Technology Driven Inequities at Work Place in India

Indian work organizations, both in service and manufacturing sectors, have brought about significant restructuring and refinement of operations through adoption of new technologies that has become imperative and indispensable for survival in the highly competitive globalizing world. These developments are assumed to be having significant long term implications for the work organisations reaching in terms of skill up gradation, composition of workforce, restructuring of organisations and work process involving huge capital expenditure. This rationalisation process has also implications for workforce in terms of increased wage differentials owing to emphasis on skill, absorption or replacement of workers with skills no longer required as well as adjustment with changed work culture. The findings based on a study of 41 service and 36 manufacturing establishments across three States in India indicate that higher skill requirements have rendered significant proportion of workforce obsolete and their tools redundant.  The adoption of the so called “skill biased” technology is found to be having significant implications for variations in wage inequality both within and between industries.   While workers with higher skills obtained through formal courses are being inducted, the older obsolete workers are on the verge of being expelled through diverse schemes of compensation or are being absorbed in the barely required unskilled cadres at considerably lower wages.  This phenomenon is more marked in private sector service industries compared to public sector manufacturing establishments.  As a result of disappearance of moderately skilled workforce, these organisations are found with skill polarisation and heightened wage inequalities.