WORKING CONDITIONS AND AVAILABILITY OF SOCIAL SECURITY BENEFITS AMONG THE UNORGANISED WOMEN WORKERS

Abstract

Social security for the unorganized sector is increasingly receiving the attention of academicians, policy makers, multilateral organizations and non-Governmental organizations. Unequal access to labour market, increase in the informal sector activities due to displacement of modern jobs and insufficient capacity of the modern public and private sector to create new jobs have made the population to move in search of work in informal sector. This informal sector in turn yields low income and low productivity. In this context, an attempt is made to know working conditions and the availability of social security benefits among the unorganized women workers. It has been discussed through analysing the variables such as hours of work per day, overtime work, weekly holidays, wages paid in time, mode of payment, awareness about minimum wages, equality of wage, equality of wage to the performed work, reasons for low wages, sanitary facilities available in the work place, type of social security benefits expected and awareness about the existing social security measures are covered in this paper. The results presented in all the tables in this paper were estimated from the primary data collected from the respondents.The inescapable conclusion is that the arguments for the regulation of working conditions ensue not only from the protection of workers and their rights as well as concerns with basic dignity of work, but also from the logic of enhancing productivity and growth, even though such logic may not be immediately obvious to individual employers (NCEUS, 2007). The workers in the unorganized sector constitute nearly 93 percent of the total work force in the country.