India Today – August 19, 2019

14 INDIATODAY AUGUST 19, 2019

Code on Wages Bill subsumes four
central labour laws—the Payment of
Wages Act 1936, the Minimum Wages
Act 1948, the Payment of Bonus Act
1965 and the Equal Remuneration
Act 1976. The OHSWC clubs together
13 laws, including the Factories Act,
the Contract Labour (Regulation and
Abolition) Act, the Interstate Migrant
Workmen Act and several other laws
specifically regulating beedi workers,
cinema workers, construction workers,
dock workers, plantation workers and
motor transport workers, sales promo-
tion employees and working journal-
ists. It reduces 622 sections in all the
laws to a total of 134.

I

ndustry watchers have hailed the
two bills as a positive step towards
increasing ease of business in
India. M.S. Unnikrishnan, chair-
man of the Confederation of Indian
Industry (CII) National Committee on
Industrial Relations, has said that the
new codes will help address violations
of minimum wage provisions and the
exploitation of labour. But the opposi-
tion, labour unions and some labour
law experts accuse the government of
diluting existing labour protections.
They also dispute the government
claim that the Wage Code will impact
the lives of 500 million workers,
pointing out that the Code applies
only to establishments with 10 or
more employees, in effect neglecting
85 per cent of India’s labour market.
The bills also look to reduce safety
inspections for companies employ-
ing fewer than 500 people. And the
entire information technology sector,
governed by a separate act, is beyond
the purview of the bills.
Tapan Sen, former Rajya Sabha
member and general secretary of the
Left-backed Centre of Indian Trade
Unions (CITU), claims that the govern-
ment’s Code on Wages Bill has not laid
down any formula to determine mini-
mum wages, leaving the entire exercise
to the discretion of the central advi-
sory board. The government has also
rejected the recommendation to limit
the number of working hours in a day to

eight. He adds that certain provisions

of the bill dealing with minimum wages

only mention their applicability to

“employees” and not “workers”, who are

defined and treated as distinct. But Jeet

Singh Mann, a labour law expert who

teaches at the National Law University,

Delhi, argues that employers cannot

take advantage of such semantics.

“This is a drafting mistake,” he insists,

“and totally unwarranted. But the law

has been categorical about the rights

of the labourers and no worker will be

impacted because of this.”

Other experts have pointed out

loopholes in the bills, which tilt the bal-

ance in favour of employers rather than

those they are supposedly intended to

benefit. The Code on Wages insulates

the principal employer from liabilities

and shifts accountability, in the case

of irregularities, to contractors sup-

plying workers. “This will encourage

further contractualisation of labour,”

wrote Akriti Bhatia, a Ph.D. scholar

at the Delhi School of Economics, and

Chandan Kumar, who works with the

Working Peoples’ Charter collective.

Several additional provisions are

also seen as facilitating the exploi-

tation of workers. Apprentices, for

example, will no longer be consid-

ered employees though they often do

the work assigned to contractual or

permanent workers. Surprisingly, the

code mentions a provision on “employ-

ees below 15 years of age”. “This could

be seen as a step towards legalisation

of child labour,” say Bhatia and Kumar.

Experts have also criticised the in-

corporation of the draconian provision

of “recoverable advances”. It might lead

to distressed and vulnerable migrant

labourers employed in the informal sec-

tor, who are willing to accept advances,

becoming entrapped in bonded labour.

This also violates the Supreme Court’s

legal presumption that clearly links

advances to forced labour.

An even more striking blow in

favour of employers are provisions

that decriminalise the non-payment

of wages and reduce current penalties

in case of non-compliance. According

to Mann, it’s enormously “damaging

that there is no protection available to

an employee who may file a complaint

against his employer. The person

can be thrown out of work the next

day”. He adds that Section 20 of the

Code on Wages Bill, 2019 allows an

employer to deduct eight days of wages

if an employee stays absent without

notice for just one day. This provision,

he says, goes much further than ‘no

work, no pay’ by enabling employers to

effectively steal their workers’ wages,

permitting them to extract several

days of work for free.

The conversion of labour laws into

four codes was first mooted by the

UPA, but it didn’t have the numbers

in Parliament to forge ahead. This bill

was first introduced in the Lok Sabha

in August 2017 and was referred to the

Parliamentary Standing Committee,

which submitted its report in Decem-

ber 2018. The bill, however, lapsed after

the dissolution of the 16th Lok Sabha.

The new bill incorporates some of the

recommendations of the standing com-

mittee. “There is no dearth of labour

laws in India,” says Mann. “What we

have not seen is proper implementa-

tion; that is where the problem lies.” It’s

a perennial complaint. n

UPFRONT

THE OPPOSITION,

LABOUR UNIONS

AND LABOUR LAW

EXPERTS HAVE

ACCUSED THE

GOVERNMENT OF

DILUTING EXISTING

PROVISIONS

PROTECTING

WORKERS