EPFO APFC 2023 General Studies · Question 101 of 120

Correct — A, (a) Living wage. Article 43 sits in Part IV of the Constitution, among the Directive Principles of State Policy, and its own marginal heading gives the answer away: 'Living wage, etc., for workers'. The text runs that the State shall endeavour to secure, by suitable legislation or economic organisation or in any other way, to all workers — agricultural, industrial or otherwise — work, a living wage, conditions of work ensuring a decent standard of life and full enjoyment of leisure and social and cultural opportunities, and, in particular, that the State shall endeavour to promote cottage industries on an individual or co-operative basis in rural areas. Every load-bearing phrase of the stem is lifted straight out of that sentence. 'Endeavour' is the article's own verb; 'through legislation or economic organization' is its 'by suitable legislation or economic organisation'; and the wage named in it is the living wage and nothing else. So this is not really a question about wage economics — it is a question about which of four wage terms the constitutional text actually uses, and only one of the four appears anywhere in Part IV. What a living wage means is what makes the other three tempting. Indian wage jurisprudence recognises three ascending levels. The minimum wage is the bare floor, enough to keep the worker and the worker's family in subsistence with a measure of health and efficiency. The fair wage stands above it and is settled with an eye on the industry's capacity to pay. The living wage is the highest of the three: it is meant to secure not mere subsistence but a frugal comfort — provision for the education of children, protection against ill-health, the requirements of essential social needs, and some insurance against the more important misfortunes. That is the level Article 43 sets as the State's goal, and setting a goal is exactly what a Directive Principle does. Article 37 declares that the provisions of Part IV shall not be enforceable by any court, but that the principles laid down are nevertheless fundamental in the governance of the country and that it shall be the duty of the State to apply them in making laws. Article 43 therefore promises no individual worker a living wage today; it directs the State to work towards one, while the enforceable floor is left to statute — the Minimum Wages Act, 1948, and now the Code on Wages, 2019.

• (b)Minimum wage — The minimum wage is a real and enforceable Indian legal concept, but it is not the one Article 43 names and it does not appear in Part IV at all. Its home is statute: the Minimum Wages Act, 1948, whose scheme of scheduled employments has been subsumed into the Code on Wages, 2019, under which the Central Government also fixes a national floor wage below which no State's minimum wage may be set. It has additionally been read into the Fundamental Rights, and that is where the confusion starts. In People's Union for Democratic Rights v. Union of India (1982), the Asiad Workers case, the Supreme Court held that paying a worker less than the statutory minimum wage amounts to 'forced labour' within the meaning of Article 23, because a person driven by want to accept less than the floor is not working freely. So the minimum wage is guarded by Article 23 and fixed by statute; the wage Article 43 aims at is the higher one. This option names the level the State must at least deliver, not the level it is directed to endeavour to reach.
• (c)Fair wage — The fair wage is the middle rung of the three-tier classification that the Committee on Fair Wages gave Indian labour law in its report of 1948, and the vocabulary of minimum, fair and living wage comes from that report. A fair wage is fixed above the bare minimum and below the living wage, and its distinguishing feature is that the capacity of the industry to pay is weighed along with the prevailing rates in comparable occupations, the level of productivity and the place of the industry in the wider economy. The Supreme Court worked with the same three-fold scheme when it examined wage fixation in Express Newspapers (Private) Ltd. v. Union of India (1958). The term is therefore sound labour economics and sound case-law vocabulary — but it is not constitutional text. Article 43 does not use it, and a candidate who chooses it has answered a question about wage theory instead of the question the paper asked, which is which word Part IV prints.
• (d)Need-based minimum wage — This is the most tempting wrong answer because it sounds the most technical, and it belongs to a document a well-prepared candidate has probably met — the resolution of the Fifteenth Indian Labour Conference of 1957, which laid down the norms for computing a need-based minimum wage: three consumption units for one earner, a food intake of 2,700 calories per average adult, 72 yards of cloth per family per year, housing rent corresponding to the minimum area provided under the government's industrial housing scheme, and fuel, lighting and other miscellaneous items at twenty per cent of the total minimum wage. In Workmen v. Management of Reptakos Brett & Co. Ltd. (1992) the Supreme Court added a sixth component — children's education, medical requirement, minimum recreation including festivals and ceremonies, and provision for old age and marriage — at a further twenty-five per cent. All of that is a way of quantifying the minimum wage, and none of it is in the Constitution. Article 43 names the living wage; the need-based minimum wage is a tripartite conference's yardstick, not a constitutional phrase.

