Workers Incorporated

CONTEXT: The passage of three Bills on labour codes by Parliament on Wednesday is a historic milestone, both for industry and workers.

Labour codes: The four codes consolidate the relevant labour laws in the central sector.

• Code on Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions

• Code on Industrial Relations

• Code on Social Security

• Code on Wages

Major Problems in Labour Sector:

• High number of casual workforce: Estimated to be 12.1 crores according to the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) data for 2011-12.
• Lack of social security to casual workers: Only about 20% of the workforce in the organized sector is currently covered.
• Low Industry sentiment: Being very high formalization costs, both in terms of cost to the company as well as low productivity low.
• Issues in Government Initiative: Shramev Jayate Karyakram: 
• The government had launched the Universal Account Number (UAN) under the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), providing portability of accounts.

• The registration under EPF, however, has gone up from 4.3 crore unique contributory members to just 5.34 crore.
• Enrolment of construction workers under EPF has remained in a few lakhs, against an estimated 5.02 crore as per 2018-19 NSSO data. 

Way Forward:

• Formalize Workforce: There is a need to increase formal workers to about 50% of the industry’s total strength, for the sustainability of operations.
• Aggregation of data: From different databases such as NREGA, PM KISAN and other state agencies can be seeded with JAM (Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, Mobile), and ‘deduplicated’ and unique portable identity can be issued on lines of UAN.
• Portability: The EPFO can create a portal so that UWIN (Unorganised Worker’s Identity Number) is portable across the country.
• Special drives should be undertaken for enrolment by EPFO, with the active support of industry and state governments.
• Actions to be taken by the states: The best practices can be replicated in the spirit of cooperative federalism.
• Single-window submission: State governments must also set up their own portals for submission of applications under various welfare schemes of the Centre and state.

• A single-window application portal would also help in monitoring the timely disposal of applications by various agencies, ensuring delivery and accountability. 

• Common Service Centres: The network of village-level CSCs under BharatNet project could be leveraged to provide doorstep access.

Conclusion: It facilitates industry to identify informal workers (contract, casual, daily wage and construction workers), critical to the economy, and bring them under the formal fold, thereby securing their long-term commitment to organizations in safe work environments.