The People on the Floor

Hiring: ITIs, references and the half-day trial

Nobody leaves a job for seven hundred rupees. That is what I told Meena, and she did not believe me, and I understand why, because the story everyone tells in an industrial estate is that operators hop for ₹500 and owners can do nothing about it. In twenty-one years I have lost perhaps thirty people. When I sat down once and went through why, money was the stated reason for most of them and the real reason for about a third. The rest left because a wage came four days late, or a supervisor shouted in front of others, or nobody had told them what the job was. Pooja had been in the Satpur shed eleven weeks. She worked alone, mixed by eye, and never knew whether Meena thought she was doing well. Sinnar simply offered her a reason.

So the first hire after a loss is a chance to do it properly, and properly starts with where you look.

Where the steady ones come from

For any job that touches a machine, I go first to the nearest government ITI, the Industrial Training Institute where boys and, increasingly, girls spend one or two years learning a trade such as fitter, electrician or machinist. Every ITI has a placement officer, and most of them are pleased to hear from a small unit, because the big plants take the top ten per cent and leave the rest. In Bhosari I have used the same institute since 2006. I ring in March, before final exams, and ask for two names in fitter or electrician, not the toppers, but the ones the instructor says turn up every day.

Meena's work needed no trade certificate. Mixing pine oil, emulsifier and water, filling and capping, does not need a fitter. But I told her to ring the ITI on Trimbak Road anyway and ask the placement officer one question: did any students have a sister, cousin or neighbour looking for factory work close to home? Instructors know families. A girl who lives fifteen minutes from Satpur by cycle is worth more to a five-person unit than one in Sinnar who needs two buses.

References come second, and most owners waste them. "Is he good?" gets you "Yes, very good." I ask three things instead:

• How many days did he miss in his last three months?
• Was there ever money or material short when he was around?
• Would you take him back tomorrow?

The third answer is the only one that matters, and you learn it from the pause before it.

Half a day, paid

Then comes the trial. I have never hired anyone for the floor on a conversation alone, not since 2005, and I pay for the trial in cash at the end of it: ₹400 today, which is more than half a day's minimum wage for unskilled work in Pune. Paying matters. It tells the person this is real work, and it means I owe them honesty about the outcome.

Meena called hers in on a Saturday morning. A woman named Rekha, thirty-four, two children, previously packing at a spice unit in Ambad. Meena gave her the batch card and watched without helping.

What I look for in a trial is mostly not skill:

• Does she ask before touching something she does not know?
• When the first can overflows, does she wipe it, hide it or call you?
• Does she notice that the floor is wet before someone slips?
• At the end, does she clean up without being told?

Rekha filled 140 cans in three and a half hours, which is slower than Pooja managed in her eighth week. She also stopped at can thirty-one and said the emulsifier smelled different from the last drum. It did. The drum was from a new lot, and Meena had not checked it against the incoming sample, which was the very lesson she had copied out in July and then let slip.

"She is slow," Meena said on the phone that evening.

"She found your mistake in her first hour," I said. "Speed I can teach."

Rekha started on Monday at ₹11,200 a month. Meena asked me what to do about the shortfall in output, and the true answer was that she now needed a second person, someone who would one day stand in for her when she was out selling. That person has a name in most factories, and it is the hardest hire I know.

Your first supervisor is your most important purchase

I spent more time choosing my corrugator in 2006 than I spent choosing the man who would run it. That was backwards. The corrugator cost ₹6 lakh and has never once taken a day off, lied about a count or walked out at Diwali. A supervisor can do all three, and he touches every rupee that passes through the floor. If I had to rank what I have bought in twenty-one years by how much it changed the business, the supervisor comes first and the machines come after.

My first one was Baban (not his real name), whom I had hired in 2005 as a helper on the slotter. By the spring of 2006 I noticed something odd. When the glue pot jammed or a reel came in damp, the other three men did not come up the stairs to me. They went to Baban. He was not the fastest operator and he was certainly not the most educated; he had left school after the eighth standard in a village near Junnar. But he was the one people trusted to tell them the truth about their own mistakes without making a show of it.

That, it turns out, is the job.

