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Empowering Employees?

Empowering Employees?

With a shrinking job market for permanent employment and fixed term  contractual employments gaining popularity in the country, the Code on Social Security, 2019 introduced in the Lok Sabha last December has been already examined by the Parliament’s Standing Committee on Labour. 

The reported move of the Committee to universalise social security among some of its other recommendations are commendable as it can bring some respite to tens of thousands of job seekers.

Even as the Supreme Court of India had deplored the practice of deploying contract labour in regular, permanent and perennial work, some management experts have their own ways to when it comes to engaging employees.

In many employments, permanent posts seem to be kept unfilled and adhoc employees are hired to the whims and fancies of managements. Although the adhoc employees may perform the same nature of duties as permanent employees, they are engaged on a permanently temporary basis. Many of these adhoc employees are denied the basic social security measures.

Take the recent case of the treated meted out to a Senior-most ad-hoc Assistant Professor in the Department of English employed in a Delhi University College since 2014. Last year as she was expecting her first child, she requested her employer for grant of maternity leave along with all other eligible benefits under the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961. There was no response from the College management. Owning to complications of pregnancy, she reiterated her leave request. The Assistant Professor was blessed with a daughter prematurely but the College rejected her request for maternity leave and declined to credit salary during her leave of absence on the grounds that maternity benefit was unavailable to contractual employees. She re-joined her duties but soon after, the College terminated her services. However, the College extended the contractual period of two other adhoc Assistant Professors junior to her.

She knocked at the doors of Judiciary and a Division Bench of Delhi High Court observed “declining to grant an extension to the appellant/petitioner as she had highlighted her need for leave due to her pregnancy and confinement would tantamount to penalizing a woman for electing to become a mother while still  employed  and  thus  pushing  her  into  a  choiceless  situation  as motherhood would be equated with loss of employment. This is violative of the basic principle of equality in the eyes of law. It would also tantamount to depriving her of the protection assured under Article 21 of the Constitution of India of her right to employment and protection of her reproductive rights”. Directing the College to appoint her forthwith to the post of Assistant Professor in the English Department on an ad-hoc basis till such time that the vacant posts are filled up through regular appointment, the Court also imposed costs amounting to Rs 50,000/- on the College to be paid to the Assistant Professor. 

Well, how many people like the Assistant Professor can seek judicial intervention? It involves, time, effort, resources and much more.

Now coming back to the Code on Social Security, 2019, among others aims to extend the coverage of Employees’ State Insurance to all establishments employing ten or more employees and to the employees working in establishments with less than ten employees on voluntary basis and also to plantations on option basis. The Employees’ Provident Fund, Employees’ Pension Scheme and Employees Deposit Linked Insurance Scheme is to be extended to all industries or establishments employing twenty or more employees and thereby expands the existing coverage. The Code also makes it mandatory to provide for payment of gratuity in case of Fixed Term Employment on pro-rata basis even if the period of fixed term contract is less than five years; to provide for maternity benefit to the woman employee besides compensation to employees in case of the accidents while commuting from residence to place of work and vice versa.

The changes recommended in social security measures is a welcome step, more so because many of the public sector undertakings, once known as the commanding heights of the economy are today in disrepair. Many state PSU employees face a desperate situation as a large number of units have either been declared sick or are facing serious financial challenges. Many of them are either closed down or at the verge of closure. Loss of employment and its after effects on the families of such employees is mind boggling. Disinvestment continues to be the buzzword and most of them are heading for privatisation. But whether privatisation will solve all the problems is another story.

That many managements prefer employing women on account of their skills, better discipline, passive union activity and easy supervision in a way paves way for her economic independence. But many of them continue to suffer in silence for a plethora of reasons best known to them. Nonetheless, the Code on Social Security when implemented in the right earnest can bring much relief to some of the most labour intensive sectors of the country.

(Published on 10th August 2020, Volume XXXII, Issue 33)