Labour pain: wage anomalies unchecked as commissionerate lacks enforcement power

Supporting his claim with figures he said that each of these four officers visited 75 factories in a month,which was a negligible effort in view of the 3,000-plus factories and four-lakh business establishments operating in Ahmedabad district alone.

On the other hand,Additional Commissioner of Labour,P K Vasavda,told Newsline that while he agreed that they were understaffed,it didn’t necessarily mean the high number of reported irregularities was because of the high number of vacancies.

He said as of now there are 57 vacancies in the department – out of which more than half are in the Rural Labour Commissionerate.

He also said that he had never heard of the figures mentioned in the “Labour File”,a bimonthly journal on labour activities,which quoted a labour ministry official mentioning in Parliament last October that 78,024 workers in Gujarat had been paid less than the minimum wages due to them between 2006-2007. The journal had slotted Maharashtra and Bihar,at the second and third places,with a combined figure of 54,700 reported irregularities.

The Rural Labour Commission,which had carried out inspections,found that the number of workers who were paid less than the minimum wages had risen almost three times – from 846 to 2,403 in the period from 1995-96 to 2007-2008.

Vasavda and Gill said that there might be another reason for the high number of irregularities,a huge supply of labour.

“Visit any factory when workers come asking for jobs. The potential employers will almost always tell those asking for higher wages to go away even if what they ask for is the same as the minimum wage. There are just too many people to choose from,” said Vasavda.

Earlier this year,global consulting firm Ernst and Young had also ranked Ahmedabad’s labour cost at the lowest rung among major cities. The Gujarat state government figures,however,said that Gujarat had become more peaceful when it came to its workforce: there had been a steady decline in the number of strikes and man-days lost; in 2003,there were 42 strikes and 1,22,098 man-days lost,but by 2008,the numbers had come down to 18 and 37,409 respectively.