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Coal heavers wear sandwich boards to protest against low wages in 1921. Hulton Archive/Getty Images

No word is invoked more to characterize the current era than crisis. The term has been wielded incessantly in 2020already the most tumultuous year since 1968 and still only half overto designate a series of new and ongoing plights. It has named the impeachment crisis and the constitutional crisis many thought it revealed, themselves signs of the crisis of polarization in U.S. politics. Crisis nearly always describes the coronavirus pandemic and the economic turmoil it has unleashed. Journalists speak of a crisis of police violence against Black people in the United States, a slow-burn tragedy that sparked a crisis of civil unrest after the killing of George Floyd. And Americans move nervously toward a presidential election whose results, regardless of the outcome, will be thrown into doubt by accusations of foreign meddling or partisan hijacking. A crisis of legitimacy, perhaps even a crisis of emergency powers, looms on the horizon.

Yet these problems, as awful and intractable as they are, add layers to an already familiar crisis atmosphere: There is also the environmental crisis, the health care crisis, the energy crisis, the housing crisis, the drug crisis, the debt crisis, the migrant crisis, the education crisis, and the marriage crisis. There is even a loneliness crisis.

None of these problems can be isolated; each extends into other domains embroiled in their own dysfunction, with the result that the world feels entangled in overlapping and intersecting crises.

How is it, then, that the term crisis should apply across so many fieldsforeign affairs, domestic politics, climate, culture, economics, to name only a few? Does crisis have any meaning, beyond just a catch-all term for trouble? Is there any logic, or novelty, to the constant proclamations of crisis?

Historians are well suited to address such questions, given their training in alertness to context, eye for continuity and change, and ornery eagerness to question the terms of debate. Perhaps no part of the historians guild is better placed to ponder the meaning of crisis than historians of Germany, a nation whose atrocities and traumas, and willingness to grapple with their meaning, are unsurpassed in modern times. Above all, it is Weimar Germanypoised between the catastrophe of World War I and the even greater calamity of Nazism and the Holocaustthat has been portrayed as the quintessential society in crisis.

Weimar is much invoked nowadays, by pundits and experts alike. This commonly involves the search for parallels between that time and today, as though such correspondences might predict humanitys future. Will democracy collapse? Will fascism return? Are protesters toppling statues a totalitarian political movement, as Tucker Carlson claimed? Is Trumpism?

What research by historians of Germany suggests, however, is that the deepest similarity between Weimar and today is not in any particular danger; rather, it is in the outsized role that fear, apocalyptic expectation, and longings for salvation play in the populations political imagination.

Research on Weimar Germany also illuminates the role of ideology and activism within this crisis-consciousness. In a 2009 article on Suicide and Crisis in Weimar Berlin, the historian Moritz Fllmer explored how political actors at the time cited cases of suicide to support their partisan agendas. For the Nazis, suicides highlighted how ordinary Germans suffered from the nations humiliation under the punitive Treaty of Versailles. Communists invoked suicides as proof of capitalisms dehumanizing impact on workers. According to liberals and Social Democrats, suicides attested to the deleterious effect of an authoritarian school system. And traditional conservatives appealed to suicides as a sign of the breakdown of religion and family life. The only consensus was that suicides confirmed the corruptions of a system that forced its inhabitants to kill themselves.

How could suicides supply proof for such disparate conclusions? Because all sides cherry-picked cases and shoehorned them into pet views about what Weimars crisis was and what it demanded. As Fllmer put it, Right-wing authors emphasized the need for decision in an existential, all-or-nothing situation; Communists predicted the imminent downfall of capitalism as the prerequisite for a proletarian revolution; Social Democrats and liberals used the notion of crisis to opt for reform in a spirit of democratic humanism. For all these voices, the present was dire but the future yielded many opportunities, provided it was ushered in soon.

Such ideological crisis-consciousness, spun from panic about the present and the call to save the future from certain doom, is the strongest link joining todays world to the Weimar pastand not just to that past but to several centuries of modern life marked by convulsive change. The world has truly been here before.

A comparative history of crisis offers not a crystal ball into the future but a powerful lens into both the concepts meaning and its function today. There are three lessons in particular that ought to be learned.

The preeminent scholar of crisis is Reinhart Koselleck, one of the great historians of the past century, who died in 2006. Kosellecks first book was a blockbuster 1959 work on the 18th-century Republic of Letters called Critique and Crisis, which rebuked Enlightenment thinkers for criticizing the absolutist state based on unrealistic expectations of what politics could accomplish.

The Enlightenments Utopian constructs of the future, Koselleck argued, damned the present to the trash heap of history; in so doing, they destabilized European society and provoked the political crisis that led to the French Revolutiona cataclysm driven by idealistic demands for virtue and unspoiled democracy whose unfulfilled, and perhaps unfulfillable, promise has been shaping political events ever since.

