Conference Agenda

In recent years, increasing disparities in wealth distribution, diminishing share of wages, lack of sustainable livelihood & adequate social protection has prompted worldwide extensive experimentation with a new generation of Minimum Wage (MW) laws, aiming to improve quality of life rather than just ensuring economic survival (ILO,2024). The core focus of this shift is on the introduction & adoption of ‘Living Wages’ (LW), providing workers with decent quality of work and life, as well as the choice to participate meaningfully in social life.

Developing countries around the world have widely utilized MW as a vital instrument to redistribute income, prevent exploitation, and alleviate poverty (Varkkey, Korde & Wadhwaniya, 2021; Rani,2017). Contrary to its intended purpose, MW have had counterproductive effects, and are accused even of contributing to unemployment and poverty (Romero 2023).

While LW has been shown to positively impact individuals livelihood and organizational performance, its adoption at industry and economy levels continues to face considerable institutional, political, and legal resistance in developing countries, including India, further complicating the transition from MW to LW.(Bisht, 2024).

India, which has a long history of MW, operating with a very complicated system has officially decided to adopt LW (Verma,2024). In this paper, we contribute to discussions on the regulatory, structural, and governance obstacles, in transition from MW to LW in India, the following questions are therefore relevant; a). Why should and how can India transition from MW to LW system to create a more equitable labour market? b). What role do stakeholders (TUs, businesses and state governments) play in effective implementation of LWs, & how can their collaboration address regulatory & structural challenges, c). How can the impending reforms in India’s labour laws and labour administration facilitate the successful transition & implementation of LW.

Drawing on the ILO’s Decent Work framework and Sen’s (1980) Capability approach, this paper examines the perspectives of HR professionals in organized industries, regarding the implementation and impact of living wage through an exploratory survey in the western part of India. Data was collected through using an in-depth interview protocol. The study utilized purpose and referral chain sampling techniques. Further, the study compares regulatory, structural & governance measures implemented by other countries, in their transition from MW to LW.

Drawing from these international experiences, we aim to propose a model tailored to the Indian context, outlining key policy measures and strategies to ensure a smooth and effective transition from MW to LW.

Earned Wage Access (EWA) is a technology-enabled financial service that allows workers to access a portion of their earned wages before payday, typically for a fee. It is generally provided by digital financial or payroll service providers in collaboration with employers. Emerging in the early 2010s, EWA experienced rapid growth during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom. More recently, it has gained traction among lower-income workers in developing countries, especially within the platform economy.

Evidence suggests that EWA may offer relevant benefits to workers’ financial well-being by improving access to liquidity, smoothing consumption patterns, aiding personal financial management, and helping to avoid costly formal and informal loans. These findings align with broader research on the positive impact of increased wage payment frequency on financial stability. However, EWA services also pose significant risks, including repeated use and over-reliance, excessive fees, restrictions on how advanced wages can be used, and data protection concerns.

As EWA services grow in popularity, regulators have begun addressing some of the associated risks. However, most regulatory efforts so far focus on financial consumer protection—such as fee transparency and affordability—while overlooking key labour-related concerns. Wage protection provisions, particularly those requiring full and direct wage payments to workers, safeguarding free disposition of income, and restricting wage payments in vouchers, are directly relevant to EWA services. Additionally, these services intersect with issues typically governed by labour regulations or social dialogue initiatives, including wage payment frequency and payroll management.

The paper examines the regulatory framework needed to ensure that EWA services, as an innovative application of digital financial technologies to wage payments, maximise benefits for workers while effectively mitigating associated risks. It explores the intersections between financial regulation, consumer protection, and labour relations in the provision of EWA services, highlighting the need for greater collaboration among regulators in these areas. The paper builds on existing academic literature, regulatory debates, analysis of international labour standards, and field research conducted by the ILO Global Centre on Digital Wages for Decent Work, which includes insights from key stakeholders and a survey of over 500 EWA users across various regions.

The minimum wage serves as a policy instrument to reduce wage inequality and narrow the gender wage gap, particularly for workers in the lowest decile of the wage distribution. However, its effectiveness in India remains widely debated due to persistent non-compliance in the labour market (Rani & Belser, 2012; Soundararajan, 2019). Weak enforcement mechanisms and the complexity of the wage system contribute significantly to this non-compliance (Belser & Rani, 2011; Rani & Belser, 2012; Mansoor & O’Neill, 2021). Despite these challenges, studies have documented improvements in compliance rates between 2004–05 and 2011–12, particularly in rural areas (Rani & Belser, 2012; Mansoor & O’Neill, 2021). This period coincides with the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the world’s largest employment guarantee program. While several studies have examined MGNREGA’s impact on rural employment, wages, and welfare, its role in improving minimum wage compliance remains unexplored.

