Striking workers at Foxconn India in Sriperumbudur near Chennai take on the corporate giant, demanding better wages. WORKERS at Foxconn-India in Sriperumbudur in Kancheepuram district, Tamil Nadu, have been on strike from September 24 demanding better wages. They also want the reinstatement of 24 suspended colleagues and the withdrawal of an eight-day wage cut slapped on some workers. That they have held out for so long is remarkable, not least...

Back in May 2010, sixty Dalits, who had worked their entire lives as manual scavengers, burned the baskets they used for collecting human excreta outside the District Collector's office here. They had just been employed as sweepers by the local administration under a rehabilitation scheme. Five months later, all of them are without work, having been suspended, astonishingly, for not working hard enough. “It took us a lot of courage to...

For the first time, the ongoing Mazdoor Satyagrah at Statue Circle here, brought together various nomadic and marginalised communities in the state on a common platform on Thursday. Representatives from the Kalbeliya, Garia Lohar, Banjara, Kherua and other communities came together, sharing the platform with NREGS workers demanding minimum wages. "These are communities that don't even have an identity card to prove themselves, a proper residential facility, schools for their children or...

Expressing 'deep distress' over the 'shameful practice of manual scavenging' in the country, the National Advisory Council, headed by Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, Saturday asked the government to 'fully abolish' it by the end of 2012. It observed that despite the practice of employing scavengers being declared an offence, no one has been punished for it. The issue is seen as 'an issue of sanitation than of issue of human dignity,'...

The Union government is reneging on its legal obligation to pay minimum wages, even to the most deprived sections of the population, in the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. If anyone wants to study the capacity of India's policymakers to turn a progressive piece of legislation upside down, the wage policy under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is a good place to...