Since the 1980s macro economic changes world over have triggered economic restructuring and decentralization of production process both geographically and within firms. This has progressively altered the production process, transformed the firms’ functions and modes of operation as well as their employment patterns and capital labour relations.
Changes both at macro and micro level have effectively de-stabilized and restructured the labour market structures (Lourdes Beneria, 2001). These changes are being accompanied with the intense competition at global level and exerting downward pressure on prices of manufacturing goods in the international market (UNCTAD, 2005). Subsequently this is altering the organization of production with the intention to reduce the cost of production. Profound changes in the organization of production functions is leading to the emergence of new global division of labour at macro level and new forms of informal and non-permanent, temporary employment at firm level. The social contract that existed between the worker and employer is fast eroding, resulting in job insecurity, low level of earnings, unstable working conditions and poor access to social security benefits. These trends are also visible in the Indian auto component industry.
With the advent of economic reforms in 1991 and liberalization of automotive vehicle sector in 1993, India has been witnessing major growth in the automobile industry. Most of the global auto majors have established their production units, which led to an exploding growth in auto vehicle sector and subsequently in the auto component sectors. Indian auto component producers are now supplying to major original equipment manufacturers in India and world over. Indian auto component industry consists of 500 firms in the organized sector and more than 10000 firms in small-unorganized sector and employs 2,50,000 persons (GOI 2006).
The competitive advantage of the Indian auto component industry revolves around the low cost advantage based on the availability of low-wage, highly skilled manpower and fast emerging local market. This competitive edge is further strengthened with the adoption of production concepts such as total quality management (TQM) and just in time production. These progressive transformations on the one hand offering opportunities for Indian component players to emerge as important global players as suppliers to multiple global assemblers and on the other hand radically altering inter-firm strategies such as narrowing supply base, focus on full service and full package component delivery and single source vendor development (Meenu Tiwari, 2000). This led to the fundamental changes in the buyer-supplier relationship among vehicle assemblers and auto component manufacturers. It also has redefined the jobs of production workers in the Indian auto component industry (John Humphrey, 1999).
The present work intends to explore and understand, how the adoption of new organization of production systems in auto component industry makes workers in automotive parts production vulnerable for informalisation of work. In order to do this we propose to begin with a review of existing literature on organization of production in auto component industry and its impact on organization of work. It will be substantiated with the critical enquiry on relationship between the buyer firms and supplier firm in terms of share holding pattern, procurement policies, and the involvement of buyer firm in the long-term and day-to-day issues of supplier firm. This is done with the intention to understand how far the buyer firms influence the activities of the supplier firm in its organization of production and on employment policies. Workers in the parts making industry will be interviewed to understand the impact of changing nature of organization of production and work on employment policies of the supplier firm. How the issue of informalisation of work has been resisted will be critically examined in the process. Further the study will also analyse various factors that contributed for the success and failures of workers initiatives towards resisting the anti-labour work practices. The fieldwork will be carried out in the NCR region, which is one of the major hubs for automobile production in India. Outcome of this research is a document, which will be useful for workers to understand micro and macro issues related to informalisation of work and various ways and means of resistance to this process.
 
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