The Long Walk Home

Contract Labour and Covid-19 in India

On 24 March, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a strict 21-day lockdown in a bid to combat the spread of the coronavirus and fend off a public health tragedy. India’s population of 1.3 billion had four hours to prepare. The government ordered everyone to stay at home as they ground cities and industrial hubs to a halt and suspended the country’s public transport systems, including its vast rail network. The government’s abrupt decision led to chaos and confusion, particularly among India’s contract labourers who operate in non-essential sectors such as automotive, electronics, tourism, garments and textiles and consumer durables.

These and other informal workers, many of whom are interstate migrants, found themselves out of work. Stranded in cities such as Delhi, Chennai, and Mumbai, they needed to get back to their homes, often in neighbouring states. With transport links shut down, workers and their families had to walk with limited supplies, some of them travelling distances of hundreds of miles. The media drew comparisons with the flow of refugees traversing between India and West and East Pakistan (the latter now known as Bangladesh) during partition in 1947.

Local authorities including law enforcement mistreated and harassed migrant workers as they tried to get home. A journalist highlighted this at the end of March when he uploaded a video of officials spraying returning migrant workers in Uttar Pradesh from head to toe with bleach meant to disinfect vehicles; the footage soon went viral and caused outrage on social media. This is not to say that the response from the authorities towards migrant workers and their current situation has been wholly apathetic. Some state governments such as Kerala, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh have taken measures to help workers including providing buses to get home and relief camps for those still stranded. The non-profit sector has also helped significantly in this regard.

Coronavirus – Making a Bad Situation Worse

India’s lockdown has shone a light on the precarious living and working conditions of the country’s contract labour force. Local and foreign companies increasingly use contract labour across sectors in India, a trend supported by changes to the labour code in 2018. Contract workers are cheaper to employ and easier to lay off than permanent employees. They are often internal migrants from poorer states such as Bihar or Uttar Pradesh who travel from small towns and rural villages to find work in the larger cities and industrial areas.

India’s unskilled contract labourers are more vulnerable than permanent employees. They have less job security, pay, statutory benefits and legal protection. Within this group, migrant contract workers face the highest risks of exploitation. They often owe money to recruiters, and send a large proportion of their salaries back home. If they complain about conditions or attempt to join a union, they are often threatened with being fired; employers know that these labourers cannot afford to lose their jobs. Working away from home, they cannot rely on social or family networks for help.

During economic slowdowns, contract labourers are some of the first to lose their jobs. Even during times of growth, they regularly suffer human and labour rights violations. These include non-payment of minimum wages, substandard living and working conditions, restrictions on freedom of association, excessive working hours, no pay for overtime, and psychological, verbal and physical abuse. Employers regularly flout laws designed to protect contract and migrant workers, the enforcement of which is the responsibility of both the federal and state governments.

Notably, many out-of-state workers do not receive the statutory benefits they are entitled to under India’s Interstate Migrant Workmen Act, which includes payment to cover the cost of return travel from their home state to their new place of work. Principals of companies and contractors that do not comply with these laws can face convictions and even imprisonment.

Still, some sectors score better on worker rights than others. Real estate, construction and infrastructure are some of the highest-risk industries for worker exploitation, with the pharmaceutical, automotive, electronics, and gig economy industries performing better.

Identifying and Mitigating Risks

Modern slavery and other laws pose compliance risks to firms that fail to understand their contract labour supply chains. Moreover, respecting human and labour rights, as set out in the UN Guiding Principles in Business and Human Rights, is simply the right thing to do. In Wallbrook’s experience, the most effective way to remedy risks to human and labour rights is a thorough review of internal policies and supply chains, combined with credible, third-party led human rights impact assessments. Findings from these exercises inform plans to address and mitigate risks.

Contract labourers in India and around the world eagerly await the opportunity to return to their jobs. With Modi extending India’s lockdown until early May, Indian workers have more time to wait. But while time will eventually end the Covid-19 crisis, it will not end the plight of India’s contract labourers. For that, we need well-informed, sustained efforts by companies to understand their impacts and use their influence to promote the rights of workers in their supply chains.