CHAPTER III
The Maze
INTRODUCTION
‘Labour’ being a concurrent subject under
the Constitution of India, a large number of labour laws have been enacted
catering to different aspects of labour. These include aspects of occupational
health, safety, employment, training of apprentices, fixation, review and
revision of minimum wages, mode of payment of wages, payment of compensation to
workmen who suffer injuries as a result of accidents or causing death or
disablement, bonded labour, contract labour, women labour and child labour,
resolution and adjudication of industrial disputes, provision of social
security such as provident fund, employees’ state insurance, gratuity,
provision for payment of bonus, regulating the working conditions of certain
specific categories of workmen such as plantation labour, beedi workers etc. The
Planning Commission’s report on the working of Labour Laws has attempted a
categorization of the laws:
(a) Labour laws enacted by the Central
Government, where the Central Government has the sole responsibility for
enforcement
12 enactments ……….
(b) Labour laws enacted by Central
Government and enforced both by Central and State Governments
16 enactments
(c) Labour laws enacted by Central
Government and enforced by the State Governments
15 enactments
(d) There are also Labour laws enacted and
enforced by the various State Governments which apply to respective States.
The Contract Labour (Regulation and
Abolition) Act, 1970 (referred to in this chapter as CLRA) figuring in category
(b) above is as comprehensive as it can be, but is not complete in itself. It
depends on several other pieces of legislation for a completing the protective
net for contract labour; at the same time several other pieces of legislation
extend their benefits to the category of ‘contract workers’ within their ambit,
generally by including indirect or contractors’ employees in the definition of
employees covered by each such enactment.
Awareness of these other laws therefore
becomes inescapable.
The general attitude with reference to the entitlements
of contract labour (whether it be wages or welfare) is that the contractor is
responsible for them and the Principal Employer need not be bothered about
these details. This is not true even from a strictly legalistic point of view, and
it needs to be remembered that legislators in their own wisdom have placed a rather
large share of statutory responsibilities on the Principal Employer. For
instance …………
In addition to the attitude mentioned above,
the ‘current economic scenario’ – with all its ramifications – has given rise
to serious debate about the relevance of labour laws as they stand today. Much
of this debate hangs on the widely proclaimed need of the employers to be free
to hire and fire as per the fluctuating trends of the market. However …….
Labour legislation has been classified by a recent report by the
Planning Commission into ‘four broad areas’ viz.
(a) Employment security and industrial
relations;
(b) Income security i.e., wages and other
remunerations;
(c) Work security i.e., working conditions,
safety and occupational health; and
(d) Social security and labour welfare.
The report also classifies the debate over labour legislation into ‘four
major issues’
a)
Rigidity – said to arise out the inability of legal
regulations to “consistently balance the welfare needs and protection of rights
of workers and enabling economic growth and increasing the level of
employment.” (Itself, a matter for debate);
b)
Dualism – defined as the need to contend with the
two divisions of the labour market i.e. the organised sector and the vast
unorganised sector;
c)
Multiplicity – said to arise out of the concurrent
nature of labour legislation with varying priorities / emphases between the
Centre and the State; and
d)
Enforcement of and compliance with the laws. (Two
distinct issues which should have been separated - but blinkered vision is
expedient).
The report goes on to state that employers find that labour laws place unreasonable
restrictions on their need to hire persons and terminate their employment at
will; the laws also inhibit rational response of employers to fast changing
economic environment…..
Workers’ organisations on the other hand say that the dilution of
employment security provision in the law would encourage exploitation…
Much heated discussion arose out of the statements made by Government
representatives at several fora regarding the proposed amendment to Chapter V-B
of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947. But the major debate centred on the CLRA.
The Report acknowledges the ‘unintended consequence’ of multiple
legislations i.e. the absence of common definitions even of the basic
categories like that of workmen, employee, industry and enterprise – which has
led to conflicting judicial and administrative interpretations that have
further complicated the employment relations scenario with their own
implications for compliance and enforcement. The issue of multiplicity and
complexity therefore, needs immediate tackling. In this context, it is
interesting to note that the Government of Tamil Nadu on the 14th of
November 2003 introduced a scheme…..
Another set of difficulties identified by the Report is that (a) the
diversity of economic structure, (b) the pattern of economic growth and ………… The
agenda of labour reforms must move away from the contentious debate on
“deregulation” and instead be set towards fulfilling the goal of enabling
quality employment growth.
So while the intellectuals deliberate over the niceties of legislated
welfare, it is necessary that the existing laws be implemented in their true
spirit. Of course it is neither practical nor necessary to deal with the entire
spectrum of labour laws that we have in India. We will restrict ourselves to
labour legislation that seeks to provide protection to contract labour along
with other workmen.
The enactments that we will deal with are as follows (arranged
alphabetically): 20 enactments….
There are several other enactments that may
also be connected in one way or another but are excluded from this chapter
because they are specific to particular trades, avocations or calling, like the
Acts for workers in mines of various kinds, dock workers, beedi workers,
working journalists, plantation labour, sales promotion employees, merchant
shipping and cinema workers or they are related purely to social reform such as
Bonded Labour, etc.
In this chapter, we establish the
relationship between the CLRA and the other Acts with the ultimate objective of
ensuring that the contract labour is provided the protection intended by the
lawmakers. The Acts referred to above are dealt with only to the extent they
are related to Contract Labour. The sections that follow are therefore not to
be taken as analyses of the said enactments in their entirety but only those
aspects that are relevant to Contract Labour and the CLRA.
