May Day: Minimum wages fail to secure workers’ interest

The Minimum Wages Board has not revised wages for one-third of all private sectors, in six to 33 years, and as a result workers are grappling with the rising cost of necessities to make ends meet with low pay.
Meanwhile, in 42 other sectors, the minimum wage set by the board has failed to secure the interests of the workers and is also often ignored by owners, alleged labour leaders.
The wages board failed to revise the minimum wages for workers of 16 sectors – type foundry, petrol pump, tea packaging, tailoring, ship breaking, ayurvedic, hosiery, hotel and restaurant, automobile workshop, pharmaceuticals, soap and cosmetics, land port labourers, iron foundry and engineering workshop, tea garden, privately-owned road transport, oil mills and vegetable products, confirmed officials.
Minimum wages board is the only statutory wage-setting mechanism for private sector workers and it is legally bound to revise minimum wages every five years.
The workers can hardly make their ends meet on the meagre wages they get, said Sramik Karmachari Oikya Parishad leader Wajed-ul Islam Khan.
‘The negative attitude of owners is the main reason minimum wages for workers of these sectors have not been revised,’ he added.
Minimum wages board secretary Mitsu Shaolin said the revision of minimum wages was a continuous process and currently the board had created a committee to review the wages of workers for hotel and restaurant, hosiery, land port and bidi industry.
Officials of the board said that they had set Tk 521 as monthly minimum wage for workers of type foundry in 1983, Tk 792 for petrol pump workers in 1987, Tk 2,160 for workers and Tk 2,510 for employees of tea packaging industry in 2008 and Tk 2,325 for workers of the tailoring industry in 2008.
Minimum wage for workers of ship breaking industry, ayurvedic industry, hosiery, hotel and restaurant, automobile workshop, pharmaceuticals and soap and cosmetics sector was last revised in 2009.
Minimum wage for workers of iron foundry and engineering workshop, oil mills and vegetable products, land port workers and tea workers was set in 2010.
The Wages Board usually sets up an individual wage board for a sector, comprising six members – a chairman, one permanent and one temporary worker’s representative and one permanent and temporary owner’s representative, and one independent specialist.
Mitsu Shaolin said that in making its recommendations the wage boards take into consideration
cost of living, standard of living, cost of production, productivity, business capability, economic and social conditions of the country and others factors.
Labour leaders including Socialist Labour Front general secretary Razequzzaman Ratan, however, said ‘the minimum wages declared by the board have so far failed to meet the needs of workers.’
‘The formation of wage boards is still bureaucratic and undemocratic. They set wages following the wishes of the government and keeping in mind how much the owners can afford,’ he said, adding ‘the board does not take into consideration how to improve the workers’ standard of living, productivity and skills’.
‘Usually, the permanent and temporary representatives of workers are selected from the ruling party, so they give priority to the wishes of the government instead of the rights of workers,’ Ratan alleged.
Labour leaders also alleged that on many occasions owners do not provide the minimum wages to the workers prescribed by the board.
Wajed-ul said the value of real wages for workers in the sectors, after inflation is taken into account, has been falling for decades. He said that generally, workers are poorly paid.
With inflation rate at around 10 per cent and the increasing price of daily necessities, labourers are passing their days in hardship, he said.
‘There is lack of initiative from the government to revise the minimum wage for these sectors,’ he added.
Hotel and restaurant sector workers, meanwhile, raised objections over the appointment of representatives of owners and workers to the wage board, saying that real representatives were ignored by the government.
In March this year, board constituted a wage board under Ruhul Amin, head of human resources at Hotel Regency, as the owners’ representative, and Ahsan Habib Mollah, adviser of Hotel-Restura Sramik League, offshoot of ruling Awami League, as workers’ representative to the board.
Bangladesh Hotel Restaurant Sweetmeat Workers Federation general secretary Rafiqul Islam said that the government appointed people to the wage board who were strangers to hotel workers and employees, ‘ignoring real workers’.
Bangladesh Sramik Karmachari Federation general secretary Ujjal Roy demanded immediate establishment of a minimum wage board for increasing the wages in the tailoring industry.

News Courtesy: www.newagebd.net