Law’s labour lost!

The Workers’ Act, meant to safeguard the lives of construction workers, has loopholes that have been exploited by builders letting labour contractors take the fall — something the Labour Commission intends to change soon

In August, 18 construction workers lost their lives because of unsafe living conditions or accidents on construction sites. If one looks at the figures available till August 2011, then the number of labourers who have died come to 60. This, despite there being a provision in the constitution to safeguard the lives of these labourers. The Workers’ (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1996, is toothless and has not been used against a single builder or developer when a construction worker has died on site. All cases for these deaths have been registered against contractors, who supply labour for these constructions. Now, organisations working for the welfare of construction workers are demanding a proper implementation of the law, by insisting that the builder or developer should be made responsible if such a situation arises. And while the Labour Commissioner’s office said that builders are taking advantage of loopholes that exist in the law, the builders claim that every case should not be measured in the same manner as in certain cases it could be the workers’ or contractors’ fault who sometimes refuse to adhere to security measures they are provided. Since 2007, over 530 deaths have been registered in Pune district alone. And one could blame the lack of enforcement of the Workers’ (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1996, as not a single builder has been charged for being responsible for the death of construction workers. When we spoke to Baba Kamble, president of Bandhkam Kamgar Panchayat, he said, “The lack of safety measures and poor living conditions of construction workers result in as many as 100 of them losing their lives every year. The reason is obvious — builders and contractors do not provide enough security measures and health facilities.” Mentioning how toothless the Act is, Kamble said, “The law says that the principal employer of the construction workers can be booked for causing death due to negligence. However, the said Act has never been implemented so far. The labour commission followed by the police end up charging the contractor under Section 304 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).” Kamble said that the responsibility of enforcing the Act lies with the Labour Department and the labour commissioner. This is missing. “It is all to protect wealthy builders.” he alleges. Kamble informs Mirror that Section 44 of the Act says that an employer shall be held responsible for providing constant and adequate supervision of any construction work, otherwise he shall be liable to imprisonment for up to three months and a fine. Section 53 of the same Act indicates that associates, management or partners of  the employer shall be deemed guilty of that offence and be liable to be  proceed against and punished  accordingly. T G Cholke, additional labour commissioner, said, “Builders often take advantage of loopholes in the law and most cases of negligence resulting in deaths of these construction workers get registered against contractors. However, we have now decided to lodge a complaint against both parties. We are soon going to launch a safety drive in which we will file a case against the builders and contractors in case of deaths due to failure of security measures.” When questioned, Rohit Gera, vice president of the Pune Confederation of Real Estate Developers Association of India (CREDAI), said, “It is wrong to charge all under the said Act. Sometimes, the worker himself may be responsible for his death. In many  cases, contractors do not implement security measures despite us providing it to them. Each case should be investigated independently and only then should a case for the crime be registered.”Gera further added that CREDAI often conducts security audits on all their 1,850 ongoing sites to avoid any mishaps. Source: http://www.punemirror.in/article/2/2011092620110926054641737a75b03d5/Law%E2%80%99s-labour-lost.html

Labour Welfare Organisation gives hope to wards of beedi workers

Syed Muthahar Saqaf

TIRUCHI: The Labour Welfare Organisation of the Union Ministry of Labour and Employment disbursed education scholarship and attendance incentive to the tune of Rs. 19 crore to about 1.40 lakh school and college going wards of beedi workers in the state during last year.

While education scholarship ranging from Rs. 250 to Rs. 8,000 per annum is provided to both boys and girls, the attendance incentive is given only to girl students of classes from V to VIII.

The Labour Welfare Organisation provided an annual scholarship of Rs. 250 to students of classes from I to IV; Rs. 500 to students of classes V to VIII; Rs. 700 to students of class IX; Rs. 1,400 to students of class X; and Rs. 2,000 to students of classes XI and XII. The department provided every year Rs. 3,000 to the wards of beedi workers pursuing diploma, under graduate and post graduate courses and Rs. 8,000 to those pursuing professional courses.

