TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF LABOUR CONTRACTS IN AGRICULTURE: RESULTS OF A SURVEY IN WEST BENGAL 1979*
| Author | Pranab Bardhan,Ashok Rudra |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0084.1981.mp43001006.x |
| Published date | 01 February 1981 |
| Date | 01 February 1981 |
TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF LABOUR CONTRACTS
IN AGRICULTURE: RESULTS OF A SURVEY IN
WEST BENGAL 1979*
Pranab Bardhan and Ashok Rudra
IINTRODUCTION
Most of the theoretical and empirical work on agricultural labour markets in poor
countries relates to the wage rate and unemployment of workers. The question of
'surplus labour' has often overshadowed other issues. Information is rather scanty
on the actual nature of agricultural labour contracts in these countries and on the
details of their terms and conditions. These conditions of the employer-employee
relationship involve, apart from the rates of remuneration: (a) duration of contract-
day, month, season, period of a particular operation, year, etc., (b) basis of payment
hourly, daily, piece rate, product share, etc., (c) frequency of paymentday,
month, year, several irregular instalments during the year, bonus during festivals,
etc., (d) medium of paymentcash, kind, meals, snacks, and their different com-
binations, (e) degree to which work obligations and hours of work are specified or are
left unspecified, (f) interlinkage with other contracts with the employer in credit or
land relations, or in employment of other members of the labourer's family on the
same employer's farm, (g) freedom to work for alternative employersfull freedom,
total absence of such freedom, conditional or restricted freedom, etc., and so on.
Variations in these conditions in individual contracts often imply types of labour
that need to be differentiated; the attendant segmentation of the labour market can
be ignored only at the cost of misleading analysis and policy prescriptions.
In this paper we report on the results of a fairly large-scale, yet intensive, survey of
a random sample of 110 villages in West Bengal that we carried out in 1979. This
survey focuses on the detailed terms and conditions of agricultural labour contracts
and emphasizes the heterogeneity of employer-employee relationships. In sections
11-IV we discuss modes of wage payment, intra-vilage and inter-village variations in
wage rates and modes of wage change. In the rest of the paper (sections V-XI) we
analyse the employer-employee relationships of attachment and dependence and
highlight the variety of labour categories that exist in agriculture but are often over-
looked in usual surveys.
In our survey the villages were allocated to the districts in proportion to the agri-
cultural population of the districts, and within each district villages were selected
randomly with probability proportional to the village agricultural population. Within
each village a questionnaire was canvassed with purposively chosen respondents in
each labour category (provided such a category existed in the village): two casual
* Research support by National Science Foundation under Grant No. SES-7804022 AOl to the
Institute of International Studies, University of California at Berkeley is gratefully acknowledged.
Prem Thapa provided valuable research assistance.89
90 BULLETIN
labourers (one landless, one with some land), two fully attached labourers (one with
more than 5 years of service with the employer and the other with 5 years or less),
and two or more (if possible, different types of) 'semi-attached' (see our subsequent
definition) labourers; there was in addition a general village questionnaire to be filled
in on the basis of information obtained from all these six or more respondents and
from a cross-checking of these accounts with other people living in the village. The
village questionnaire contained questions on the general economic, demographic, and
agricultural conditions of the village as well as questions on types of labour contracts
prevailing in the village (and the particulars of these contracts). It may also be noted
here that the same sample design and in fact the same set of sample villages for West
Bengal were used by us in an earlier (i975-6) survey on terms and conditions of
contracts in land, labour and credit markets in 400 sample villages in North India. For
some of the results of that survey, see Bardhan and Rudra (1978) and Bardhan and
Rudra (1980).
II MODES OF WAGE PAYMENT
Our survey records a whole variety of modes of wage payment. Table I reports the
relative incidence of different modes of payment, both for daily and longer-term
labour contracts, in our sample villages classified by the extent of agricultural progress
in the village. It seems in general that it is quite common for the labourer to receive
wages in some combination of cash, kind and some perquisites like meals or snacks. In
Table I, so far as daily wage contracts are concerned, about 74 per cent of all villages
report either cash plus meals or cash plus meals plus kind payment or cash plus kind
payment. The same combination of modes constitutes a much larger percentage (about
87 per cent) of the total number of longer-term wage contracts in our sample. It
may be worth noting that in a substantially larger percentage of longer-term contracts
than in daily contracts the wage includes meals. This is consistent with the hypothesis
that if longer-term contracts enable employers to capture the productivity benefits of
the worker's nutrition intake, the employer is interested in ensuring, through pay-
ments of wages partly in the form of meals consumed at the work site or in the
employer's house, that a larger part of wages is spent directly on nutrition for the
worker and less on his dependents and on non-food items of expenditure.
It is interesting to note that wage payment in the form purely of cash applies to
only 23 per cent of all villages for daily contracts and 3 per cent of all villages for
longer-term contracts in our sample. Putting together the 'highly advanced' and
'advanced' villages in one category and the 'semi-advanced' and 'not advanced' in
another, the evidence in Table I suggests that monetization of wage payments seems
to increase with technical advance in agriculture (for the definition of the categories
of villages classified by agricultural advance, see the note to the table).
Table I also suggests that in about half of all sample villages piece-rate daily wage
payment (for a job done, like the ploughing of a given plot) or, somewhat less fre-
quently, a share-rate system (payment to the labourer of a fraction of the total number
of bundles harvested by him, for example) prevail, along with other forms of wage
payment. The rationale for such forms of incentive payment is clear when supervision
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