INDEBTEDNESS. 241 
the employee who is engaged by the month must give and receive a month’s 
notice, whereas in the case of the employee engaged by the week, only a 
week’s notice is necessary on either side. This tends to give the employer 
an additional inducement to continue the payment of wages by the longer 
period. Since employees are seldom in a position to give a month’s 
notice, another result is that they forfeit the legal right to their wages for 
any broken period for which they may have worked. As they have 
ordinarily to go on working for about a fortnight in order to secure their 
wages for the previous month, the loss may be appreciable. For both 
reasons, we recommend that for industrial employees in factories the 
legal period of notice should in no case exceed a week, whatever the 
period by which wages are paid. 
Prevention of Delayed Payments. 
While in our opinion the reduction of the waiting period in 
respect of wages is much less important than that of the wage period, 
we consider that labour hasa strong claim to protection against the 
unduly long delays which are frequent at present. To quote the 
Government of India “ it is no uncommon thing—in fact, it appears to be 
the rule in certain industries—for monthly wages to be systematically 
withheld until a fortnight after the close of the month to which they 
relate. And cases have come to the notice of Government in which wages 
had been withheld for considerably longer periods.” We have been unable 
bo find any adequate justification for this practice. There is no force in 
the argument that the withholding of the previous month’s wages for 
a substantial part of the following month tends to prevent the workman 
from leaving his employer, and the long period is really not necessary for 
the calculation of wages. In many cases, and especially on railways 
which have been conspicuous in this matter, the division of the em- 
ployees into groups paid on different days of the month would ease the 
strain that at present falls on the accounting staff in a particular portion 
of the month and secure prompt payment for all concerned. For various 
reasons the payment of wages in India is not so simple as it is in the 
West, but there is little evidence of serious attempts to secure that 
Wages should be paid as promptly as possible. Our recommendation 
1s that the law should insist on the payment of wages within 7 days 
from the expiry of the period in which they have been earned in the 
ordinary case and that they should be paid as early as possible but not 
later than two days from the date of discharge in the case of an operative 
who is discharged. In our opinion the law should be applicable to fac- 
bories, mines, railways and plantations and it should provide for possible 
extensions to other branches of industry. It may be necessary 0 provide 
for exemptions to cover cases of those railway workers who live at a long 
distance from headquarters, but we hope that they will seldom be required. 
This proposal should secure for many workers the payment of their 
Wages a week earlier than is customary at present and protect others 
against the very long delays to which they are subjected ab times. It 
should be of especial assistance to the worker when he enters industry for 
the first time or returns to it after a period of absence.