I look for three things in a first supervisor, and experience is not one of them:

• He counts honestly when the count is bad. If yesterday's scrap was 9 per cent, he writes 9, not 6.
• Workers bring him problems before they bring them to you. Watch who people walk towards when something goes wrong.
• He can say no to the owner. If he cannot tell you a rush order will wreck the next morning's schedule, he is only a messenger.

Meena's instinct, when I said she needed a second person, was to look outside. She had heard of a man with eleven years at a chemical plant in Ambad who wanted ₹22,000 a month.

"He knows everything already," she said.

"He knows how a plant with a quality department and a purchase officer runs," I said. "You have neither. You have Rekha and a mixing tank."

I did not tell her never to hire from outside. Sometimes you must, and a bigger unit's man can teach you things. But a person who has only worked inside large systems often stands about waiting for the system to appear. In a five-person shed, the supervisor is the system.

Training one, slowly

I paid Baban ₹1,500 a month above the best operator, which in 2006 meant ₹6,300 against ₹4,800, and I wrote down on a single sheet what he could decide without me. He could stop a machine for a quality fault. He could send a worker home for being drunk. He could reject an incoming reel if the moisture reading was above 9 per cent. He could not give credit, change a price or promise a delivery date to a customer. I pinned the sheet beside the time-card rack so the workers could read it too, because authority nobody can see is not authority.

For the first ninety days, he filled in the Owner's Morning Sheet and I filled in my own copy beside it, from my own counts, without looking at his. Every morning at 9 we compared. In the first fortnight we disagreed on output on eleven days out of fourteen, usually by a few hundred boxes, usually because he counted bundles and I counted sheets. By the third month we disagreed twice. After that I stopped keeping my copy, and I have not kept one since.

Meena asked how long she should wait before deciding whether Rekha could become that person.

"Give her the batch card for one full week," I said. "Do not stand next to her. Read the sheet at nine. See what she writes when the numbers are bad."

On the Monday after, Meena sent me a photograph of the first sheet Rekha had filled in alone. Output 410 cans. Scrap 14 cans. And in the complaint line, in careful Marathi, a note that the new drum still smelled wrong.

The wage register is not paperwork

Before Rekha's first payday I made Meena do something she found faintly insulting. I asked her to look up the minimum wage for her zone and her category of work, print the notification and keep it in the blue file. She had taught accounts for nineteen years. She did not think she needed reminding to pay people.

"I am paying her more than the minimum," she said.

"Today you are," I said. "Maharashtra revises the dearness allowance twice a year. Do you know which months?"

She did not. Most owners don't. The basic rate is notified for each scheduled employment and zone, and a variable allowance is added on top at intervals. A wage that cleared the line comfortably in January can sit under it by July without anyone touching it. Rekha's ₹11,200 cleared the figure Meena found, by less than she had assumed. She wrote the next revision date on the inside cover of the file in red.

Keep a wage register from the first worker, even if the law in your state lets a unit your size get away without one. Name, days present, overtime hours, gross, deductions, net, the date paid and a signature or thumbprint. It takes ten minutes a month. When a worker leaves angry and complains to the labour office, which happens to almost every owner eventually, that register is the only thing that speaks for you.

PF and ESI arrive earlier than you think

Two contributions catch first-generation owners out. They are not hard. They are just easy to put off until the day they cannot be put off.

• Provident Fund (PF) becomes compulsory once you have twenty employees. The usual contribution is 12 per cent of basic wages from the worker and 12 per cent from you, with the statutory wage ceiling currently at ₹15,000 of basic.
• Employees' State Insurance (ESI) covers medical care and sick pay. In Maharashtra it applies to factories with ten or more people, for workers earning up to ₹21,000 a month gross. The employer pays 3.25 per cent and the worker 0.75 per cent.

The four labour codes passed by Parliament in 2019 and 2020 may move some of these thresholds and definitions once states finish notifying their rules. I do not know exactly how that will land for a ten-person shed in Satpur. Check with your CA each April rather than trusting a book, including this one.

My own advice goes further than the law. When you reach seven or eight people, register for ESI anyway. A worker who cuts a hand on a slitter blade is then treated at an ESI dispensary, not paid for out of your cash drawer at a private hospital in Bhosari, which is what I did twice in 2005, for about ₹14,000 in all.

