148 S.GALAB, S. SUDHAKAR REDDY, ISA BAUD
The commodity chain is not very interested in increasing its productive efficiency
through technological innovations or investment in new machinery. This is shown
among recycling units, where small ones make only intermediate products and large
ones final products for which more machinery is necessary. Wholesalers and retailers
try to invest as little as possible, indicated by the preference among wholesalers to hire
storage premises and among retail traders to hire both premises and transport as and
when necessary. Increasing productive efficiency is mainly done in a ‘low road’
manner by reducing costs throughout the commodity chain. The major way of
reducing costs is not to conform to legal requirements in terms of taxes (for the whole-
salers and recycling units working to some extent informally). Neither do the units or
traders and pickers conform in any way to labour legislation requirements, as I will
indicate further in the next section.
Employment and labour conditions
Levels of employment created in the commodity chain are quite substantial. The ten
recycling units covered created employment for 500 people, of whom almost 40
percent women. The 25 wholesalers covered employed 143 people totally. The 55
retailers employ on average two family members as unpaid labor, coming to 110
people. Itinerant buyers are an important category in the commodity chain in
Hyderabad, with 60 people found in only one sample. This suggests that this category
may well be larger than usually suggested in the literature (with the exception of
Furedy, who has indicated its importance). Pickers covered were almost 200 people,
not including the family members working with the respondents. However, these
numbers are samples from populations of unknown sizes, which do not allow one to
extrapolate the numbers to the city as a whole.
Security of employment is low among all workers in the sector. Only in the recycling
units are employees found who have contracts for a longer period of time. Neverthe-
less, the workers in the wholesale units and recycling units with no official contracts
do tend to work there for longer periods of time. Fringe benefits are not given
according to official rules in the whole commodity chain, but yearly bonuses, gifts in
kind and usually some form of loan is possible from the employer (or buyer of goods)
to cover large expenses or calamities. The loans made by retail traders to their pickers
provide an informal type of social security to them. However, only 10-20 percent of
the pickers have access to this kind of social security.
Incomes have been indicated above for a number of categories of entrepreneurs and
self-employed traders and pickers The wage labourers in the recycling units earn
between Rs 900 – 2,600 per month. Women earn about 60 percent of the wage levels
of men, and form 40 percent of the workers Again, the figures suggest that wage levels
in the sector are not lower than comparable jobs for the different groups of people
involved. However, the social status of the work is much lower than comparable jobs
in the construction industry, for instance.