The Life of Labour, a compilation of important labour developments from around the world, will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday at 10 am. Click here to subscribe.

Why workers are opposed to the Motor Vehicles Amendment Act

The major legislative story of this parliamentary session was the tabling and debate in the Rajya Sabha over the Motor Vehicles Amendment Bill. After the NDA government’s attempt to pass a Road Safety Bill failed in 2015 due to severe opposition, the government chose to amend the existing law to bring in some of the provisions from the withdrawn road safety bill. The amendment bill, which has been passed by the Lok Sabha, has come under serious criticism from the opposition parties as well as the transport sector unions. LiveLaw has elaborated on some of the concerns raised against this amendment. Transport sector workers have expressed their opposition to the bill ever since it was first proposed in 2014, arguing that the provisions in the bill are poised to ease the business space for big private players rather than focus on safety. Here are articles from Thozhillalar Koodam and Newsclick that discuss the issues raised by workers and unions against the bill.

App-based and call taxi drivers fear that the bill, by defining aggregators as intermediaries rather than employers, allows these companies to extricate themselves from responsibilities to their drivers even while controlling the market and pricing. Auto spare parts traders will face severe impact on business as the bill demands only the use of original company parts that are expensive. Small-scale mechanics are in a similar predicament with the bill declaring that only the OEMs and their authorised service centres can engage in repairs for the vehicles. Such elements in the bill are being seen as an excuse to enable big investors to capture the transport operations as well as the product market. There is also fear among the state transport corporation workers that the bill will increase pressure towards privatisation of the public transport sector.

Protests and strikes are planned across India on August 7 against the bill, demanding that the amendments be withdrawn. Here are reports from Karnataka, Puducherry and Bihar. The opposition has also come down heavily against the bill for infringing on rights of the states. They have successfully held up the passage of the bill.

Tamil Nadu announces minimum wage for domestic workers

The government of Tamil Nadu has notified minimum wages for domestic workers, from maids to house nurses. The action comes after years of struggle by domestic workers to get their occupation recognised in the scheduled employments and receive a minimum wage. In early 2017, the government constituted a committee under the deputy commissioner for labour, Coimbatore, to recommend minimum wages for this sector. The committee had recommended a minimum wage band between Rs 31 an hour and Rs 39 an hour. If a domestic worker works for 8 hours a day on all days she/he would receive Rs 7,500 to Rs 9,300, depending on the particularity of their work and the city or town in which they work.

While most media reports have concentrated on the penal aspect of violations, the minimum wage notified falls far short of the demands of the workers who sought Rs 50 per hour. There has also been a criticism of the manner in which skills have been categorised, with child care and disabled care being treated as unskilled work, while cooking and gardening treated as semi-skilled. It is also surprising that minimum wage classifications even include skills of workers as a variable component.

The International Labour Organisation has been championing the need to recognise domestic work as wage work and implement minimum wages. The convention 189 of 2011 is an attempt to protect the rights of domestic workers. India is yet to ratify the convention and pass legislation across India to protect domestic workers.

Sanitation workers exposed to chronic health diseases at work

India’s sanitation sector has often made news for the wrong reasons. From the regular episodes of worker deaths due to manual scavenging, which has been abolished in India, to stories of the callousness in which workers are employed in garbage collection, reams of newsprint and hours of tape have documented the abysmal condition of workers. In this detailed investigation by Hindustan Times, we get a glimpse of the blatant violations of solid waste management rules that lead sanitation workers to be exposed to severe and chronic illnesses that debilitate them over time. From lung diseases to skin diseases, the workers are burdened with heavy physical and financial costs of these diseases because neither the municipal corporations nor the contractors invest in proper and effective safety gear or monitor its use and availability.

Kuwait to pay 710 unpaid Indian workers of a construction firm who quit after a labour dispute

The Kuwaiti Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour will pay KD 250 (Rs 56,680) to each of the 710 employees of Kharafi National Company, who were registered with the Public Authority of Manpower (PAM) and had left the country between November 2017 and April 2018, the embassy said in a press release. Over 3,600 workers had been stranded without work in Kuwait after the company ran into financial difficulties. They were repatriated by India. When India submitted a list of 3,614 people who were entitled to compensation, an agreement could not be reached after which the Indian government submitted a revised list of 1,200 names. Of these, 710 are to receive compensation from PAM (Public Authority of Manpower). This is less than a fifth of the total number of workers who had lost their jobs.