The Directive Principles of State Policy occupy Part IV of the Constitution, Articles 36 to 51. Article 37 fixes their legal character in one sentence: they are not enforceable by any court, yet they are fundamental in the governance of the country and the State has a duty to apply them in making laws. Several of them speak directly to labour, which is why an APFC paper mines this Part rather than Part III. Article 38 asks the State to secure a social order for the promotion of the welfare of the people and to minimise inequalities in income, status, facilities and opportunities. Article 39 lists the principles of policy — adequate means of livelihood for all citizens, equal pay for equal work for men and women in clause (d), and protection of the health and strength of workers and of children against abuse in clause (e). Article 41 covers the right to work, to education and to public assistance in cases of unemployment, old age, sickness and disablement. Article 42 requires just and humane conditions of work and maternity relief. Article 43 is the living-wage article. Two later insertions extend the group: Article 43A, on participation of workers in the management of undertakings, was added by the Forty-second Amendment of 1976, and Article 43B, on the promotion of co-operative societies, by the Ninety-seventh Amendment of 2011. Read as a block, these articles are the constitutional source of nearly every welfare statute an Assistant Provident Fund Commissioner will administer, from provident fund and pension to bonus and minimum wages.

EPFO's General Studies paper reaches for Part IV repeatedly because the office itself is a creature of directive-principle policy: the Employees' Provident Funds and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, the Payment of Bonus Act, the Payment of Wages Act and the Minimum Wages Act are all statutes by which the State has tried to discharge duties that Articles 38 to 43 impose on it. An officer who knows which article says what can place any new labour statute or scheme in its constitutional frame instantly, and that is the habit the question rewards. The habit it punishes is answering from general knowledge of wage policy rather than from the text. All four options here are genuine terms of Indian labour law, all four are in current administrative use, and three of them are more frequently spoken about in day-to-day practice than the one the Constitution actually prints — an APFC deals with minimum wages far more often than with living wages. The paper is testing whether the candidate has read Article 43 or merely absorbed the surrounding subject. Notice also the grammar of the stem: 'enjoins the State to endeavour'. A Directive Principle never confers a right on an individual, and the verb the framers chose for Article 43 — endeavour — is the same verb the stem reuses. Where a wage question uses words like 'shall be paid' or 'is entitled to', the source is a statute, not Part IV.

• Article 43 reads that the State shall endeavour to secure, by suitable legislation or economic organisation or in any other way, to all workers — agricultural, industrial or otherwise — work, a living wage, conditions of work ensuring a decent standard of life and full enjoyment of leisure and social and cultural opportunities, and in particular that it shall endeavour to promote cottage industries on an individual or co-operative basis in rural areas. Its marginal heading is 'Living wage, etc., for workers'.
• Article 37 makes every Directive Principle non-justiciable — not enforceable by any court — while declaring the principles fundamental in the governance of the country and imposing on the State a duty to apply them in making laws. That single article is why Article 43 creates a policy goal and not an individual entitlement, and why the enforceable wage floor has to come from statute instead.
• Indian wage jurisprudence recognises three ascending levels. The minimum wage secures bare subsistence with some allowance for health and efficiency and takes no account of the employer's capacity to pay. The fair wage is fixed above it with the industry's capacity to pay in view. The living wage is the highest, extending to education of children, protection against ill-health, essential social needs and insurance against major misfortunes.
• The three-tier vocabulary comes from the report of the Committee on Fair Wages, 1948; the norms for computing a need-based minimum wage come from the Fifteenth Indian Labour Conference, 1957, and were supplemented by the Supreme Court in Workmen v. Management of Reptakos Brett & Co. Ltd. (1992), which added children's education, medical needs, recreation and provision for old age and marriage at a further twenty-five per cent.
• The labour cluster of Part IV to memorise together: Article 38 (welfare of the people, minimising inequalities), Article 39(d) (equal pay for equal work), Article 39(e) (health and strength of workers), Article 41 (right to work, education and public assistance), Article 42 (just and humane conditions of work and maternity relief), Article 43 (living wage), Article 43A (worker participation in management, added in 1976) and Article 43B (co-operative societies, added in 2011).

