Monday, May 1, 2023
Wednesday, April 26, 2023
On Ten Years After the World’s Deadliest Garment Factory Disaster of 2013 | Saurav Sarkar
Ten Years After the World’s Deadliest Garment Factory Disaster
In 2013, more than 1,130 garment workers were killed when the Rana Plaza building collapsed in Bangladesh. Has enough changed to keep it from happening again?
Imagine you’re sent home from work because there are cracks in the building. You’re told to come back the next day, and you do, dutifully, because you don’t have a choice; you don’t want to get fired. The owner of the building says it’s just a problem with the plaster.
But when you show up, it’s clear that the problem runs deeper. You don’t want to go back in, but your manager tells you that you’ll lose a month’s pay and your bonus if you don’t. You see another manager hit a coworker who doesn’t want to go into work.
Ten years ago, that was the choice facing garment workers and other
staff at the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka, Bangladesh. As we now know,
the building collapsed at about 9 a.m. on April 24, killing more than
1,130 people, most of whom were garment workers.
[ . . . ]
https://progressive.org/latest/ten-years-after-worlds-deadliest-factory-disaster-sarkar-230425/
Thursday, April 20, 2023
Tuesday, April 18, 2023
There has been a dramatic reduction in Indian women working – here’s why | Joe Wallen
There has been a dramatic reduction in Indian women working – here’s why
India’s economic boon is being hampered by a failure to create formal employment opportunities for its women
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/women-and-girls/india-women-workforce-employment/
Friday, April 14, 2023
Adivasi migrant labour and agrarian capitalism in southern India | R.C. Sudheesh
Adivasi migrant labour and agrarian capitalism in southern India
Abstract
This paper looks at a case of rural-to-rural movement of agrarian capital in southern India and the ways in which capital–labour relations are reworked to maintain oppressive forms of exploitation. Faced with an agrarian crisis, capitalist farmers from affluent communities of Wayanad, Kerala, take large tracts of land for lease in the neighbouring state of Karnataka and grow ginger based on price speculation. Landless Adivasis from Wayanad have served as labourers on these ginger farmlands for the past three decades. Recently, farmers have shifted to employing labourers from a Scheduled Caste (SC) from Karnataka. The change happened not just because of the lower wages the SC labourers were willing to work for but also because of the farmers' inclination to move away from Adivasis who have been resisting the poor working conditions on the farm. The story resonates with the broader dynamics of agrarian–labour relations amidst capitalist expansion and highlights the centrality of socio-political factors at play.
Thursday, April 13, 2023
India: Wages are the worry, not just unemployment | Jean Drèze (April 13, 2023)
Jean Dreze writes: There has been no significant growth of real wages at the all-India level or in the last eight years. It calls for a reorientation of economic policies, with more focus on the drivers of wage growth
Written by Jean Dreze
Updated: April 13, 2023 09:09 IST
(Illustration by C R Sasikumar)
India’s most important economic indicator is also the most neglected — the growth of real wages. The Statistical Appendix of the latest Economic Survey, for instance, goes on for well over 200 pages without mentioning wages at all. Nor are wages mentioned anywhere in the Union Finance Minister’s latest Budget speech, or in last year’s speech for that matter.
Even in public debates on economic policy, very little attention tends to be paid to real wages. Instead, there are endless discussions of comparatively useless data on “unemployment”. The unemployment figures are not particularly relevant to poor people. In India, poor people are rarely unemployed, because they cannot afford to do nothing. If they are unable to get a good job, they do their best to survive from fallback activities such as selling eggs on the street or pulling a rickshaw. Most of them are not counted as unemployed in household surveys. Their problem is more “underemployment” than unemployment, but underemployment is not measured in these surveys. Indeed, it is hard to measure.
Real wages, on the other hand, are quite informative. If real wages are rising, workers are likely to be earning more and living better. A sustained rise in real wages is a good sign that economic growth is translating into better jobs. Stagnation of real wages, on the other hand, would be a major concern from the point of view of poverty reduction.
Unlike unemployment, real wages are quite easy to track, for some occupations at least. Consider agricultural labour. In most Indian villages, there is a reasonably well-defined wage for casual agricultural labour at any point of time. No household survey is required to find it out — simple enquiries at the village level will do. If this is done at regular intervals in a good number of randomly-selected areas, we can get a fair picture of what is happening to wage rates. Deflating them with a price index to compute real wages is not difficult either.
The Labour Bureau has been doing something like that for many years. The Bureau collects occupation-wise wage data every month in all Indian states and publishes summary statistics in the Indian Labour Journal. The quality of this information is uncertain, but it is likely to be good enough for the purpose of assessing broad trends in real wages.
That task has been made easier by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). In its latest Handbook of Statistics on Indian States, the RBI presents annual wage estimates based on Labour Bureau data from 2014-15 to 2021-22. Oddly, the estimates pertain to male workers only. They cover four occupation groups: General agricultural labourers, construction workers, non-agricultural labourers and horticulture workers. The last group is ignored here as the wages of horticulture workers are reported for a few states only.
It takes little effort to convert the nominal wage figures into real wages using the Consumer Price Index for Agricultural Labourers (CPIAL) and then to estimate the growth of real wages by semi-log regression of real wages on time. The results are startling. The growth rate of real wages between 2014-15 and 2021-22 was below 1 per cent per year across the board; more precisely 0.9 per cent, 0.2 per cent and 0.3 per cent for agricultural labour, construction workers and non-agricultural labour respectively. If we use the general Consumer Price Index as a deflator, instead of the CPIAL, the growth rates are lower — even negative for construction workers.
The RBI series stops in 2021-22, but more recent figures from the same source presented in the latest Economic Survey clearly show that the pattern of stagnation continued until the end of 2022, when the wage series also ends as of now. The conclusion is clear: There has been no significant growth of real wages at the all-India level in the last eight years. Earlier work by Shambhu Ghatak came to a similar conclusion.
The picture is similar at the state level, for the same period. Consider real wages for agricultural labourers, the fastest-growing series. For this occupation group, the annual growth rate of real wages is above 2 per cent in just two major states: Karnataka (2.4 per cent) and Andhra Pradesh (2.7 per cent). In five major states (Haryana, Kerala, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu), real wages declined between 2014-15 and 2021-22.
A few salutary lessons emerge from this simple exercise. First, we must pay much more attention to real wages. Second, the collection of wage data is begging to be expanded and improved. Third, there is a stark and disturbing contrast today between the rapid growth of the Indian economy and the sluggish growth of real wages.
Finally, this contrast calls for a reorientation of economic policies, with more focus on the drivers of wage growth. If the next Budget speech includes a few words on employment and wages, that will be a good start.
The writer is Visiting Professor at the Department of Economics, Ranchi University
© The Indian Express (P) Ltd
Gig Workers Are Being Stabbed, Stoned, and Abused in India | Varsha Bansal
Wired, April 13, 2023
Gig Workers Are Being Stabbed, Stoned, and Abused in India
by
An
Uber driver was mugged. An Ola driver was beaten and left in a coma.
Platform workers say tech companies are doing little to protect them.
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