In a complementary development, the Kuwaiti Government is planning to enter into an agreement with India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Philippines with regards to safeguarding migrant domestic workers, to ease recruitment. This comes in the backdrop of several disputes and allegations of abuse by employers of the migrant domestic workers.

Three workers die due to poison gas in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh

In yet another case of poor safety, three workers who were tasked to clean a dye mixing tank died after inhaling poisonous gas, two others who suffered injuries have survived. Such incidents expose the lack of respect for human lives that is at the core of safety failures. It also points to systemic failure to enforce safety provisions and protect workers’ lives.

Gujarat: Three workers electrocuted in Gir Somnath

Five workers in Gujarat were putting up an electrical pole as part of a project to provide electricity to farmers when the pole touched a live cable, according to PTI. Three of them died and two have sustained injuries.

Tamil Nadu: Three families forced into bonded labour at power loom rescued

Nine people - three men, three women and three children - were rescued from bonded labour in a power loom by police and social workers. “The three families have been shifted from place to place within the same locality for the last 10 years by an arrangement between owners of many workshops,” said T Jaba from International Justice Mission told the New Indian Express. One of these families had been in this condition for four years. The employers have been arrested and the labourers are being offered a rehabilitation amount of Rs. 20,000 under a central scheme.

Bangalore metro rail workers complain against trebling night shift for track maintenance workers

For the past month, the workers employed in the P-Way department of the BMRLC that oversees track maintenance have been doing 16-18 night shifts rather than the usual 6 night shifts per month. The company has claimed that such an increase is due to the increase in traffic in phase 1 as well as the fact that track maintenance work is concentrated between 12 midnight to 4 in the morning when the train services are closed. The Union representing the workers has disputed this and said that such drastic increase in the number of night shifts will have severe effects on the health of the workers as well as their efficiency in such a critical work. 36 workers including 6 women employees have been affected by this change in shift allocation. The union has written to both the company and the labour department.

Unlocking the Indian blue-collar social graph with deep learning, trust scores

Pitched as a “lifecycle management solution”, writes Shadma Sheikh in Factor daily, Betterplace monitors data of 4.5 million blue-collar workers in India. “Companies like HouseJoy use Betterplace to evaluate their workforce and learn about “family structure, education, salary history, salary hikes over a period of time, the employee’s willingness to learn new things, how quickly he or she acquires new skills, social network, financial worth, work experience, and how many jobs they have switched. An attendance solution which uses geofencing-based facial recognition attendance helps rate employees on punctuality.” It’s important to note how this kind of rating system would be differently received if it was for white collar workers. It enables surveillance and social control with the ability to punish workers who take action against their employers. As the workers have no ability to respond to the data being collected, this database and evaluation essentially reflect only the opinions and interests of their employers. This might penalise, as we have seen many times before, workers’ rights to unionise. This is especially prone to misuse in the case of gig economy companies that are not governed by many existing labour laws.

International news

With Samsung bound by arbitration, SHARPS ends a 1,023-day sit-in

The labour rights organisation Supporters for the Health And Rights of People in the Semiconductor industry (SHARPS) ended their 1023 day sit-in after forcing Samsung to agree to third-party mediation. This mediation proposal was initially made more than 5 years ago. SHARPS began their sit-in to raise international awareness about Samsung’s deplorable occupational disease record. As of June 2018, SHARPS has profiled 320 victims of Samsung, among whom 118 have already died. “Samsung will proactively cooperate with the Mediation Committee,” said Kim Sung-Sik, Samsung’s executive vice president who signed the agreement on his company’s behalf.

South Africa: union wins historic court victory against precarious work

The IndustriALL-affiliated National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) have won a ruling in the highest court in South Africa that states that an employer cannot employ a worker for more than three months without a permanent contract. Similarly, the court also ruled that “the worker’s employer is where they perform their duties, and not with the labour broker who placed them”. The labour broker or contractor is omnipresent even in India and is a tactic used by many employers to shirk their responsibility regarding labour protections. Companies typically pay the labour contractors who give the workers only a share of the payment as their wages. While all the companies are aware of this, they prefer to patronise this exploitative system rather than hire the workers themselves.

Weekend reading

What Is Socialist Feminism? Jacobin republishes Barbara Ehrenreich’s famous 1976 essay with a new preface by the author. While she herself says the project of combining Marxism and Feminism is a bit “too ahistoric” for her present tastes, she is proud of “its suggestion that both forms of oppression are rooted in, or maintained by, violence.” For Jacobin, the essay is an exciting thing to publish when, in their words, “more and more people are being exposed to socialist and feminist politics for the first time.”

The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.