The working hours in kilns are arduous and the principle of 8 hours a day and 48 hours a week is not followed.
The UK observed anti-slavery day on October 18. This year’s observance was marked against the practice of modern slavery which still persists in UK. India, too, should dedicate a day against all its traditional and modern slavery like practices. India has the largest number of slaves in the world and India’s brick kilns engage slave labour (Walk Free Report).
Contrary to popular perception, slavery is still prevalent and exists in various modern forms and names such as forced labour, bonded labour, child labour, debt bondage and human trafficking among others. According to Global Slavery Index (GSI) 2013, more than 29 million people worldwide are captives of slavery. GSI estimates that India is home anywhere between 13,300,000 and 14,700,000 enslaved workers though India doesn’t have any official data on the same.
As per J John’s estimates in Labour File, brick kilns employ more than 5% of 472.9 million workers in India (NSSO 2011-12). An estimated 50,000 to 100,000 brick kilns function in India (Labour File, 2014) and the way the sector operates, promote bonded labour and debt bondage.
Workers engaged in kilns are not paid a monthly wage instead; payments are made on per brick production. The Piece-Rate Wage (PRW) method is not commensurate to the value of labour input and is barely sufficient for subsistence living. Due to low wages and poverty, most workers take a loan from employers/ owners. Once the loan is taken, workers lose control over their conditions of employment and usually have no idea until the end of the season how much they are entitled to receive, or if they still owe the loan and are servicing their debt. There is also an interest component to loan disbursed, which inflates the debt rate. The loan/advance contract, oriented toward kiln owners’ profit, restricts workers’ mobility forcing them to continue working in the kiln.
Under PRW, the labour management is designed in a way that production is seasonal, nevertheless continuous and the structure of advance and postponement of wages is such that workers’ economic mobility is impaired.
PRW is exploitative and discriminatory in nature; no wages are paid to workers for the day when work is temporarily halted due to harsh weather conditions and bricks aren’t produced. No wages are given during days of rest or during sickness. The labour that goes before moulding of bricks, ie, carrying soil, mixing, kneading it etc, is not counted in the PRW method.
The working hours in kilns are arduous and the principle of 8 hours a day and 48 hours a week is not followed. No wages are paid during non-production months. Brick kilns follow ‘family labour’ norm in payments in which women are not recognised as workers and are denied separate wages. The sector is afflicted by child labour.
Debt bondage or bonded labour has been identified as an institution or practice similar to slavery (Labour File, 2014). International legal instruments such as ILO Forced Labour Convention 1930, the UN Slavery Convention 1926 and UN Supplementary Convention 1956 recognise bonded labour as a form of slavery.
In 1976, Bonded Labour System (Abolition) (BLSA) Act was promulgated in India to free workers from debt bondage. BLSA Act draws heavily from Article 26 of the Constitution. However, the Act’s implementation has proved ineffective.
Kilns are in the schedule of the Minimum Wages Act 1948 and various state governments publish the minimum wages of brick-kiln workers. However, a survey by Centre for Education and Communication in Punjab revealed that PRW declared by the government does not tally with what workers actually receive. The survey also identified a glaring gap between the PRW and the declared Minimum Wage Rate (MWR) where income differentials between the two is substantial in all categories of work from unskilled to highly skilled. Considering the abusive nature of piece-rate wage, it remains to be seen if the government considers abolishing it and introducing monthly wage method instead, to free the kilns of bonded labour.
The author is manager, research and communications, Centre for Education and Communication, New Delhi.
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