INTER STATE MIGRANT WORKMEN ACT

Subject : Governance

Context : Migrant labourers, abandoned by employers and the state, undertaking an arduous journey home, in many cases walking hundreds of kilometres on the highways, became the defining image of the national lockdown during the pandemic.

Concept :

• The Act seeks to regulate the employment of inter-State migrants and their conditions of service.
• It envisages a system of registration of such establishments.
• The principal employer is prohibited from employing inter-State workmen without a certificate of registration from the relevant authority.
• The law also lays down that every contractor who recruits workmen from one State for deployment in another State should obtain a licence to do so.
• Contractors are bound by certain conditions. These include committing them to providing terms and conditions of the agreement or any other arrangement on the basis of which they recruit workers.

Applicability of the law:

• It is applicable to every establishment that employs five or more migrant workmen from other States; or if it had employed five or more such workmen on any day in the preceding 12 months.
• It is also applicable to contractors who employed a similar number of inter-State workmen.
• The Act would apply regardless of whether the five or more workmen were in addition to others employed in the establishment or by the contractors.

Beneficial provisions for inter-State migrants:

• Registration of establishments employing inter-State workers creates a system of accountability and acts as the first layer of formalising the utilisation of their labour.
• It helps the government keep track of the number of workers employed and provides a legal basis for regulating their conditions of service.
• The wage rates, holidays, hours of work and other conditions of service of an inter-State migrant workman shall be the same as those extended to other workmen in the same establishment, if the nature of their work is similar.

Attempts to reform:

• As part of the present regime’s efforts towards consolidating and reforming labour law, a Bill has been introduced in Parliament called the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2019.
• The proposed code seeks to merge 13 labour laws into a single piece of legislation. The Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act, 1979, is one of them.