श्रम की महँगाई/ Cost of Labour with Chandan Kumar (HRW'21 Day 7)

श्रम की महँगाई/ Cost of Labour 

Session Topic: श्रम की महँगाई/ Cost of Labour.

Speaker: Mr. Chandan Kumar (Trade Unionist & National Coordinator at Working people's Charter).

Date: 16th December 2021.

Time: 5:00 to 6:30 PM.

Moderator: Atiya Memon, Social Media and PR Head of PSA and Sakshi Jadhav, Joint Secretary of PSA.

“This pandemic is a collective crisis, more so for daily-wage workers who have been rendered without work and therefore meals.”

            ~K Ganesh

    Politics and Economics both are somewhere down the line as a core of the entire situation of this topic and the situation of the labourers. When the COVID-19 Pandemic hit the world, India was one of the main Nations, which has had to face such an ugly and brutal phase of society where it witnessed millions of people walking on the streets without any employment and food. Many people migrate to the Financial Capital of India- Mumbai, where such a huge number of populations are living in a deplorable situation across informal settlements slums with a poor standard of living yet contributing to building the economy. India has almost 450 million people who would fall under such informal sectors. Such informal sectors are groups of people that consist of those populations who don’t have a guarantee of employment, clear defined wages, proper social security and convenient established housing facilities. Such working sectors, unfortunately, constitutes approximately 93% of the total working population, i.e., 450 Million people, according to the NCEUOS (National Commission for Enterprises in the Un-Organised Sector) Report, which came during the UPA 2 Government. It is very important to reiterate the fact that these are the people who are denied their basic rights just because they come from rural India and Remote pockets like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Bengal, Assam, Orissa, which are the North-east and Central pockets of India and these people belong to Dalit, Adivasis and Muslim Communities. They face the denial of the fundamental rights and injustices called “Structured Inequality”, and had never been able to get any attention for as basic as the land reforms and forest rights. Thus all these caused such distressing circumstances that they had to migrate to metropolitan cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, etc. and the industrial areas and developed corridors for the sake of employment and survival. The Free Neoliberal market system was created in order to basically subsume this sort of workers for extracted cheap labour by the capitalist class of the society to obtain the huge wealth while these working class are facing inequality. There was a report stating that the Workers lost approximately 300 Trillion Dollars as wages. After the Lockdown was imposed in March 2020, the Home Ministry issued an order in the month of June that no industries or employers are going to deduct any kind of wages or deprive these workers of their rights but yet the migrant workers were compelled to live on the roads in front of their working industries without any food supplies, indicating that these industries did not adhere by the government orders. During the burst of Covid-19, a lot of many laws were put on hold and several cases were filed under the Disaster Management Act, especially the cases of non-payment of wages of the migrant workers and the violations of their rights, but the Supreme Court and Home Ministry did not really take any worthy actions. They didn’t get much support from the Government and Judicial system apart from small support which they used to get from a few Civil Societies, the Trade Union Movement and all the people who volunteered in perspective of Food Security and Travelling back to their home towns only after a few months as in the beginning there wasn’t much idea about the how to cope with such situation with all the COVID precautionary restrictions. The migrant workers face cheap politics in the different states where they migrate for work, witnessing Caste bias, questions on identity, community and linguistic discriminations in many areas. The Government of India, now after around 2 years of COVID, is initiating to acknowledge the rights of these migrant workers under the E-Shram Policy. 

After giving a brief introduction in sense of the context of what these migrant workers are their current situation in the COVID-19 period and what could be the way forward, the speaker opened the floor and answered a few questions raised by the participants.

Q. What Rights do you see the Gig Workers getting in India in the near future?

~ To answer the Question, Mr Chandan Kumar, started off with the rapidly growing Reserved Transport Systems and delivery services, such as Uber, Ola, Amazon, etc. He gave an example of recent America’s Amazon’s Warehouse incident during the cyclone where the warehouse owners forbade the workers to leave or it would cost them their jobs resulting in several workers deaths and no one including the government ministries as well took responsibility of it in clear denial of the migrant worker’s rights. There are no authentic policies even in India created by the Government to regulate such gig companies and complexities. Such workers don’t even get much of the profit as it is majorly taken away by the owners, concluding it as there are so far by and large no regulations or policies concerned to the Worker’s working condition, fundamental basic labours rights. However, the WPC has a research unit called Labour Access, which helped in basically thinking, designing and understanding how to cope with such circumstances and trying to bring companies to the negotiation table.

