All social security laws fail due to the absence of credible data on unorganised workers, who comprise 94 per cent of the total workforce.
Heard of flexicurity? That is the mantra of developed nations in times of economic meltdown. It means a combination of flexibility in industrial laws to enable industry to manoeuvre itself out of a depleting fund situation and ensuring security for the millions of workers who are dependent on industry for their daily bread.
Recently, industry and trade unions had a debate whether this would work in India. Paul Vandernberg of the International Management Institute, who proposed the idea at a Ficci-sponsored event, himself concluded that it was not relevant for India.
Not because there is no social security to support the workers when industry retrenches or in a more benign scenario downsizes or freezes fresh recruitments. The reason is because such an initiative would apply to just 6 per cent of the total workforce of 45-50 million. Employer-employee relationship pertains only to a small number. What about the rest?
No one even knows till now how many of these 94 per cent have been affected. Of course, half of them are in farming and the Planning Commission and the labour ministry take solace in that. Jayati Ghosh, labour advisor in the commission, says the current recession will not affect most workers as they did not benefit from the recent high growth. Labour Minister Oscar Fernandes says the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) and the farm loan waiver scheme have taken care of these people and they are immune to the meltdown. For the rest, there is an ESI unemployment dole of half the salary for six months. Guess how many have taken this so far? Just 500. And then he adds: “Don’t worry, wait till Monday, the unorganised worker social security Bill is being passed in Parliament.” He means the Bill will solve all the problems of this 94 per cent population, that is, those who don’t work under the rural job scheme and haven’t benefited from the farm loan waiver.
How smoothly the NREGS functions and whether the farm loan waiver has stopped suicides (4,000 at last count) would require another story.
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Will the social security Bill immunise the unorganised sector from job losses? Most schemes mentioned in it don’t reach the unorganised sector. For instance, not a single construction worker or a potter woman in Khurja would know how to access the maternity benefits mentioned in the Bill, say unions. Besides, is there a database of workers in various sectors, say the weavers in Benaras? Will they be ensured pensions under the National Old Age Pension Scheme? One Benaras weaver who struck the jackpot recently, meaning, got a chance to display his work at Dilli Haat in the capital, says his work has been used by filmmakers like Muzaffar Ali and bought by people like Priyanka Gandhi and some big names in industry. But that left him no better.
They buy, they smile luminous smiles and expect the weavers to consider themselves fortunate for having such great clients, says the weaver.
The least the government could have done is to create a database of these workers. The government says once the law comes into force, each worker will be registered, but this is not inspiring much confidence.
Unions like the AITUC are asking for a social security card for every person in the unorganised sector. But what takes the steam out of the law that Fernandes talks of so proudly is that it has no fund to back it.
As a top Ficci official says, governments just tinker with laws, which benefit neither workers nor industry. Maybe the workers could do without the sweet nothings from the government and would be glad to have a fund and a database that finally makes social security a reality.