Authors: Robin Jeffrey
The automobile itself became a major business, spawning dealerships, service stations, [and] repair shops
.
Claude S. Fischer,
America Calling
When the Supreme
Court of India revoked
licences for 2G Radio Frequency spectrum awarded in a controversial allocation in 2008, one of the affected companies instantly sought sympathy by appealing to ‘the authorities … to ensure that our … 17,500 workforce and 22,000 partners are not unjustly affected’.
1
Mobile phones created jobs in manufacturing, distribution, maintenance and repair. In 2007, 2.5 million people were estimated to be employed in the ‘telecom services sector’, and this figure did not include the most innovative mobile mechanics of all—those doing repairs and second-hand sales in small shops in every town in the country.
2
This cascade of new occupations, and the training and skills that went with it, resembled to some extent the expansion of the automobile industry in industrial economies after the First World War. In the US, the popularity of the automobile created ‘a system of dealers who not only offered sales outlets … but also service facilities’. A ‘used car market blossomed’ from the 1920s.
3
In every hamlet, petrol (gas) pumps appeared, and people were employed to pump gas and provide ‘service’. ‘Service stations’ became a feature of American life, as did the mechanics who were part of them. As late as 2012, when the American car industry was thought to be in alarming decline, it was estimated to employ 3.5 million people, 800,000 in repairs and maintenance.
4
If cars in the US bred like rabbits, mobile phones in India gushed like water from a burst dam—rapidly and into every nook and corner. A dam
had
burst: the dam that limited what people in villages, and even towns and cities, were able to know and how they were able to communicate. Those barriers, as we have seen, were structural (poor roads, limited radio and television, relatively few newspapers) and ideological (some people were
entitled
to know more than others and some people were positively forbidden from knowing some things). The popularity of the mobile phone generated a need for workers who could make, repair and sell them. The two or three million people estimated to be involved in provision of telecommunications were simply those in formal occupations identifiable for government statistical purposes. They included thousands of (mostly) young rural women who found jobs in the manufacturing of phones. But many more people were involved in the informal repair and resale industries that flourished in every town. They were the ‘mechanics of the mobile’.
And another kind of ‘mechanics’ was also at work: the process by which people learned about their phones—how to buy, sell, fix and use. As we saw in
Chapter 3
, great corporations and small shopkeepers selling Fast Moving Consumer Goods became part of the education system for cell phones. But many people found neighbourhood mobile mechanics more to their taste and budget.
People
FACTORY WORKERS
At Sriperumbudur where Rajiv Gandhi was
assassinated, Nokia had its largest factory in the world in 2010. About 12,000 people were employed on a vast, carefully controlled floor, located in a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) of 85 hectares. The factory ran 24 hours a day with three eight-hour shifts six days a week. Most of the employees were young women, and the story told by Nokia celebrated the effects of mobile-phone manufacture on society and economics in Tamil Nadu.
‘Seventy per cent of our employees are women’, said Sabyasachi Patra, head of government relations for Nokia in the Chennai area in 2010. ‘The reason is when we take these people, we do [a] dexterity test and hand-eye coordination test. It’s the woman who gets through’.
5
To qualify to take the test, applicants had to have twelve years of schooling and passed final exams with a mark of at least 60 per cent. ‘90 per cent of our employees are from economically poor background. Even one-meal-a-day kind of families. You’d be surprised at how poor some of them are’. On a starting wage of about Rs 5,000 (US $100) a month, factory work brought training, free transportation, meals and medical care. For some, it could also mean the possibility of further study. ‘After saving for one and a half years or so, they are able to save Rs 50,000 or 60,000, something like that. They can go for higher studies, and some of them are’, Patra continued. In some cases, Nokia paid the costs in return for bonding the employee to the company for two or three years after completion.
The workers were not, according to the company account, a classic urban proletariat. They were recruited largely from villages up to 60 kilometres west of Sriperumbudur in rural Tamil Nadu, not from the great city of Chennai to the east. They were mostly young women, were relatively well educated and were living with their families. ‘We spend a huge amount of money’, Patra said, to pick up and deliver people from their villages over such a wide area. Most of the women were aged between 18 and 22, and the factory had a fairly steady turnover because once married, ‘families don’t like it if the wife or daughter-in-law goes to the factory working night’.
Nevertheless, the company story emphasised the social change that efficient, dignified factory employment brought about. Most of the workers were in ‘first-time employment’, Patra said. On one occasion, a group of young workers had been called to meet a gathering of foreign guests. One young woman said, ‘Yes, money is important, but it’s just not money’. What else was it?
It’s very important for us that I get Rs 5,000. My father gets Rs 2,000 a month; I get Rs 5,000 a month. What I like is, I now go back home and tell my brother what to study, tell my father what to do, tell my neighbours what to do.
Patra added his
conclusion: ‘So this girl, in her locality, is seen as a leader’.
There was, however, a different view of life in a mobile-phone factory.
Phony Equality
, a report on workers’ conditions in the four factories in the Nokia SEZ at Sriperumbudur, was published in 2011. Conducted by three NGOs, two from Europe and one from India, the report was based on interviews with a hundred workers and visits to the factories by researchers from two of the NGOs.
6
Contrary to the Nokia contention, the report asserted that ‘most of the workers lived in rented rooms’, not at home in their villages. ‘The vast majority … were migrants … and … had to live in temporary accommodation’.