Q. Almost all the ID Cards in the Country requires the address of the recipient, but are there any policies or plans for the migrant workers in this concerning context?

~ India is a country where there are numerous amounts cards and with each government there are different policies pertaining it, depicting the slight politics through ID Cards. The Speaker giving the example of John Hobbes’s “Social Contract Theory” for explaining the relation between the State and citizens, which was very visible during the Farmers Movement. He further explained that during the critical times of elections, there are the uses of cards in favour of these lower-class people in terms of a few monetary aids (Kisan  Atmsammaan, Shramik Maandhan, etc.) and for being a vote bank system.  In the context of India, everything functions on the politics of vote, so these cards remain useless until the migrant workers use them and assert their political rights at the right and accurate political moment & right way.

Q. What are the Speaker’s insights for the policy formation and reforms for the migrant labourers?  

~ Policy is a subjective context. In our Nation’s Political system and Labour Law System, there are many things to argue about for the rights of these migrant labourers such as equality rights, equal pay wage for equal work. The speaker gave the example of the massive strike in Bombay City in 1921, where the Girini Textile Workers started agitating for working hours and wages, resulting in the British Government bringing in two pieces of legislation; the Public Safety Act which argues that the workers can’t have strikes, union power, and right to association. When the bill was passed in the Delhi Assembly, Bhagat Singh bombarded the assembly to support the workers. But from 1921 to 2021, the debate about the passing the new laws for labour policies via government continues to remain the same where the laws are finalized in the Industrial Relational Code which advocates the same that they aren’t allowed to have strike and right to associations and all without the permission of the employer. From 1923 with the Workers Compensation Act till date there are a plethora of labours laws enacted but still, the fundamental rights now act as a custodian to try and ensure its safety which now is seen to be diminishing. The only effective thing which can be done is to create awareness among the workers so that they can develop a better understanding of their basic political and constitutional rights.

Q. Elaborate the merits and demerits of the recently passed labour codes briefly.

~ The Government has sort of aggregated all the 44 labour laws in very precise terms, 29 labour laws have become 4 new labour codes. When the government started the labour laws discussion there were 44 labour codes in 2002 when Prime Minister Vajpayee formed a committee called the National Commission for Labour, popularly known as the Ravindra Verma Commission Report which was a principle guiding lines to understand the labour laws and recommended that many archived labour laws should be brought together, aggregated and codified and in later in UPA 1 Government when Prime Minister Manmohan Sigh also formed a Committee known as NCEUS (2007), and that commission also recommended the same as prior in its report that we need to have separate laws for the unorganised workers hence the “Unorganised Workers Social Security Act” in 2008 was enacted. And now it finally seems to be implemented gradually. Further, there are four new laws are drafted: Labour code on wages, labour code on industrial relations, labour code on Social Security and last is labour code on Occupational, Safety, Health and Working condition (OSHW Code). So, it started off with 44 laws but now in the current context, there are 29 labour laws and these 4 labour codes are to deal with different purposes as per its concerns, which now are been passed in parliament in 2019 but not implemented in all the states as the rules are not finalized yet. 

Q. Are there any laws or framework which states that Migrant Workers can work anywhere in the country even during the era of a pandemic? 

~ Speaker tackled this Question by stating that there are several constitutional approaches for individuals and other unorganized sectors to approach while facing such a situation as the laws clearly state that everyone is entitled and is free to move anywhere in India and work or settle. They can’t even be discriminated against on any sort of basis and taken away their employments without any severe charges. 

The Speaker further encouraged all to interact with the Labour workers and migrant workers on the local level to understand their stand especially in times of COVID-19. How they managed the works and sanitation, etc. As per recent data, there are around 120 Million of them and the living conditions are as well very poor and unhygienic with low wages of these migrant workers in this pandemic period. The Speaker explained their living conditions with the example of Prof. Jan Bremen’s “Wage Hunters and Gatherers” where they are basically travelling in the republic where there’s no impunity and accountability on the State to ensure that these migrant workers have their basic constitutional rights. So, the politics of migration contribute to India’s economy but yet the state is not really recognizing it the way it should be done.  


“Without labour, nothing prospers.”

- Sophocles.

~ Report Drafted by Priyanka Mahendra Mishra, Member of PSA, TYBA, Political Science.

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