This study investigates the impact of MGNREGA on compliance with minimum wage regulations for informal sector workers in rural India. Specifically, it examines whether MGNREGA contributed to the observed improvements in compliance rates, as suggested by Rani and Belser (2012). Using a matching procedure combined with a difference-in-differences estimation approach, the study analyses the short- and long-term effects of MGNREGA on rural wages, wage distribution, and employment between 2004–05 and 2018–19. The findings indicate that MGNREGA significantly improved minimum wage compliance and increased reservation wages. However, the program’s effects vary across states, regions, and genders, highlighting its heterogeneous impact.

At its inception, MGNREGA provided a legal guarantee of 100 days of public-sector employment per year at the minimum wage for rural households. However, policy changes since 2011, such as indexing MGNREGA wages to the Consumer Price Index, have weakened its distributional effects and diminished its impact in recent years. In developing countries with weak enforcement mechanisms, employment guarantee schemes like MGNREGA not only provide employment opportunities in underserved populations but also serve as effective tools for enforcing minimum wage regulations for unskilled workers.

Over the last three decades, wage inequality and minimum wage policies have occupied a central space in academic and policy circles. Extant literature stresses that effects of minimum wage policies can spill over and even affect workers with earnings above the minimum wage (Gopalan et., 2020; Bossler and Shank, 2022), with recent studies finding positive ripple effects ripple up to the 60th percentile but negative effects for those beyond (Gregory and Zierahn, 2022).

In this paper, we present the first discussion of the changes in the wage distribution following labor reforms in Qatar. The GCC, as a whole, is a high-income region with relatively unrestricted access to the global poor and a major source of international remittances (Wagle, 2024). Yet, the distributional implications of recent labor reforms in the region remain understudied. Qatar, with almost 90 percent of its population consisting of expatriates, and a minimum wage legislation enacted in 2021 that increased wages of affected workers by 32 percent, offers a unique opportunity for research.

Three waves of primary data collected in 2018, 2019 and 2022 show that the Gini index of wage inequality among blue collar workers (defined as those earning less than QAR 6000) declined from 0.30 in 2018/2019 to 0.24 in 2022. The p90/p10 also recorded a decline from 3.5 to 2.6 in 2022.

Using density decomposition techniques as introduced by DiNardo et. al (1996) and developed by Firpo et al. (2018) and Fortin and Lemieux (1996), we decompose changes in wages at each decile to show (preliminary) that wage increases were limited to the bottom 20 percent, and these were explained almost completely by changes in the wage structure. However, there were significant decreases in wages (up to 18%) from the 50th to the 80th percentile, where up to 50 percent of the decline may explained by changing characteristics, particularly Qatar specific work experience.

Identification remains challenging, not least because the 2020 promulgation of the Minimum Wage Law overlaps with the negative labor demand shock due to COVID-19 and a positive shock due to FIFA 2022 preparations. This said, we use the differential bite of the minimum wage between broad occupational categories to come closer to causal estimates of the impact of the legislation [in progress]. Despite these limitations, this works highlights the potential implications of labor reform.

India’s comprehensive minimum wage system has long been an important tool for improving the incomes of the large section of India’s workforce that still relies on daily wage labour to make ends meet. Empirical findings that demonstrate the low distortionary costs (w.r.t. both inflation and employment) of this policy raise exciting prospects of its possible applications as an efficient mechanism not just for improving incomes, but also to allay distributional concerns, as labour market discrimination along the lines of gender, caste and religion continues to be a persistent and pressing problem for India’s uniquely diverse workforce, as these marginalized sections remain beyond the protections minimum wage is supposed to offer. The size of these wage differentials varies across the distribution. The impact of minimum wages on wage inequalities between these social groups remains woefully understudied in the Indian context. This warrants empirical examination, as several factors like labour market dualism and varying compliance levels affect how minimum wages shape between-groups wage inequality. The skewed distribution of these groups across different states adds another dimension to the evaluation of minimum wage legislation, which is largely a state subject, as varying base rates and temporal variations can be expected to affect inequalities in different ways. Using NSSO-EUS (1999-00, 2004-05, 2011-12) and PLFS data (2017/18 to 2023/24), this study seeks to use a two-way fixed effects regression framework and a stacked difference-in-difference approach (both using a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition) to estimate the impact of an increasing minimum wage on between-groups inequality at different percentiles of the wage distribution in the formal sector, focusing especially on backward castes and religious groups, as no other research exists on this topic. It also uses a generalized quantile regression framework as a robustness measure for its results. This research has the potential to be consequential, given that minimum wage cover continues to be inadequate despite being an active policy area, and as an important input in the ongoing debate about the necessity of increasing the minimum wage to a living wage level.