The total annual family income should not exceed Rs.10,000 per month for getting the education scholarship, D. Job Prince, Deputy Welfare Commissioner, Labour Welfare Organisation, Tirunelveli, told ‘The Hindu'.

To check the practice of girls in the school going age getting engaged in beedi rolling and encourage them to attend the schools, the Department is providing attendance incentive to the girls of classes V to XII. An incentive of Rs. 440 is given to each beneficiary at the rate of Rs. Two per day and is given to a maximum of 220 days.

During last year, education scholarship and attendance incentive worth Rs. 19 crore was disbursed to about 1.40 lakh beneficiaries of Tirunelveli; Vellore; Tiruvannamalai; Tiruchi, Erode, and Salem districts and Chennai city.

Mr. Job Prince said while scrutinising the applications for incentive and scholarship, the department noticed that some of them who were not involved in beedi rolling had applied for the same. To check this, from the academic year 2010-11, the wards have been directed to produce the beedi workers pass books and provident fund receipts to the officials when they come for verification of the applications. The scholarship will be sanctioned only if these documents were produced by the applicants, Mr. Job Prince said. The official will undertake the verification of the applications after duly informing the school authorities to enable the students to remain well prepared to produce the same, he added.

Source: http://www.hindu.com/2011/05/20/stories/2011052059970100.htm

Beedi workers demand rise in wages

They are getting only Rs.50 for rolling 1,000 beedis

NIZAMABAD: Beedi rollers and packers, under the banner of Andhra Pradesh Beedi Workers' Union, took out a rally here on Saturday and later staged a dharna demanding the government to issue the final G.O in the place of draft notification given on November 30 last increasing their wages.

Addressing the gathering of beedi workers at the Collectorate, the union State president V. Krishna deplored that beedi workers were lowest paid amongst the working class in the State. While prices of all essential commodities were skyrocketing, the beedi workers were hardly getting Rs.50 for rolling 1,000 beedis, he said.

When the workers were suffering from different ailments rolling and packing beedis for year, the owners of beedi industries were amassing wealth, he said and pointed out that the managements were spending a maximum of Rs.199 for making Rs.1,000 beedis, but they were getting Rs.400 by selling them.

Plea to issue final G.O.

Coming down heavily on the government for not issuing the final G.O. to implement payment of Rs.145 for rolling 1,000 beedis, Rs.5,000 per month for sorters and staff members, Rs.7,000 for head clerks and Rs.10,000 for managers provided in the draft notification, he said that it had promised to bring in the GO within 60 days, but failed to keep its word.

The union's State general secretary M. Narender described the delay in issuance of GO as injustice to the working class.

Appealing to all the elected representatives to exert pressure on the government, he said eight lakh families depended on the beedi industry in the State.

The union district president Muthanna presided.

Source:The Hindu, Sunday, Apr 24, 2011

RESOURCE METERIAL

RESOURCE METERIAL

A Handbook on Labour Laws of India

Labour Rights and Labour Standards for Migrant Labour in India

For stranded migrants, a jail stint is the first step towards freedom

An immigrant’s travails highlight the challenges that workers stranded overseas face while trying to return home

Hyderabad: Durgam Dastagiri spent nearly five months trying to get thrown into a Saudi jail. It was the only way he could go home.

A slight, bird-like man with a neatly groomed moustache, Dastagiri is one of approximately 4.5 million Indian workers who have moved to countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council, or GCC (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates), to take up semi-skilled jobs to support families in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Sometimes, the job is all that is promised. More often, it isn’t. And, because of the unique, almost repressive laws governing immigrant workers in most West Asian countries, many find themselves stranded.

“We’ve had cases of people who have been stuck not just for four and five years, but 18, 20 years. We ask them why they stayed so long and they say they didn’t know what else to do,” says Mehru Vesuvala, who works at Migrant Workers Protection Society in Bahrain. “They tried to leave and found that they could not.” Read More

Source:http://www.livemint.com/2011/05/19000236/For-stranded-migrants-a-jail.html?h=B

Child labour - India's 'cheap commodity

Farm workers toil long hours in the fields in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu for little reward in the intense heat.
But it is often their only means of survival.
Cheap labour is one commodity India has in abundance.
Hidden from public view though, is another workforce.
In an isolated spot, miles from the nearest town, is a thriving matchstick industry.
Here inside makeshift straw huts - and in the small dwellings that neighbour them - we found some of India's youngest workers.
Rows of exhausted young girls - up to 20 and as young as five are working alongside their mothers.
For 16 hours a day their tiny blistered fingers skilfully turn out matches for export.
Ordered to leave
The toxic smell of sulphur is overwhelming in the windowless room.

CHILD LABOUR 2006 218m aged 5-17 in work 126m in hazardous work Almost 50m work in Africa 122m work in Asia 70% of workers in agriculture Estimated cost of ending child labour: $760m over 20 years Source: International Labour Organisation

Twelve-year-old Sindhu dips the tips of the sticks into hot sulphur.
"I start work early but don't finish until late into the night. I get paid less than two dollars a week."

Our presence was clearly not welcome. As we were speaking to the girls the owner came in and ordered us to leave.
Within walking distance are other factories. But again, when we arrived, the youngest workers were quickly led away.
While the factory owner denied he was employing underage workers, almost every single household in this part of Tamil Nadu has one or more children working long hours in appalling conditions.
Campaigners say over 11 million children are forced to work in India.
Lighting a fire for a rare family meal, Sarojama gathers her five grandchildren around her.
Exploited
She has barely been able to feed them, so she was forced to borrow money from a local factory owner.

Unable to pay back the loan she sent her young grand-daughter to work. Parimeeta was taken out of school and has been working 12 hour days for two years.
The debt is less than $20.

Campaigners fear that as India's economy continues to boom, children are increasingly being exploited to meet the country's hunger for global success.
In a recent raid in the capital Delhi, police rescued a large number of boys from local sweatshops.
Agents had lured them from India's poorest regions, promising the children that they would be taken care of and paid well.
They were found hidden on the top floors of garment factories - held captive in filthy cramped rooms under lock and key.
They painstakingly spent hours applying crystals to garments. Many of the clothes end up being sold in shops in the UK.
Ineffective
These are places the authorities say are difficult to close down.
But Swami Agnivesh of the Bonded Liberation Front says that hundreds of children are kept hidden from public view in the buildings of crammed alleyways.

"They are kept in the most appalling conditions and not enough is being done to help them," he said.
India has laws in place to protect children and bans the use of young workers, but they remain pretty ineffective.
The United Nations Children's' Fund says that the sheer volume of children engaged in work is living proof of the world's failure to protect them.
That is the reason why the agency's work is focused on building a protective environment which safeguards children from exploitation and abuse.
In Tamil Nadu local charities have helped pay off families' debts so that at least some children can be released from the matchstick factories.
Finally freed from the shackles of work, they now have some hope of reliving their childhood.
Bu it is often a dream that is short-lived.
Charity workers admit most of the children are likely to find themselves forced back into a life of bondage. Read the full ILO report 
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/5059106.stm

Fair labour standards for domestic work

A major problem in forcing a recognition — officially and in popular perception — of domestic workers as workers, stems from the nature of their work. Spanning cooking and housework on the one end and caring responsibilities on the other, housework and caring has been described as ‘reproductive labour’ — the unpaid and uncompensated burden women in patriarchal households have shouldered often in addition to paid employment. We have historically seen campaigns at the international level that have demanded wages for housework, in an attempt to combat the devaluation of housework and thereby women’s contribution to the economy. The devaluation of the work performed by domestic workers and the refusal by most states and private actors to recognise this category as workers stems from the ideological classification of this work as non-productive/reproductive labour.

