[ad_1]
As factories come to life after weeks of closure, Indian states are diluting labor laws. A key change made by at least seven states is to increase maximum work hours from 48 to 72 per week. In most cases, these rules, notified in mid-April, will remain in effect for three months. Uttar Pradesh has suspended most labor laws for three years.
The Center had been reflecting on an increase in hours of work after industries were hit by the shutdown to contain the coronavirus. But it appears that states have been quietly introduced to contentious change.
In effect, states have scrapped one of the defining rights of workers in an industrialized world: eight hours to work, eight hours to sleep, eight hours for what they want. It appears to be an act of amnesia. Historically, pandemics in India have led workers to demand more rights rather than settle for less.
“Exempt” from the Factory Law
Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh have made radical changes, suspending a series of labor laws. Uttar Pradesh has completely rejected the Factory Act of 1948 for three years. Other states issued notifications that “exempt” workers from the specific provisions of the law.
The law limits working time to 48 hours a week and provides for a weekly day off. Spread over six days, that translates to an average eight-hour workday. The law also stipulates that daily work hours must not extend beyond nine hours, spread over ten and a half hours with breaks included. Additionally, a five-hour shift must be followed by at least a half-hour break. Overtime, according to Section 59 of the law, must be remunerated at twice the hourly rate of regular wages.
Now factory workers could be forced to work 12 hours a day, with six-hour shifts spread over 13 hours. While Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, and Haryana will pay overtime specified in Section 59, Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh have ignored the law to say that they will pay regular wages. Rajasthan is silent about overtime pay.
Rajasthan’s order is forceful: with factories having to settle for a 33% reduced workforce, the new rules would ensure the “minimum presence” of workers, now necessary to keep up the flow of essential supplies. Extended hours would allow three shifts and limit movement of workers. Instead of returning home part-time, they would only travel twice a day: they reported to the factory in the morning and returned home late at night. Gujarat claims that the new rules are for the “security and social distancing” of workers.
Madhya Pradesh, which also exempts new factories from Labor Department inspection, to a large extent, brilliantly called their changes “reforms,” aimed at attracting new industries, allowing flexibilities for employers, and creating jobs.
On the factory floor
What will these changes mean in real terms for Indian workers? Labor law enforcement is weak at best. A lot of factories are not registered, therefore, without restrictions by such rules in the first place.
In the Tamil Nadu garment industry, workers, mostly women, are paid by the piece rather than by the hour. According to Sujata Mody, who is affiliated with the New Union Initiative and the Union of Fashion and Garment Workers, the employees of these units are forced to work 10 hours without being paid overtime. In order to circumvent the rules, workers were forced to slip and then work for an additional hour or two, he said.
In larger sectors like the auto industry, which have stricter mandates, regular workers are paid overtime, Mody said. The same cannot be said for a range of smaller manufacturing units, where workers spend 10-12 hours a day, in addition to long hours spent traveling.
Older factories have higher regulations than those in sectors that shot up after liberalization in 1991, Mody explained. According to a survey, about 92% of the 61 million jobs created in the 22 years after liberalization were informal jobs. As offices and housing complexes rose overnight, construction workers on short-term contracts worked 12 hours before returning to their villages. Manufacturing companies also switched to informal employment.
Overall, this has led to a lower quality of life, poorer working conditions and less job security. While an informal workforce meant that employers had fewer regulations, it also reduced the bargaining power of regular workers.
No matter how state governments try to launch it, suspending legislative guarantees, as they are, will likely worsen conditions.
Eight hours of work
The orders suggest that India is quickly forgetting promises made in forums like the International Labor Organization. That includes its ratification of the first convention adopted by the ILO in 1919: the Working Hours (Industry) Convention, which guaranteed an eight-hour working day. That it was the first on the agenda of the newly formed organization gives an idea of its symbolic weight in labor movements.
Welsh manufacturer Robert Owen had coined the motto “Eight Hours of Work” in 1817. For the rest of the century, workers in Europe and the United States marched in demand for shorter working hours. It entered revolutions in France. It became a rallying cry for European and American labor organizations, uniting workers from all countries. Marx wrote of the “werewolf hunger for surplus labor” that fueled the depredations of capital in a worker’s time.