The fingerprints of Kosellecks Weimar youth are all over the book. His first political experience, he once recalled, was watching partisans of the radical left and right bash each other in the schoolyard during Germanys 1932 presidential election. In Kosellecks view, the utopianism of communists and Nazi Brownshirts was traceable to the rigid moralization of politics of 18th-century critics like Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the belief that today is rotten, that history can be engineered for the better, that the unmerry facts of political lifecompeting interests, plural perspectives, shady compromisesmight pass away as a pure society is created on Earth.

Kosellecks most ambitious project was a collaborative, multivolume lexicon mapping the conceptual shifts that took place with the advent of modernity. He dubbed this the Sattelzeit (saddle age), a bridging period, from roughly 1750 to 1850, when words like revolution and citizen took on new, complex meanings in line with the enormous social and political changes underway in the West.

Koselleck wrote the entry on crisis himself. He began with the words Greek originsfrom a verb meaning to judge or decide, it had long implied stark choices, including a medical usage, enshrined by the ancient physician Galen, for the decisive moment in an illness that determines if the patient will live or die. But Koselleck went beyond the etymology of crisis to trace its birth as modernitys fundamental mode of interpreting historical time.

For Koselleck, the turning point came in the years around 1770, when the concepts residual meaning from Galen combined with a post-theological notion of history as the stage for final judgment. If society is sick, it must be healed and savedor else. Rousseaus Emile (1762) was the first text to deploy crisis in the fully modern sense, joining a diagnosis of current ills and a prognosis for the future within a philosophy of history that views the present as a moment pregnant with change and ripe for action.

Crisis in this sense fires the imagination. It takes hold of old experiences, Koselleck wrote, and transforms them metaphorically in ways that create altogether new expectations. We are reaching a crisis that will culminate in either slavery or liberty, Rousseaus fellow Enlightenment philosophe Denis Diderot declared in 1771. These are the times that try mens souls, proclaimed Thomas Paine a few years later, in a pamphlet series urging American independence aptly titled The Crisis.

In the 19th century, crisis became a key term in economics. For liberals, it named the trough in capitalisms boom-and-bust cycles; shorn of its eschatological dimensions, crisis became an agent of creative destructiona bringer of progress.

For Marxists, on the other hand, economic crises were not bumps on the road to innovation; rather, they were the inevitable journey to a terminal crisis, following intensifying busts, that would bury capitalism forever and usher in a socialist utopia. But the reliance on the idea of crisis remained, despite the terms semantic wobble between acute circumstance and epochal shift.

In the 20th century, crisis-talk sprawled everywhere. So haphazard was invocation of crisis, so omnipresent was its appearance in headlines and novel compounds (crisis of self-confidence, crisis expert, mini-crisis, etc.), that it threatened to lose even the modicum of meaning it once had as imposing an unavoidable choice between alternatives. In an age of crisis, Koselleck suggested, crisis itself had ended up in crisishollowed out to fit the exigencies of whatever perturbs people at a particular moment.

The dark side of modernity, its propensity to produce seismic fractures, was taken up by the German historian Detlev Peukert in his influential 1987 book, The Weimar Republic. For Peukert, Weimar was an extreme casea society in which successive upheavals generated a deep-seated sense of unease and disorientation, an awareness that the conditions underlying everyday life and experience were in flux. Nazism was merely a drastic answer to an all-embracing crisis that refused to yield to conventional remedies.

What Adolf Hitlers Germany demonstrates, Peukert argued, is how cascading turmoil can tip over into catastrophe when coupled with the modern states technological and bureaucratic powers to intervene. The Great Depression, parliamentary gridlock, the traumatic legacies of World War I, and meteoric social and cultural change fueled a crisis-ridden popular mood that swung between enthusiasm and anxiety, hopes of national reawakening and fears of national extinction.

Though Peukert presented Weimars crisis as an objective condition, his emotional languagehis talk of unease, anxiety, fear, and hopehelps readers see that it was more than just an external fact. Crisis also lives in peoples heads, bounded by the horizons of dream and dread.

In 2010, Rdiger Graf, another historian of Weimar Germany working in the wake of Koselleck and Peukert, argued that no one can ever construct a necessary causal chain linking external events to the experience of those events as a crisis.

No economic indicator, for example, decides how a society or government will respond. What steers the imagination are normative ideals about politics and society, a vision of history, and expectations and desires. What demands explanation is the feeling of crisis itself.

Most people naturally resist this idea: Declaring a crisis, they think, is the only reasonable response to facts they decry. But even a pandemic is first and foremost a crisis at the level of interpretation, not blunt fact. A disease becomes a crisis not because it kills widely but because it seizes the mind in a certain way.