• Reading the item as a question about labour economics rather than about constitutional text. All four options are genuine wage concepts and three of them are used more often in administration than the one the Constitution prints; only 'living wage' appears in Article 43.
• Confusing Article 43 with Article 43A or 43B. The first is the living-wage article, the second, added by the Forty-second Amendment in 1976, concerns worker participation in the management of undertakings, and the third, added in 2011, concerns co-operative societies.
• Treating a Directive Principle as an enforceable right. Article 37 makes Part IV non-justiciable, so no worker can sue for a living wage under Article 43; what is enforceable is the statutory minimum wage, and — through Article 23 — the prohibition on paying below it.
• Attaching the 1957 Indian Labour Conference norms, or the Reptakos Brett additions, to the living wage. Both quantify the need-based minimum wage, which is a floor, whereas the living wage is the ceiling of the three-tier scheme and has never been reduced to a formula in Indian law.

Constitutional labour questions in EPFO papers come in three recognisable shapes. The first names an article and asks what it contains, or names a phrase and asks which article contains it — this item and Q100, on the article prohibiting the employment of children in a factory or mine, are the two on this paper. The second asks which Part of the Constitution a stated duty belongs to, testing whether the candidate can tell a Fundamental Right from a Directive Principle from a Fundamental Duty. The third runs the same ground through statute — a wage, bonus or provident fund calculation whose authority is a section rather than an article. Preparation for all three is the same and it is finite: Part IV is sixteen articles long, of which about seven concern labour and welfare, and each can be reduced to a single remembered phrase. Learn the phrase and the number together, because the paper supplies one and asks for the other in whichever direction it pleases.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following Articles of the Constitution of India directs the State to secure the participation of workers in the management of undertakings, establishments or other organisations engaged in any industry?

  • (a)Article 41
  • (b)Article 42
  • (c)Article 43
  • (d)Article 43A

  Answer(d) Article 43A — inserted by the Forty-second Amendment Act, 1976, it directs the State to take steps, by suitable legislation or in any other way, to secure the participation of workers in the management of undertakings. Article 41 covers the right to work, education and public assistance; Article 42 covers just and humane conditions of work and maternity relief; Article 43 is the living-wage article. The distinction between 43 and 43A is the one this cluster is most often tested on.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The norms of three consumption units per earner, 2,700 calories of food per average adult and 72 yards of cloth per family per year, used to compute a need-based minimum wage, were laid down by which one of the following?

  • (a)Article 43 of the Constitution of India
  • (b)The Fifteenth Indian Labour Conference, 1957
  • (c)The Committee on Fair Wages, 1948
  • (d)The Minimum Wages Act, 1948

  Answer(b) The Fifteenth Indian Labour Conference, 1957 — the tripartite conference resolved on these quantitative norms, adding housing rent at the government industrial housing scheme rate and fuel, lighting and miscellaneous items at twenty per cent of the total. The Committee on Fair Wages of 1948 supplied the three-tier vocabulary of minimum, fair and living wage but no formula; Article 43 names the living wage and prescribes no norms; the Act of 1948 created the machinery for fixing wages without setting these figures.