All work and no wage

 Demands for respectable academic contracts with adequate living wage and social security are not surprising

Underpaid scientific labour has been systematically justified, if not internalised, by the very intellectual community whose standards of living and passion for building a science-conscious society are being invisibly compromised. The status quo seems to be challenged by the recent academic workers’ strike at the very core of Western capitalist nations, the United States of America and the United Kingdom, where cost-cutting in the academia has been institutionalised in the name of market competency in scientific endeavours. Around 48,000 academic workers from the University of California went on strike demanding full-time wages and academic benefits (picture, top); about 70,000 academic workers, covering 150 universities across the UK, took part in the university strike (picture, bottom).

Demands for respectable academic contracts with adequate living wage and social security are not surprising. Numerous underpaid academic employees are burdened with the rising costs of living and pre-existing debts. Many of them are now realising that the university system has forced them into indebtedness by encouraging the marketisation of education and the delegitimisation of rightful, free college education.

Hypothetically speaking, if the cost-of-living crisis subsides by short-run economic management, should university employees forget the demands for better academic pay and social security benefits for their junior peers? No, they should not. Evidence suggests that decades of low wages for academic labour are detrimental: for instance, research at the University of Colombia found that persistent low wages are linked to a faster decline in memory.

Underpaid wage combined with increasing work dissatisfaction and diminished career prospects among researchers is a reflection of a structural crisis in the labour market of science. Scientific research is undoubtedly a risky and expensive venture. But why should economic vulnerability be imposed on doctoral students, postdoctoral fellows and trainees? Policy-instituted economic insecurity is harmful to the nurturing of scientific passion and innovation. It also undermines the emancipatory potential of scientific projects for society.

The slogan, “U.C., U.C., you can’t hide! We can see your greedy side”, echoing from the walls of campuses, is emblematic of the sentiment of every underpaid researcher across the globe. Scientists are leaving academia in response to low wages. Economic security and academic freedom are two fundamental conditions that must be met to stem the tide.

Such anxiety-inducing ec­o­nomic penury has been per­sistent in the scientific com­munity. Post-doctoral fel­lows are being forced to accept underpaid wages in the form of stipends and fellowships. However, despite the growing disenchantment, researchers are delivering remarkable innovations.

There is an additional dimension to the crisis. The underpayment of the scientific community — researchers and others — may have wider societal consequences. What society is receiving in terms of returns, such as scientific innovation and endeavours, is only a small percentage of what researchers are capable of. If ideal conditions — fairer wages and intellectual freedom — are met, the returns from the scientific community would be greater.

Jameel Barkat, Amit Sadhukhan

Source: The Telegraph, 18/04/23

Database of unorganised workers is a welcome step towards creating a robust social security architecture

 

The absence of credible data on the migrant workforce, the inability to identify them quickly enough, meant that little policy support could be extended to this section during a period of acute economic distress.

The migrant labour crisis that played out during the Covid-induced national lockdown last year exposed the gaping holes in the social security architecture in India. The absence of credible data on the migrant workforce, the inability to identify them quickly enough, meant that little policy support could be extended to this section during a period of acute economic distress. But this absence of comprehensive, granular data extends well beyond the migrant workers, and encompasses the entire unorganised labour, which accounts for roughly 90 per cent of the entire labour force in the country. In its absence, it is difficult not only to design appropriate policy support, but also to ensure delivery of benefits during times of need. To address this glaring gap, the government has launched the e-Shram portal — a database of unorganised workers. This is a welcome and long overdue step. The identification and registration of these workers marks the first stage in a long journey towards creating a social security structure for this part of the labour force.

As reported in this paper, roughly a fifth of the estimated unorganised workers in the country are now registered on the database — the government hopes to register 38 crore unorganised workers. Odisha leads the coverage with around 87 per cent of its unorganised workers registered on the portal, followed by West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Bihar. Preliminary snapshots of the database reveal that 40.5 per cent of unorganised workers belong to the OBC category, 27.4 per cent are from the general category, 23.7 per cent are Scheduled Castes, while 8.3 per cent are Scheduled Tribes. The portal also gathers information on the occupations the workers are engaged in. As reported in this paper, maximum registrations have been in the agriculture sector (53.6 per cent), followed by construction (12.2 per cent), and domestic and household workers (8.71 per cent). Considering that some sectors/occupations have been hit worse by the pandemic, this is vital information. Governments could tailor specific schemes to help those sections of the unorganised labour force who have faced the brunt of the economic dislocation. Reportedly, the database will also be linked to Unnati — the proposed labour matching platform.