7
Presenting the condition of workers as underpaid and precarious, the report carried pictures of ‘a room and kitchen shared by twenty-five working women for Nokia and Foxconn’.
8
It confirmed the Nokia assertion that ‘the mobile phone manufacturing workforce is the first generation of industrial workers in this region with parents who have been agricultural labourers throughout their lives’ and held that this made the workers especially vulnerable to exploitation.
9
‘For poor, rural youth, a factory job with an identity card and uniform offers a degree of social status’.
10
Most of the workers were trainees or on contracts, hired by employment agents and not directly by Nokia or by the other three companies operating in the SEZ.
11
Labour laws were ‘routinely flouted’,
12
and contracts and trainee systems were said to ‘trap workers in an unfair and exploitative position’.
13
‘Most of the surveyed workers’ believed that their experience in the mobile-phone industry was “a waste”’ and could not see how it would advance their ‘career prospects’.
14
The companies had accepted some unionisation after strikes in 2009 and 2010.
15
Allies of the protesting workers put a video of demonstrations on YouTube—shot on workers’ mobile phones.
16
The Nokia factory, however
strained and contentious its labour relations, could turn out 300,000 phones a day. Elsewhere in India, the old government telecom factories in Bangalore represented a different model of production and labour relations. The Bangalore factory of Indian Telecom Industries (ITI) was the ‘first state-run enterprise’ in independent India, started in 1948. The travails of ITI became the subject of a 680-page book, among whose many details was the fact that in ten years, the factories had manufactured 9 million phones, a total that the Nokia factory could have equalled in a month.
17
The government factories suffered from overstaffing, poor discipline, outdated products and promotion solely by seniority. ‘A role reversal … occurred where it was in the supervisor’s self-interest to maintain cordial relations with his subordinates … Misdemeanours … generally went unreported …’.
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The private-enterprise mobile-phone industry of the twenty-first century forced some changes in the government factories.
The ITI factory located in the small town of Raebareli in north India provided an illustration. Originally established in 1973 for manufacturing landline equipment and infrastructure, the ITI factory in Raebareli began to change its work practices. In 2005, it began to try to cater for the demands of the thriving mobile phone industry and particularly for the state-owned telecommunication company, BSNL. The factory, which employed more than 3,700 people in 2011, had been primarily making and installing mobile phone equipment for transmission towers.
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From 2005 it produced and assembled more than 2,000 towers a year for urban and rural markets. Its hi-tech electronics division, trained by the French telecom giant Alcatel, staffed the sophisticated machinery for assembling Base Trans-Receiver Station (BTS) equipment. The factory had incorporated some of the rituals of modern factory practice into its daily routine, with 24-hour shifts, and the token requirements to use health and safety equipment, which the staff still managed to ignore. The Raebareli factory remained almost exclusively staffed by middle-aged men, most of whom sat gazing at the machines, waiting for their shifts to end.
The contrast between the government factories of ITI and the Nokia factory of the Special Economic Zone highlighted the different experience that cell phone manufacturing meant for its workers. In the ITI factories, the workers were largely men of mature years, highly unionised and treating the job as lifetime employment, regardless of whether production targets were met. In the Nokia and associated factories, workers were mostly young women, often with little job security, tenuous links to trade unions and a keen awareness of the need to keep the production line moving.
There are unattractive features
of both pictures: sloth and slovenliness in one; exploitation in the other. But the young rural women exposed to factory life illustrated another break with the past that the mobile phone provoked. Factory conditions may have been harsh, but they threw people together, just as Marx and Engels had seen in Victorian England. Out of such random but large-scale shoulder-rubbing, new consciousness would emerge, though not necessarily the militant class consciousness that Marxists predicted. The mobile phone was tiny. Unlike the factories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, manufacturing mobile phones required dexterity, not physical strength. Women did it better than men, and young women, the big companies concluded, were easier to control than men. In leading thousands of young women into wage-earning, strictly disciplined, card-carrying factory life, the mobile phone industry may have taken on the role of the munitions factories of the World Wars—bringing women into the workforce in ways that would change social practices. Though the numbers were small relative to the population of India (tens of thousands, not tens of millions), their employment was part of a cascade of different and often new jobs that accompanied mobile telephony.
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TOWER WALAS
Tower building and maintenance was another way that the cellphone industry infiltrated the lives of large numbers of people, many previously little affected by the perils and incentives of modern states and capitalism. In 2012, 400,000 mobile phone towers were estimated to dot India, each one of them requiring landlords to offer them space, managers, lawyers and clerks to tie up the deals with the landlords, engineers and technicians to care for the computers and air conditioning equipment, delivery people to transport the large quantities of diesel fuel that powered the back-up motors, skilled workers to maintain the towers against wind and corrosion and security people to guard against theft and vandalism.
Mobile phone towers were
an industry in themselves, and companies were set up simply to erect and maintain towers. The largest was Indus Towers which operated 110,000 towers in 2012.
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Established in 2007, it was a consortium of three of the largest service providers—Airtel, Vodafone and Idea, which together claimed more than 45 per cent of Indian mobile phone users. Indus Towers rented space on its structures to its founding companies—and any other company that wanted to pay the rent—and claimed 200,000 tenancies on its sites in 2012.
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The structure of the company, and the contracts that bound it together and under which it rented out its facilities, belonged to corporate India, far away in the towers of Mumbai and Delhi. But the transactions that put towers into paddy fields and onto people’s rooftops took the industry into tens of thousands of homes and villages.