Lawmakers on Thursday expressed disappointment in the Union Labour Ministry failing to revise the non-binding National Floor Level Minimum Wage (NFLMW) for the last eight years. These wage levels are expected to be revised biennially, in keeping with the price pressures in the economy and other factors.
The National Committee on Rural Labour introduced NFLMW in 1991 as a non-statutory measure to establish a minimum wage structure and reduce wage disparities across India, factoring into the rise in the consumer price index for industrial workers (CPI-IW).
Since it has only persuasive value, the Centre can only request states and union territories to fix and revise the minimum wages for all scheduled employment in their respective domains, ensuring they are not below the NFLMW.
What do trade union members say?
Sources who attended the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Labour and Employment said members across party lines, barring those from the ruling BJP, were critical of the Labour Ministry’s “lapse” and asked it to submit in the next sitting, in writing, the reasons for not hiking the NFLMW, at its regular intervals.
“Considering that the increase in floor wages is only advisory only on the part of the central government, and doesn’t require it to bear any financial burden, the ministry’s lapse is inexplicable,” said a trade union source.
The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Labour and Employment has 29 members. Of them, 15 attended the Thursday meeting, including the committee chairman, Basavraj Bommai. Though the meeting was supposed to deliberate on the implementation of the labour codes, which have been hanging fire since 2019-20, a lion’s share of the two-hour meeting was spent on the non-hiking of the NFLMW issue.
When was NFLMW last revised?
NFLMW was last revised from 160 to 178 per day, effective from August 1, 2017. In 2019, NFLMW was subsumed within the Code on Wages, 2019, which provides for the Centre to fix the floor wages. The Code stipulates that minimum wage rates fixed by the appropriate government shall not be less than the floor wage.
Proper and timely revision of the NFLMW by the Centre would have enabled millions of workers in sectors like plantations and services to benefit from the economy’s buoyancy and escape poverty, provided states had followed the norm.
