Covid-19 turns spotlight on 'invisible' workers let down by labour laws

In India, the post-Covid-19 scenario brought to the fore issues of migrant/informal employment and labour law reforms in the most dramatic fashion. As the migrant exodus unfolded with unrelenting grimness around this time last year, there was frequent mention of how the pandemic had exposed the 'invisibility' of migrant labour to Indian planners and policy-makers.

As Barbara Harris-White has observed, in comparison with other low-middle income countries, the very large proportions of the Indian workforce in vulnerable employment make for a 'distinctively' Indian pattern. The scale of informal employment and its wide-ranging ramifications are glaringly obvious to anyone with the slightest familiarity with urban Indian street-life. The reference to the supposed invisibility allegedly 'exposed' through the draconian lockdown was, therefore, both startling and telling.

For nearly a decade now, studies on global employment trends to classify economies according to the degree and intensity of their employment of informal labour have shown India to be at the top of this league table. In what precise sense could India’s migrant workforce then have been termed 'invisible'? How do we understand the metaphor of labour invisibility when more than 90% of the workforce is in informal employment? And importantly, what was it a metaphor for?

Given the high visibility of governmental interventions to support vulnerable groups, what does it mean to propose that policymakers were ‘unaware’ of the conditions of work and survival for this overwhelming majority of labour force? Indeed, in highlighting the alleged invisibility of migrant labour, were we not, as commentators, pointing to our own implicit endorsement in the production of this invisibility? And most critically, how could an overwhelming majority of the workforce be rendered invisible to the public eye without an active contribution from current and previous policy paradigms? So, are there ways in which planning discourse and labour policy have been instrumental in producing and sustaining this invisibility of migrant, informal labour?

Quite rightly, the manner in which the lockdown was announced and enforced has elicited much comment. However, the above questions suggest it would be utterly shortsighted to locate the migrant crisis only vis-à-vis the ‘insensitivity’ of the current regime. We know major changes in labour law followed close on the heels of the migrant exodus, which only advanced strategies towards labour pursued over the last decade or more.

Introduced initially in the form of ordinances passed by nine states in May 2020, many provisions in those ordinances were soon consolidated through the three labour codes passed by Parliament in September 2020, namely the Industrial Relations Code Bill; the Code on Social Security Bill; and the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code Bill. The Code on Wages was passed by Parliament in 2019.

These labour law reforms had been in the making for many years; yet presently, they were explained as geared to the changing needs of the post-Covid economy. The government claimed these measures to let employers hire and fire at ease, and extend working hours to incentivise investors in the changed business environment to set up big factories to generate more jobs. Such arguments about supposed labour market inflexibility being the primary impediment to investment have been a strong influence upon policymaking leading up to the reforms of 1991 and since.

Labour market

In response, scholars have shown the evidence to correlate labour market flexibility with employment outcomes to be less than weak. Simultaneously, labour law experts, activists and commentators have argued for labour market reforms that would enhance transparency and consistency in the codes while providing greater social security to strengthen demand and welfare and stimulate growth. However, the new labour codes bypassed much of this existing discussion.

Indeed, we may speak of a long tradition of disjunct between informed debate, expert recommendations and the course of labour policy, going back all the way to the report of the First National Labour Commission (FNCL), submitted in 1969. Appointed by the Vajpayee-led NDA government in 1999 with a mandate to review and suggest amendments in labour laws, the Second National Labour Commission (SNCL) submitted its report in 2002. In keeping with its terms of reference to suggest ways to provide social security protection to all workers, particularly those in the unorganised sector, who make up nearly 93% of our workforce, the National Commission of Employment in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) submitted nine reports to the UPA government between 2006 and 2009.

At the manifest level, all three reports seem to have met with the same fate. However, following the introduction of The Unorganised Sector Workers’ Security Bill in Parliament in 2007, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Labour held extensive deliberations with stakeholder groups, many of whom had met with the NCEUS. Writing in the context of the Covid lockdown, NCEUS member K P Kannan pertinently argued that NCEUS proposals for social security for informal workers would have covered an overwhelming proportion of deserving households through the multiple crises induced by the pandemic. Even such a schematic take on the course of labour policy highlights its role in aggravating the precarity of living conditions for the overwhelming numbers in informal employment, all of which culminated in the migrant workers crisis that unfolded post-Covid. Clearly, the tortuous course of policy deliberations cannot be easily extricated from the steps that have fed into the trope of labour ‘invisibility’.

Rather than viewed as discrete instances, the unfolding of the migrant crisis and subsequent labour law reforms need to be read together to consider how current terms and scenarios were anticipated in earlier formulations of policy and desired change. Befittingly framed as measures reflecting the current hegemonic consensus on optimal possibilities open to labour, such a reading would enable us to explore continuities between the current labour policy and its previous phases. Tracing these continuities will alone allow questions about the deeper logics embedded in the trajectories of policy discourse that extend beyond ideological differences espoused by particular governments and different policy regimes.

(The writer is Professor of Sociology, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi)