Trade unions and other organisations, fighting for the rights of workers, have consistently demanded a comprehensive legislation for social security for all categories of unorganised workers. Various governments have proposed a number of Bills over the years, but none with provisions adequate to the requirements of genuine security. LABOUR FILE will monitor the efforts to secure these protections for the unorganised sector workers until a suitable Bill is enacted by Parliament, and will follow the implementation of any legislation.

Heading Towards Social Security

On 24 May 2007, the Union Cabinet approved a plan for the provision of social security to unorganised sector workers. The main provision of the plan is to constitute a National Advisory Board to design, from time to time, suitable welfare schemes for different sections of unorganised workers and to recommend the same to the government. On the recommendations of the Board, the central government will, again from time to time, notify schemes. The schemes are to contain provisions for life and disability cover, health benefits, old age protection, and any other benefit decided by the government. The Board will also monitor the implementation of all schemes, ensure that every unorganised worker has an identity card, and oversee record keeping functions, performed at the state and district levels.

The plan seems to aim at creating a consolidated government bureaucracy, dealing with social security issues, without any foundation in legal entitlements or the recognition of the rights of workers or citizens. While the UPA claims that this is a revolutionary step and satisfies the commitments of the NCMP, trade unions such as CITU argue that the failure to provide for `comprehensive social security` is a failure to adhere to those commitments. The fact that 90 per cent or so workers in the country are unorganised (and thus without basic labour protection and often also without basic social protection) can be found cited everywhere. It is not generally understood, however, that such a large percentage of the working population which contributes hugely to the production of wealth in the country, having a little or no share in the wealth created and a little or no legal protection of their rights, as founded in the Constitution, is a social crisis of some magnitude.

In their reaction to the clearance of the plan by the Union Cabinet, CITU noted that the process went against the spirit of tripartite negotiation and that it virtually negated a series of ongoing exercises among stakeholders to come to some agreement on an adequate plan. Meanwhile, the Social Security Now Campaign has noted the complete disregard for a democratic process, evidenced by the approval of a draft plan so grossly at odds with the demands of workers. The use of concern for the Aam Admi as a principle of interpretation of the political guarantees given in the Constitution has an obviously marginalising effect on the realisation of those guarantees.

Another suggested aspect of the plan is phased implementation, beginning with BPL workers for the first five years, and APL workers in the following years. Setting aside the fact that the official poverty line is widely regarded as too low, and that the shift from universal to the targeted provision of entitlements to the `weaker sections` of society has been widely criticised, such a plan ignores the labour aspect of the problems of unorganised workers and the nature of their insecurity. The latest NSSO survey describes a trend of `informalisation of the workforce` in which some industries are converting their regular wage employees into informal labourers. The significance of this is that the population of informal workers is being increased through changes in employment relationships and practices in all sectors, and cannot properly be understood simply as a problem of the poor and the unfortunate, where workers who previously worked under legal protection have been stripped of these protections. Assuming that these new informal workers will not fall into destitution, and thus not be able to claim social security entitlements under the phased plan, we may see a ballooning of the numbers of APL unorganised workers, who are promised coverage some time in the future, and who under any reasonable calculation of poverty, could still be considered poor. What we may see then, more generally, is an increase in the number of workers without protection, and an empty or at least extremely suspicious promise of coverage in the future.

There should be no doubt that the proposed benefits, should the Board recommend such schemes and should the government choose to act on such recommendations, would be of enormous benefit to unorganised workers, as they would be to anyone living in conditions that many informal workers do. However, the issue to be reflected on is not what would benefit a given population in need, but what the entitlements of workers are and how to ensure that their Constitutional and legal rights are protected and that the promises of the current government, as laid out in its Common Minimum Programme, are enacted.