There are several issues that require greater government attention. For one, the information gathered on workers, especially on migrants, will need to be regularly updated. The states of origin and destination will need to do this and keep track of circular migration. Second, registration for those unwilling to do so will need to be incentivised. Third, eligibility criteria for schemes that depend on information that is not collected by the e-Shram portal will also need to be integrated. There is also the issue of portability of benefits, extended at both the central and state level, that will need to be examined. Merely creating a database of workers is not enough, but identifying them, registering them, is a step towards including them in social security schemes, and creating a more comprehensive and robust social security architecture.

Source: Indian Express, 23/11/21

Rethinking Social Security 

Social security has to be a whole lot more than writing cheques for beneficiaries

The government is preparing a new code on social security, as part of its mammoth overhaul of the country’s labour laws to condense them into four codes. The codes on occupational safety and wages have come to light and are more amalgamation of extant laws than articulation of new principles to suit emerging reality. The code on social security offers a chance for fresh thinking. Should the code cover only the organised sector workers or those who toil in the unorganised sector, too? If the latter, why not extend the coverage to all of society? In reality, selective coverage will be meaningless. Every citizen should be eligible for social security, for social security to yield meaningful social cohesion and dignity. No Aping the West The conventional notion of social security is that the government would make periodic payments to look after people in their old age, ill-health/ disability and indigence. This idea should itself change. Social security should conceptually change from writing a cheque for the beneficiary to institutional arrangements to care for beneficiaries, including by enabling them to look after themselves, to a large extent. The write-a-cheque model of social security is a legacy from the rich world at the optimal phase of its demographic transition, when the working population was numerous enough and earning enough to generate the taxes to pay for the care of those not working. This model is ill-suited for less well-off India with growing life expectancy, increasing urbanisation and resultant migration, in a context of radical shifts in the nature of production and of work. Urbanisation radically changes society’s requirements. Housing for all, for example, has different meanings under a static ratio of urban-torural folk and under a progressive shift to urbanisation, with people migrating from village to town. Someone might have a home in the village, but needs a place to stay in the city where he goes to work. Housing for all will not meet this requirement. What an urbanising society needs is a plentiful supply of affordable rental accommodation. Similarly, social security under urbanisation will be different from social society in a static society. For example, should the beneficiary unit be the family or the individual? What is considered a family in a traditional society could be spatially distributed in an urbanising society, dependent parents staying back in the village while the earning members work in different cities. Social security would have to target the individual rather than the family
How to pay for social security for the entire population is a big question. But how much is to be paid for would depend on how social security is conceptualised. Who are the elderly, and what are they capable of ? If anyone who crosses the age of 60 is seen as a doddering dependent incapable of doing anything productive or earning anything, the social security bill would be an order of magnitude larger than if those over 60 are recognised as people capable of contributing to society but on a flexible schedule and at varying levels of intensity of work during their hours of work. Old people’s homes are probably ill-suited for anyone but invalids. Ideally, elders and younger families should live together in close proximity in a framework of community living. Elders could take care of preschoolers and schoolkids after school hours. They could tutor them in math and science, recount folklore and myths that constitute tradition and provide emergency response in case of accidents. In return, young members of the community could take care of the seniors in various ways, running errands, as companions and emergency responders. Tap Seniors’ Capability Teenagers could accumulate social work points for the voluntary work they do in looking after the elderly who are housebound, and these points could count towards college admissions or their own eligibility for volunteer service when they need it. Social security should keep the accounts. Work is changing, with technology liberating many kinds of work from geographic location, rendering some others redundant and yet others amenable to being divided up into bits to be performed by independent so-called gig workers. Retired schoolteachers in India could help teenagers struggling with their homework in South Africa or North Carolina. A software engineer in Kolkata could collaborate with his former classmate in Salem to deliver a tool outsourced by a Bengaluru-based company. Social security should include worker retraining, not just unemployment allowance. It should help/mandate gig workers buy insurance and save for old age, perhaps by automatically deducting a fraction of the payments received into their bank accounts into insurance/pension accounts, say, in the National Pension System. Social security should help elders deploy their skills to match the demand anywhere in the world. Comprehensive healthcare and a quality education system would plug into social security, improving worklife earnings and enhancing the earning capacity of the next generation. It would be useful to rethink social security in holistic, if unconventional, terms.

Source: Economic Times, 4/09/2019

Making sense of NYAY

It is best read as a political promise for social security. There is more than one way of redeeming it

Written by Jean Drèze |

Guaranteed minimum income is a powerful idea that has already made some headway in various countries. Some European countries, for instance, guarantee a minimum income to their citizens. This requires extensive data collection as well as an effective cadre of welfare officers and social workers tasked with enquiring into the circumstances of people who claim to need income support.

