TISCO During the Decade of the 1900s: The Formation Period

Abstract

Growing market integration , improving institutional setting, and changes in government economic policy during the 19th century were important developments in the founding of the first full-fledged iron and steel maker in colonial India , the Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO) . This chapter will cover TISCO during its formation in the first decade of the 20th century by focusing on the two aspects of the procurement of necessary inputs and the realization of corporate structure .

Appendix: TISCO’s Sources of Domestic Labour During the Colonial Era

Despite India’s relative inexperience in iron and steelmaking using western technology at the beginning of the 20th century, the shop floor workforce of supervisors and skilled and semi-skilled millhands, comprising the fourth and fifth tiers of TISCO’s corporate structure , were usually supplied from the domestic labour market from the company’s very start. The questions of where this workforce was recruited and what level of education and vocational background these workers had before being hired by TISCO will be addressed in this Appendix.

First, let us outline the geographical distribution of the domestic sources of TISCO ’s workforce, for which there is unfortunately minimal evidence for the formation period, but from the end of the 1930s on becomes clearer thanks to the 1938 TISCO publication Answer to the questionnaire of the Labour Enquiry Committee, Bihar.⁸¹ According to this report, the geographical origins of the employees on the payroll as of 1 April 1938 were mainly from the three provinces in and around Jamshedpur of Bihar, Bengal and the Central Provinces , accounting for almost 60% of the workforce. The report also provides us with district-level information on the origins of workers employed during the past six years since 1932. The district that supplied most of TISCO’s labour was Singhbhum District in Bihar (2,596), where TISCO was located, followed by the port city of Surat in Bombay presidency (754), Raipur in the Central Provinces (669), Cuttack in Orissa (622) and Dacca , Bengal (578), which were located between 1630 km (Surat ) and 220 km (Dhaka) from Jamshedpur , indicating that TISCO had to seek far and wide for over half of its shop floor workforce. Although we have no information on the type or quality of the labour supplied from outside Singhbhum, we can only conclude that TISCO was looking in these remote places for people with specific steelworker experience and skills not available locally. Incidentally, such long distance recruitment and migration to TISCO was made possible by the advances in domestic market integration discussed in the previous chapter.

Turning to the vocational and educational backgrounds of the fourth and fifth tier workforce as a whole,⁸² there is data provided by a feature entitled “Our Old Employee,” often appearing in the TISCO Review, a monthly magazine published mainly in English (and partly in Hindi) beginning in November 1932, which has been preserved in the Tata Steel Archives . The periodical was released to inform TISCO’s literate employees of general notices issued from the company’s Board and general managers and of current company news, such as the results of intramural sporting events, newlyweds, retiring employees, and the hiring of top managers, all for the purpose of creating a sense of loyalty to TISCO and unity among its employees. “Our Old Employee” was an feature tracing the professional and educational career of Indian shop floor workers before and after they were hired by the company. The feature covered a total of 71 employees, most of whom had been with the company since the early 1910s and some of whom had over the last 20 years or so been promoted to the post of foreman .⁸³ “Our Old Employee” enables us to identify three characteristic features of the occupation and educational background of TISCO’s clerical workers , the first of which is that most of them had previously worked for the Government or the railway companies, indicating the importance of such work experience in their job performance at TISCO. For example, among the 22 clerical workers appearing in the features, nine had worked for the Government (including one in the armed forces), seven had worked at a railway company , two had been hired by TISCO directly out of a college, while the remaining four had different work and educational backgrounds. Secondly, there seems to be no clear difference in the rates of promotion between those with railway company or government work experience and those directly recruited out of college. Moreover, those who did not have such occupation and educational backgrounds had less chance of promotion. Finally, less than half of the “old employees” had received any formal “school” education (five advancing to college level), which indicates that formal education was by no means a necessary condition for acquiring a clerical position at TISCO.

“Our Old Employee’s” coverage of the skilled position of fitter reveals that first, nine among the total of eleven had worked at a railway company before joining TISCO, indicating such experience as a strong requirement for filling the position at TISCO. Secondly, four of the nine had worked at the Railway Workshop in Kharagpur , Bengal, one of the largest railway maintenance facilities in India.⁸⁴ Next, none of the eleven fitters, except one by the name of J. T. Rufas, were likely to have had learned English, although mostly receiving primary education in local languages or training as apprentices at their previous places of work. Finally, eight of the 11 were promoted to the post of foreman or equivalent despite having no higher education background or English skills.

