The Beedi and Cigar Workers' (Conditions of employment) act, Employees Provident Funds and Family Pension At, Employees' State Insurance Act, the Factories Act, AP Shops and Establishment Act are acts that govern women working in these and other organised industries. All these acts provide for rules regarding pay, leave, hours of work, intervals of rest, overtime and ban on work in hazardous conditions. Night work is banned for women. The Acts go into detail on the rest facilities for women, including washing and toilet facilities. Every Act has the provision for Creches where more than 30 women are employed, the guidelines for running the Creches also laid down rigorously. Women contract labourers and inter-state migrant labourers under the relevant Acts are also eligible for creche and rest-room facilities.

The Maternity Benefit Act applies to all establishment including plantations. The rules declare that a woman is entitled to 12 weeks (three months) of maternity leave following a delivery or miscarriage and after resumption of work can have nursing breaks apart from the regular rest-intervals.

The Equal Remuneration Act provides for similar wages for work similar nature for both men and women. Not a single complaint has been made under this Act 20 years after its enactment in the Deputy Commissioner of Labour's Office which covers 5 Telangana districts.

The Minimum Wages Act with its schedule revised periodically provides the basic minimum wage for a wide-ranging set of activities ranging from agriculture to bakeries, colour-printing and dyeing, hotels, handloom weaving, etc. The rates devised from zone to zone, these also specified in the schedule.

For all these Acts, except for the Factories Act (Where the Inspector, Factories is the authorised officer) the office of the Commissioner of Labour is the governing authority which revises schedules, oversees implementation and passes orders on complaints.

The problems of the implementation of these Woman & Child Laws lie with the unorganized nature of working women. Agriculture, that sector that absorbs the majority of working women has virtually no organisation to support the women, though minimum wages are never paid, nor the ERA implemented. Various NGOs and welfare schemes of the Govt. operate in these areas, but very few take on the task to organise the women and vigorously campaign to implement the Woman & Child Laws. The few that do so are daunted by the inadequacy of implementing staff and by the active disapproval and threats of land-owners, police and revenue authorities. Both police and revenue authorities do not see the implementation of these Woman & Child Laws as relevant - they regard them as threats to peace in the villages and impediments to developmental activity. As long as activity to implement labour Woman & Child Laws are seen as radical, mainstream NGOs will not touch them.

As for the labour Dept itself, the rural areas are very poorly served and it is a rare village that sees a visit of the Asst. Labour Officer, the field officer of that Department. The problem of migrant workers is that of a different nature. Their labour is usually bonded - that is, they have taken a loan before they have agreed to work and this aspect of bondedness tells on their hesitation to organise. Besides this, they are taken to different places where they have no ability to negotiate with the local labour department officials. They lack all other support structures in their distant work-places, being totally dependent on the contractor. We can safely state that none of the provisions of their relevant Act are implemented.

The beedi-making industry absorbs, among all others, the most women after agriculture. Here male-female labour is clearly differentiated. In the factories where the provisions of the Beedi and Cigar-making Act apply, men are employed as packers. Women on the other hand are engaged in piece-rate work of beedi-rolling at their own homes so that they are exempt from the provisions of the Act. The beedi-making industry is the classic case of women in low-paid unorganised work and men in similar but well-paid organised work of a similar nature. Girl children also work along with their mothers.

The implementation authorities lack the time, integrity and impartiality that is necessary to make a dent in the system. The system can work - whenever a committed officer takes on a drive, there are changes, if slight, in the system.

What adds pathos to the condition of working women is that they carry a double burden. Women have always worked. The work of women is crucial to survival of families, household maintenance and child care as also food generation and income generation. In the Indian context, the concept and boundaries of housework are not clearly defined. In most households, a woman's economic contribution is crucial for subsistence, male earnings are not sufficient. Further she undertakes diverse activities to make good the deficit in family's survival requirements. She adds to the real income by collecting and processing fuel, fish, vegetables or fruits. She substitutes for paid labour in activities like repairing or maintaining the house. She also looks after small productive assets as vegetables plots, poultry or cattle. She is often self-employed in unrecognized. Worst of all, the working women carries and is expected to carry the burden of guilt for not fulfilling the role of mother and wife exclusively, and in the middle classes, facing the barrage of propaganda that exhort the women to run perfect homes and nurture perfect families.

Recent trends indicate that women in the paid labour force have increased. Male generated incomes are declining; more women are entering the labour force and working for longer hours that ever before. Due to limited skills, lack of access to credit and demands of multiple responsibilities, most women have no means of increasing economic contribution except by increasing hours of work. This further reduces opportunities for acquisition of skills and impairs health and nutrition status, thus setting up a vicious circle. Public social and health services have also declined combined with erosion of traditional family support, making women put more time into household maintenance and care giving. Effects of population growth, environmental degradation and male migration have made work responsibilities for women increasingly demanding. Walking further to find fuel, increased school attendance of children, desirable in itself mean that women have more work.
 

The invisibility of women workers in labour force statistics is well established. When work was defined as wage or salary earners only 13% of women were defined as economically active. When activities such as agricultural work, family business and crafts were included, 32% of women were defined as economically active. When the new ILO standard which includes all subsistence production, processing and informal sector work was applied, 88% of women were defined as economically active."

Marginalisation of women in the employment market is another major problem. A very high percentage of them work in the informal sector, providing a low return and also characterized by virtual inaccessibility to credit, technology, training and other facilities. The very large number of women employed as casual labourers in agriculture, construction and other industries do not get even the prescribed minimum wages and other benefits. Women have long been concentrated in informal activities, self-generated employment, both as petty traders or pre-entrepreneurs and as dependent wage workers in family enterprises. Very little has been done to enhance the status and living standards of such workers, and they are little affected by the gamut of law and trade organization.

In regular service jobs, women's earnings are still below men's, but the gap is narrowing, in casual labour, even in agriculture, where the largest number of women are engaged, the gap has increased between 1977-78 and 1987-88 and probably continuing to increase; this is also true outside agriculture.

Women have relatively poorer qualifications and experience. Women workers tend to get concentrated in a few women-dominated industries or in a few gendered tasks with any industry. This way, the rates of wages for women can be kept low without contravening the law requiring equal wages for equal work. As soon as the tasks are separated by general, then it becomes easy to label women's tasks as being of a lower order and thus earning lower rats. The differential between female and male rates of wages in the same industry increases when any takes in it gets closely identified with task, because it is exclusively done by women, the payment is lower than it is for threshing where men are also employed.

Domestic work performed by women is unpaid and goes unaccounted in the accounting of national product. The gap between the percentage of women in paid employment and that of men's remains wide, partly due to the undercount of women's economic activities. Nevertheless it is indicative of limited access of women to formal paid employment. They are generally the last to be hired in favourable economic conditions and the first to be left out in the labour market during economic recession women's unemployment is higher than men's. (Unemployment on weekly and daily status is higher for women than for men. The 1994 NSS also indicates that chronic unemployment was higher for women in Andhra Pradesh - 4.5% as compared to 2.5% for men). The following table gives us an idea of the occupation of enumerated women workers.

Percentage distribution of women workers (other than cultivators and agricultural labourers and sex ratio (females per 1000 males) by occupational division. (1981 census) in Andhra Pradesh.
 

A comparison of employment of women in the organised sector with Kerala throws very unfavourable light on Andhra Pradesh.