DASAM has been working with sewer workers and waste pickers across Delhi since its inception. In this regard, the ToT Workshop of 26th August 2023 was organized which was attended by over 100 sewer workers and waste pickers. The resource person for the training was Thaneshwar Dayal Adigaur, Secretary of the Dilli Asangathit Nirman Mazdoor Union and has been engaged in the campaign for the rights of construction workers in Delhi.

He is also a former member of the Delhi Labour Welfare Board, and was a part of the Delhi Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Board (DBOCW) Advisory Committee and member the Regional Advisory Committee (Delhi) in the Dattopant Thengadi National Board for Workers Education and Development (DTNBWED), Ministry of Labour and Employment, Government of india.

With his years of experience in campaigning for the rights of construction workers, he addressed the gathering focusing on the importance of organization building for daily wage workers.

A panel member of the workshop, Ved Prakash Bidlan, president, the Delhi Jal Board Sewer Department Mazdoor Sangathan, elaborated on the importance of demanding the rights and needs of sanitation workers and the role of organized unions in it. Another panel member Aysha. who has been a waste picker in Rithala, Delhi and works for the rights of women in informal labour like waste picking in West Delhi.

The workshop began by highlighting the importance of sanitation workers in sustaining cities, where sewer workers work with the management of liquid waste and waste pickers help in the segregation of solid waste.

Sewer workers’ continuous fight for minimum wage

One of the major demands raised by sewer workers was minimum wage and regular jobs. Most of the sewer workers in Delhi are contractual labourers and one of the biggest challenges faced by contractual sewer workers is their exposure to hazardous working conditions. Another major cause of concern is job security or lack of job security and benefits.

These workers are hired on a contract basis which means that they do not receive benefits such as health insurance, paid leave or retirement benefits. They are not covered under any labor laws and are often exploited by contractors who subject them to unsafe working conditions. Furthermore, contractual sewer workers face social stigma and discrimination due to the nature of their work.It was pointed out that the minimum wage in Delhi, decided by the government, is Rs 646 per day.

However, during the workshop many workers voiced that they receive roughly Rs 430 per day, which is below the decided minimum wage. Furthermore, they are made to give bogus signatures on documents stating they are satisfied with their pay. The workers do not get paid leave and have to often sacrifice on their health due to the incessant hazardous working conditions.

One of the workers from Rohini, Delhi said how he recently secured minimum wages for himself through continuous pressure put on the authorities. However, some workers from Pitampura, Delhi still expressed concerns for not receiving the minimum wage and facing harassment from the authorities upon expressing their demands.

Ashok Kumar Taank from DASAM said that these discrepancies existing in the wages of different workers need to be addressed by bringing the workers under the payroll of the Delhi Jal Board (DJB) which would ensure minimum wage and regular pay.

Through these issues highlighted in the workshop the exploitation by contractors and the loopholes in the government sector were exposed. The work of sewer workers and waste pickers, which is daily labour, must be brought under the regular employment scheme of the government, removing the contractual system.

Women waste pickers: Stories of stigma and exploitation

With the increasing trend of privatization, in 2022, all the five zones of the Ghaziabad municipality have been given to private firms in the name of ‘waste management’, the money for which is being received by the Municipal Corporation. Municipality, being an executive body, has the responsibility to do work instead of outsourcing, however, Ghaziabad Municipal Corporation is the only executive body in India that is taking money from contractors.

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Image Courtesy: New Indian Express/ Parveen Negi

New Delhi: The Mazdoor Adhikar Sangharsh Abhiyan (MASA), an umbrella organisation of workers’ unions, took out a rally in the national capital on Sunday demanding better working conditions and social security for the unorganised sector. The rally was to protest and resist the increasing attacks on working-class rights, living wages, division of labour, state repression and the unjust distribution of resources.
 
The massive rally was also organised against the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government’s attempts to weaken the labour laws and privatise the public sector.

The rally began at Ramlila Maidan and ended at Sansad Marg. It was attended by workers from around 20 states across the country.

