Framework for a national wage policy

Abstract

The conflicting considerations of the desirability of raising the levels of living of workers and the need for capital formation and price stability have rendered it difficult for the policy makers in India to formulate a wage policy with unqualified and mutually consistent set of objectives. In spite of oft-pronounced denunciation of the free play of market forces, the intervention in the labour market has been limited and ineffective. On the other hand, the system of wage adjustment prevalent in the organised sector has turned wages into largely dysfunctional as factor prices and highly inequitable as factor incomes. For some time now the need for evolving a national wage policy based on the principles of ensuring a minimum wage to all employed, raitonalising the wage criteria and wage differentials and making wage adjustment functional, has been widely recognised.