Skip to main content

Bill on national wages floor to be tabled in winter session

The labour ministry will seek Cabinet approval for the Wage Code Bill, which seeks to empower the Centre to set a minimum wage across all sectors in the country, in the next few weeks and will try to have it passed in Parliament’s coming winter session.
Union Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya on Wednesday said discussions over the Bill between the government, trade unions and industry bodies had concluded.
A group of ministers will meet on Thursday to decide the final shape of the Bill. Apart from Dattatreya, the group consists of Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Power Minister Piyush Goyal and Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.
The Bill provides for a floor rate of national wage that will be mandatory for all states. This will provide a boost to the Centre’s recent initiative of increasing the minimum wage of central government employees by 42 per cent.
“We are trying to create a mechanism for a minimum wage for all sectors,” Dattatreya said.
The Centre and states now set minimum wages for different categories of workers, in their respective jurisdictions. The Centre wants to club around 40 labour laws into five and all wage-related laws will be part of a wage code.
The labour ministry is likely to push the codes on wages and industrial relations when the the Parliament resumes next week.
CODING WAGES
  • Union Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya said tripartite discussions over the Bill among the government, trade unions and industry bodies concluded
  • A group of ministers will meet on Thursday to decide on the final shape of the Bill
Business Standard New Delhi,15th September 2016

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Household debt up, but India still lags emerging-market economies: RBI

  Although household debt in India is rising, driven by increased borrowing from the financial sector, it remains lower than in other emerging-market economies (EMEs), the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said in its Financial Stability Report. It added that non-housing retail loans, largely taken for consumption, accounted for 55 per cent of total household debt.As of December 2024, India’s household debt-to-gross domestic product ratio stood at 41.9 per cent. “...Non-housing retail loans, which are mostly used for consumption purposes, formed 54.9 per cent of total household debt as of March 2025 and 25.7 per cent of disposable income as of March 2024. Moreover, the share of these loans has been growing consistently over the years, and their growth has outpaced that of both housing loans and agriculture and business loans,” the RBI said in its report.Housing loans, by contrast, made up 29 per cent of household debt, and their growth has remained steady. However, disaggregated data sho...

External spillovers likely to hit India's financial system: RBI report

  While India’s growth remains insulated from global headwinds mainly due to buoyant domestic demand, the domestic financial system could, however, be impacted by external spillovers, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said in its half yearly Financial Stability Report published on Monday.Furthermore, the rising global trade disputes and intensifying geopolitical hostilities could negatively impact the domestic growth outlook and reduce the demand for bank credit, which has decelerated sharply. “Moreover, it could also lead to increased risk aversion among investors and further corrections in domestic equity markets, which despite the recent correction, remain at the high end of their historical range,” the report said.It noted that there is some build-up of stress, primarily in financial markets, on account of global spillovers, which is reflected in the marginal rise in the financial system stress indicator, an indicator of the stress level in the financial system, compared to its p...

Retail inflation cools to a six-year low of 2.82% in May on moderating food prices

  New Delhi: Retail inflation in India cooled to its lowest level in over six years in May, helped by a sharp moderation in food prices, according to provisional government data released Thursday.Consumer Price Index (CPI)-based inflation eased to 2.82% year-on-year, down from 3.16% in April and 4.8% in May last year, data from the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) showed. This marks the fourth consecutive month of sub-4% inflation, the longest such streak in at least five years.The data comes just days after the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) Monetary Policy Committee cut the repo rate by 50 basis points to 5.5%, its third straight cut and a cumulative reduction of 100 basis points since the easing cycle began in February. The move signals a possible pivot from inflation control to supporting growth.Food inflation came in at just 0.99% in May, down from 1.78% in April and a sharp decline from 8.69% a year ago.A Mint poll of 15 economists had projected CPI ...