Adam Gopnik captured the interpretive dimension of the coronavirus crisis in a moving account of New Yorks recent lockdown. Plagues happen only to people, Gopnik observed in the New Yorker. Animals can suffer from mass infections, of course, but they experience them as one more bad blow from an unpredictable and predatory natural environment. Only people put mental brackets around a phenomenon like the coronavirus pandemic and attempt to give it a name and some historical perspective, some sense of precedence and possibility.

It is not that hardship does not really exist; it surely doesand just as surely can it wax and wane. Crisis, however, is the product of a narrative that exceeds any particular data point of pain. No matter how bad, disorderly, and turbulent events and processes at a certain time are, Graf argued, they become a crisis only by relating them to a past development and projecting two different paths into the future, thereby defining the present as the critical moment of decision. In other words, crisis springs from the story that tells you what the pain means, what can be done, and what (or who) is responsible.

Talk of crisis can be a justifiable reaction to grave conditions. But because there is no narrative-free way to relate the present to past and future, crisis should be seen in narrative terms, as a strategy to cope with present trouble by imagining that trouble within a story leading to plausibleyet morally or existentially contrastingfutures. Crisis stories are always speculative interpretations of lived experience, inextricably interwoven with the storytellers principles and purposes.

Because crisis in its true sense is a stage in a dramatic plot, in which the present teeters on the brink of ruin, the identification is not neutral. Human agency is implied in the proclamation of crisis; it presumes that something still can and must be done. As Graf noted, it is difficult to find any prominent author, politician, intellectual, or journalist in Weimar Germany who publicly used the notion of crisis in a pessimistic or even fatalistic sense.

This is the true meaning of the clich never let a crisis go to waste. It is not that crises happen and then must be exploited. Rather, it is that a sense of the cure is already built into the determination of the disease. With timely activism, the looming catastrophe that opens up the present as a time of decision can be averted. Crisis does not paralyzeit empowers.

This is also why railing against those who would politicize a crisis misses the point. It is only because people are already politicized that they can assess the moment and declare it critical. The darker ones view of the present and the more exalted ones hopes for the future, the more justifiable radicalism seems. Clucking at opponents politicization of a crisis often means only that you cast the crisis in different terms and demand different solutions. Sometimes it means you do not share their sense of emergency to begin with.

The coronavirus pandemic has loosed a flood of calls to openly politicize it or to at least recognize the political choices entailed by the diseases uneven impact on societies and demographics. COVID-19, we are told, has exposed myriad needsfor expertise in government, for better public health infrastructure, for sovereignty and borders, for tough measures against China, for more democratic government, for racial justiceneeds that the current emergency can finally awaken humanity to address.

Such calls are almost honest. Crisis does have a revelatory power. What it reveals, however, are not just societal needs but the speakers ideology too, which constructs the crisis as an opportunity for change.

As Fllmer observed, Weimar Berlins suicides were deciphered through an ideological lens that linked those deaths to crisis in order to advance solutions that were no less ideological. While suicides were real enough, the crisis remained an imaginative construct. Fllmer pointed out that, from 1929 to 1932, as unemployment soared and the gears of government ground to a halt, the suicide rate rose by only 11.9 percent. A definite uptick but certainly not enough to serve as dramatic evidence for a desperate state of mind.

Then as now, the utility of crisis lies in the dramatization of the present for those with an agenda to change it. Its significance is in the stories we tell to mobilize ourselves and others.

Can grasping the meaning of crisis inform political thinking today, at a time when crisis has literally gone viral? For Koselleck, the problem with crisis, in particular for academics, was its growing imprecision. When we assess its role in public discourse, however, the trouble is not so much the terms vagueness as its reliable function as a catalyst of action, an accelerant of fear and expectationanother log on the fire.

The law of crisis is that crisis-talk fuels itself: Every time a choice is pitched as life-or-death, or an institution is pronounced in crisis, panic and partisanship and zero-sum thinking gain ground. Use of crisis mirrors your ideological commitments. If you want to raise the temperature, then breathlessly framing your cause as a crisis will do the trick. Crisis-talk is the gas pedal, not the brakes.

If you want to lower the temperature, then resist the impulse to reflexively label every problem a crisis. Keeping crisis-talk in check preserves the words potency for the time when the true watershed arrives. The difficulty faced by those who would declare 2020, with much justification, a year of crisis is that the word has been overused for generations. Not just COVID-19 but a host of deadly maladiesAlzheimers, malaria, AIDS, diabetes, tuberculosis, heart disease, cancerare regularly cast in crisis terms. Every election is declared the most important in our lifetime. When everything is a crisis, nothing can be.

