Indian Journal of Labour Economics最新文献

For the last decade, India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA, 2005) has been the world's largest public works programme. This legal entitlement provided employment to 28 per cent of rural Indian households in 2019-2020. After the COVID-19 pandemic, NREGA is increasingly emerging as an invaluable employer of the last resort. However, longitudinal data of implementation in its first fifteen years reveal distinctive trends. On the one hand, since inception, NREGA has rendered greater benefits to women and marginalised communities. But on the other, since 2014 till before the pandemic, the present National Democratic Alliance (NDA) regime has reduced NREGA coverage compared to its implementation during the previous United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition government which had enacted the legislation. Nevertheless, in light of the pandemic and based on international experiences in public work programmes, there is an urgent need for the expansion of the employment guarantee.

The onslaught of COVID-19 has been catastrophic for India's world of work. While it was a bolt out of the blue, its impacts on employment need to be located in the context of a long-term and ongoing structural crisis of (un) employment and systemic vulnerabilities (and subsequent burgeoning of 'labour reserves') that have tended to worsen during the neo-liberal regime. Using the various EUS and subsequent PLFS rounds for roughly the last two decades, the paper seeks to highlight selected aspects of the vulnerabilities and inequities that have plagued India's world of work. These include participation rates, vulnerable employment, composition of workforce and access to certain aspects of decent work such as social security, paid leaves, and written contract. An important issue that the paper investigates is 'income-vulnerability' of the employed at the present juncture. Further, inequities across gender and social groups have also been assessed as regards these variables using the most recent data.

The recent international attention paid to the formalization of the informal economy finds reflection in ILO Recommendation No. 204 concerning the transition from the informal to the formal economy and the Sustainable Development Goals (Target 8.3). There is great diversity within the categories of the informal sector, informal employment, and informal economy in India. This paper examines the category of the 'informal economy' as understood in international instruments as well as in international statistics and maps these onto legal categories recognized within Indian law. The categories of 'employed', 'engaged', and 'work arrangement' used in Indian laws, and their interpretation by the courts, are useful to understand the links between the concepts of work, employment, and livelihoods. The paper also focuses on the diversity of the informal economy, focusing on wage employment, self-employment, including the diverse forms of own-account work and contributing (unpaid) family labour. The categorization of gig and platform workers as own-account or waged workers continues to pose a normative challenge. The regulatory responses for formalization of each segmented category of informal workers and informal enterprises cannot be uniform, and neither do they need to be linked to any particular domain of the law. Moving beyond the extension of social security coverage as the key vehicle for formalization, the paper suggests various entry points through which law and policy can improve conditions of work and protect the livelihood of those in the informal economy as measures to achieve formalization.

Eight sister North-East states of India are unique in diverse flora and fauna and manifest distinctive social and ethnocultural identities. Meanwhile, North-East states exhibit common problems ranging from ethnic conflict, insurgency, and secessionist movement, illegal taxing and extortion, and drug trafficking to poor transportation and communication and immigration issues. The region incurs prolonged ethnopolitical turmoil, which left imprints on the migration from this region. The present study examines the level, trend, and pattern of interstate migration from the North-East during 1991-2011 and associates it with prolonged ethnopolitical turmoil. The exodus of workers to the mainland Indian states implies a lack of employment opportunities. Employment elasticity suggests that income growth in North-East states lacks inclusiveness and fails to sensitise the employment opportunities, inducing the workers to migrate from North-East into mainland Indian states. Not only the labour migration but the student migration is also conspicuous, which exhibits the weakness of the educational system. The decades-long ethnopolitical unrest and enforcement of AFSPA of 1958 for more than 60 years caused predicaments of economic developments, employment opportunities, and challenge to the fundamental human rights and social well-being, resulting in people being forced to move out in the 1990s and 2000s.

Historical experience suggests that a sustained rise in per capita incomes and improvement in employment conditions is not attainable without a structural transformation that moves surplus labour from agriculture and other informal economic activities to higher productivity activities in the non-farm economy. In this paper, I analyse India's performance from a cross-country comparative perspective, estimating the growth semi-elasticity of structural change. Using a cross-country panel regression, I estimate the effectiveness of growth in moving workers away from agricultural and informal activities as compared to other developing countries at similar levels of per capita income. I show that the performance in pulling workers out of agriculture is as expected given its level and growth of GDP per capita, but the same is not true for pulling workers out of the informal sector. I also propose the following five indicators that need to be kept track of when evaluating the growth process: the growth elasticity of employment, the growth semi-elasticity of structural change, the growth of labour productivity in the subsistence sector, the share of the organised sector in total employment and the workforce participation rate. Comparing these indicators across periods, states, regions or countries, allows us to understand which sets of policies have worked better than others to effective improvements in employment conditions. And taken together the indicators allow us to set structural change targets as well as to say whether the current pattern of growth is going to be sufficient to meet those targets.

The right to social security has strong anchoring in international human rights law and forms a critical component of international labour standards. While social security has sometimes been portrayed as inimical to economic dynamism, there is a much larger body of work that posits a positive relationship between social welfare and economic progress. The COVID-19 crisis has revealed stark gaps in social protection. Workers in the informal economy have been particularly hard hit, as they were excluded from formal work-related protections and were not eligible for social assistance that often targets the very poor and those outside the labour force. Social assistance schemes with flat-rate benefits can be an element of a rights-based national social protection system if their eligibility criteria, benefit levels and modalities are set out in the national legislation, to ensure transparency and accountability. However, social assistance schemes should be part of a broader social protection system, which usually combines tax-financed schemes and social insurance to guarantee a social protection floor and provide higher-level benefits in line with international social security principles. Inspired by a vision that seeks to formalize all economic units, especially micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises, and make the right to social protection a reality for workers in all types of employment, the paper points to a number of country examples that have extended social protection by combining contributory and non-contributory elements. This vision is particularly needed at a time when climate change adaptation, digital transition, and other drivers of transformative change call for the formalization of jobs and enterprises, while making it possible for states to mobilize the maximum available resources to build universal, comprehensive and adequate social protection systems that can facilitate inclusive transitions.

The ruling National Democratic Alliance regime in India pushed through three labour codes in September 2020 namely the Code on Social Security; Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code; and the Industrial Relations Code. These alongside the Code on Wages approved earlier in 2019 amalgamate several labour laws. This study is an endeavour towards a critical examination of the Industrial Relations Code, 2020. It engages in a comparative analysis of the various provisions of the Code vis-à-vis the laws which were its predecessors. Some key features of the Code as well as their ramifications are probed. Further, their potential impact on trade unionism and the right to strike is discussed. The relationship between capital and labour is adversarial rather than complementary. This paper argues that reforms in the real sense must seek to balance the interests of both parties rather than that of employers alone.

Novel Coronavirus disease and the resulting lockdown has created a unique situation of involuntary return migration among labourers in India. It provided a stage for conducting a retrospective study to analyse determinants of return behaviour among internal migrants upon their return. The aim of the paper is to carry out an empirical verification of socio-economic profile of migrant workers, information about destination, determinants of return migration, and future aspirations of the return migrants. Based on a telephonic semi-structured open-ended questionnaire-based survey conducted in February and March 2021 among 238 non-returnees and return migrants of Sonitpur District of Assam, we found that four states from South India, namely-Karnataka, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala, are the most attractive destinations for migrants from Sonitpur. The bulk of the migrants are young, unmarried men with minimal education, and majority come from households with no cultivable land. About 30% of the returnees went back to their previous destinations within a year, while a sizable portion of non-returnees are willing to return. Not all migrants returned home during pandemic. After controlling for all variables, it was revealed that the percentage of income sent as remittances, the availability of a job card by migrants' households, status of family migration, income, and the number of working days per week are all significantly related to migrants' decision to return. We suggest a hypothesis based on the observations that during times of crisis, migrants with other economic options at sources, such as a job card, are more likely to return.