Coronavirus, workers and social security

IN PERSPECTIVE

The coronavirus pandemic has brought to the fore the fact that more than 90% of workers in India have no social security. They have to work every day unfailingly if they want to survive to see the next day. They have no savings as their earnings do not amount to a living wage and the State provides them with no unemployment allowance. Millions of them are migrants living in cramped shanties in cities, lacking identity/address proof at the destination of migration. This, as well as the absence of central databases and portability of benefits, deprives them of subsidised food, healthcare and social protection even in normal times, and more so during disasters. Hence, the migrants’ desperation during the lockdown is understandable.

But the government announced a lockdown with little thought and planning for its consequences on the working class. The Prime Minister said, “Jaan hai tho Jahan hai”. The workers might want to remind him, “Kaam hai tho Jaan hai.” The need to bring in long-term universal social security was never more urgent.

Efforts to frame a Social Security Code (SS Code) to provide universal social security have been hanging fire for several years, with multiple versions being rolled out. The latest SS Code, presented to Parliament in December 2019, has been sent to the Standing Committee, and its three-month term has been extended to July 2020 due to the pandemic. Meanwhile, the government is planning to bring in an ordinance to give effect to the Code. It is necessary for civil society to ensure that the SS Code really ensures universal social security to prevent the kind of abject and heart-rending sufferings that the working class has been subjected to during this crisis, raising the question whether there is any humanity left in our polity at all.

The 2018 version of the SS Code was much better than the 2019 version: It had the basic framework for universal social security to cover every worker if certain provisions were tweaked; the 2019 version does not. Especially galling is that the dysfunctional Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act is carried almost wholly into this version of the Code with all its faults. “It is unfortunate that the Code on Social Security does not offer any roadmap for universal social security for unorganised workers and has no definite framework for portability (of benefits),” says a recent Centre for Employment Studies’ Working Paper by Ravi Srivastava.

It is also necessary that there is ‘binding legislation’ within the SS Code itself, which compels the government to provide to all workers, including the unorganised, all the nine benefits of ILO Convention No. 102, without leaving it to the whims of executive orders. These should necessarily comprise healthcare, sickness, maternity, disability/accident, unemployment and survivors’ benefits, and old-age pensions.

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There is also a need for what are termed ‘Extended Social Security Benefits’, such as for childcare, education and housing. Karnataka, for instance, has a provision for paying a childcare allowance of Rs 500 per month to children of construction workers for three years. Such a childcare allowance needs to be ensured in any fresh SS Code. Alternatively, accessible day-care centres need to be provided or built with SS funds, to care for the children languishing at work sites, especially of migrant workers, who are deprived of other familial support. Otherwise, malnutrition and consequent susceptibility to infections will continue to kill 69% of the 8.8. lakh children under five years of age who die in the country every year – a figure that fails to move policymakers, as demands for day-care centres for 0-6-year-olds mostly fall on deaf ears.

Financial aid even to the compulsory school-age children are meagre in our country by all counts. The SS Code needs to supplement these with conditional cash transfers linked to the completion of compulsory education by children, so that these incentivise parents, especially those who migrate temporarily, to retain their children in school, as it is mostly their children who drop out.

The lack of house rent allowance for temporary migrants in cities is the reason why as many as 10 of them are often forced to live in a one-room, window-less, tin shed measuring 10 x 10 sft, without drinking water and toilet facilities. Is it any wonder that calls for maintaining hygiene and ‘social distancing’ to avoid the coronavirus sound ironic to them? The new SS Code needs to ensure that an allowance for decent rental housing for temporary migrants is provided, or that such housing is constructed with the SS funds in every ward. A silver lining is that Karnataka has issued a Government Order requiring most of the above benefits to be given to construction workers, based on a memorandum by CIVIC.

Both the rental housing allowance and house construction subsidies for workers need to be high enough in any SS Code to enable a worker’s family to have a house of minimum 600 sft, providing at least 100 sft of living space per person (a norm in other countries), apart from space for a kitchen and a toilet. The current norm of building 250 sft houses for a low-income family, because “they cannot afford a bigger house” must go if we really wish to avoid infections spreading and also put an end to the invisible and unspoken but endemic disease of TB, which kills 4,40,000 persons in the country every year.

Can we hope that the buzz-line for the SS Code will be: “Samajik Suraksha hai tho Jaan hai” (There is life, if there is Social Security).

(The writer is Executive Trustee of CIVIC Bangalore)