Using crisis with care may also make solving some problems easier, since avoiding the term helps enlarge the middle ground and with it the room for political maneuver. Crisis can create unrealistic expectations of unity while, ironically, hindering a societys ability to work together. Often enough, it invites demagoguery and makes people impatient with pluralism and dissent and the necessary but sometimes sordid deal-making of party politics. Compromise and cooperation work best in non-crisis mode.

But there is a trade-off to swearing off crisis-talk: Doing so also means surrendering power to enrage voters and open wallets. And sometimes rage and mobilization are appropriate; sometimes societies do stand at the crossroads.

Crisis, when understood as a state of emergency, can even pose a threat to liberty and representative government because of the perceived need it creates to curtail rights and centralize power. The Roman Republic enacted a temporary dictatorship during times of military danger. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the American Civil War. Hitler and Benito Mussolini came to power in an atmosphere of crisis and used emergency powers to further dismantle constitutional government. Franklin D. Roosevelt interned Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. Restricting freedoms in moments of extremis may save open societiesbut the decision itself is a political one and prone to abuse.

More recently, authoritarians on the left and rightincluding Venezuelas Nicols Maduro and Turkeys Recep Tayyip Erdoganhave declared crises in order to seize greater power and silence critics. In March, as coronavirus cases surged elsewhere in Europe, Hungarys Viktor Orban pushed through an emergency law that would permit him to rule by decree. In Brazil, the coronavirus is sowing instability that critics fear the nations scandal-plagued president, Jair Bolsonaro, could use as a pretext for a military takeover.

Crisis bends in an illiberal direction for a more insidious reason as well. David Moshfegh, another historian of Germany, assigns Koselleck to his students. I ask them whether they think crisis is a positive or a negative word, Moshfegh told me. More than 90 percent each year say it is negative and explain it as meaning something stressful and abnormal.

In Moshfeghs view, crisis is nowadays approached in the spirit of crisis management, which aims to go through a crisis and re-create stability and normality without having to make any big fundamental changes. To be sure, there are still people for whom crisis offers hope for fundamental change. Black Lives Matter, which seeks to channel rage against police violence into a broad crusade against systemic oppression, comes to mind. But Moshfegh is correct that rampant use of crisis also gives voice to a pervasive unease, a deep sense that a great many things are not as they should be, a craving not for apocalypse or utopia but for things to be normal.

In this sense, authoritarian reaction is crisis management writ largethe urge, in a time of chaos, to re-create a bygone stability and normality while avoiding big social change. Fascism in the Hitlerian sense was revolutionary, promising a heroic thousand-year empire for the Nordic Man. But the garden-variety authoritarianisms of today promise something more prosaic: security, predictability, order, traditionin short, normalityin a topsy-turvy world.

In a 2017 Hungarian Review essay on the crisis of Europe, Orban pointed to a generalized restlessness, anxiety, and tension that, he claimed, testified to [l]arge masses of people [who] want something radically different than what is being proposed and done by the traditional elites. Orban offered himself as a tribune of this populist discontent. His response has been to create an overtly illiberal Hungary shielded from the disruptions of free elections, a free press, and open bordersa new normal.

Today, crisis risks priming populations, in the United States and around the world, for authoritarian temptation, though what lures most people is less fascist revolution than autocratic stabilization. Faced with the anxiety of total crisis, it is easy to embrace, even normalize, those who promise to manage, by authoritarian means, the volatility and bewilderment of modern life.

It is worth remembering that what killed the Weimar Republic, Germanys first liberal democracy, was not an objective predicament but the fear and desperation of runaway crisis-consciousness, which led a majority of Germans to abandon the democratic center for illiberal ideologies of the radical right and left. Those who would again destroy democracy must first ride the mood of crisis. Every time you abstain from loose crisis-talk, you take a bit of wind out of their sails.

More here:
When Everything Is a Crisis, Nothing Is - Foreign Policy

A migrant boat off the coast of Lampedusa, Italy. Photo: dpa picture alliance/ AlamyStock Photo

During the peak of Europes coronavirus crisis, immigration a perennial hot-button issue in Italy was conspicuously MIA from the countrys political debate.

Not any more. A fresh surge of migrants arriving across the Mediterranean, combined with a string of mass escapes from migrant quarantine facilities, has reignited tensions over irregular immigration into Italy, as anti-immigration politicians cast the new arrivals as a potential threat to public health.

The growing number of arrivals and breakouts the most recent of which happened on Monday have heaped pressure on the countrys coalition government, and been gratefully seized on by anti-immigrant opposition politicians, who have painted the escapees as potential carriers of the virus.

For the last ten days, immigration has been back at the top of the Italian political agenda, Teresa Coratella, program manager in the Rome office of the European Council on Foreign Relations, told VICE News. The government is deeply divided; this is putting a lot of pressure inside the coalition. Were back in a critical point of the political debate.

