Organizing Against the Odds: Women in India's Informal Sector

It is estimated that less than 8 percent of the work-force in India belongs to the formal sector, leaving more than 92 percent-well over 350 million people in a labour force of almost 400 million-in the informal sector. This is partly due to non-implementation of existing legislation, but mostly a result of the inadequacy of these laws. For example, the Factories Act, 1948, which covers working conditions, health and safety, basic amenities like toilets, working hours, creches and much else, does not apply to work-places with fewer than ten workers using power-driven machinery or less than twenty workers without such machinery; similarly the Employees' State Insurance Act, 1948, providing for sickness, accident and maternity benefits, also does not apply to work-places with less than twenty workers without such machinery, nor to workers earning more than a fairly low wage, above which unions have to negotiate their own schemes with employers. Thus employers have a variety of ways to evade these laws: for example, splitting up an establishment into smaller units which are supposedly independent of one another, putting out work to homeworkers, employing large numbers of contract workers (on site) who are supposedly employees of labour contractors and therefore do not appear on the payroll of the company, or subcontracting production to smaller work-places. The Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1971, forbids the employment of contract labour for work of a perennial nature, but the way this legislation has been formulated leaves gaping loopholes which have been exploited by unscrupulous employers, including the government itself