“Every moving The Code on Wages Bill, 2019 made it a point to inform the Members of the Rajya Sabha that the government had accepted 17 out of the 24 recommendations made by the Standing Committee which had scrutinised a similar bill introduced in the previous Lok Sabha.
That there is a serious problem with minimum wages and that it needed to be set right was brought home by the bill. Approved by Parliament, the bill enables the introduction of minimum wage for every worker in addition to focusing on issues like delay in payment to employees and gender disparity in wages, etc. Incidentally, the bill incorporates four labour laws: Minimum Wages Act, Payment of Wages Act, Payment of Bonus Act and Equal Remuneration Act.
While the government is keen to ensure that minimum wage will become the right of every worker, Minister Gangwar assured the House that the central government would not “take the rights of the states” to fix the minimum wages even as the Bill stipulates that a tripartite committee comprising trade unions, employers and state government would fix a floor wage for workers throughout the country.
However well-intentioned the government might have been, the minimum wage has been fixed at 178 a day – way below the 375 a day that a labour ministry body recommended and even lower than the 700 a day that the Seventh Central Pay Commission had prescribed. Incidentally, the law has raised the wage by 2 a day! The salutary effect of the bill: there is today a national minimum wage that is applicable across genders, jobs and even geographies. One can only hope that the norms will be imposed all across the country.
This story is from the August 2019 edition of Legal Notes.
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This story is from the August 2019 edition of Legal Notes.
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