READ: Social Media Footage Shows Massive Explosion Rocking Beirut

Coratella said the tensions had been created by a huge surge in arrivals that began last month, when more than 5,000 migrants arrived by boat on Italian shores, compared with about 1,000 in July of 2019 and 2,000 the previous July.

About 200 more migrants arrived on the island of Lampedusa overnight on Monday alone. The new arrivals were taken to an overcrowded reception center built to hold 95 people, which now holds nearly ten times that number.

The surge has been driven by a massive flow of people fleeing political and economic instability in Tunisia, currently in the grip of a major political crisis. Of the 13,700 migrants the Italian government says have arrived by boat this year, more than a third were Tunisians.

Alarm over the surge in arrivals some of whom have been photographed landing on beaches surrounded by sunbathing tourists, or even disembarkingwith rolling suitcases and a pet poodle in tow has been compounded by mass escapes from reception centers where the new arrivals are required to spend a mandatory 14-day quarantine.

About 50 Tunisians escaped by climbing the fence of a migrant center in the Sicilian town of Porto Empedocle on Monday, sparking a major manhunt. It was the second large breakout from the facility, after about 100 people escaped last week. Italian media reported the facility, which had capacity for 100 people, was holding about 500 migrants at the time.

Just days earlier, 184 migrants fled another Sicilian detention center in Caltanissetta.

Coratella said the escapes appeared to be motivated by widespread fears among Tunisians that they would be repatriated as economic migrants without a legitimate asylum claim.

READ: China Is Sending a COVID Testing Team to Hong Kong. Locals Worry It Might Be a Front for Government Spying.

Amid growing public alarm over the rising number of arrivals and escapes, senior ministers have condemned the situation, sent a naval ship to the Sicilian coast to act as a floating quarantine center and raised the prospect of cutting off development funding to Tunisia unless it stops the boats leaving its shores. Interior Minister Luciana Lamorgese said Italy was grappling with an uncontrolled flow from Tunisia that was creating significant problems for the health system.

But that hasnt been enough to blunt the attacks from the countrys anti-immigration populists, who have gratefully seized on the issue and condemned the government for failing to do enough to control immigration.

Giorgia Meloni, head of the Brothers of Italy party, has attacked the center-left ruling coalition for subjecting Italians to draconian lockdown measures while allowing illegal immigrants to transgress our borders and violate quarantine, wandering around infected, while Salvini, the leader of the populist Lega party, has been firing daily broadsides at the government over the issue.

Salvini feels hes losing support, so hes using the only two strong arguments he has: migration and coronavirus, said Coratella. These merge together to create the perfect political propaganda immigrants bring coronavirus to Italy.

So far, she said, that claim hasnt been supported by the testing of migrants, which had found only low levels of COVID-19 infection among the new arrivals. But that hasnt quelled fears among a public that is only just emerging from the trauma of one of the worlds worst outbreaks. Nor have recent clusters detected on migrant boats elsewhere in the Mediterranean; last week, 65 of 94 migrants who were brought to Malta after being rescued at sea tested positive for the virus.

Link:
Mass Breakouts from Quarantine Centers Are Reigniting Immigration Tensions in Italy - VICE

The pandemic has proven to be challenging times for every community in the country. The worst hit by this crisis is the lower income group of the nation which is not only vulnerable because the low wage system but also due to the lack of infrastructure of the country in terms of health, housing, transportation, food and life security. With all the business being shut it has evidently taken a toll upon the economy of the country. The pandemic has been successful in affecting each and every sector of our economic built up. If analysed from a wider perspective the crisis has created a multi dimensional domino effect. With a pandemic at hand, it has also given rise to a migrant crisis added with the burden of providing people with suitable security needed amid the economic slowdown. Within all this, a crucial question of payment of wages and salaries to the employees came into the picture before the government which went to a number of twist and turns throughout the period of last 3 months. Now, from any natural justice giving mechanism it is clearly expected that, the system would be able to empathise with all the parties involved and shall be able to reach, in the words of the Supreme Court- a reasonable solution through negotiation. The attempt would be to analyse the opinions and conditions attached to both judiciary and the legislative decisions in the matter. Adding to which determination regarding the numerous other interests and strategies involved is also be made which shall guide us towards understanding this convoluted affair which comprises of the some major stakeholders of our welfare oriented state.

