1000 of us whose clearance and renewal were due till March and asked us to get our clearance and go on leave for three months, and that we would be rehired...We have already seen our colleagues who were promised the same but were never called back. There’s a fear in the minds of the workers that this is a ploy to get rid of us permanently and hire new workers at much lower wages,” Somnath, who has been working at HMSI since 2011, told The Wire.

Workers are also agitated with the fact that they are the first to face the brunt of adverse circumstances while people in the management remain unaffected irrespective of the slowdown...