around 1 am, following an 8 hour flight to London that gained 6 hours on the clock, a less than 3 hour layover at Heathrow Airport in London (where, fortunately, we did not have the three hour waits at security that were featured on Monday evening’s news, but did have to navigate the tube from terminal 3 (American Airlines)to British Airways in terminal 5), and then another 7 hour flight gaining another 4 ½ hours to the new airport in New Delhi.
ou might have heard of—McDonald’s, partly because we needed to eat somewhere, and I knew we were going to have a spectacular dinner that night (at a restaurant designed by a fashion designer, and it showed). I also wanted students to see what adaptations a global corporation, one best known (and sometimes reviled, as in “the McDonaldization of the world”) had to make to adapt to Indian tastes. One adaptation occurred when the company came to India, where the Hindu majority (75% of the population) does not eat beef, the cow being sacred (and that’s another thing I’ve noticed here—a lot fewer cows roaming the streets). When I was here in 2001, we stopped at McD’s and had a “Maharajah Mac” that featured lamb. About 5 years ago, in response to an animal rights attack, the company abandoned lamb for chicken. So we had, at the recommendation of our IWU student who is Indian, variants of the spicy chicken that is the featured meat. And it was spicy!The second visit was to a company named Britannia (how’s that for indicating India’s heritage as a country which had been ruled–certainly in
terms of its foreign policy–by the British, who linked together British ruled India as well as Pakistan and Bangladesh and Burma with states run by maharajas and sultans, depending on whether Hindu or Muslim) into the “Jewel in the Crown”). The conglomerate, which also owns an airlines, has a major share of the biscuit (again, a British term—for cookie) market in India. We visited a factory, which for many of our students was their first exposure to any manufacturing facility. The 800 employees make several lines for north India, which the company trucks take to 14 warehouses for further distribution to the variety of retailers; India is, by and large a country of small businesses. Laws have blocked the emergence of multi-brand stores, a synonym for Walmarts or Carrefours (French) or Metros (German) or Tescos (British) or Lottes (Korean) or Mitsui (Japanese), so common elsewhere. When I asked students what they saw, they remarked on how labor based the production was. Telling for me was “quality control”—where men (the facility was mostly male) stood looking for the ‘non acceptable’ cookies—whether because of shape or shade or size or broken—and physically pulled them from the line. Men physically put the cookies in sleeves and packages, then put the packages into boxes for reshipping. The factory manager told us—and this is typical of what I’ve seen of manufacturing in India—that ¾ of his employees are contract labor, who are seasonal workers, going back to their villages when not needed. Though the manager assured us that the contractors get the same benefits as the regular employees, they do give some flexibility to management in a system that has been working to become more “free trade” since 1991, when the License Raj—very government controlled or regulated—system collapsed. The company practices “kaizen”, a Japanese process which encourages employees to make continuous improvements, sort of a “suggestion box”, but routinized; throughout the factory, we saw pictures posted of the changes that indicated Japanese manufacturing practices are world class. One other corporate initiative I saw—and questioned—was to go international and reposition cookies from baked goods to healthy snacks. The cookies are already exported, mostly—and this is typical for Indian companies—to the Middle East and nearby SE Asian countries. The health is partly aspirational, and partly new ingredients. I am munching on fiber cookies as I type.