The issue begins with an order passed on March 20 by the Ministry of Labour and Employment where it was notified that all the employers were duly bound to pay the wages or salaries to all their employees, further adding that they also could not deduct any percentage of money from the payment. Interestingly not much clarity was given on the specifications as to what kind of work does it apply to nor did it specify as to what nature of employer- employee relationship comes into its ambit thus giving it a larger scope of interpretation which aided to the deteriorating chaotic conditions. In a addition to this on March 29 the Government of India, to effectively implement the lockdown order and to mitigate the economic hardship of the migrant workers issued an order under Section 10(2)(1) of the NDMA. It directed the State governments and the Union Territories to issue orders, compulsorily requiring all the employers in the industrial sector, shops and commercial establishments to pay wages to their workers at their workplaces on the due date without any deduction during their closure due to lockdown. With this, the government gave it a legal angle by making it an obligation and non adherence of which was a straight legal offence. This was practiced by The Home Secretary, Ministry of home affairs in exercise of the powers conferred by Section 10(2) (l)of the Disaster Management Act, 2005. The Central Government issued the MHA Order to restrict the movement of migrant workers within the country in order to contain the spread of COVID-19 in the country.The MHA Order directed the governments and authorities of the states or union territories to take necessary action and issue orders to their respective District Magistrate or Deputy Commissioner and Senior Superintendent of Police or Superintendent of Police or Deputy Commissioner of Police, to implement the additional measures contained therein. Furthermore the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship ordered all the establishments to pay full stipend to the designated and trade apprentices engaged by them during the lockdown period. All these tumultuous orders coming back to back from different ministries were bound to create panic amongst the industrial employers of the country also keeping in mind that the vagueness of all these order further makes the condition even more vulnerable due to its open interpretation.

It was after this, that numerous petitions were filed in the Supreme Court challenging the order. A batch of petitions came before the Apex Court challenging the constitutional validity of the MHA Order. Among the petitioners, the Karnataka-based Ficus Pax Private Limited filed a writ petitionchallenging the constitutional validity of the MHA Order as well as an advisory dated March 20, 2020issued by the Ministry of Labour and Employment, on the grounds that they violated Articles 14 and 19(1)(g) of the Constitution of India and, were in contravention of the principles of 'equal work, equalpay' and 'no work, no pay'by not differentiating between the workers so covered and those who had been working during the lockdown. The petitioners submitted that in light of the pandemic and the subsequent lockdown, many industries were unsustainable and already at the brink of insolvency, wherein payment of full wages to its workers would drive them out of business. They even argued that they should be allowed to pay the worker 70% less and the rest of the amount should be taken care of throughthe funds collected by the Employees State Insurance Corporation or the PM Cares Fund or through any other government fund. The basis of this demand seemed compelling and credible pertaining to the fact that they have not been able to conduct business because of the nationwide lockdown and that being forced to pay workers in full in these compelling circumstances has put extreme financial and mental stress on them. Amid all this, the reasoning given by the government was that it was a temporary order which shall be mandatorily applicable for 54 days as the migrant crisis was at its peak, thus the payments of wages would help in bringing the crisis into some stability. The bases of the orders were termed to be completely altruistic and humanitarian which had the goal to avert human suffering. What needs to be analysed here is that the way in which the orders have turned out by different ministries without much interpretation or conditional clauses clearly shows the short sightedness of the government. It seems as if the government failed to recognise that the ongoing pandemic is not limited to the vulnerable sections of the society but even the middle class employers and high end firms are under its atrocities as well. During this global pandemic and economic slowdown, solutions in the form of such orders are by no means an efficient solution. Further adding to the facts if we may try to connect the dots the orders are so ambiguous by each ministry that not only do they create an unrest is the industrial set up but are also unable to address the more technical aspects of the issue including the question of managerial level employees, paid leave adjustments, accurate timing of the payment etc. All these factors leave a room for a lot of exploitation while social welfare of the country takes a back seat.

Acknowledging the gravity of the situation, on May 15, 2020, the Apex Court had asked the Central Government not to take any coercive action for a week against companies and employers who were unable to pay full wages to their workers or employees during the nationwide lockdown. After reserving the order on June 4 2020, the judgement was pronounced by three judge bench comprising Justice Ashok Bhushan, SK Kaul and MR Shah in batch of petitions filed by more than 15 MSMEson 12 June 2020. The court highly emphasised upon the fact that the notification compelled the payment of 100% of the salaries. It could have been around 50 to 75% by the firms. So the question stood, do they have the power to get them to pay 100%, and on their failure to do so, prosecute them. The court was also of the point of view that such standards should only be set after the negotiations with the industries and the government should rather act as a facilitator of solutions rather than behaving in an authoritarian manner such as in the present case. So on June 12 2020 the court gave its verdict upon the issue addressing the various aspects and expectations from the parties involved. The court expressed that, the employers willing to enter into negotiation and settlement with the workers or employees regarding payment of wages for the 50 Days period, may initiate a process of negotiation with their employees' organization and enter into a settlement with them. If they are unable to settle by themselves, a request may be submitted to the concerned labour authorities. This advisory was also made to those firms which were functioning during the lockdown period but not to their full capacity. The court also conveyed that the employers who proceed to take the steps recommended shall publicize and communicate about their steps to the workers and employees for their response or participation. Such a settlement would be without prejudice to the rights of employers and would promote the willingness of the parties towards a solution. Further adding, that if a mutual agreement is reached by the parties till the end of July then further legal formalities would be initiated. The present directions given are the most practical and viable solutions which the judiciary could have provided given the uncertainty of the situation, considering that due and timely payment of wages also comes within the ambit of legal rights of the labourers but at the same time it is equally important to address and acknowledge the special case of the ongoing of pandemic. Keeping the same in mind, the harmonious approach which the court has recommended to follow sets a precedent for any future decision which the government might take to cater to the present crisis. A key highlight which shall be noticed here is that the court was silent upon the non compliance of any regulation which would be initiated after the negotiation. This sends us into an assumption that it was done so with an intention to maintain harmonious relationships within the industry and also to prevent any further disturbances. The essence of the judgement is the far sightedness adapted by the court as all the steps suggested would not only almost solve the current issue at hand but would also ensure and aid the process of the post crisis economy revival.

