About 95 percent of the workforce in India is engaged in the informal sector, and we cannot leave them outside of our imagination, says Subhash Bhatnagar of Nirmana, an organisation that seeks to empower unorganised sector workers.
Subhash Bhatnagar: It is very important to understand what the gig workers are called in India. They are not called workers, instead they are called ‘partners’.
In practice, the company, which is also called the aggregator, unilaterally decides what it will give to the people who are driving or delivering food and groceries. The company decides what share they will keep for themselves and what they will give to the partners, which is not fair.
Why should employers alone decide? They are asking all these drivers to buy cars. They are buying cars on loan, paying instalments and driving the car. They are buying the petrol and paying for maintenance. Nothing else is provided by the aggregator except the mobile application. And they are taking 25-30 percent of the profit for this. Initially the companies were giving a lot of incentive to the drivers. But now the incentives have disappeared. So why should we accept them as partners just because the companies are calling them partners. They are in fact workers.
In a recent case decided by the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, the gig workers were declared as workers and the aggregators were declared as employers.
Subhash Bhatnagar: Demonetisation led to immediate paucity of cash for people and there were restrictions on the amount of money you could get on your own from the bank.
I remember that at that time I could not draw more than Rs 2,000 from the ATM at one time, and only about Rs 8-10,000 in a month. Such a scenario had a debilitating impact on small scale businesses in India.
Then, during the Covid-19 pandemic, all the employers pushed their employees out of their residence, factories, construction sites, etc. They got no money and were not allowed to live there. They were also not given the basic amenities – water, electricity or food. So the workers had no option but to migrate back to their homes.
In India we have the Disaster Management Act, under which a lot of money is transferred and kept ready for such emergencies. The government should have poured more money into the Disaster Management Act and announced immediately that no construction site should be vacated. Even if the employers or contractors disappeared, the government should have said that it will provide food and other basic necessities.
But the government did not do that. So workers had no choice but to leave.
Subhash Bhatnagar: Nirmana means construction. It’s called so because we started working for the construction workers. We wanted to get social security legislation enacted by the parliament.
Nirmana began in 1988 to provide logistic support to the national campaign of construction workers. But we were not confined to dealing with the parliament alone.
Ultimately, we got this legislation – Building and Other Construction Workers Act, 1996 (BOCW) – passed by the parliament in 1996. Then for another 10 years we were pushing for its implementation. Initially the act was implemented only in six states.
We moved the Supreme Court in 2006 through a public interest litigation to get the Act implemented comprehensively. After the Supreme Court started monitoring the law, by 2012, all the states and union territories had the BOCW boards required under the Act.
Subhash Bhatnagar: Employment is divided into organised and unorganised sectors everywhere in the world. The former is one where people join work at a young age and retire from work at the age of around 60 years. The central government, state governments, other government institutions, public sector undertakings and big companies are the main employers for this type of work. In these places you get social security in the form of provident fund and employee insurance.
But in the unorganised sector, which comprises about 95 percent of the employment in India, there is no long-term employer-employee relationship. There is no permanent team of management. So how can such workers access pension, health insurance, children’s education support, accident support and death support?
While all these benefits are possible in the organised sector, it is impossible in an unorganised sector.
We cannot leave 95 percent of India’s workforce outside of our imagination. We have to create a substitute for the permanent management. What we have designed is a tripartite board which includes the government, employees and employers, and all the three jointly manage this board.
We take resources from employers and the government, but sometimes the contribution is there from workers too. This way social security is provided in the long run by the board itself.
This model existed for dock workers and mathadi workers (load bearers) of Maharashtra. We developed this model into something that should cover all unorganised workers.
Subhash Bhatnagar: The issue of dignity is ultimately tied to the financial and economic question. When your economic situation changes for the better, it results in enhanced dignity.
In some European and other countries, those who do scavenging and related tasks are paid much higher than anybody else because the work is very risky.
In India we have the caste system too. Workers from lower castes are made to work on meagre wages. This situation is peculiar to Indian society. Over a period of time it will definitely disappear.
The lead image shows an artisan crafting his toys (Photo by Ganesh Pandian)