Some of the biggest labour representations came from organized sectors like automobile, electronics, garment, pharmaceuticals and related sectors from the core industrial regions in Gurgaon-Manesar (Haryana), Neemrana-Jaipur (Rajasthan), Rudrapur-Haridwar (Uttarakhand), Ahmedabad-Sanand (Gujarat), Pune-Mumbai-Goa, Chennai Sri Perumbudur. Tea garden Workers were also present which included Chai Bagan Sangram Samiti (CBSS) in Darjeeling Hills-Terai-Dooars and Chah Mukti Sangram Samiti, Assam. Workers of Coal mines from Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Bengal and Jharkhand also came to represent their voices. Rural workers from across the country, like MNREGA Mazdoor Union and Construction Workers Union from Haryana, were also present. Workers from unorganized sectors were also there in strength, like the Safai Karamcharis from Gujarat and Rajasthan, Rickshaw and Thela Pullers, Jari makers, Bidi Workers Union, Construction Workers Union, Anganwadi Workers and Domestic Workers Union from West Bengal.
 
“Today, neoliberalism, and especially the present regime backed by fascist forces, is wreaking total havoc on the toilers of the country. We see increased exploitation, repression and criminalisation of workers, intensifying contractualisation and unemployment, falling real wages and standards of living. But in the current context, where war hysteria peaks before the election, the issues of workers and farmers are completely absent from discourse. Hence, there was a need for the rally,” a volunteer of MASA said in a report by The New Indian Express.

 
Among other demands, the MASA has demanded the abolition of the contract system, creation of permanent jobs, Rs. 25,000 as minimum wage, halting the privatisation of public sector undertakings, and Rs15,000 pension, the right to unionise, including all social security benefits, for all unorganised workers.
 
The MASA constitutes organisations like All India Workers Council, Grameen Mazdoor Union (Bihar), Indian Centre of Trade Unions, Indian Federation of Trade Unions, IFTU Sarwahara, Inqlabi Kendra Punjab, Inqlabi Mazdoor Kendra, Jan Sangharsh Manch (Haryana), Shramikshakthi (Karnataka), Socialist Workers Centre (Tamil Nadu), Struggling Workers Co-ordination Committee (West Bengal), Trade Union Centre of India, Workers Solidarity Centre (Gurugram), and Workers Solidary Centre (Uttarakhand).
 
“A country runs on workers’ toil. But the country’s working class neither gets respect for their labour nor do they make their ends meet with their wage,” the organisers said.
 
MASA is a joint platform of struggling workers’ organisations and trade unions from across the country. Over 13 such bodies, including Indian Center of Trade Unions, All India Workers’ Council, Federation of Trade Unions, participated in the “Chalo Delhi” rally.
 
It is a broad coalition of working-class forces from across the country rooted in labour struggles. They have come together in the last three years to get their 17-point Charter of Demands approved.
 
Two and a half years back, on 26 August 2016, 14 workers’ organisations came together to form MASA in a Convention in Delhi and started with focusing initially on these central issues of a workers’ movement – against anti-worker labour law reforms, demanding a minimum wage of Rs. 22,000 (calculations based on the price level on 1st January 2016), abolishing the contract labour system, calling for permanent workers for jobs that are permanent in nature, attending to the demands of unorganized sector workers, and to build an uncompromising struggle against anti-worker neoliberal policies, a report said.
 

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Currently, the formula for calculating the national minimum wage presumes that each wage earner supports three persons (“consumption units”), and that a “consumption unit” needs at least 2,700 calories per day (in addition to essential non-food items such as clothing, medicines and transport).

The new formula, arrived at by using new evidence on how and how much households consume, suggests increasing the number of “consumption units” per household to 3.6.

Given “a reduction in the proportion of workers engaged in heavy work and an increase in the number of workers in moderate and sedentary occupations”, the committee recommends reducing the per head (adult) minimum calorie requirement to 2,400 calories, but also that the monetary value for food consumption used in the formula must account for including 50 grams of protein and 30 grams of fat in an adult diet.

