Professor Shyam Sundar is an eminent Labour Economist teaching at the Xavier Labour Relations Institute (now called Xavier Institute of Management, Jamshedpur) and is on the Editorial Board of the Indian Journal of Labour Economics . In an e-mail interview, he speaks in detail about the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown and on migrant and organised labour.....
How do you see this extended lockdown affecting labourers across the country considering the majority of them hail from the unorganised sector?
A. T he national lockdown now is potentially for 40 days and this means loss of income for more than a month for 400 millions of informal workers which according to the ILO will push them into deeper recesses of poverty. The informal workers are reported to be not able to avail even the additional free foodgrains and pulse since they do not have necessary documents such as the ration card.
On the other hand, contract and other precarious workers employed in the so-called organised sector do not have KYC completed and portable EPF account and hence are not able to get the EPF subvention benefits nor are they able to make withdrawals from their EPF which given their low and uncertain incomes will anyway be lower. The MSME establishments have closed down and due to absence of liquidity/revenue even the well-meaning employers are unable to pay wages to their workers.
The issue of employment security will be a limited privilege to the labour aristocrats, i.e. permanent and skilled workers and unemployment will be much higher than around 24% estimated by the CMIE. The absence of decent income flow, inaccessibility of foodgrains, etc., and absence of any social protection mean starvation and livelihood threats for these millions of unorganised workers. Thus, the potential 40-days of lockdown will mean intensification of vulnerabilities to these workers. The lower MNREGA wage and limited availability of work under this scheme is not providing enough relief to them in the rural sector, though exempting farming activity will provide some relief. These hardships will intensify considerably due to the extension of the lockdown.
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The Central government has not so far announced any credible and comprehensive relief measures to the poor and the informal workers and there are media and field reports which show that even the notification of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) dated March 29 is not widely implemented. Now the notification of the MCA dated April 10 which is purely connected with linking wage payment with the CSR expenditure is being conveniently interpreted by many that employers are not required to pay wages. Thus, there will be legal battles on the existential issue of payment of wages during this extraordinary time of COVID-19.
What steps can be undertaken, within the lockdown period itself, to take care of migrant labour?
It is reported that migrant workers ranging from thousands to millions in several industrialised States have been stranded and started their exodus in several States which has been quickly arrested. The following measures should be quickly implemented: One, in each State a multi-partite special taskforce or a Board should be constituted which should include representatives of trade unions, the NGOs, relevant Departments like Labour, Women and Welfare, etc. to take stock of stranded migrant workers, constitute more relief/settlement centres, to allocate these workers to these centres, ensure compliance of basic needs (like shelter, food, clothing, etc.), provide psychological counselling to address their mental/emotional travails and concerns, among others.
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Two, establish helplines through social media, FM and other radio channels, etc. to connect with the unidentified migrant workers. Three, empower the tashildars to issue temporary ration cards valid for 2-3 months to help these workers and their families avail themselves of ration supplies which will decongest relief/settlement centres. Four, several State governments like Jharkhand are sending varying amounts — ₹1,000 or so — to their respective workers and information regarding the origin States of migrant workers could be built. Five, most importantly, they should be tested if they have travelled and/or living in congested places. Six, if the migrant workers are construction workers which probabilities are higher, then, their welfare can be taken care of from the Construction Cess Fund. Six, the orders of the Supreme Court and High Courts (Bombay and Karnataka for example) should be strictly implemented.
Many migrant labourers have moved back to their native places after the announcement or just before, of the lockdown. Employers are worried about the absent labour. What is the way out once the lockdown ends?
The share of migrant workers that have returned due to national lockdown is not significantly high enough to warrant thinking about this issue as the Central and the State governments have successfully arrested the exodus. However, there is a possibility that in the short run due to the COVID-19 impact the absence might be somewhat intense and the mobility-issues long-distance migration might temporarily be operative which will slow down return migration to previous work and geo spaces. However, the market forces obtaining in the rural sector due to restricted demand arising out of economic losses incurred during COVID-19 (difficulties related to harvesting of rabi crops and marketing issues) which mean limited liquidity for employment in future and hence the demand for labour will be relatively much less than in the past.
The MGNREGA offers limited support due to poor implementation issues reflected in pending arrears, low average of days of work (45-50 days in a year) offered during a year, lower NREGA wages, etc. may temporarily offer cushion to the migrant workers; even an optimised implementation of this scheme means 100 days of work. If long-distance migration is weakened, then there could be changes in the geographical composition of migrant workers in the sense that “neighbourhood migration” might replace “long distance and indiscriminate migration” as a solution which if succeeds could change long term migration effects.
