WFH bares wage disparity for industrial homeworkers

While the pandemic has brought 'work from home' to the limelight as a strategy to prevent mass unemployment, traditional homeworkers in India earn 60 per cent less than their counterparts who do not work from home, finds a study by the International Labour Organisation.

In India home work is dominated by industrial homeworkers, who are employees working from their home premises. The Periodic Labour Force Survey in 2018 has identified 31 lakh as homeworkers. When 2.35 million home-based beedi rollers and almost 8,00,000 home-based embroiderers were recast as probable homeworkers, the total homeworkers in India stood at 62,41,333, says ILO.

Around 66 per cent of these homeworkers are women. Most of them are in the age group of 35-59 years of age. Further, 58 per cent are into craft and related trades.

The industrial homeworkers of India are paid by piece and their earnings are just 41 per cent that of workers who do not work from home. The monthly earnings of garment workers in India are 11 per cent of the average Indian wage.

The earnings gap is 18 per cent due to fewer hours and 82 per cent due to very low hourly wages as they are paid per piece. In India homeworkers in all occupational categories are paid less.

The gender wage gap is higher among homeworkers in low or middle income countries like India, Mexico and Argentina. However, average weekly working hours for women homeworkers were higher at 36 hours, while it was 28 hours for non-homebased women workers.

At one end of the category of homeworkers are some of the poorest workers in the world of work, such as the 2.5 million women rolling beedi in India, while at the other end are the well-educated and highly paid employees of leading corporations working remotely from their home. In India, the Department of Telecommunications has given IT workers an exemption that allows them to work from home. This has led to 90 per cent of India's 4.3 million strong IT workforce shifting to full-time telework, says ILO.

"Given the possibility of other labour market disruptions in the future, homeworking may well feature as a key method of operation adopted by firms and their workers," says ILO. Hence, the governments have the responsibility of establishing comprehensive home work policies. Key policy areas include improving the visibility of homeworkers, raising awareness of their rights and responsibilities, setting fair wages and limiting working hours, ensuring safe and healthy workplaces, eliminating child labour, applying a strategic compliance model of enforcement, ensuring social protection coverage, ensuring access to quality childcare and promoting training and career development.