Contract Work
Retrenchment of workers and reducing the contractual obligation has been one major impact of globalisation. NTUI views this more as a part of, and a phase in, the re-composition of the workforce in the production at the global level. The main focus is the access to cheap labour for low cost production. As these are labour intensive operations there is a pressure for wage rise. To forestall such tendency and insure the production from such risks, the strategy is to install and sustain sub-standard employment relationships that create low capacity for organizing and collective bargaining.
In the Indian context, the underlying political notion of universality of equality, engraved into the Constitution, has been progressively made into legal entitlements in employment relationships through various legislations. Within a same class of employment in an establishment viz. within a factory, equality of treatment and entitlement was accepted and became a basis of both, discourse and struggle. Even the Contract Labour Act is founded on progressive realisation of this universality. But, successive judgments of High Courts and the Supreme Court have in the past few years violated this underlying political notion and strengthened the need and demand of capital to keep labour unregulated.
The large majority of contract workers are from among disadvantaged sections of the society. Scheduled caste employees and women find themselves employed largely as contract labour. The Sixth Pay Commission recommendations for Central Government Employees singles out Class IV employment for outsourcing, effectively implying that the lowest class of employment in the government and public sector will get contractualised. Class IV employment has traditionally been the only avenue available to candidates from the scheduled castes for a decent tenured employment. Legal support to abolition of contract labour, as envisaged under the Contract Labour Act stands compromised with recent judgments of the Supreme Court and other courts. Today, when the economy is in a severe downturn, the first workers to lose employment are contract workers.
Contract workers have no security of employment. They have no real recourse to social security benefits, despite the Contract Labour Act clearly specifying social security coverage of contract workers. Wages to contract employment is generally limited to the statutory Minimum Wage. The workers get wages less than one fourth wages to tenured workers in similar employment.
The New Trade Union Initiative (NTUI) represents over 2 hundred thousand workers in contract work, from all sectors of employment, including the public sector, private manufacturing, service sector, government employment in municipal work, anganwadi work, etc.