Labour groups lobby for state insurance for informal workers

MUMBAI: Despite over 93% of the country’s labour force working in the informal sector, the latter has no social security or employee benefits. In their fight to change this, the Working Peoples’ Coalition (WPC), a nationwide collective of unions, NGOs and labour experts, held a conference on Thursday with labour organisations, unions and government officials to discuss expanding the scope of the Employee State Insurance scheme (ESI) to all informal workers.

Bilal Khan, one of the organisers, said the ESI didn’t give just health insurance to workers but had many other benefits. “But right now, the scheme is restricted to salaried employees in organisations with over ten workers and earning less than ₹21,000 a month,” he said. To change this, WPC has been working to create welfare boards for informal workers, which will be the base to get them the benefits that come with formal employment.

This is not an easy task. “The ESI is a fund to which both workers and employers contribute,” explained Rajiv Khandelwal, vice-president of WPC and director of labour rights organisation Ajeevika Bureau. “The workers earn too little to be able to contribute. And in informal work, the employer is not always formally recognised or is even absent. Consider the case of domestic workers, waste-pickers or hawkers.”

In some instances, figuring out the employer-worker equation is simpler. For instance, in IFAT, a union of gig workers, the workers are mainly drivers and delivery personnel. “The employer is easy to recognise here, as these workers are employed by recognisable big names such as Uber, Ola, Zomato and Swiggy,” said IFAT general secretary Uday Ambolkar. For such workers, Khan explained, the employee cess can be collected from the companies.

“Likewise, with the case of construction workers, thanks to the building and construction workers (BOCW) welfare board, where construction companies already pay a cess, collecting an amount for the ESI cess should not be difficult,” said Khan, adding that in categories such as domestic workers and hawkers, the municipal corporations could step in. There were suggestions at the conference that companies that make household appliances could be charged a cess for domestic workers’ ESI; similarly, for waste pickers, massive plastic waste-producing companies could be roped in to contribute.

The challenges do not end there. Ambolkar also brought up the poor conditions of the many ESI hospitals in Mumbai, which lack doctors, medicines and facilities despite having a corpus of around ₹1 lakh crore. Getting the informal workers to sign up for the ESI can be a challenge too, said Khan, but a surmountable one, with many organisations working on ground.

Fifteen sectors of informal workers unions from the west zone attended the conference, representing fisherfolk, domestic workers, salt pan workers, powerloom workers and construction workers. “The government is itself keen on introducing social security benefits for informal workers,” said Khan. “That is why it set up the e-shram portal: to quantify and understand the population of informal workers in the country.”