Trade unions in a protest.
Credit: PTI photo
New Delhi: The ten Central trade unions affiliated to the Opposition are all set to announce a general strike in February against the implementation of the four labour codes.
Sources said the announcement by the joint platform of the trade unions – INTUC, AITUC, HMS, CITU, AIUTUC, TUCC, SEWA, AICCTU, LPF and UTUC – is likely to come on December 22, when its leaders meet.
Like in the previous instances, the Samyukta Kisan Morcha is also likely to endorse the general strike call.
When the union government notified the four Codes on November 21, the trade unions had called its implementation “genocidal attacks” and “war on the working masses”. It had already held a one-day protest programme in a joint action with farmers on November 26 demanding its scrapping.
The four codes are the Code on Wages, 2019, the Industrial Relations Code, 2020, the Code on Social Security, 2020 and the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020.
Sources said one of the issues the trade unions will be highlighting is the new norm for fixed term employment, which they claim would kill permanent jobs and social security.
They believe it would lead to an end of the Constitutionally-guaranteed quota system and in a way, the labour codes are a “total demolition of the Constitution”. Sources said youth will be hugely impacted with this.
Sources said adivasis, Dalits and the backwards would be the communities that would be hugely impacted by the codes. They claimed that the fixed term employment would be implemented not only in the private sector but also in the public sector.