With the new formula–which also ascribes enhanced values to essential non-food items–the committee has arrived at a figure of Rs 375 per day, or Rs 9,750 per month, as the national minimum wage.

The Report of the Expert Committee on Determining the Methodology for Fixing the National Minimum Wage has been prepared by a committee chaired by Anoop Satpathy, a fellow at the VV Giri National Labour Institute, an autonomous institute under the labour ministry.

Estimation Of The Daily National Minimum Wage (NMW) (In Rs)

Source: Report of the Expert Committee on Determining the Methodology for Fixing the National Minimum Wage

Such a national minimum wage would apply across the country irrespective of sectors, skills, occupations and rural-urban locations, the report recommends, and would represent the basic minimum wage that enables healthy living and efficient performance at work.

More than 80% of Indian workers are employed in informal jobs, as per the International Labour Organization’s 2018 report, Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture. These workers are unable to negotiate decent wages and working conditions, and often have no social security benefits.

The increase in minimum wage recommended by the committee–to Rs 375–looks like a lot compared to the Rs 176 at present, “but if you compare it to the central minimum wage, it is not an increase”, Sabina Dewan, president and executive director of research organisation JustJobs Network, told IndiaSpend.

The central minimum wage is what is paid to workers in central government organisations or those working on central government projects, e.g., a building in Odisha for the IT department.

It starts from Rs 333 for agricultural unskilled workers and goes up to Rs 728 for highly skilled, industrial workers.

“Such a minimum wage is in no way representative of the workers’ skill levels and the employer’s capacity to pay,” the report says, “It is just enough to meet the basic requirements of workers and their families and can be made statutory.”

Region-wise alternative
Alternatively, the committee suggests, the country could be carved up into five different regions with diverse socio-economic and labour market situations. The national minimum wage for each region could be estimated using a nationally representative food basket (but at regional average unit price of each food item), the committee says.

The report discourages using regional food baskets in order to “dissociate the consumption pattern from the level of poverty and ability to pay in a region”.

The required expenditure for non-food items would, however, be estimated separately for each region.

As per the committee’s estimates, the minimum wage for various regions, thus calculated, would range between Rs 342 per day (or Rs 8,892 per month) and Rs 447 per day (Rs 11,622 per month).

Source: Ministry of Labour and Employment

Rent allowance extra
Recognising that house rent “accounts for a significant proportion of the overall non-food component”, the committee has recommended an additional house rent allowance, averaging up to Rs 55 per day or Rs 1,430 per month in cities, to be paid “over and above” the national minimum wage.

The rent allowance may vary by city and town, and the committee has recommended that a separate study look into it.

Wages by skill-level
At present, various state governments have opted to fix minimum wages for at least three or four categories of workers based on their skills level–unskilled, semiskilled, skilled and highly skilled.

The national minimum wage recommended by the present committee applies to workers across skill levels.

However, the committee says, to know whether minimum wages should vary by skill level would need a detailed analysis of the National Skill Qualification Framework (NSQF), as well as a standard approach to define skill levels at the national and state levels.

It recommends that a separate committee be set up to study this in collaboration with stakeholders such as the skill development ministry as well as employers’ and workers’ organisations.

Six-monthly revisions
The panel has also recommended reviewing the minimum wage every six months based on the changes in retail price fluctuations, as some states do at present (and others do after a gap of five years).

“I think it is a good idea to revise the minimum wage based on inflation and other economic indicators that change regularly, but implementation will undoubtedly be difficult,” Dewan of JustJobs Network said. “For one, how do you ensure that enterprises of all sizes are apprised of the changes on a regular basis? What will the administrative cost of revising payroll be?”

Beyond subsistence
The labour ministry, in its preface to the report, says the committee’s work aims to achieve “decent work and inclusive growth” for India’s workers, and acknowledges the need for India to address issues such as low pay, wage inequality and gender wage gap.

