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Introduction
Steel manufacturing industry is one of the major industries of India. India is among the top three producers of steel in the world (IBEF, 2018). By the year 2030, it is expected that India will overtake Japan and will become the second largest producer of steel in the world (IBEF, 2018). It is also likely that steel production will rise to 128.6m tonnes (MT) from 88.4 MT, which will increase the share of India (in the steel production) from 5.4 to 7.7 percent in the world (PTI, 2017). To meet this growing demand, steel manufacturing organizations need efficient and competent workers who can work efficiently to contribute and accelerate the production. Further, to meet these varied needs, it has also been noticed that manufacturing organizations across (the world) are hiring contractual and daily wages workers (Connelly and Gallagher, 2004; Singh et al., 2017). Similar trends are observed in India as reported by Ananthanarayanan (2014). The statistics reported states that in the year 2014 contractual workers accounted for 46 percent of the total workforce in the manufacturing sector of India (Ananthanarayanan, 2014; Jha, 2018).
Apart from these, there are several other reasons behind increase in the hiring of contractual workers in India. The nature of the work in the manufacturing sector is characterized as labor-intensive and the stringent clauses of Indian labor laws such as the different sections of Industrial Dispute Act, 1947 (India Code – digital Repository of Legislations (ICDRL), n.d.; Jha, 2018) and Indian Trade Union Act, 1926 (National Laws on labour, social security and related human rights (NATLEX), n.d.; Jha, 2018) are some of the reasons. Under these stringent laws organizations are not allowed to lay-off permanent workers without a prior intimation and permission from the relevant state government (Ananthanarayanan, 2014; Kapoor, 2015). Roychowdhury (2018) explored the problems associated with the issue of labor flexibility in Indian manufacturing market and suggested two major challenges of this sector – the issue of job security laws which strictly regulate the hiring and firing of the workers, and the increasing real wages which encourages more capital intensive techniques to improve production.
Added to this, factors such as the costs associated with the full time or permanent workers for instances high wages, safety and security...