Lately, I have been working with trade unions in the informal sector. This is the unregulated segment of the economy, comprising workplaces and economic activity that are beyond the pale of law and governmental supervision. It employs 95 per cent of the country’s working population. Agriculture and construction are the major components, but there are plenty of smaller ones such as street-vending, head-loading, bidi-rolling, ragpicking, domestic work and home-based production.

Our image of trade unions is that they organise fat cats in large factories. What they know is to take on the employer. With whom will they fight where the employer changes from one day to another or is absent altogether as in self-employment? The simple answer is that they do what the Government ought to be doing, but doesn’t. They are there to make up for the colossal failure of the Government, especially the bureaucracy, to deliver .

Absent enablers

For the brick workers’ union I was researching, coaxing benefits out of the bureaucracy had become their bread and butter. Brick kilns across the country are notorious for terrible labour practices, including the employment of children and bonded labour. The union had its hands full with powerful kiln owners, many of them connected to the mafia. In addition, it was doing a job that bureaucrats are paid to do.

A huge crowd lines up in front of the union office every morning. The workers are there to claim benefits due to them from the construction workers’ welfare board. Every State collects a cess from builders that goes into a welfare fund, and construction workers who enrol in the fund by paying a fee become eligible for a range of benefits. There is money to marry off a daughter, to educate a child, to buy tools, to cover funeral expenses — it is a long list. The union official does the paper work needed to make a claim. She chides workers who are in arrears and forces them to pay up, else no benefits will accrue. She follows up pending claims by putting pressure on officialdom. This goes on every single day. And there is much to show by way of result. The benefits that have accrued are indeed substantial.

What happens when there is no union or NGO to intercede on the workers’ behalf? Nothing. Many workers don’t even know what benefits are available. No one will help them with the paper work — the bureaucrats will certainly not lift a finger. Some States have not even constituted a welfare board although they collect the cess. Elsewhere, the cess is collected and the board is constituted, but no money reaches the workers. It simply vanishes into a black hole, and it is not a small amount.

The caste question

My second union organises agricultural labourers, most of them Dalit women. What matters to them is not just wages and working conditions but caste oppression. Kidnapping Dalit women and setting their hamlets on fire are par for the course. There is a law that makes atrocities against Dalits a non-bailable offence, but the police are not keen to file an FIR. Even if they take cognisance of the offence, it is under a less stringent section of the law that permits bail. Fighting untouchability is not the job of a trade union, but it has done so tooth and nail, and with considerable success. What then is the job of the bureaucracy? What are they paid for?

Finally, to where I live and to the poor who have started building a house trusting the Government.

Across the road from my place is a Dalit settlement Twenty-eight families were recently offered a subsidy of ₹2 lakh each by the panchayat to build a house under the ‘Housing for All’ scheme. Three accepted the offer, and all three are now in a jam. Eight months down the road, not a single rupee has been released Threatened with forfeiture of the offer if construction was not begun within a month, the families have put in all they have and the buildings are standing like skeletons. The panchayat is now advising them to complete the job with a bank loan. No one in the administration is uttering a word on the subsidy.

Our policymakers seem to live in a world of their own. They announce grand schemes while bureaucrats make sure nothing takes off. The disconnect is profound, but no one seems to care. For the citizens there is little hope unless an interceding organisation steps in to convert promise into delivery.

The writer is a labour relations and HR consultant

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