On the basis of a historically specific case-study of industrial relations in a manufacturing plant, this article attempts to extrapolate wider theoretical implications regarding two social processes, namely, social polarisation and social mobilisation. The social legitimacy of the employers gets eroded when workers, spread across different locations of a company, align to articulate their grievance of relative deprivation. Further deepening of social cleavage within the organisation takes place when the labour leadership takes up programmes to mobilise workers into collective action and remits support for its demands from macro structures like political parties.