“The government is ever committed to improving the living conditions of informal economy workers who contribute significantly to India’s economic growth and progress,” the preface states, “A minimum guaranteed income for all workers would therefore go a long way towards bettering workers’ living standards and help India achieve many of its socio-economic goals, including the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).”

The Code on Wages Bill introduced in Parliament in August 2017 aimed to achieve these objectives by making the national minimum wage legally binding by giving it statutory backing.

At present, although a national minimum wage floor has been in place since the 1990s–and has risen progressively to Rs 176 per day in 2017–some 62 million workers are paid less than the indicative national minimum wage, as per the International Labour Organization’s 2018 India Wage Report. The rate of low pay is higher for women than for men.

Making the national minimum wage legally binding would require fixing a single national minimum wage–or different national minimum wages for different states or geographical areas–which was the remit of the present committee.

However, the term of the 16th Lok Sabha having ended, the Code on Wages Bill has lapsed and would have to be reintroduced in parliament after the next government comes to power. The committee’s report would also have be considered by the subsequent government.

A study by JustJobs Network that looked at wages across the globe suggests that successful wage regimes include a minimum wage that serves as a floor to ensure workers’ basic needs, Dewan said. “They must also provide compensation ladders, established through sound industrial relations and collective bargaining in which wage growth is aligned with productivity and prices,” she added.

We welcome feedback. Please write to respond@indiaspend.org. We reserve the right to edit responses for language and grammar.

Courtesy: India Spend

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Around 2,000 workers of a unit of Shahi Exports at Maddur in Mandya district, walked out of the factory to protest against the management on June 23, 2018. The protest that was staged demanding minimum wages, brought out the level of harassment that the women working in the factory face.

Workers protesting outside Shahi exports, Maddur / Image courtesy: GATWU
 
Shahi exports, Maddur, has more than 5,000 employees. The factory here has many units in one compound; these units are specialised units for stitching, washing, embroidery and knitting.  Speaking to Newsclick, Jayaram, one of the union leaders of Garment and Textile Workers Union, present at the site, explained: 

“We had planned a protest for minimum wages in Mandya, but the CM had called for a meeting, so we called off the meeting and decided to wait. The workers were not happy with the developments around their minimum wage and the conditions inside the factory. Adding to this was the payment of only Dearness Allowances (DA) without any increment. Every April the workers get DA; however, these companies do not pay them in April but do in May or June along with all the arrears. Shahi Exports in Maddur has paid DA this month, with no increment. All of this together forced the workers to walk out of the factory and protest.”

The top-ranking officials of the management were in attendance at the protest site. The protesting workers made use of this opportunity to explain the incidents of harassment that they go through and the unhygienic working conditions that prevail in the factory. Jayaram noted that the workers complained about, “verbal abuse by the supervisors, unhygienic toilets that are cleaned only when the units are visited by the management, and unavailability of drinking water during the working hours.” He also pointed out that the workers demanded free sanitary pads from the management. 

As Divya, a worker in this factory for last four years, speaking to Newsclick, noted, “the Garment factories, in general, employ thousands of women”. Nationally, between 60–80% of the workers are women. The women in the industry are subjected to sexual harassment and other forms of harassment. According to her, Shahi Exports in Maddur alone has employed six thousand women from the villages around Maddur and Mandya and the employees are exploited and harassed by the male colleagues in slightly higher positions. Kavitha Rani, another worker also pointed out that they work under tremendous pressure to reach production targets.

Harassment of women working in Shahi Exports Maddur
A study conducted by Garment Labour Union (GLU) and a local NGO Munnade in 2015-2016 show unprecedented levels of sexual harassment and other kinds of harassment in the workplace in the Garment and Textile industries in Bengaluru-the hub of Garment industry in the South of India. According to this study, 14% of women garment workers in Bengaluru have been raped or forced to commit a sexual act; 75% of garment workers report that there is no functioning complaints procedure in their factory for investigating and punishing cases of sexual harassment or violence; 80% of women garment workers report their health and safety is at risk because of working conditions; 43% of women workers were not given maternity leave; 65% do not believe women garment workers can access justice because they are too poor.  

