The Life of Labour: India’s Wage Growth to Remain Suppressed Till 2030

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Domestic workers’ organisation granted trade union status for the first time in Bengal

Paschimbanga Griha Paricharika Samit (PGPS) or West Bengal Domestic Workers Society has become the first trade union of domestic workers that has been officially recognised by the state government. The workers have been fighting for recognition since 2014. “Every day I set out for work at 6 am and returned home in the afternoon. Since 2014, I had to rush to the labour department’s office several days a week to ensure that our organisation is granted trade union status,” Tapsi Moira, a domestic worker, told The Hindu.

Illustration by Aliza Bakht

1.5 lakh teachers to be brought under School Education Dept. in Chhattisgarh

With an eye on the upcoming elections, the state government has announced that the merger of at least 1.03 lakh teachers, who will have completed eight years of service, will be carried out from July 1. The remaining 48,000 teachers will be regularised after they complete eight years of service.

Retired public transport employees demand pension dues running into crores

Between June 11 to 15, thousands of retired employees of State Transport Corporations gathered in Chennai for a five-day protest outside the State Transport Corporation headquarters. Each day was designated for one or two of the eight transport corporations and workers from several districts travelled to the city to make their presence felt. Given the large number of dues including dearness allowance, gratuity commuted pensions and other arrears, the main demand is that the government must set aside money in the budget for this purpose and all dues must be cleared at once. Left unions from other public sector undertakings like railways and electricity board lent their support. TNSTC Retired Employees Welfare Association (REWA) is pushing the government to take action during the session where a request for grants from the annual budget will be made for each department.

Welfare Board and unorganised workers’ ‘unease of accessing benefits’

Welfare boards were set up for construction workers as well as many other categories of informal workers as a means of assuring them social security. However, their performance in terms of disbursing pensions and other benefits have come under serious criticism. Thozhilalar Koodam chronicled the stories of some of the workers, who have been long denied their benefits due to delays in the bureaucratic process. The article raises questions about the priorities of the state and central governments that are concerned about the ‘ease of doing business’ but inconsiderate to the demands of the workers to ease of accessing their welfare benefits.

India’s wage growth to remain suppressed till 2030

A global study on Talent Crunch has estimated that most major economies are going to see their wage rates beginning to increase from 2030. As demand for skilled workforce increases, the wage rates of these categories of workers will begin to increase as supply plateaus. However, India will be the only major economy that might continue to have suppressed wage rates due to an abundant supply of skilled workforce. While the economy, overall, might not see any significant increase in real incomes, sectors that employ skilled workforce might face a scarcity of workers in all major economies including the USA, China and Germany. But India will ‘buck this trend’ according to the study by Korn Ferry. "The new era of work is one of scarcity in abundance, there are plenty of people, but not enough with the skills their organisations will need to survive. While overall wage increases are just keeping pace with inflation, salaries for in-demand workers will skyrocket if companies choose to compete for the best and brightest on salary alone," Korn Ferry’s head of rewards and benefits for the APAC region Dhritiman Chakrabarti said.

Kerala to take steps to end orderly system in Police

Once again Kerala is planning to do away with the ‘orderly’ system in the police department after a policeman, posted as a driver for a police officer, was physically assaulted by the officer’s daughter for being late to pick her up. The policeman, who sustained serious injuries to his back and is undergoing treatment, filed a complaint against the lady. As the issue came to light, there has been a renewed call to end the ‘orderly’ system where policemen of lower rank are assigned to police officers as helps. Invariably, these personnel are used as house helps by the officer’s families, often having to undertake household chores. This feudal British era system has survived in the police and the army, even as it has been phased out of the navy and air force. There has also been opposition from senior police officers to the proposal to end this system, with some claiming that the system as a whole is essential to keep officers focussed on their gruelling duties. Previous attempts to incentivise voluntary shift for this system has failed. It would be interesting to follow how the Kerala government, which took proactive measures to end ‘nookukuli’ to curb the excesses of unionised manual workers, will engage with the elite bureaucratic workers in the police department.

What does the 2011 census tell us about what non-agricultural workers do?

Arguing that employment will probably be the major issue in next year’s general election, Roshan Kishore dives into the data around India’s non-agricultural workers. His data suggests that the states with higher shares of the non-agricultural workforce have higher GDP. He also points out a large gender gap in terms of the number of men and women in the non-agricultural workforce. His charts also suggest that higher the education level, the more likely women are to be engaged in work outside agriculture.

In a second analysis looking into the type of employment, Roshan Kishore writes that “men have a greater share than women in all six non-agricultural employment categories, except HHIs (manufacturing that happens within the household). This shows that while women are not allowed to go outside and work except in farms, they are bigger participants in economic activities which take place within the confines of the household. This underlines how restrictions on female mobility limit the participation of women in the non-agricultural workforce.”

Is the NDA government doing away with ‘hire and fire’ policy?

Several news reports emerged in the last week suggesting that in a ‘pro-worker’ measure the NDA government was planning to withdraw provisions that would allow for ‘hire and fire’ of workers by companies. The articles mentioned that the government, faced with opposition from unions - including the RSS affiliated BMS, might revoke an amendment to the Industrial Employment Standing Order Act which allows companies to employ and sack up to 300 contract employees according to their business needs without giving them compensations. It states that a fixed-term employee “shall not be eligible for all statutory benefits available to a permanent workman in his period of employment” and that “no notice of termination shall be necessary in the case of temporary workman”.

