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The first national convention on labour 1969 attempted to define unorganised sector; “Unorganised sector is that part of the workforce who have not been able to organise in pursuit of a common objective because of constraints such as, casual nature of employment, ignorance and illiteracy, small size of establishments with low capital investment per person employed, scattered nature of establishments and superior strength of the employer operating singly or in combination”.
The ILO Convention no. 141 of 1975 defines rural Labour as “any person engaged in agriculture handicrafts or related occupation in a rural area whether as a wage earner or as a self employed person such as tenant share cropper or small owners-occupier.” This definition covers marginal farmers and they are covered as self employed.
According to the National Commission on self-employed workmen (1987) in the unorganised sector, women do arduous work, as wage earners, piece rate workers, casual labour and service conditions of these women are dismal. The commission further observed that “the unorganised sector is characterised by a high incidence of casual labour mostly doing intermittent jobs at extremely low wages and/or doing their own account work at very uneconomical returns. There is total lack of job security and social benefits. They are, exploited by way of long working hours, unsatisfactory working conditions and occupational health hazards.
The unorganised sector is also called informal sector, which refers to informal nature of employment or the work. Unorganised sector includes own-account-workers. The term denotes the workers who are accountable to themselves for their work and mostly they are self employed artisans, share crappers, small farmers, traders in small shops, micro or tiny industrial units of self and in service sectors. The unorganised workers however, cannot be referred as those who are not organised workers or those who are not engaged in organised sector.
The unorganised workers of unorganised sector or informal economy are vast majority of employed, employable unemployed and self employed work force which encompass contract labour, casuals, temporaries, home workers, domestic servants, part time workers, own account workers, marginal farmers, contractual workers and includes women, child labour, old aged workers; whose wages and earnings are generally at subsistence level; who do not get protection of labour laws, due to ignorance and very loose enforcement; who are generally dented social security, welfare and health cover; who are not organised in any form of trade unions or association and generally face inhuman or hostile environment”.
This descriptive definition would only help to formulate some sort of concept of informal sector workforce. However, there are variations, For instance unorganised working in organised sector industries as well. Rather such informal workers are increasing in number in formal or organised sector.
Unorganised sector workers constitute 95-96 per cent of total work force. Only about 30 million workers are in organised sector. If we include dependents also with 390 million unorganised workers, than we have approximately 900-950 million population of unorganised working class. Thus our entire country is a vast unorganised sector workers colony or an informal sector economy.
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Participants