The stories of Divya and Kavitha Rani (names changed to protect from victimisation) working in Shahi Exports Maddur show it is no different in Maddur. 

Divya started working in the factory in July 2014. She joined in the training batch four years ago. Divya is one of the thousands of workers who are abused in the factory. Divya is the sole bread earner in her family. Her husband left nine years ago and she takes care of her daughter and a son. Her job is the only option she is left with. She noted that since she has joined she has been subjected to verbal abuse and harassment and never retaliated till January 2018; after that, she has been subjected to extreme verbal and physical violence. She narrated: 

It became very violent. The torture took extreme turns. They also started to mentally torture me. I would be pushed off the chair. They would hurl abuses at me,  would say I am shameless and call me names like donkey, bitch, owl, etc. I still continued to work. Once I was transferred to a different department, the Production in charge in that department misbehaved with me. He asked me why I came to work and said I am shameless. He also asked me to stop working in the factory and instead do sex work on the streets and asked me why do I wear clothes and come to work. He also threatened me to beat me up if he sees me next day in the factory. 

I could not take it anymore and approached the HR department to complain about it. The HR did not accept the complaint instead they abused me in return. She warned me not to talk to her as I am uneducated and ask me how did I dare to waste my time by not working and visiting her. Since I approached to complain I was tortured for months together. I was shamed in front of other workers and was not assigned to any work. Since January, until a few days ago, I had no work. It is only from the last few days that I am being allowed to work. This man is also using other supervisors to torture me. All of them verbally abuse always. The union had to come to my rescue. This person has been influencing the other workers into shaming me for complaining against him. They come and give me lectures about how good the man is.

He does the same with every other woman in the factory. He touches them inappropriately and approaches for sexual favours. If women refuse, he starts abusing and torturing them. Not a single woman is spared from this torture.

Divya also noted that though the women have been complained about in the past, nothing has been done about it. “There are complaint boxes placed in every floor, and many of us have written complaints after complaints, but the head office is not bothered at all.” 
Kavitha Rani is working in the embroidery department for last five years. She was also one of the workers who had been protesting last week. Kavitha is a thirty-eight-years-old widow living with her children, mother and her elder brother’s family. She travels every day in the morning on a bus, or auto or some tempo to the factory. She had to quit her job, as she was unable to bear the production torture that she was subjected to. After her friends insisted that she should again start working in the factory, she joined as a helper in the embroidery department and now she is working as an operator in the department. Kavitha said that the production torture in the factory is unbearable and verbal abuse — hurling sexual language at the workers is a routine. 
Kavitha said:

Workers in our department are also abused every day. If we ask for something, as basic as warm water to drink in the canteen, we are abused. They keep asking us to quit the job in the factory and buy some cattle and work as an agricultural labourer. We at the embroidery department do not keep quiet — we ask them to give us loans for buying cattle. They know we are not the kinds who would bear everything and anything. The conditions in other departments are worst. Production torture is too much. Workers do not even take lunch breaks. If we ask them why they have not taken a break, they usually ask us to shut up, by saying they haven’t met production targets. All the workers come from a similar background. It is very common to hear workers lamenting about the conditions that are forcing them to work in the factory. “If our husbands were on the right path, why would we have to see these days?” Some ask.

The committee to study “long-pending issues” of the garment workers
The Chief Minister of Karnataka, H D Kumaraswamy has directed the formation of a committee involving labour department officials, textile manufacturers, central trade unions, and garment workers. The committee is said to study the “long-pending issues” of the garment workers including the minimum wage. The Garment and Textile industry workers in Karnataka are protesting for a revision in the minimum wage. 

