Employment Relations and Labor Conditions in the Automotive Industry's Rising Stars: China and India Compared

Global value chains (GVC) represent a large, cross-disciplinary area of research.However, employment relations (ER) and labor conditions have been downplayed in theliterature. GVCs refer to commodity chains across multiple countries that are dominatedby “lead firms,” which are often powerful transnational corporations. Some scholarscontend that the global production network (GPN) approach is better suited to the studyof ER than GVC because of its focus on the links between these commodity chains andeconomic development in different countries and regions. We will conduct a comparativecase study of the automotive industry in China and India to explore the debates onGVCs, GPNs, and their implications on ER. We focus on the operations and ER practicesof three rising stars of global automotive production: German carmaker Volkswagen(VW), Chinese firm Geely Holding Group, and Indian firm Tata Motors. This study is thefirst international comparative study of automotive industry workers in China and India.The auto industry has been crucial to the development of “modern” industrial andconsumer societies in the West and Japan, where workers are historically regarded asbenefiting from good wages and employment conditions. Using the GVC/GPNframework, our project will explore whether or not auto industry ER in China and Indiawill follow a similar path. The auto industry represents a specific type of “value chain”and is now shifting to these emerging economic giants, where global carmakers are keento take advantage of huge domestic markets and relatively low-cost production. VW, oneof the world’s leading auto firms, is one such company that has substantial investmentsin China and India. In each country, VW has had to adapt its distinctively “German” ERpractices to local conditions. By documenting and analyzing VW’s practices andcomparing them to those of Geely in China and Tata in India, we intend to contributesignificantly to the literature on value chains as well as to assess whether the GVC orthe GPN approach is more effective in incorporating and explaining the role of ER inindustrial development. We will also outline the possible direction of ER practices inChinese and Indian auto firms as the industry continues to expand. We will surveyworkers, interview managers and trade union representatives, and generate reports andarticles of interest for scholars and practitioners alike.