PLFS Statement 17: Percentage distribution of workers by broad occupation division & Table 25

This data roughly maps on to the proportion of self employed (the middle income group) and regular salaried and casual labourers (the low income groups) given in tables 3 and 7 above. Of course the ‘regular salaried/wage workers’ is an omnibus category which will include the top strata of managerial and bureaucratic classes as well as those working in return for meagre monthly wages.

What is significant in this table is that the workers who work for wages in factories or outside of as unskilled manual workers constitute a significant 27% of the working population of towns. Among women too, we find 24% of working women in this category.

The above statements should be read with some caution as these nine categories of employment really do not allow us to presume who exactly are wage workers, self employed and managerial strata. The ‘skilled craft persons’ for example can include women tailors who work in garment sweat shops and not really self employed persons.

Significantly the share of manufacture too has decline over the last four decades. At the same time the construction sector has been absorbing a very large segment of urban working population especially of male workers. Its share over the forty years has increased from 4% to 12% for male workers. Even if one were to include construction in the category of industry, it is the so called service sector which appears to provide maximum employment. This sector employs about 61% of male and well as female workers. In terms of total employment manufacturing and construction together employ about 33% workers, while Trade and Transport etc employ about 27%. All other services together employ 34% of all workers. In other words service sector employs about 61% workers in all. (it should be noted that even within the service sector, 35% of all women workers are employed in education, health and household work.)

This indicates the tremendous expansion of the so called service or tertiary sector the cost of the primary production sectors.

Conditions of Employment

As noted earlier nearly 47% of urban persons who are engaged in income earning activities can look forward to ‘regular salary or wage’ and these are overwhelmingly men. The PLF survey tells us about the precarity of even this miniscule minority.

The absence of any formal arrangement naturally precludes other essential features of decent employment like weekly holidays and fixed working time etc. paid leave including leave during sickness, maternity, etc. Most of ‘regular salary/wage’ workers were not entitled to any social security benefits (pension, gratuity, provident fund, health or maternity benefits). According to the survey results nearly 48% of urban workers in this category were not eligible for any social security benefits. If we were to include all urban workers (self employed and casual workers) then less than 25% of urban workers are entitled to any social security benefit. No wonder we see such a high degree of begging among the 65+ year old urban population.

The survey shows that 53% of urban regular wage earners are not entitled to regular paid leave. It also appears that this condition has been intensifying over the years as the percentage of workers without paid leave appears to be steadily increasing over the last decade. The denial of paid leave is just the tip of the iceberg. It only indicates long hours of work without any respite.

The data on hours of work shows that almost all categories of workers worked for more than six days a week and put between 40 to 60 hours every week. The self employed men who constitute 28% of the urban workforce, on an average put in 58-59 hours of work a week and worked almost on all days of the week (more than eight hours every day of the week). The hours of work for women in the self employed sector is 41 hours a week, an average of six hours every day of the week. In addition they would be attending to domestic work like cooking, cleaning , attending to children and the old and ill persons.

Statement 26: Average number of hours actually worked
in a week by workers in different statuses in employment

It would appear that the low capital intensive and low technology work that such self employed persons do at a pace set by themselves, allows them to work longer on all days of the week. From the unemployment statistics compiled by the NSSO, it appears that this category of workers feel that they can work for another seven or nine hours a week if gainfully employed.

The regular salaried/wage workers of the urban areas appear to be putting in the longest hours of work, the men working for more than 60 hours a week (eight and a half hours in case of 7 day week and 10 hours a day in case of 6 day week); women in this category also work for over 52.6 hours a week (again averaging over seven and a half hours every day of the week). This is the price they pay for their ‘regular’ salaries or wages. In a highly insecure labour market, relative job security comes with a stiff bill.

In contrast, casual workers in the urban areas typically get less work: Male casual workers get work for around 5 to 6 days a week and appear to get on an average only 46 hours of work a week. Women casual workers too, get work for five days a week and an average of 40.6 hours work a week. However, this unskilled work can be highly exhausting so much so that despite putting in lesser hours of work, they feel disinclined to work more as this category of workers shows least willingness to extend hours of work. Unlike in the rural areas, urban working hours do not appear to vary between seasons (however, casual labour does show marginal variation of about an hour or so)

Statement 27 of the PLFS gives further details which can be fairly alarming. As many as 34% of urban male workers work for 60 to 84 hours a week!

A simple look at these figures, tells us that as in the rural areas, in the urban areas too, the 150 year old demand of ‘Eight Hours Day’ remains a distant dream for the Indian labouring masses. Condemned as they are to work for over eight hours every day of the week, there is little time left for either educational, political, cultural or recreational purposes.

Let us now turn to the issue of remuneration and earnings of these workers.

Earnings of Urban labouring people

Let us first take the category of Regular wage or salary earners (Statement 22 of PLFS report) as their earnings can be clearly expressed in terms of monthly earnings. As mentioned above they constitute 47% of the urban workers. We learn that even though the earnings are supposed to be regular, they are not constant over the year and vary from season to season. The range for male workers is between Rs 17314 (in monsoon months) to Rs. 18,353/ (in Spring). Averaging the seasonal variation, we get a figure of monthly salary/wage of Rs. 18,000 for men and Rs. 14,600 for women. Assuming from the above discussion on working hours, that women work for 208 hours a month and men work for 240 hours a month, we get the following hourly averages for their respective incomes: women Rs 70 per hour and men Rs 75 per hour. Women thus get about 93% of the men’s wages per hour.

