-Scroll.in It provides no guidelines to account for minimum consumption by households, despite Supreme Court rulings on this. Over the past year, the government has taken steps to consolidate India’s complicated patchwork of labour laws into four codes. The Code on Wages, 2019, which received presidential assent on August 8, is the first of the codes to come into effect. This Wages Code has been enacted with the express objective of simplifying...

-The Hindu While indexation of the NREGA wages is critical, lifting them to the minimum wage would help workers and the economy The government made two recent announcements at two ends of the spectrum to mitigate the economic crisis. One concerns a new indexation of NREGA wages meant to increase rural incomes. The second is a reduction in corporate tax rate. Prices of commodities increase each year, so it’s important to accurately estimate...

-Newsclick.in The labourers from Dang migrate every year to Bardoli—a hub of sugar mills—where they are caught in a system of advance payments that bind them to the workplace for the duration of the season. Dang, a district in southern Gujarat, is witnessing one of the largest labour movements in its recent history after the tribal sugarcane harvesters of the district decided not to migrate to Bardoli and other neighbouring areas. Bardoli,...

-The Hindu Stimulus measure to link pay to consumer price index with annual revision. Staring at a slump in rural demand and a slowdown in the rural economy, the Centre plans to inject more money into the UPA’s flagship Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme by linking wages under the Act to an updated inflation index, which will be revised annually. It hopes this will increase wages, thus increasing...

-Scroll.in Some of these workers had found temporary jobs with political parties for the upcoming Haryana Assembly elections. Rahul Kumar Sharma, 22, worked in the welding department of an auto-component company in Manesar, Haryana, fixing nuts and bolts that would be later assembled to form a car door. He had joined the company in June 2017. The work hours were gruelling. For a nine-hour shift, he earned a monthly salary of Rs 9,765...