JOIN USILO seeks response from trade unions on wages, job loss during COVID-19 lockdown
After a complaint from ten Indian Central Trade Unions (CTUs), the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has initiated an exercise to assess the efficacy of social dialogue mechanism in South Asia to ensure the welfare of workers, especially during crisis situations like the COVID-19.
The ILO has sent a 21-point questionnaire seeking details of bipartite and tripartite social dialogue mechanisms in these countries, including India, and have asked the trade unions about wages payments, job loss and working hours among others.
It has asked whether the tripartite mechanism engaged in issues like layoffs and wages and if not, what were the main reasons for the lack of social dialogue in responding to the COVID-19 crisis?
Ten CTUs -- INTUC, AITUC, HMS, CITU, AIUTUC, TUCC, SEWA, AICCTU, LPF and UTUC -- had last month approached the ILO against the Narendra Modi government as several states went ahead with suspending labour laws in the pretext of COVID-19 crisis and some even went to the extent of increasing working hours from universally accepted eight-hour duty to 12 hours by bypassing the rules on overtime wages.
ILO's Freedom of Association Branch chief Karen Curtis had said that Director General Guy Ryder had immediately intervened in the matter expressing his "deep concern" and appealed to PM Modi to "send a clear message to central and state governments to uphold the country's international commitments and encourage engagement in effective social dialogue".
In its letter to trade unions seeking their response on the tripartite mechanism, the ILO said the purpose of the exercise is to obtain information on any activities undertaken by these mechanisms to respond to the COVID-19 crisis, assist to identify gaps for focused short, medium and long-term interventions to build the resilience of these mechanisms so that they can be more effective in responding to future crises.
"The information obtained from the questionnaire will allow the initial development of a single repository of data on the bipartite and tripartite social dialogue mechanisms in South Asia, and their roles in responding to the COVID-19 crisis. It is also intended to enable the identification of needs for further technical support to these mechanisms, and their constituents, in a more targeted and structured way, with the objective of building more resilient social dialogue mechanisms for the future," the ILO said.
The trade unions have accused the Modi government of undermining the tripartite mechanism, which involves the government, employers and trade unions. Trade union leaders said they will highlight the problems in the mechanism.
"The process is aimed at analysing the tripartite mechanism in Asian countries. They will analyse it and the main context is India. The ILO will try to compare the tripartite situation in India with neighbouring countries," CITU National Secretary Amitava Guha told DH.
The questions posed by the ILO included "what is the representation on each of these key bipartite and tripartite social dialogue mechanisms (i.e. a number of representatives per constituency)? How many women are represented in each of these mechanisms? Are any of these mechanisms bipartite-plus or tripartite-plus? Which of these mechanisms are currently active/operational, dormant/non-functional, or not sure of their status?”
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