-The Hindu Business Line Trade union seeks urgent measures to alleviate pain of joblessness, drastic fall in income Trade unions and industrial associations painted a grim picture of the unemployment scenario in the country at a recent meeting of the Labour Standing Committee. The trade unions demanded urgent measures such as direct cash transfers to address job loss and wage loss, while the representatives of industries demanded a re-look at the current...

-Livemint.com The aim is to enrol nearly 380 mn workers and provide them benefits during times of distress The Union government will roll out the unorganized sector database by the end of July to enrol almost 380 million workers, weeks after the Supreme Court rapped the labour ministry, saying that it showed “unpardonable" apathy towards workers in the Informal sector. The development comes more than a year after the mass reverse migration of...

The recent Supreme Court of India’s judgments (please click here and here) related to ensuring food security of the migrant and unorganised sector workers through the provision of dry ration, running of community kitchens and proper implementation of the 'One Nation One Ration Card' scheme should come as no surprise to us. A recent review of some of the robust studies, which relied on multi-state surveys (or reference surveys), having...

-TheWire.in The pandemic disproportionately impacted women and young workers. A school bus driver is struggling to make ends meet driving a tempo for hire, purchased with an informal loan; a five-star chef is volunteering for an NGO preparing cooked meals for distribution in the slums of Bangalore; and an MCA degree-holder is working as a door-to-door water purifier technician. These and many more such anecdotes give us a glimpse into the disruption...

-Press release by National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM) dated 2nd July, 2021  The sudden and unplanned lockdown imposed by the union government in March 2020 in the wake of pandemic had caused immense hardship to the Informal sector workers. After much criticism and concern on its inaction, Supreme Court on 26.05.2020 took suo moto cognizance of “problems and miseries of the migrant labourers”. Later, several persons associated with people’s organisations...