The contractor who saves you money

Contract labour looks like the cleanest answer to a small owner's worries. A contractor supplies the men, pays them, handles their PF and ESI and sends you one bill. You never see a muster roll. That last part should frighten you.

In 2009 I took eight loaders and helpers from a contractor I will call Mohite (not his real name). His rate was ₹900 a head a month cheaper than employing them myself, and I congratulated myself on the saving for about a year. Then an inspector from the PF office climbed my stairs with a list of the eight names. Mohite had been deducting 12 per cent from their wages every month and depositing none of it. Under the law, the factory where people actually work is the principal employer, and the principal employer pays when the contractor doesn't. I paid ₹1.9 lakh in arrears, interest and damages. Mohite's phone was switched off by the following week.

Since then my rule has been fixed. Before Sunita releases any contractor's monthly bill, she must see the PF and ESI challans for that month, with every worker's name on them, and match the names against the faces at the gate. No challan, no cheque.

The loaders, incidentally, did not blame Mohite. They blamed me. Three of them asked if they could come on to my rolls directly, at my rates, with their contributions where they could check them online.

I said yes. One of them is still here.

Why Ganesh stayed twenty years, and the two I lost

Ganesh came to the gate in August 2005, nineteen years old, from a village outside Junnar, with one spare shirt in a plastic bag. I took him on as a helper at ₹2,100 a month. He stacked sheets off the corrugator, swept the trim and carried tea. Tonight, as on most nights, he will run my second shift: nineteen people, the corrugator, both slotters including buddha, and the printer, from 8 p.m. until the day supervisor takes the keys at six.

He has had better offers. In 2011 a unit in Chakan offered him ₹1,500 a month more than I was paying, which in those days was a serious sum. Last Diwali I finally asked him why he had never gone.

"Pagaar saat tarkhela yeto," he said. The salary comes on the seventh.

That was his whole answer, and I have thought about it more than anything a consultant ever told me. In twenty years I have paid wages late once. That was November 2008, when two customers sat on ₹6 lakh between them, and even then I borrowed from my brother-in-law and paid on the eighth, at eleven in the morning, and walked the floor apologising to each person by name. Ganesh remembers that day better than I do.

The second thing was the ladder. Since 2006 there have been four grades on my floor: helper, assistant operator, operator and machine in-charge. Each step has a written test on the machine itself and a fixed rise attached to it, currently ₹1,400 a month per grade. The sheet hangs on the canteen wall. Nobody has to come upstairs and ask me for a raise, and nobody has to wonder whether the man who flatters me gets one first. Ganesh climbed all four by 2009 and then asked what came after. I had no answer, so I invented supervisor training for him.

The rest is unglamorous. Lata cooks lunch in the canteen and a full plate costs a worker ₹30; I pay the difference. The toilet is cleaned twice a shift, and I use the same one my helpers use, which is the only inspection system that has ever worked.

The two I lost taught me as much.

In 2007 I hired an operator I will call Sanjay (not his real name), the best corrugator hand in Bhosari. Glue lines perfect, changeovers in half the time. He also shouted at helpers and took credit for their work, and in four months three of my best young boys left. I kept seeing Sanjay's output figure. I did not see the empty places beside him until there were three of them.

In 2014 I made the opposite mistake. I hired a supervisor from a large Pune company, a polished man I will call Deepak, at ₹45,000 a month. His reports were typed and his English was better than mine. He almost never came down to the floor after dark, and his Morning Sheets showed scrap at 2.1 per cent for five weeks running, which I now know is a number nobody honest reports five weeks in a row. Ganesh, by then an in-charge, wrote me a resignation letter. I asked Deepak to leave instead, eight months after he joined.

Both times I hired for what a man knew and never checked how he behaved when I was out of the building.

Meena listened to all of this on the phone with Rekha's third week behind her. Then she asked the question I had been waiting for. Her sister was getting married in Pune in October. Four days. Could she leave Rekha alone with the unit?

"Not yet," I said.

"You trust her. You said so."

"I trusted Ganesh in 2012," I said. "I took my first fortnight off that May, to Kerala, with my wife and daughter. The phone rang at 6.40 on the second morning."