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It would be nice if India could achieve something similar, but the obstacles are daunting. Starting with the financial burden, a recent brief of the World Inequality Lab by Nitin Bharti and Lucas Chancel presents some useful figures. The authors essentially estimate the “minimum-income gap”, that is, the gap between minimum income and actual income summed over all households with actual income below the minimum. With a minimum income of Rs 72,000 per year, the gap turns out to be 1.3 per cent of GDP. This information is helpful, but it does not tell us much about what it would cost to guarantee a minimum income of Rs 72,000 per year to everyone. All it says is that if this could be done through perfectly targeted and costless top-up transfers, it would cost 1.3 per cent of GDP.

In an earlier avatar, the Congress party’s minimum income guarantee (MIG) proposal was based on this sort of top-up model. The idea was that the government would simply fill the gap — if any — between minimum income and actual income, household-wise. This is impractical, if only because it requires household-specific income data that are virtually impossible to collect, at least for now. It also creates obvious incentive problems. One possible response is that the basis for calculation of the gap should not be actual income but some sort of “imputed income” — an estimate of what a household is expected to earn based on observable characteristics such as education and land ownership. Imputed-income estimates, however, are bound to lack precision, leading to large inclusion and exclusion errors.

For these or other reasons, the top-up formula was dropped and NYAY was announced: Uniform cash transfers of Rs 72,000 per year, equivalent to Rs 6,000 per month, to the poorest 20 per cent households — about 50 crore households based on 2011 census data. Initially, an impression was created that NYAY “guaranteed” Rs 12,000 per month, because most households earn at least Rs 6,000 on their own, but this is incorrect. In fact, Bharti and Chancel estimate that 33 per cent of households earned less than Rs 6,000 per month in 2011-12, and the corresponding proportion today may not be much lower. In short, NYAY is a targeted cash-transfer scheme that guarantees Rs 6,000 per month to the recipients — nothing more, nothing less. It can also be thought of as a massive non-contributory pension scheme.

Naturally, the NYAY proposal is more expensive than the top-up formula. It requires Rs 360,000 crore per year, or close to 2 per cent of today’s GDP. If NYAY is rolled out over five years, and India’s real GDP continues to grow at 7 per cent per year or so, the cost will be around 1.4 per cent of GDP at its peak. If that really goes to the poorest households, NYAY would seem like a good idea. How the NYAY recipients are to be identified, however, is an unresolved puzzle.

Identifying the poor used to be the main purpose of the so-called “below poverty line” (BPL) surveys. The record of BPL surveys, however, is dismal: Three national surveys suggest that about half of all poor households in rural India did not have a BPL card in 2004-5. In recent years, for the purpose of identifying the recipients of food subsidies under the National Food Security Act, some states have adopted a different approach, known as the “exclusion approach”. In this approach, well-off households are excluded using simple and transparent criteria, and everyone else is eligible by default. This approach seems to work much better than the BPL surveys, but mainly when the proportion of households to be excluded is relatively low — say 20 or 25 per cent. Excluding 80 per cent, as NYAY requires, is another matter.

The targeting problem is all the more serious as the income transfers being proposed under NYAY are much larger than anything ever delivered to BPL households. Shocking as it may sound, Rs 6,000 per month is the sort of salary that many informal-sector workers earn in the poorer states — say chowkidars or domestic workers. People struggle, bribe, cheat and fight for this sort of job. Selecting 20 per cent of households for an unconditional monthly pension of Rs 6,000 is likely to be a chaotic exercise.

Perhaps the way forward is to read NYAY as a political commitment to a massive pension scheme, equivalent to cash transfers of Rs 6,000 per month to the poorest 20 per cent households, and explore possible variants of this formula. To illustrate, one possible variant would involve individual pensions of Rs 1,200 per month for 25 crore persons, instead of Rs 6,000 per month for 5 crore households. The NYAY pensioners could include all elderly persons, single women and disabled persons who do not meet well-specified exclusion criteria. That would add up to something like 12 crore persons, leaving substantial room for other vulnerable categories. This would not be perfect, but it would have a chance to work at least.

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Other variants are also possible, for instance a mix of household and individual pensions. Politicians need simple slogans, and “Rs 72,000 per year for the poorest 20 per cent” serves that purpose, but it is important not to let this slogan shut the door to other ways of redeeming the political commitment underlying the NYAY proposal.

The writer is visiting professor at the Department of Economics, Ranchi University

Source:Indian Express, 5/04/2019