Session #3: Saturday, 10 January, 9.30 - 11.15 (CSLG)
Panel coordinator(s): Prabhu Mohapatra, Department of History and Kamala Sankaran, Law Faculty, University of Delhi (prabhuayan@gmail.com/kamala.sankaran@gmail.com)
Chair/discussant: TCA Anant, Member-Secretary ICSSR and Professor of Economics, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi (tca.anant@gmail.com)
Panel description
Panelists, paper titles, and abstracts
This panel aims to explore the conception of a 'worker' who is the object of legal protection. How have the state and law imagined the 'worker'; what have been the shifts and continuity in the law; why have certain categories of work and livelihoods been privileged over others, and in what manner; what are the implications of legal protection/ exclusion; and what are the costs the 'worker' and organizations/collectivities have to bear for inclusion in such legal coverage.
Over recent times, there has been a persistent call for reform in Indian labour law, largely posed as a demand to increase flexibility in the labour market. In response, while there have been no apparent changes in labour legislation, much of the change appears to have been worked out at the level of implementation, both in terms of executive involvement as well as in judicial interpretation of statues. One key area where judicial changes are manifest is in court decisions resetting the definitions of a ‘workman’, acting to disfranchise large sections of the workforce from being covered by existing legislation. This paper begins by collating the contents of such recent decisions to get a sense of how the courts are coming to define a worker - prima facie it appears that courts persist in using the 'control' test, or some related variant, to label the distinction between employee and independent contractor. This test, as is well known, originated in the 19th Century to determine when a "master" should be held liable for torts committed by a "servant", and is clearly inappropriate to negotiate the economic realties underlying the more contemporary relationship between workers and employers. In the next part of the paper an attempt is made to spell out the substance of the economic relation between employers and workers, particularly attempting to engage with the modern theory of the firm in this context - an exercise which in turn throws up a series of vexatious questions regarding the relationship between the organisation of production and the content of the law. This leads to the last section of the paper which attempts to normatively spell out the distinction between instances where 'contingent relationships' between workers and employers are established for efficiency and flexibility and not to evade labour law and standards – with the hope that spelling out such distinction can help conceptualise labour law reform more robustly.
Labour law is traditionally premised on an employer-employee relationship. Recent data however reveals that the predominant form of work within India is that of own account enterprises and establishments. Ensuring a ‘decent work’ environment for those in self employment remains a challenge confronting labour law. This paper examines whether, and if so how, the contours of labour law could be expanded to deal with such self employed persons, to what extent other areas of public and private law could be utilised to supplement labour law and questions the divisions limits of the different branches of the law.
The paper focuses on social effects of conceptualizations and imaginations of ‘workers’ in the context of the industrialization of Rourkela, Orissa. Soon after India’s independence Rourkela and the Rourkela Steel Plant (RSP) metamorphosed into an icon of an industrial modernization that was to launch India’s development into a modern, secular nation-state. Before development could take off land had to be acquired on a large scale that had hitherto been inhabited and cultivated by a peasantry that was conceived as ‘backward’, even more so as it was made up predominantly by scheduled tribes. The Nehruvian developmental vision made it a point that the quid pro quo for the loss of land should go beyond compensatory payments and resettlement and should entail employment provisions for the displaced people in the public sector undertaking that ought to shape the nation’s working class vanguard. With the state as their enlightened employer steel workers – among them the ‘able bodied’ out of the local displaced – were to become a privileged ‘labour aristocracy’ with legal provisions for unionisation, comparatively good wages, high job security, subsidized medical care and housing for the workers’ families and education for their children. Since skilled labour had to be recruited from outside the former peripheral, rural, but mineral-rich region the ‘labour aristocracy’ was also to lead the way with regard to integration and transcendence of the nation’s diverse ‘primordial’ identities. That dream got soon shattered by ethnic violence between different segments of the working class and from its construction until the present day access to this ‘model industry’ and the ‘model citizenship’ it was to provide remain fiercely contested evoking various claims of justness and legitimateness. My paper aims to trace the trajectory of this contest, its embeddedness in the politics of the public sector labour force which in turn is shaped by conceptions of working class ‘model citizens’ as revealed in labour laws, industrial relations, employment policies and resettlement practices.