The myth of ‘unskilled’ labour

According to the Safe in India Foundation, unskilled workers earning under ₹8,000 a month in the automotive sector lost 2.27 fingers per accident on average in 2024 versus 1.54 fingers for skilled workers earning more than ₹20,000.

Earlier this year, thousands of industrial workers protested their stagnant wages across Noida and New Delhi. The Uttar Pradesh government responded by giving ‘unskilled’ workers an interim hike of ₹13,690 a month and ‘skilled’ workers ₹16,868, despite both groups facing the same inflation.

Based on assessing migrant labourers in Keralam’s construction and hospitality sectors, the International Institute of Migration and Development, Thiruvananthapuram, has estimated that ‘unskilled’ workers experienced 40% more wage theft than skilled workers. Factories often use the label ‘unskilled’ to justify withholding annual increments, health benefits, and safety training. The Safe in India Foundation report attributed the higher severe injury rate among ‘unskilled’ workers to employers often tasking such workers with operating dangerous power press machines without adequate training or safety measures. Contractors likewise deny construction workers personal protective equipment and often deny the final month’s pay knowing labourers lack legal recourse, and exclude sanitation workers from safety protocols in hazardous occupations.

In fact, the ‘unskilled’ status is one the state sustains rather than what naturally arises in society. Across sectors, supposedly ‘unskilled’ workers are expected to have skills such as handling construction materials, coordinating physical work, identifying defects or irregularities in finished products, using hand and power tools effectively, aligning and placing materials accurately, maintaining tolerances during repetitive production, troubleshooting routine production issues, responding appropriately to process issues, carefully handling human waste, working safely in confined spaces, and recognising hazardous gases and other dangerous conditions, among many others.

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Stratified labour market

‘Skill’ in India has become an occupational as well as a social category: workers may acquire a considerable amount of embodied knowledge through experience yet remain ‘unskilled’ in the eyes of institutions because they lack the formal credentials used to recognise, and pay for, skill.

India’s labour market also remains stratified along caste, class, gender, and, increasingly, migration lines, influencing which forms of labour are considered ‘skilled’, and so remunerative. The informalisation of jobs — such as municipal corporations hiring contractors to hire sanitation workers on contracts — has also weakened the relationship between competence and occupational status. Ultimately, economic production is sustained on the engagement of millions of workers whose job security it fails to improve.

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The Code on Wages requires governments to account for a worker’s skill level when fixing minimum wages, together with geographical area, whether the work is arduous or hazardous, and so on. The wage schedules of the Union government then assign floors for workers performing otherwise comparable work. In agriculture, thus, the daily rates in September were ₹528 for unskilled work, ₹578 for semi-skilled work, ₹627 for skilled work, and ₹694 for highly skilled work (in urban centres with the highest costs of living).

Per the government, ‘unskilled’ agricultural work encompasses weeding and manually watering crops and requires ‘only’ physical effort and no training or judgment. ‘Highly skilled’ work, however, demands advanced technical expertise, like calibrating a combine harvester or managing pest outbreaks. But weeding and irrigation also involve learned techniques such as identifying weeds, assessing soil conditions, using tools without damaging plants, and planning work according to weather conditions.

Yet the way India classifies skills, compounded by its preference for institutional recognition, disproportionately concentrates ‘unskilled’ workers in informal jobs. And the classification is self-reinforcing: lower wages reduce workers’ ability to obtain institutional qualifications or avoid precarious employment while precarious employment makes employers less inclined to invest in their workers’ training and safety.

mukunth.v@thehindu.co.in