There have been many reports and studies that have indicated existing violence and harassment in the workplace in the Garment Industry. India’s garment industry operates in the informal sector and remains poorly regulated, resulting in a lack of legally binding employer relationships, limited or no legal protection for workers, a lack of trade union protection and collective bargaining, denial of employment-related benefits and very few functioning grievance mechanisms. This has left the workers to face a vicious nexus of management, police and politicians. As Divya and Kavitha Rani observed, often the workers who complain are targeted. Jayaram noted that the company never fire the workers, but they keep transferring from one department to the other. 

These frequent transfers do not let the workers get accustomed to the department that they are newly posted to. Thus they mostly are unable to fulfil their production targets and this gives the management an excuse to harass them. 

One has to wait and see if the committee formed by the CM would take into consideration the narratives of the workers in the Garment and Textile industry. Jayaram and Divya noted that the functioning sexual harassment cell should be set up with the union members in the cell.

First published in Newsclick.

Yogesh S is part of the editorial collective of the Indian Writers’ Forum and Newsclick.
 

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Let the state provide incomes and social protection, freeing up capital to exploit labour at will says working draft of new flagship report.

 
The recently released ‘working draft ’ of the World Bank’s flagship World Development Report (WDR) for this year neatly summarises what the world capitalist class is thinking – or should be thinking – about labour. Calling for a new social contract, the draft suggests that while income and social insurance can be provided by the state employers should be freed of this onus and allowed to abandon such ‘outdated’ concepts as minimum wage, long term job security, protection from hire and fire, severance pay, doing away with ‘colonial era’ labour laws, and linking of wages to productivity. These suggestions are under a section sub titled ‘Protecting Workers’, in chapter six.

Replacing these fetters on the technology driven, flexible work based new economy will be some form of Universal Basic Income (UBI) and social insurance (not social security). One important factor that will help this system to work better will be detailed data bases used to identify targeted populations for, say, electronic cash transfers.

Are you getting an eerie sense of déjà vu? Haven’t we Indians heard some of these things before? Yes we have. Some of these elements were initiated by the previous Congress led government, others have been energetically initiated by the current Modi govt.

Aadhaar is a massive databases of people, linked to electronic cash transfers. It was a brainchild of the UPA burnished and expanded by Modi sarkar. UPA tinkered around with labour law reforms but then Modi has moved in with a whole new set of Labour Codes (still pending clearance), fixed term employment with in-built hire-and-fire and replacement of social security benefits with insurance based systems. State govts. (Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Jharkhand) run by Modi’s party have gone further amending several labour laws to ease firing of workers.

Although India still officially subscribes to the minimum wage concept – and has laws to back it up – in practice, it is all but abandoned. Trade unions have been fighting for years to increase minimum wages to Rs.18,000 but the govt. is not even willing to talk. The machinery to implement minimum wage and other laws has been gutted country-wide leaving wage fixation to the complete mercy of employers. Working hours and other service conditions too are no longer governed by any laws in practice though on paper such laws exist.

So there it is: the World Bank is nudging govts. of the whole world, especially from developing countries, to move forward in this direction and drawing upon experiences – quoted extensively in the draft report – from countries like India and scores of others for validating its assumptions. On the flip side, Modi’s advisors in the labour and finance ministries will heartily welcome the new guidelines from Washington and hold them up to justify their policies.

The World Bank’s draft report suggests that the state can think about providing a Universal Basic Income to all persons, or preferably in a tapering mode so that the poorer get more and the richer less (or none). It gives patchy data to indicate that such a provision could entail a cost of anything between 2-14% of the country’s GDP. Who will give this UIB? Obviously, the state, from its tax kitty.

So, while the state gives income sustenance to people, and provides social insurance (maybe subsidized for the poor), the need of people to get benefits from labour laws goes down, argues the Report. Why have minimum wage when UIB is there? Why have job security when social insurance is there?

Note that financial liability of UIB and social insurance will be borne by the state while benefits of destroying labour protection laws will go to the capitalist class. This in essence is the new formula of neo-liberalism that the World Bank is trotting out.

The final report will come out this autumn. Meanwhile, capitalists and govts. world over can chew on this delicious concoction served up by their favourite chef, the World Bank.

Courtesy: Newsclick.in

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