Laboured laws

When I recently ran into my old friend Kesha Devi from Amwa village, I asked what her son Babloo was doing. "He gave me sleepless nights when he dropped out of school without giving his class ten examinations because he'd just been married and could not concentrate on studies," said she, nostalgically, "but now my worries are over as he's finally secured a decent job in a carpet factory."

Just then, the boy in question lumbered up to us. "How come you're not at work on a Monday "" is there a holiday in your factory?" I asked. He replied in the negative, saying that these days he was just sitting at home. "Baitha diya?" I asked uncomprehendingly, "what do you mean by that?"

He told me that his employers didn't want too many permanent employees, so apart from a privileged few, others, like him, were chucked out without pay after a couple of months of work, only to be rehired later.

"You see, there's some law that if we work for a whole year in one place, the court will force the company to make us permanent. So my employer has to follow this practice," he said, rather tolerantly, I thought.

"But it's a more secure job than it sounds, I get anything from Rs 1,800 to Rs 2,000 a month. And since I've a good rapport with the supervisor responsible for hiring temporary labour, I manage to stay employed most of the time," said he. Most of the time, for Babloo, meant at least six months a year. The rest of the time, as Kesha Devi said in the local lingo, "Babloo baithat hai."

"Of course it's unfair to deny workers permanent jobs! But the archaic labour laws leave us with no option but to hire only temporary labourers like Babloo!" exploded a carpet exporter, when I told him about Babloo. He showed me hordes of hopefuls crowding his factory gates in the morning, waiting to get work.

"Making carpets is a labour intensive process and many carpet manufacturers would be only too happy to have in-house production done by permanent employees," said he, adding, "this would enhance both the quality and efficiency of production, and would also be more cost-effective in the long run." I asked what laws stopped them from doing this.

"As you know, carpet exports vary from year to year and even from season to season "" which means that our production (and therefore our need for more labour) also changes on a monthly basis," he said.

But the present Indian labour laws make it practically impossible to retrench permanent workers, or to close establishments with more than 100 workers.

"So either we maintain a huge permanent staff even when there are no orders, and consequently no production, bankrupting ourselves in the process, or get into the hassle of employing new workers every few weeks!" He said all manufacturing units which worked on orders, not just carpet manufacturers, faced this problem.

"We're lobbying for a change in the labour laws, to enable hiring and firing of workers for business considerations at the discretion of the employer, with no questions being asked, so long as all legal dues of the workmen have been paid, such as retrenchment compensation, notice pay, gratuity, etc," said he, "but nothing's come out of it yet."

So it looks like Babloo and more than half of the huge workforce of the carpet industry, will continue to be at the mercy of employers in temporary jobs till there's some change in the labour laws. The irony is that these very laws are meant to safeguard the interests of people like them.