Occupational experience at a railway company was not a requirement for a machine operator ’s position in an iron and steel production department. Among the nine Indian machine operators covered, only one had previously worked at a railway company , while three had worked at engineering companies, and of the remaining five, only one had experience at a production facility operated by a Western company, meaning that almost half had no workshop experience before joining TISCO. Notwithstanding, three among these four were promoted to such posts as shift foreman , assistant iron breaking foreman and head maistry during their stints at TISCO, although the others with railway or engineering experience were promoted more rapidly to lower managerial posts.

Regarding the 22 remaining “Our Old Employee” subjects, we notice two notable features, the first of which is that ten had previously worked at a railway company , indicating the overall significance of such experience for finding a job at TISCO. Secondly, of those ten, three had worked at the Kharagpur Railway Workshop , suggesting the importance of that city as a source of skilled labour .

Most notable among all the “Our Old Employees” is the professional career of a middle management staff member by the name of Makdum Sheikh , who a few months after joining TISCO in 1911 was promoted to the post of labour foreman and later became the general foreman of the Labour Department . As we will see in more detail in Chaps. 5 and 7, TISCO’s foremen played important roles as “jobbers” in recruiting, supervising and training shop floor workers from 1910s on into at least the 1930s. In this sense, Makdum, who supervised the foremen during that entire time was the key person responsible for controlling the two lowest tiers of the TISCO corporate structure , in keeping with his former career at an army sergeant.

The prevalence of prior experience working in the railway industry or Government agencies⁸⁵ and the steady promotion of such veterans to the post of foreman or its equivalent at the fourth tier seems to mean that such experience imparted such skills as assembling, operating and repairing modern machinery and performing clerical tasks. These skilled workers also had previous connections with myriad other skilled workers and clerks, and brought many of them along to work in Jamshedpur , greatly assisting the TISCO management (Tata Sons ) in reducing the cost of recruiting and supervising such a huge industrial workforce.

As to how many fourth tier managers who played a significant role in TISCO’s indirect labour management system came out of the railway industry can be estimated based on a statistical examination of the number of railway employees. To begin with, the data show that the Indian railway industry was employing a total of 402,249 persons (387,566 Indian) in 1903 and 589,422 (571,506 Indian) in 1912, not all of which of course sufficiently qualified to work as lower level managers at an iron and steel company. To estimate those so qualified, there are the figures on the number of skilled workers employed at the five railway companies of Eastern Bengal, East Indian, Oudh and Rohilkhad, Great Indian Peninsula and North-Western, which all told accounted for 56.8% of the total expenditures (not total workforce) of the railway industry in 1921/22. A total 98,889 skilled workers were reported by those companies during the mid-1920s, and between 2,000 and 3,000 of them were acting in some kind of supervisory capacity in various iron and steel production -related workshops (GOI 1926). If we assume that these companies’ share of total expenditure in 1921/22 was equivalent to their share of the total workforce at that time, and the ratio of supervisors to total skilled workers was constant throughout the industry, then we can estimate that the total number of skilled workers employed in the railway industry as a whole was approximately 174,100, (23% of the total workforce), among whom approximately 4,500, or were in supervisor positions. On an assumption that the ratio was constant in 1903 and 1912, we estimate that there were 89,140 and 131,446 skilled workers, respectively, in the railway industry in those two years, indicating a huge pool for TISCO to choose from.

As previously mentioned, most of TISCO ’s indigenous labour force had no experience in iron and steel manufacturing, requiring experience workers to be hired from abroad as covenanted labour to fill both top management posts (such as general manager ) and line positions (such as blast furnace assistant). The need for foreign covenanted labour , however, does not lessen the contribution made by skilled indigenous labour supplied by the railway industry and Government agencies from the very start of operations. It was the above estimated rich pool of between 85 and 130,000 skilled railway workers that enabled TISCO to recruit the quality of labour necessary to man its fourth and fifth tiers.