Appropriation of daily wages
Workers are paid less than there legal dues in several ways, for example not paying the due minimum wage, or not making the mandatory contribution to Employees' Provident Fund (EPF), Employees' State Insurance (ESI), or Workers’ Welfare Cess Account (Workers' Cess). In this note we discuss minimum wage -- a subsistence wage mandated by the Government of India, you can find more details on EPF, ESI and workers' cess on the respective page.
Legal Position: Indian law prescribes a “minimum wage” for each kind of work, including unskilled labor. See The Minimum Wages Act, 1948. Note that these are meant for “preservation of the efficiency of the worker” and are meant to be LOWER than the “living wages” the latter being one “which should enable the worker to provide for himself and his family not merely the basic essentials of food, clothing and shelter ... ”, this being from the government report on the working of The Minimum Wages act 1948, 2005. Payment less than the minimum wage amounts to extracting bonded labor and is severely punishable under law. Also the “principal employer” (in this case IIT Kanpur) has a legal obligation to ensure that the minimum wages are being paid to all the workers, including those employed by its contractors.
Conditions @ IITK: Underpayment of wages is rampant at IITK -- a phenomenon which was continuously highlighted by campus community since alt least the nineties, forcing the institute to establish Minimum Wage Monitoring Committee. Some of the key observations from the committee in this regard are contained in the following documents:
"Even though the MWMC has existed for 4 years monitoring has been possible only for maintenance, cleaning and similar contracts (it has not yet monitored construction workers' payments). There is evidence of fairly widespread evasion of minimum wage payments to workers at least by some contractors."
"In spite of all these efforts we are very far from paying minimum wages in the campus because the authorities are not willing to implement simple suggestions of the MWMC. In spite of incontrovertible evidence collected and provided by the MWMC, including workers willing to speak up at great personal risk, the authorities have not penalised any contractor."
Case Studies: A few cases reports can be accessed below: