The UPA Government is completing four years of governance, and it is time for the report card. The Manmohan Singh Government served the corporate, national or international, in its eagerness to achieve higher growth rates, unmindful of its implications for growing unemployment, impoverishment and the result was economic disparities. Despite the disillusionment sources rightly claim during the UPA regime were able to extract important gains for the working class while also keeping the labor movement relatively uninvolved with divisive forces. One such gain was forcing the Government to set up the Sixth Pay Commission, which is expected to submit its report in March this year. The Central Employees Joint Action Committee had to call for a general strike before the Government could agree to appoint the Pay Commission and not compel the employees to remain satisfied with the merger of DA with the basic pay. The constituents of the Sponsoring Committee had fully supported the Central employees demand for another Pay Commission. They would like to wait for the Pay Commission report and the Government’s response.

Another achievement was the passage, in Parliament, of the Guarantee Act after the Government accepted some important amendments on legislative assurance to provide jobs to at least 30 per cent women labor and arrange facilities for working women at the work site. More importantly, the Government has been made to accept the demand that the NREGA be implemented forthwith throughout the country, which will be done from April 1, 2008 and not in five years from February 2, 2006 as originally conceived.

The policy-makers approach towards the private, national and foreign corporate and attitude towards urban and rural working people in the implementation of NREGA and corruption in other welfare schemes can be seen to have increased. Economic reforms, corporatization of economy including agriculture, complete silence on land reforms, permission to corporate, national and foreign retail trade, with increasing prices of essential commodities has only by the NCEUS. As for the organized labor, labor productivity in India had gone up by 84 per cent but real wages in the manufacturing sector declined by 22 per cent. Growth of Indian billionaires by dozens in recent years on the one side, and growing unemployment and impoverishment, on the other, point to unprecedented growth in disparities to which our policy-makers close their eyes by callously pointing only to GDP growth rates which are not ipso facto accompanied by growth in jobs.

In this backdrop, it is to be seen that the UPA Government takes positive steps on workers outstanding issues. Enforcement of labor laws, growth with employment generation and not by reducing it as is happening in public and private sectors, and disinvestment of public sector enterprises including entry of the private sector in Defense Production restoring the previous practice of making public sector wage agreements valid for five years and stoppage of imposition of the 10-year term, halt to reckless expansion of SEZs, no further dithering on the Social Security Bill, no playing with pension funds , no EPF investment in the Special Deposit Scheme and, last but not the least, land reforms and higher allocation for agriculture. Only people-centric economic policies can inspire the people to work for national regeneration and face globalization challenges.