However, no such clause was introduced when the amendment was made in the Central Rules of the Industrial Employment Standing Order 1946, to include ‘Fixed Term Workman’ as a legal category of workers. The news reports do not suggest that the government is planning to revoke fixed-term contracts as demanded by the trade unions including BMS. Instead, the government seems to have devised a ‘straw man’ in the name of ‘hire and fire’ clause, which the government then seeks to revoke, painting itself as ‘pro-worker’. As it stands, if a temporary worker (including fixed-term workman) is terminated before the end of the contractual period, a two-week notice of termination has to be provided if they have completed 3 months of employment. No notice of termination is required If the contract term period expires.

Delhi government to count manual scavengers, provide loans to buy sewer cleaning machines

As reported earlier, manual scavenging exists in all parts of Delhi despite what the municipal corporation might claim. The Delhi government has acknowledged this and now begun a census of manual scavengers. It has simultaneously set up a credit system for sewer cleaning machines that will help eliminate the manual parts of the job. The machine requires four people to operate.

A worker’s death on the shop floor in Manesar spurs protest for safety, yet again

A worker at SPM Autocomp in IMT Manesar in Haryana died on the shop floor after fainting. Co-workers said that the summer heat and the heat from the work led to his death. While the company officials tried to pin it on his ill health, maintaining that he had died in the hospital, the workers on the shop floor have said to media that the worker had died at the factory premises itself. They have also claimed that the company was responsible as they don’t even provide cold water at the factory, let alone other clothes and infrastructure to overcome exhaustion at work. But the workers in the plant did not carry out a protest, leaving former workers to protest at the labour commissioner's office. The protesting former workers were those who were expelled from work after they had led a gate protest last year after the death of a colleague in an accident at the factory. In that instance, the company had called the police to round up the protesting workers instead of engaging with their demands of safety and better compensation. The police had also used violent measures to disburse the workers at that time. Given that experience, many workers this time did not protest this accident, even though they claimed that the company was responsible for the tragic death of their co-worker.

International news

Thailand banks on tech to end slavery at sea as workers push for rights

More than half the workers in Thailand’s fishing industry are migrant workers from poorer neighbouring countries. Thai ships that function almost completely on slave labour have become widespread. As Reuters reports, workers sold into slavery sometimes work their entire lives on these ships without any pay. The government has pushed the idea of tracking devices out at sea, satellite phones, even biometric identification of all sea workers, but most of these would never work, according to former enslaved workers who are now activists.

While the promises and progress so far have only been technology-centric, Thailand has also “pledged to ratify two other conventions on collective bargaining and the right to organise, which campaigners say would better protect seafood workers. This would be good news for Lin’s fishermen’s group, which has helped rescue more than 60 people since 2015, but has no legal status as Thai law does not permit fisher unions, leading rights advocates to use other terms, like workers’ groups.”

Weekend reading

Privatisation: propaganda vs reality

Ever since the ascendancy of neo-liberal ideology, the one panacea for government’s failure to deliver services is to privatise the services. Policy think tanks with reach high up in the government have held as gospel the notion that commodifying basic services and bringing them within the ambit of profit maximising market system would miraculously improve quality and access to these services. Their zeal is so great that they have gone on to identify sectors and spaces for privatisation even before a case of public sector failure has been made out. However, there are instances when privatisation has backfired, deteriorating the quality of service while also worsening the conditions of work.

Rupe India has a detailed article about an instance in a reputed educational institution where an attempt to privatise mess and hostel facilities in the pretext of tapping professional experience worsened the situation for the institution, the guests and students who used the facilities as well as for the workers. Apart from documenting the failure of the private concern to deliver on quality and the numerous violations of workers’ rights through the use of migrant workers, the article also highlights how, rather than confront the mistake of hiring ‘professional’ expertise, the management tried to blame the failure on the workers who demanded that their rights not be trampled away. By documenting in detail this fiasco of privatisation, the article also poses the larger question about the macro model of privatisation that we have come to accept as ‘truth’. The lessons from this instance might be of great relevance as our government gears towards privatising national assets and public sector enterprises in the garb of improving service quality and sustainability.

‘Choice’ as an excuse to dismantle women’s right at the workplace

Early in its term, the NDA government had increased the maternity paid leave benefit for women workers in the formal sector from 12 weeks to 26 weeks. While it was greatly appreciated by the workers as well as public health experts, it has since come under criticism from industry lobbyists and commentators who have often used surveys of recruitment officers to show that such increase in social security and public health adversely affects women’s employment in the formal sector. Here is another such article that tries to use surveys by corporate consultancies to advance the argument that a ‘voluntary’ benefits system instead of mandated provisions would allow women to make ‘choices’ as to their work - life decisions. Arguing that hiring managers’ discrimination against women due to maternity costs is not an expression of prejudice but of a prudent business decision, the article reminds policymakers of ‘unintentional’ consequence of their decisions.

What is interesting is that the article cites the ILO report on ‘maternity and paternity at work’ to press its argument for allowing companies to make flexible schemes rather than have statutory benefits. Yet, it fails to note the extensive discussion in the same report against discrimination of women on the basis of maternity choices or marital status. The title of the ILO report is ‘Maternity and Paternity’ at work. A sure way to reconcile discrimination would be to implement paternity leave benefits that would be both progressive welfare as well as reduce discrimination. The article suggests that companies would choose to voluntarily increase maternity benefits but the ILO report points out that at times of economic crisis, companies actively discriminate against women to cut costs. Thus, women and families would be left to the mercy of the corporate decisions with regards to their life choices. It is surprising that even as the article clearly identifies instances of discrimination, it argues to legalise such practice rather than suggest ways to improve gender sensitivity and non-discriminatory behaviour.

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