Statistical sources on the size of the domestic workforce in India vary in their estimates, ranging from 4.75 million (NSS 2005) to over 90 million. For several years now, the National Domestic Workers’ Movement in India, the largest membership-based organisation that works with different categories of domestic workers across 24 states in the country, has been campaigning for protection from abuse, wage regulation, fair and decent conditions of work and social security for domestic workers — migrant, live-in and other categories of this extremely vast, unregulated and unprotected workforce.

Networks like the National Domestic Workers Movement challenge the basis of the organisation of work and assumptions of productive and reproductive labour. There is a resistance from the state and from employers. Interestingly, established trade unions are not particularly interested in fighting for protection for domestic workers either, not only because they are an unorganised workforce, but also because in the hierarchy of work, domestic work is devalued by trade unions that are concentrated in the organised sector.

The Domestic Workers (Regulation of Employment, Conditions of Work, Social Security and Welfare) Bill, 2010, has been a subject of internal debate between the government and social movements working in this sector especially after the circulation by the ILO of the Brown Report on Decent Work for Domestic Workers, after the 99th session of the International Labour Conference, 2010, calling for state parties to hold consultations with stakeholders and provide comments on a proposed convention that will set fair labour standards for domestic work. The year 2011, it is expected, will see both international and domestic law on this important subject in place. It is therefore apt to outline the key concerns raised in the Brown report and anticipate some queries that might arise in the course of our domestic deliberations on this issue, in the hope that a national debate will strengthen the work of the domestic workers’ movement in India to secure full and comprehensive protection.

The fact that the work site for domestic work is often the home of the employer, not a public place, the concern for not derogating the right to privacy of employers is often posited as contradictory to the right of the worker to regulated employment. The employment of a domestic worker involves an opening of the private space of the home to a paid worker who is not part of the household. The Home Work Recommendation, 1996 (No. 184) builds on this by providing that “(i)n so far as it is compatible with national law and practice concerning respect for privacy… officials entrusted with enforcing provisions applicable to home work should be allowed to enter the parts of the home or other private premises in which the work is carried out.”

While the Brown report recognises the possibility of children under the age of 18 but above the minimum age of employment engaging in domestic work, this stands already regulated by law in India with the enactment of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, which makes it mandatory for all children between the ages of six and 14 to be at school. There is without doubt a large gap between the legal position and practice, but unarguably protection needs to be put in place for children between the ages of 14 and 18 who are in domestic work.

The rapid rise in crossborder trafficking calls for special protection for migrant domestic workers, often people at risk because they have crossed international borders without requisite documentation. The provision on migrant domestic workers however needs to address the important issue of reintegration and/or return after completion or termination of contract — a time when they are particularly at risk.

The draft bill attempts to mandate a registration of workers both in source and work areas, and complete documentation on employers and placement agencies; and limiting the work day to eight hours for part time and nine hours for live-in workers with adequate rest; overtime at twice the wages, but limited to an overall 10 hour work day with a provision for annual wage increases and most importantly specification on conditions of work — which include living facilities and food. While the will of the enforcing authority is critical to the guarantee of protection for domestic workers, the disciplining of employers and regulators alike can happen effectively only through the exercise of the right to freedom of association and the strengthening of collective bargaining by domestic workers through membership based associations and unions. Since this is a predominantly female workforce, unionisation will have a positive impact on the profile workers’ associations in the country and hopefully also the methods.

Finally, advocacy and rights groups have found that domestic workers are especially vulnerable to sexual harassment and sexual assault, and often find it impossible to access the criminal justice system. There must be an interlinking clause in both legislations that offer protection to domestic workers against sexual harassment.
Source:http://expressbuzz.com/opinion/op-ed/fair-labour-standards-for-domestic-work/244537.html