Product details

This caselet deals with the challenges facing Dilip, HR Manager at Prospecta Engineering (Prospecta), a manufacturing company located in the industrial belt at Bhosari, Maharashtra, India. Rakesh Sinha (Rakesh), a businessperson (currently designated as Director Operations), with multiple businesses to manufacture auto ancillary parts, floated this company. However, the venture was not very successful due to lack of capital, technology and management capabilities. Hence, Prospecta was forging an alliance with Asian Engineering (Asian), a leading automotive equipment manufacturer to turn around its fortunes. Dilip was deputed to Prospecta along with Ranjit (Factory Manager) from Asian with the desired management expertise to improve the functioning of the organization. The wages at Prospecta were very low and it had a large population of contractual workers, who were not governed by a proper process as per the applicable industrial legislation, which led to a majority of its workers joining a politically motivated external union, Workers Union (WU), as its registered members. Asian viewed this as a major obstacle to their proposed growth strategy and feared the spill over of external unionization and industrial unrest into their factories. Sharad Sathe, HR Director and Andy Roberts (Andy), the Managing Director of Asian, deployed Dilip and Ranjit to ensure that the external unionization did not succeed. Dilip and Ranjit had to deal with formation of the internal union by managing various groups / factions among the workers and getting them together. These workers had some expectations from the management, relative to the promises made by the WU. Dilip and Ranjit had to operate within the negotiation framework laid down by Andy. However, Rakesh complicated the situation by unilaterally declaring the wage increase of 10% in the current salary levels. This shifted the base level being considered for the wage negotiations and increased the expectations of the workers. Dilip and Ranjit now had to decide how to manage the negotiations. The caselet presents dilemmas pertaining to group behavior, power issues, conflict management and negotiation strategies, within a dynamic industrial relations situation.