78 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Wage Committee for cement and sugar has also been suspended. ^ MRIDUL EAPEN 1 Statement 'made by a Finance Ministry spokesman on the day the ordinance was announced. a Industrial employees comprise of workers who earn wages as defined in the 1948 Factories Act—a person employed for wages or not in any manufacturing process, in or cleaning any part of the machinery or premises used for a manufacturing process, or any other kind of work incidental to or connected with the manufacturing process; and other than workers who earn salaries, 3 The Survey started in 1959 replaced the Census of Manufacturing Industries and is a comprehensive enumeration of factory statistics covering large and small units in 63 industry groups, the former on a Census basis and the latter on a probability sampling basis. The Labour Bureau, Department of Labour and Employment publishes anually, statistics on employment, wages and earnings, levels of living etc. relating to factories covering both small and big units. The coverage of the two is almost the same. 4 Payment ofdearness allowance is a method of "neutralising" increases in the cost of living started in 1940 in the form of a grain compensation in the public sector and the cotton textile industry, which with labour's demand for it in other industries spread throughout the country. • First Five Tear Plan—A Summary, Planning Commission, Government of India, 1953. 6 The review of wage policy and legislasion given is from KV Iycr,Review ofWagcsPolicy in Indian Plans in Wage Policy and Wage Determination in India (ed) J C Sandesara and L K Deshpande; D A S Jackson, Wage Policy and Industrial Relations in India, Economic Journal, March 1972. 7 In 1948 the Minimum Wage Act was enacted which empowered State Governments to fix a wide variety of minimum wages, the Committee on Fair Wages recommending that these be set on an industry-cum-region basis. The ineffectiveness of the Act can be judged by the fact that the level of minimum daily wage had been generally fixed at Rs. 1.3 by 1953 and by 1970, the levels prevailing were only about Rs 1.9. Also the interval between the setting of a minimum and its revision appears to have been very long, on average about 9 years ! * J C Sandesara, The Central Wage Boards—A Study of the Impact of their Recommendations and their Functioning, in Sandesara and Deshpande op.cit. 9 B N Datar, Labour Economics, Allied Publishers, Bombay 1968. I ° Reserve Bank of India Bulletin, July 1972. II Report of the rational Commission of Labour 1969. 1-2 S A Palekar, Real Wages and Profits in India: 1939-1950, Indian Economic Review August 1957;RNarayanan and B Roy, Movement of Distributive Shares in India 1948-49 to 1957-58 and K Mukerjee, Wages in Large Scale Industries and National Income, Papers presented at the Third Indian Conference on Research in National Income Bombay 1961; S L Shetty, Share of Wages and Profits in the Private Corporate Sector, Economic and Political Weekly, October 3, 1973; M M Dadi, Income Share of Factory Labour in India, Shri Ram Centre for Industrial Relations New Delhi, 1973. published in the Journal of Development Planning, United Nations. 18 National Commission on Labour, op.cit. 14 K N Raj, Linkages in Industrialisation, to be published in the Journal of Development Planning, United Nations. 1 B Raj op.cit. 16 Raj op.cit. 17 Cclso Furtado, The Brazilian Model, Social and Economic Studies, March 1973.