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Scrutinising the anarchical situation of wage regulation in the country amid the covid pandemic - Lexology

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New Delhi: The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Labour, in its report on Code on Social Security, 2019, has recommended that the time limit for payment of gratuity to an employee after termination of employment should be reduced from the current five years of continuous service to just one year.

The committee, which submitted its report to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla Friday, also said the provision of gratuity should be extended to all kinds of employees, including contract labourers, seasonal workers, piece rate workers, fixed term employees and daily/monthly wage workers.

Recommending the reduction of time limit, the committee noted in its report, most people are employed for a short duration period only, making them ineligible for gratuity as per extant normsthe committee desires that the time limit of five years as provided for in the code for payment of gratuity be reduced to continuous service of one year.

This code will replace nine existing social security laws and is pending before Parliament. The parliamentary committee, headed by senior BJD MP Bhartruhari Mahtab, had examined the code referred to it by the Lok Sabha last December.

Also read: Migrant workers, freelancers must be under social security net, Parliamentary panel suggests

Considering the migrant crisis, which had unfolded in the wake of a nationwide lockdown, the parliamentary panel has also recommended that inter-state migrant workers be mentioned as a separate category in the Code on Social Security, 2019 and a welfare fund be created exclusively for them.

The fund should be financed proportionately by the sending states, the receiving states, the contractors, the principal employers and the registered migrant workers.

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The funds so created should exclusively be used for workers/employees not covered under other welfare funds, the committee said.

ThePrint had reported on 30 July that the parliamentary panel has also recommended universalisation of social security coverage to include domestic workers, migrant workers, gig workers (freelancers), platform workers (who access other organisations using online platforms and earn money, such as Uber, Ola drivers) and agricultural workers.

To address issues of identification and help in inter-state portability while extending welfare aids, especially at the time of distress and exigencies like Covid-19 pandemic, the panel has called for the creation of a central online portal and database of registered establishments as well as migrant workers, including building and other construction staff.

The parliamentary panel has said it should be made mandatory for all establishments, including agricultural, non-agricultural, contract as well as self-employed workers to register under one body, instead of multiple organisations. This body should remain responsible for provision of social security for all types of workers in the country.

The parliamentary panel came down heavily on states for under-utilisation and misuse of the Building and Construction Workers Welfare Fund.

The committee is perturbed to note the latest audit findings on underutilisation of BOCW funds by as many as 24 states and misutilisation of such funds by one state. It is a matter of serious concern that states are sitting on thousands of crores of rupees collected towards the welfare of construction workers, even as labourers have been left to fend for themselves amid the prolonged lockdown period arising out of the Covid-19 pandemic, the report states.

The committee has recommended an enabling mechanism in the code itself for portability of Building and Construction Workers Welfare Fund among states so money due to beneficiaries can be paid in any state irrespective of where the cess has been collected.

The Building and Construction Workers Welfare Fund is raised by levying a cess of 1 per cent of the construction cost. It is part of the Building and Other Construction Workers (BOCW) Act, 1996, which regulates employment and working conditions of construction workers and also provides for their safety and welfare measures.

Also read: Directly employed, self-employed also migrant workers under Modi govts new definition

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Reduce gratuity payment period to 1 yr, extend it also to daily wagers Parliament panel says - ThePrint

Written by Pranav Mukul, Aashish Aryan, Prabha Raghavan, Aanchal Magazine | New Delhi | Updated: August 4, 2020 10:44:23 am Many of them are now realising that the rural economy has hit a saturation point and cannot absorb more workers.

