It was a May Day with a difference. Several hundred municipal workers had converged on Mumbai’s sprawling Azad Maidan with their wives and children to celebrate the success of their 10-year legal battle. They had come in all their finery; and with king-size grins that would put a Cheshire cat to shame.
The Supreme Court had, a few days ago, upheld a judgement of the Bombay High Court directing the cash-rich Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) to take on their rolls 2,700 workers who slave on garbage collection trucks. It was a big day for these workers, many of them Dalits, who had migrated from Tamil Nadu to continue in the city the curse of their caste of cleaning and waste collection.
Court Decries Exploitation
In his judgement rejecting an appeal by the BMC against an Industrial Court order, Justice Nitin Jamdar of the Bombay High Court had noted in December 2016: “These 2,700 workers, working round the year, provide the foundation on which the city functions. Instead of acknowledging this importance and giving them the stability of permanent tenure to improve their living conditions, the corporation, a public body, has taken advantage of its dominant position to exploit this lowest level of the community, disregarding various welfare measures suggested by the state government.”
These workers of the Kachara Vahatuk Shramik Sangh had challenged in court in 2007 their plight of being kept as contract workers on a salary of Rs 8,000 a month, while permanent workers in the same conservancy department earned Rs 25,000. The Bombay High Court also noted the contract workers were not only paid a pittance, but were denied basic facilities like washrooms, toilets and medical facilities. “One doesn't have to go through years of such sub-human existence to complain of exploitation,” the court said.
The municipal corporation had obviously not learnt its lesson. In 1999, the Bombay High Court, in a similar case had ordered an end to hiring of contract labour in the Solid Waste Department, and directed that 782 conservancy department workers be made permanent. The ratio of the judgement: contract employment is for casual or seasonal work and cannot be the tenure for jobs that are of continuous and permanent nature. The order obviously had little effect on the public body, which merrily carried on contracting jobs, and faced another challenge by 2007.
It is ironical these waste disposal workers find no place in the Prime Minister’s Swachh Bharat narrative. These are the workers who not only collect our trash and carry them to disposal yards and incinerators, but sweep our streets, and slither down gas-filled manholes at great risk to life and limb to open up choked drains. Bettering their miserable conditions and providing job security should logically be part of the ‘Swachh Bharat’ Abhiyan. After all, they were the backbone of the 2015 Mumbai clean-up campaign inaugurated by the PM in 2015.
The BMC employs 35,000 cleaning and waste disposal workers, most of whom are contract labourers. Municipal records show that during 2010-15, as many as 1,386 workers of this department died of various diseases and accidents – an inexplicable high number.
At a larger, national level, the problem of joblessness is being further compounded by job insecurity. A recent industry study shows the country’s top-listed companies employ 36 per cent of the workforce in the ‘contract’ category which gives them, apart from the cheaper wage bills, the hire-and-fire flexibility. “Unfortunately, big public sector organisations, mainly in steel and banking sectors, are in the forefront today to reduce costs by increasing hiring of contract labour,” says N Vasudevan, president of the New
Trade Union Initiative, a national federation that represents contract workers.
Unfortunately, the legal pendulum is swinging against the workers. BJP-ruled states Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh have amended the Industrial Disputes Act, Factories Act and the Contract Labour (Regulation & Abolition) Act to make it easy to hire and fire workers and close industries. For instance, only units employing 300 workers or more will now be required to seek the Labour Department's permission for closures and retrenchment. Earlier, all units employing 100 or more were required to seek government approval. A similar amendment to the central Industrial Disputes Act is also on the anvil.
It is unfortunate that the voice of those at the bottom of the labour pyramid is becoming feebler by the day.
[The author can be contacted at gurbir1@gmail.com]