On May 1, 1886, workers in the United States went on strike to demand an eight-hour workday. Three days later, police fired on workers who were still protesting in Chicago, and May 1 became Labor Day, consecrated in blood.
In Britain, a Factory Act passed in 1847 gave women and children a 10-hour day of work, and in the 1870s, several unions had earned nine-hour days. The colonial government then turned its attention to workers in India, who still live in a regulatory desert.
Early factory law grew out of debates that related almost exclusively to Bombay ‘s growing textile industry, writes historian Aditya Sarkar. Officials who wrote at the mills noted the “physical wear and tear of the employees” and, in a burst of paternalistic respect, recommended shortening the 14-hour day. The Factories Act of 1881 granted workers the grand concession of a 12-hour day.
Approximately half a century later, in 1921, the colonial government of India would be one of the first to ratify the ILO’s eight-hour working day convention. The intervening years had seen a world war and at least two pandemics that devastated India.
Plague Pandemonium
Both the plague of 1896-1997 and the Spanish flu of 1918 shook labor relations in the urban industrial centers of India. Sarkar’s account of the plague in Bombay finds a grim resonance in the events unfolding today. The contagion spread like wildfire throughout the city. So did the panic, created by the disease, as well as the administration’s attempt to inspect and control the bodies of the poor. The workers fled to the field only to be rejected by the famine.
The strikes and riots that erupted during the plague years, Sarkar writes, created fleeting solidarity between disparate groups of poor workers. As cities emptied of workers, creating labor shortages, employers tried to offer lucrative concessions: higher wages, no more arrears, bonuses. “The attempt to retain these concessions later, as a matter of right perceived by the mill workers, led to an industrial conflict of an intensity hitherto unheard of in Bombay,” writes Sarkar.
But the worlds of work in colonial India would not change significantly for decades. Chitra Joshi, writing at Kanpur Mills, describes public beatings and management attempts to monitor even the time they spend in the baths. Business days in the early 20th century still ranged from 12 to 15 hours. The administration seemed to justify long hours of work in the old language of paternalism: it was better for children to spend their days in the “sanitary environment” of a “well-run mill” than to spend time in “a dirty bazaar”.
Joshi notes that workers’ accounts at the time equate long hours at a factory with “a sense of lack of freedom,” with time stolen from family and friends. “Work is a jail,” says an employee. World War I worsened conditions. Working hours were increased and administrative control was tightened, faults were punished even more severely.
The 1918 flu pandemic was the straw that broke the glass. It made excruciating industrial cities like Bombay and Kanpur the most affected by the virus. Both cities saw worker strikes in 1919, marking a shift from individualized to organized protests, Joshi writes. Some link the Bombay attacks with the larger currents of the national movement. Joshi also points to Russia’s inspiration, still in the throes of revolution. But the nightmarish conditions created by the war and the pandemic played their part in the unrest of the workers.
When it comes to work
Labor reforms followed soon after. The Factories Act of 1922 shortened adult work hours to 10 and guaranteed one hour of rest. In 1934, a new Factory Law limited weekly hours to 48 and daily hours to nine. Sundays were a day of rest. But legislative guarantees were often suspended in times of high demand or war.
Independence did not bring radical legislative changes and the Factory Law of 1948 bears the traces of its colonial ancestors. Union leader Raja Kulkarni, when evaluating the law in 1949, was not impressed. On industry, he wrote, the government encouraged cutting-edge technology that would put India on a par with the world. “But when it comes to work, their working conditions, standard of living, and employment-management relationship, neither employers nor the government seem to think that they should not be left behind by anyone in the world.”
Seven decades later, his words seem prophetic. The eight-hour workday is receding further into the mists. Even the inadequate provisions of the 1948 Act will be shelved once again in a season of trouble. For this to work, the government has the acquiescence of the workers. But does it explain the energies that a pandemic can trigger?
.
[ad_2]
