Inter-State Migrant Workers

In one line

Part II applies where ten or more inter-State migrant workers are employed; they must get the conditions and benefits of the establishment's own workers, a report to both States if they are killed or seriously hurt, an annual fare home, and a ration they can draw in either State.

In exam wording: section 59 of the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 applies Part II to every establishment employing ten or more inter-State migrant workers on any day of the preceding twelve months; section 60 imposes three duties on every contractor or employer; section 61 requires the employer to pay a lump sum annual to and fro journey allowance to the worker's native place; and section 62 requires the appropriate Government to make schemes for an option to draw the public distribution system benefit in the native or the destination State, and for portability of building and other construction cess benefits.

Why the law has this at all

In the summer of 2020 several million people walked home. They walked because the work stopped in one State and the ration card worked in another, and because nobody could say how many of them there were or where they had come from.

That is the background against which Part II must be read, and it explains the two provisions in it that have no ancestor in the old law: section 62(a), the option to draw the public distribution system benefit in the native State or the destination State, and section 62(b), portability of the building and other construction cess benefits into the destination State. Both address the same failure. A worker who has paid into a welfare fund in one State, or who is entitled to subsidised grain in one State, should not lose it by going where the work is.

The other reason for a separate Part is older. A worker in a State not his own is more vulnerable than a local worker in every respect that matters: he does not know the language, he cannot go home, he does not know where the labour office is, and if he dies his family may not be told. The Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act 1979 was passed for that reason, and section 143(1)(j) of this Code repeals it.

Whether what replaced it is better is a fair examination question, and the honest answer is that it is better in reach and worse in content. The Code covers far more workers and gives each of them less.

Some words this chapter uses

Inter-State migrant worker, section 2(1)(zf), is a person employed in an establishment who either (i) has been recruited directly by the employer or indirectly through a contractor in one State for employment in an establishment situated in another State, or (ii) has come on his own from one State and obtained employment in an establishment of another State, called the destination State, or has subsequently changed the establishment within the destination State, in either case under an agreement or other arrangement for such employment, and who draws wages not exceeding eighteen thousand rupees a month or such higher amount as the Central Government notifies.