India Labourline has unearthed numerous cases of contractors or employers skipping wage payments or providing fewer-than-promised work hours.
File photo of labourers. (Representational image/Creative Commons)
Hari Prakash (name changed), a migrant labourer in Kerala, has been awaiting wages of ₹18,800 from his contractor for over a year.
Hailing from Bihar, he now lives with his family in the Ernakulam district of Kerala.
“In 2022, I did painting work for over a month for a contractor but didn’t get any payment. He initially said he would pay, but I couldn’t reach him over the phone afterwards,” said Prakash.
“When I complained at the Angamaly Police Station, the police mediated a compromise wherein he agreed to pay ₹12,000. But his cheques have bounced thrice,” he added.
Prakash has remained unemployed since September, when his eight-year-old daughter was abducted and raped.
The child, who sustained severe injuries, is still undergoing treatment at a government medical college in Kerala.
Prakash knows the pending wages will be nowhere near enough to get his daughter treated at a private hospital, like he wants, but he said it would help in at least the short term.
On 17 December, Prakash was among the 50-odd labourers who attended an adalat (court) organised by the District Legal Services Authority (DLSA) in Ernakulam, hoping to get the wages their employers or contractors had cheated off of them.
The adalat, comprising a retired sub-judge and a lawyer, was supposed to hear both parties and settle the complaints.
A total of 38 cases were heard on the day, but none, including Prakash’s, could be settled since not a single respondent — employer or contractor — showed up at the adalat despite advance notices.
Over the past two decades, migrant workers from North and East Indian states have been pouring into Kerala owing to higher wages and lower levels of caste-based discrimination.
However, workers’ complaints indicate that wage theft has become a major problem and that the government machinery is unable to tackle this.
India Labourline (ILL) — a helpline for workers in distress that is run by a collective of civil-society organisations under the leadership of Aajeevika Bureau and the Working Peoples Coalition — set up its Kerala chapter in Kochi in October 2022.
In its first 14 months alone (October 2022 to December 2023), the helpline received 1,093 complaints on non-payment or withholding of wages from migrants in Kerala.
These cases made up 98 percent of all complaints the centre received.
Disha D, the centre coordinator, said they have intervened in 739 wage-theft cases so far, and that the total amount claimed by these workers alone added up to ₹1.3 crore.
The amount claims range from as low as a few hundred rupees to ₹1.4 lakh in a case filed collectively by 13 contract workers of Kochi Water Metro.
“In the cases where we intervened, over half the complainants were from the construction sector, including painters and carpenters. About 20-30 percent were from the plywood industry. Others worked in shops, restaurants, the fish-processing industry, and the likes,” Disha told South First.
The team has settled nearly a third of the 1,093 cases, she noted.
Since workers from West Bengal and Assam formed the biggest chunk of migrant labourers in Kerala, they also accounted for the biggest share (528) of the complaints the ILL received.
Workers in Ernakulam have been raising wage-theft issues with officials as well, which resulted in the DLSA adalat in December.
After public outrage following the rape and murder of a five-year-old migrant child in Ernakulam in July, district-level officials held meetings with migrant workers, wherein workers reported wage theft as their biggest concern.
But labour activists said that knee-jerk responses such as a single adalat were insufficient as migrant workers were vulnerable and their cases difficult to resolve.
Of the 38 cases it heard, the aforementioned adalat referred only four to the DLSA for legal aid. Some proof was available in these cases, such as the Kochi Water Metro employees’ case.
DLSA officials said they would send notices again to the employers or contractors, and a lawyer would be assigned to take these cases to labour court if they still did not respond.
The adalat referred the remaining 34 cases back to the Labour Department since these cases lacked any evidence.
The district assistant labour officers (ALOs) were supposed to follow up on these cases with employers, hopefully pressuring them to pay up.
However, these are mostly cases in which the ILL and the ALOs had unsuccessfully intervened prior to the adalat.
In two cases, though, the employers have now verbally agreed to make the payment, said Perumbavoor ALO Jayaprakash KA.
Jayaprakash said that resolving these cases was difficult owing to lack of evidence. “Also, many migrants leave their workplaces abruptly without informing the employer, and ask for pending wages later on,” he told South First.
But workers’ accounts reveal that many leave precisely due to lack of promised work or wages, or because of poor working conditions.
Mukul Ali, a worker from West Bengal, said he was promised daily work, but got only six days of intermittent work over the one month he stayed at the worksite.
“Also, I got only one day’s wage — ₹1,200. I left as I got neither wages nor work. I couldn’t send any money to my family that month,” he said.
In the seven months since then, Ali approached the police station to get the remaining wages of ₹6,000, but the contractor has paid him only ₹500.
Meanwhile, the contractor, a local resident, claimed that Ali had stolen an LPG cylinder from the work site.
“There was no cylinder at the site; all cooking was done on a wood stove. Besides, why would I go to the police station if I had stolen it? Wouldn’t I hide?” Ali asked at the adalat. His complaint was referred to the ALO.
“One-third of the migrant workers in Kerala are footloose labourers,” noted Benoy Peter, the executive director of the NGO Centre for Migration and Inclusive Development (CMID), which runs ILL’s Kochi centre.
“They stand in town areas in the mornings and wait for an intermediary or employer — usually a local person — to hire them on a temporary basis,” he explained.
Such workers have no proof of the work they do. In fact, most of them don’t even know the full names or addresses of the persons they are working for. And that makes filing of complaints difficult.
Though migrants hired in bigger groups by contractors tend to have some proof, such as a job card, this pattern of hiring is relatively less in Kerala, said Peter.
A report released by the Kerala State Planning Board in 2021 acknowledged that employers in the state tend to underpay migrant workers compared to locals.
Peter said that additionally, the daily work hours of migrant labourers in many sectors were longer than those of local workers.
This meant that, in effect, migrants’ pay per hour was much lower than that of local workers. “Employers prefer migrants for not just their skills but also ease of exploitation,” Peter told South First.
DLSA officials said currently there were no plans for another adalat dedicated to migrant workers, and that other complaints could be heard in the regular quarterly adalats held for the public.
ALO Jayaprakash said the Ernakulam district currently has a facilitation centre to support migrants. However, according to the district labour office, very few of the 1,000-odd calls the centre received in 2023 were wage-related complaints; most callers instead sought scheme-related information.
Complaints by labourers to ILL.
Peter said states like Rajasthan and Jharkhand had a much better system of complaint resolution through dedicated government helplines.
“The government helplines there are being operated efficiently by NGOs. Employers respond better when they get calls from a government helpline rather than from a civil-society organisation like us,” he noted.
KN Gopinath, chairman of the Kerala Institute of Labour & Employment, which functions under the state government, said labour officers in Kerala already take up migrants’ wage-related complaints.
But since many cases lack evidence, he said, “Officials should regularly hold inspections under various labour laws, instead of focusing on complaints, alone to ensure that migrants are not exploited.”
He adds that the state had 6 lakh registered migrant workers, whereas their actual number was estimated to be 10-12 lakh.
George, an activist with the Progressive Workers Organisation, said the long-term solution was that migrant workers should organise as much as local workers.
He recounted instances where they organised migrant workers to hold protest marches to the residences of employers, embarrassing the latter into paying up.
But so far, migrant workers have formed unions in only a handful of pockets in the state. “Trade unions say that these workers move around frequently, and hence it’s difficult to retain them as members,” said Gopinath.
For now, labour rights organisations demand that at least regular adalats, or helplines or centres that actively resolve wage-related complaints, should function in the state.
Labour Commissioner Dr K Vasuki couldn’t be reached for comment.
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