The Tamil Nadu government’s final notification of minimum wages for the tailoring industry has halved the dearness allowance (DA) component for all categories of workers compared with the preliminary notification. This is a major change and in variance with its submission before the Supreme Court in November last year. “The DA would now amount to Rs 4,070 for this financial year (till March-end 2025), compared with Rs 8,130 as per the DA calculation specified in the preliminary notification, which was also filed before the Supreme Court seven months ago,” said Sujata Mody, President, Garment and Fashion Workers’ Union (GAFWU).
The Chennai-based union, which has fought for timely minimum wage revisions for garment workers since 2010, is now protesting the cut in DA as per the new order of May 31, 2024. Their demand is that the preliminary notification of November 6, 2023 be restored, without changes. Though the sector is highly industrialised and integrated with global markets at one end, nearly the entire workforce – a majority of whom are women, landless migrants from all over the country, and from Dalit and other socially disadvantaged communities – are hired on informal terms or are under contractors, with little to no job security.
Either way, they work in highly exploitative conditions. In practical terms, it is hard to enforce even the specified monthly minimum wages. This move, singularly, and seen in conjunction with the often opaque processes in labour-re.