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The COVID-19 effects will be felt in the legal and institutional reforms concerning workplaces and this will strengthen the incentive for the migrant workers to move out to other States if not old States. The much stronger political measures like regional parties’ violence inflicted on the migrant workers and reservation of jobs for locals have not discouraged inter-State migration because of the under-supply of locals to several low-waged unskilled tasks and the lower reservation wage of the migrants.
Post-lockdown, the market wage is likely to be revised downwards till recovery and then revival phases which are going to take some time and hence the naturally migrant workers who are used to under-bidding and with low reservation wage (the wage at which workers are willing to supply labour) will be even more needed. Adverse political and economic measures like job reservation for locals, violence targeting some types of migrants have not historically discouraged inter-State migration and COVID-19 is less likely to impact adversely. But what will surely happen is the strengthening of legal and institutional frameworks concerning them including portable ration cards and EPF accounts, etc.
Some States (like Rajasthan ) have pushed labour laws that allow 12 hour shifts in essential industries to deal with social distancing measures. How do you view these measures?
The 12-hour shift is based on two assumptions which may not be valid ones. One, in a factory all workers are capable of doing different tasks and hence skills are substitutable; as a result instead of say 100 workers, a factory could employ say two-thirds of the total workers and this will also satisfy social distancing and health security principles. Two, it is kind of inversion of lump of labour fallacy which holds that there exists a given number of hours of work which could be redistributed to create more or fewer jobs.
The 12-hour work arrangement could have some adverse implications. One, if workers are not circulated across a pay period so that all workers enjoy equitable or equal opportunities getting work in a factory, this measure will introduce inequalities in income. Two, though workers will be eligible to get overtime wages which will maximise their incomes, the longer hours of work will adversely affect work-life balance, increase fatigue and in a sense could pose threats for occupational safety and health also.
Three, employers could be incentivised to employ non-regular workers to reduce cost-to-company (CTC) and in that sense contract and trainee workers might be preferred which could cause unrest. Four, the work arrangement will most likely affect incomes of women employees as they need to balance work and family time; further their families may not prefer to send them to the factories due to genuine and/or perceived insecurities in these times. Five, the onus of providing transportation will fall on the factories as public transport system is still under prohibition, which all firms may not have — though the government and industry could solve these logistical issues. But safe transport especially for women employees will be an important concern.
Finally, not only women may be discriminated against, there could be other forms of discrimination like physically differently abled workers’ employment chances will be limited. Having said these, social dialogue, i.e. trade unions and the management should discuss these issues and sort them out cordially. Hence the ILO also stresses the role and importance of social dialogue in these extraordinary contexts.
How can one use this as an opportunity to organisethe hitherto unorganised labour?
If there is any powerful lesson from this entire dreadful COVID-19 context it is that unorganised labourers need two kinds of cover, viz. union organisation cover and legal cover. Had the mainstream trade unions organised the precarious workers such as daily-wage earners, contract workers, migrant workers in highly labour-intensive sectors like construction, then trade unions would not only have been powerful but also proved highly useful in the extraordinary crisis times such as these to partner the government in providing relief to them.
In a sense the “market” for unionism is quite high in India as 85-90% of the 470 million workers are not organised by any trade union. Mainstream trade unions will have to adopt unconventional organising strategies and adopt sector-specific employment relations strategies to organise the workers, though some work has already begun in this direction and hence India has witnessed rising unionisation unlike in the Western countries.
Trade unions have begun to organise the employees in the IT industry, platform economy and other emerging sectors which are also unorganised as conventional industries and occupations such as construction, domestic workers are unorganised. Trade unions need to build bridges with civil society organisations (CSOs) who organise unorganised workers even in the so-called organised industries like garment and also with the CSOs who are engaged with issues concerning environment (green activists).
On the other hand, trade unions need to work hard and persistently to ensure large scale registrations of unorganised workers under the Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act, 2008 and utterly pressurise the government to issue smart portable electronic chip-based registration-cum-identification cards as envisaged in the said Act. Direct benefit transfer (DBT) to these millions of workers would have been easier. Trade unions need to employ not merely organising strategies but also use legal battles in the courts, lobbying with the government, network with like-minded organisations and become as encompassing as possible. If the union coverage is larger then trade unions could not have been ignored by the government in the design and delivery of relief measures.