Casual labourers who depend upon daily random employment constitute about 15% of urban working population. Their average per diem wage averages around Rs 324/ (ranges from Rs. 313/ to 335/) for men which gives an hourly average (assuming an eight hour day) of Rs 40/. For women it is a daily average of Rs. 192/ giving a paltry hourly rate of Rs.11/. We also need to remember that they don’t get regular work on all days. As such the average monthly earnings would be both varying and much less. The wide gulf that separates the wage rates of the regularly employed and the casual workers is noteworthy. While in the case of men it is little less than double in the case of women those regularly employed get seven times the hourly wages of a casual worker. This huge difference can be attributed to the fact that the bulk of regular employed women are in the service sector like education, health, etc, which are highly paid compared to casual work.

We shall now turn to the most complex segment of all, the ‘self employed’ workers. These constitute 38% of the urban workforce, with men dominating the profile. To recall the information from Table 2, the own account workers constitute about 38% of rural workforce and helpers in the same category constitute about 17%. Unfortunately, the report does not give us any break up of the earnings of the two categories, assuming that the ‘helpers’ are largely unpaid. Despite some seasonal fluctuations, the average monthly earnings of male self employed workers average around Rs. 16,067/ and that of women is less than half of this at about Rs. 7000/ (Statement 25, PLFS). These earnings are termed ‘gross’ in that they include both ‘profit and wages’. The profit ought to accrue to the capital investment in the form of land, equipment and animals. Also these are income of the entire family and not of individuals as in the case of regular salaried or casual wage workers. The average monthly income projection of about Rs. 16000/ for men and Rs. 7000/ for women, is a lot better than the earnings of the casual workers but lower than that of regular wage/salary earners. If one were to go by the hours of work put in, it works out for male self employed workers to be about Rs. 68/ per hour (compared to Rs.75/ for regular salary/wage earners and Rs. 40/ for the casual workers). Considering that this is a combination of return on capital investment and labour put in by an entire family unit, we can appreciate the extent of distress faced by the self employed in the urban areas.

By way of a conclusion

We had noted in the very beginning a highly uneven pattern of urbanization with states like Bihar showing very low degree of urbanization and states like Tamil Nadu having substantial urbanization. Among the more populous states, it appears that only about six or seven states have urbanization to the extent of 40-50% of their populations living in urban areas. Likewise seven populous states have less than 25% of their populations in urban areas. Such uneven urbanization has important economic as well as political implications for working class development and organsiation.

We had also noted that sex ratio has improved in the urban areas but at the same time female participation in labour in urban areas has declined. This indicates that women in towns are engaged mainly in reproductive activities sustaining the male labour force engaged in income earning work. This is not to deny a significant female workforce especially in the service sector (health, education, administration and shopkeeping), but it points out to the fact that the predominant segment of women in towns are engaged in upaid domestic labour. This has serious implications for organization of workers and women workers especially. Domestic issues which hitherto had not occupied the concerns of trade union and working class movement needs to be addressed if women workers are to be organized and their latent militancy which comes to the fore time and again harnessed for social change.

About 33% of all urban persons are ‘gainfully’ employed (the rest being either unemployed, students, housekeepers or persons engaged in ‘disreputable’ professions like prostitution and begging or boot legging). These amount to about ten crore persons. Of this about 47% have some regular work with regular periodic income. While this category includes all kinds of persons with salaried income and thus will include highest civil servants and also managerial strata of corporate houses, the vast majority of this category will be industrial workers, school teachers, clerks, shop workers etc. with some technical or liberal education. Another 38% are self employed. Significantly, unlike in the rural sector, most of the self employed are own account workers and not helpers.. In the rural sector nearly 30% of the self employed were unpaid helpers while in the urban sector this proportion is less than 15%. These urban informal sector workers play a crucial and yet unrecognized and unsupported role in the urban economy. Petty shop keepers, petty producers, peddlers, without any institutional support not only act as links between large producers and consumers but also play an important role in the production chain as ‘outsourced’ producers. This sector was the most hit by the ill conceived acts of the Modi government like ‘demonetisation’ and the new tax regime of ‘GST’. Even though this is largely a petty-bourgeois strata, this is a category of workers who put in long hours of work and get rather poor returns. Casual workers without any certainty of employment or wages constitute 15% of the urban population, whose main problem is the lack of regular work or social security support. The self employed and the casual workers together constitute the most vulnerable segment of the urban employed persons.

One of the burning issues we noted above was the killingly long hours of work urban laboring people have to put in to eke out subsistence wages. We saw that virtually all categories of workers except probably the white collared work for all seven days and work for more than eight hours every day. A large number of people actually work for more than ten hours on all the seven days of the week. For over a hundred and fifty years the working class has been demanding eight hours day and six day week as essential for a civilized life in our times. It is an irony of capitalism that despite the tremendous leaps in productivity since then, workers still have to put in inhuman hours of labour in the service of capital.

A corollary of long hours of work is low wage levels, the average wage level being between Rs 40 to Rs 75 per hour. (At present exchange rates this amounts to a maximum of one US$ per hour.) We had noted earlier that each working person has to support two non earning persons financially (who are either children or spouses who help to reproduce labour). The minimal wages would be insufficient even for one person and thus forces on them longer and longer hours of work.

Another burning issue we need to note is the low social security cover available for urban working people. Less than a fourth of all urban workers are entitled to any social security benefit. This abysmal coverage combined with growing privatization of basic services like health and education and not to say of basic needs like food and housing, pushes the laboring poor into greater degree of self exploitation through greater hours of work and are forced to continue to work even in old age and sickness or resort to begging etc just to keep themselves alive.

These are some of the issues that need immediate attention of labour activists, trade unionists and communists working in the country.