A key bellwether of activity in the manufacturing sector slipped in July after two months of steady growth reflecting the adverse impact of localised lockdowns by states to fight the surging Covid curve. For those who lost their jobs, this fresh metric three months into the lockdown PMI falling to 46 in July from 47.2 in June is a disquieting reminder that a return to normalcy, or even a sustainable uptick, is far away.

More so for the thousands, who because of job losses or lacking a safety net if infected, moved from metros and urban industrial hubs to their hometowns and villages. Many of them are now realising that the rural economy has hit a saturation point and cannot absorb more workers.

Take Chittranjan Kushwaha.

The first in his family to hold a diploma in engineering, 30-year old Kushwaha went to Pune in 2014 and found an assembly line job with a major auto-component maker. Earning a monthly average of Rs 21,000, he was laid off in the lockdown and so returned to his family in Kushinagar, eastern Uttar Pradesh.

Opinion| Despite govt claims, migrants continue to be vulnerable and abandoned

Unlike many, Kushwaha got lucky: his diploma helped him get a job at a Common Service Centre (CSC) but at less than one third of his Pune salary.

His expenses are down as he doesnt have to pay rent but the drastic cut in income means he has to cut several corners. One big casualty: his childrens education.

After schools closed, I paid fees for a month. After that I got them de-registered. How will I pay Rs 1500 for three kids? he said.

Kushwahas case is emblematic of the crisis that has hit a majority of those who returned. Their scale is sweeping.

Official records show that of the 64 lakh migrant workers across 116 districts in six states Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand and Odisha (covered under the Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyaan), a quarter returned to just 17 districts across these states.

The highest number of returned migrants under the scheme has been registered for Bihar, with 32 districts accounting for 23.6 lakh or 37.2 per cent of the total migrant workers covered, followed by Uttar Pradesh, with 17.47 lakh returned workers (27.5 per cent of the total) and Madhya Pradesh with 10.71 lakh workers or 16.9 per cent of the total.

Read| Rs 50,000-crore scheme to provide jobs for migrants returning home

The progress of the monsoon and a good summer sowing notwithstanding, the surge in Covid-19 case numbers in Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh is beginning to hurt the rural economy and so most of these workers are struggling to make ends meet.

The reduction in disposable income for many families comes on the top of an already increased household savings a metric that indicates people start saving more than they spend to cover themselves in situations like job losses or pay cuts, which, in turn, is an indicator of a slump in the economy.

RBI records show net financial savings went up to 7.7% of GDP in 2019-20, compared with 7.2% in 2018-19.

This improvement has occurred due to moderation in household bank borrowings being sharper than that in bank deposits, except in the fourth quarter of 2019-20 due to COVID-19 related economic disruptionsSeveral studies show that households tend to save more during a slowdown and income uncertainty, the RBI noted.

Explained| Half of 30 lakh workers who returned to UP are unskilled, MNREGA the main avenue for jobs so far

Job opportunities, few and far between, for those who have returned home are largely coming from public setups. A number of states, including Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, have rolled out migrant labour employment schemes, in addition to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA).

In all of the 116 districts covered under the Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyaan, the number of households availing MGNREGA work in these districts jumped to 89.83 lakh during May 86.27 per cent up from 48.22 lakh in the same month last year.

However, despite these efforts, several are still struggling to find a job.Companies such as Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, Indias biggest carmakers, have been ramping up output but are largely relying on local workers since those from UP and Bihar are yet to return.

Deepak Kumar from Dhagar in Bhiwani district is among those who has queued up at Marutis Manesar factory over the past few days. With the facility restoring output to near normal levels, Kumar and other ITI diploma-holders from nearby towns in Haryana many have prior work experience here have responded to calls to return.

My hope is that even if they keep me as a temporary employee, they should not ask me to leave soon, Kumar said. Until he got the call, he said, he was unemployed and working on a farm.

Similar is the plight of Santosh Kumar, 32, from Dinapatti village in Supaul, Bihar. He ran errands at a small aviation logistics company in Mumbai but went back to his village in May in a three-wheeler auto-rickshaw along with three other persons.

Right now there is a lockdown, how can I go back. I am relying on farming for survival in my village, he said.

When will his company resume operations is anybodys guess. While in the Centres financial package, micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) were among the main intended beneficiaries, these are yet to recover from the impact.

According to a survey by CARE Ratings conducted over two weeks from June 23 to July 7, one-third of the MSMEs faced revenue losses of over 50% in the last 3 months and over 60% have been unable to pay full salaries to their staff.

Santosh said he received the cash transfer of Rs 1,000 from the government and also got Rs 300 a day during the quarantine. The ration supplies are procured by the family through his fathers ration card as he is yet to get a ration card in his name. Santosh said he would like to return whenever his employer calls him back. That call could take longer now.

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July harder than June, migrants out of work hit economic wall at home - The Indian Express