Articles by A V Jose

It has been a year since the United Democratic Front government took offi ce in Kerala. During this period communal forces have exercised their infl uence in government formation, and caste and sectarian mobilisation has grown. One could surmise from the policy orientation of the state government over the past year that the ascending classes now have a decisive infl uence over the agenda of development projects. While taking crucial decisions on investment priorities, the government is playing to the gallery of public opinion, which, in turn, has been taken over by special interest groups.

A review of evidence on employment and wages from selected European Union countries leads one to surmise that in the context of developing countries, we tend to judge the performance of labour regulatory regimes more in terms of their impact on employment creation. Inadvertently though, we seem to foist a false idiom, since a job-creating function is beyond the terms of reference of any protectionist labour regulation. What is important in developing countries is to facilitate a rapid, but endogenous evolution of labour institutions that can protect workers' rights and remain friendly to job-creation. This requires a fresh look at some national level policies and programmes, which are not necessarily in the domain of labour relations.

This paper argues that historically the main mission of trade unions has been to ensure an equitable distribution of the fruits of economic growth. The unions accomplished this mission through strategies aimed at enhancing the content of 'substantive rights' - wages, hours of work and working conditions - and at minimising income inequalities between the incumbents and new entrants to the world of work. A return to this earlier emphasis on non-competing groups has assumed strategic importance in today's global economy. The paper discusses some options before the labour movement with special reference to the developing countries. There is much to learn from union experience in industrial societies, where they have made substantive rights accessible to a broad spectrum of workers including those at the lower end of markets. By building on such rights, the labour movement can help develop a social floor for the global economy, empowering workers to gain access to a larger basket of rights and entitlements.

Some Perspectives A V Jose In a number of densely populated Asian countries, rural workers dependent on agricultural wage employment as their principal source of income account for a sizeable share of the total labour force engaged in agriculture. This lends significance to analysis of the net impact of farm mechanisation on prospective wage income of the rural population. Some issues related to farm mechanisation and also the consequences of farm mechanisation are examined in this paper.

This paper makes a comparative study of wage rates of agricultural labourers in the different states over the period 1956-57 to 1971-72.
While according to earlier studies wage rates improved significantly in real terms only in Punjab (including Haryana and Kerala), our extension of the series to 1971-72 shows that improvement in real wages took place also in Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat. However, these states still account for less than 30 per cent of the agricultural labour force in the country.