Govt to bring Bill for mandatory national minimum wage

The government on Tuesday said it will soon introduce a Bill to provide for mandatory national minimum wage and go ahead with labour reform measures to protect the interests of poor workers.

Winding up a debate on the Payment of Bonus (Amendment) Bill, 2015, in the Lok Sabha, Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya also said that following the recommendations of the second national labour commission, 44 central labour laws would be converged into four codes.

"The four codes would be - code on industrial wages, code on industrial relations, code on social security and code on safety and security conditions of workers," he said.
 

"I will bring in this House a national minimum wage bill which will have a statutory provision so that every worker in this country gets a fair wage. Till now, the minimum wage is non-statutory," he said.

The house later passed the Bill allowing for doubling of wage ceiling for calculating bonus to Rs 7,000 per cent for factory workers with establishments with 20 or more workers, with the benefits being applicable retrospectively from April 2014.