<p>The year 2025 came to a close amidst heated discussions about the changing regulatory landscape of labour and the shifting framework of understanding worker rights in India. The last quarter of the year witnessed the introduction of important labour policy documents in quick succession. The draft Labour Policy was released in October as a prelude to the new labour codes that came into effect in November. This was followed in December by the enactment of the new law replacing the MGNREGA. With these reforms, the language and strategy of dealing with the issue of labour rights have shifted decisively. The four Labour Codes – the Code on Wages 2019, the Industrial Relations Code 2020, the Social Security Code (2020), and the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Condition Code 2020 – mark a paradigmatic shift in the labour administration in India. They have restructured the existing 29 labour legislations, separately governing aspects of wages, working conditions, industrial relations, industrial safety, and social security, into four codes with the stated intention of aligning the labour ecosystem with the changing economic realities.</p>.<p>The codes do not recognise the overwhelming presence of unorganised or informal workers in non-agricultural production sectors in India. These workers are unprotected, their workplaces are unsafe, real wages have been stagnant over the years, and living conditions are deplorable. A large section of them are inter-state migrants, employed in the deliberately fragmented production units across a host of sectors. A close reading of the four codes together reveals that the status quo of these workers is unlikely to see any improvement. A few gaps seem critical based on our experience of working with informal and migrant workers<br>in major migrant destinations across Gujarat and Maharashtra over the past 20 years.</p>.What the robot reveals about India’s education.<p>An important feature of the new codes is upward revision of legal employment thresholds across the board to aid compliance. Raising the applicable threshold for factories and contract labour from 20 to 50 workers might end up excluding large segments of workers from the ambit of meaningful legal protection. Similarly, raising the threshold for mandatory government approval for layoff/retrenchment from 100 to 300 workers might make businesses more agile, but it will compromise the job security of a large number of workers. Furthermore, the legal vigil over increasingly informal recruitment practices may get diluted because of the changes in the threshold on licensing of contractors for employment of migrant and contract workers.</p>.<p>The Social Security Code has many provisions targeted at unorganised sector workers, including gig and platform workers, self-employed workers, and home-based workers. The code pronounces schemes for life and disability cover, health and maternity benefit, old age protection, funeral assistance, education and skill upgradation, and provides broad-basing of the coverage of EPF and ESI benefits for workers in registered establishments, as also gig and platform workers. Paradoxically, it also allows establishments to exit the applicability of its provisions if ‘the employer and majority of the employees agree in writing’ (sub-section 5). This may open up enough room for employers to evade legal responsibility by co-opting workers’ consent.</p>.<p>The OSH Code limits the applicability of its provisions to factories employing more than 20 workers. This would deny justice to precarious workers in smaller establishments. It is widely known that the most vulnerable workers are employed in micro enterprises that form a dominant segment of India’s manufacturing landscape. Many industrial peripheries and corridors have come up over the last decades, teeming with tiny sweatshops located at the bottom of long supply chains. Our studies in clusters such as Jodhpur, Surat, and Mumbai have shown that lakhs of informal migrant workers labour dangerously amidst worn-out machines and hazardous materials in these establishments, constantly facing the threat of life-changing diseases, injuries, and accidents.</p>.<p><strong>A workforce alienated</strong></p>.<p>A crowdsourced database, the accident e-log that we have been compiling over the post-pandemic years to record workplace injuries and fatalities, reaffirms this. The smaller units that dominate sectors like metal, steel, automobile, and textiles often operate with very low margins and do not have the financial capability to provide basic safety measures to their workers. The State must support such units, technically and financially, to upgrade basic safety provisions and compensate the workers in case of injuries or death.</p>.<p>An apparently progressive provision like fixed-term employment is likely to be exploited by employers to deny permanent rights to workers and to dilute the power of unions. On the face of it, the flexibility allowed to employers to decide work schedules with the weekly cap of 48 working hours appears to be an enabling provision. However, this provision may introduce a significant degree of arbitrariness in work scheduling without reducing the burden of work for informal and migrant workers. A 12-hour workday is already the norm in many labour markets despite the apex court in India labelling it as an anti-labour practice.</p>.<p>If, after seven decades of independence, 90% of the country’s workforce is informal without access to social security benefits, the reasons for such entrenched infirmity need to be sought in the structural and institutional bottlenecks that perpetuate informality in the labour market. The country needs stronger and sensitive worker-facing policies, robust institutional architecture for policy implementation and enforcement, and active State oversight in all matters that concern the rights and dignity of the workforce. Reorienting labour inspectors as inspector-cum-facilitators may further weaken enforcement by diluting the regulatory authority required to ensure adherence to the labour code provisions. The major concern about the new codes is whether they would widen the schism between the State and workers by allowing employers a larger and unequal playing ground to function as they like.</p>.<p><strong>(The writers are Co-Founders and Directors at Work Fair and Free Foundation, an action-centric knowledge organisation working on informal and migrant workers)</strong></p><p><em>(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)</em></p>
<p>The year 2025 came to a close amidst heated discussions about the changing regulatory landscape of labour and the shifting framework of understanding worker rights in India. The last quarter of the year witnessed the introduction of important labour policy documents in quick succession. The draft Labour Policy was released in October as a prelude to the new labour codes that came into effect in November. This was followed in December by the enactment of the new law replacing the MGNREGA. With these reforms, the language and strategy of dealing with the issue of labour rights have shifted decisively. The four Labour Codes – the Code on Wages 2019, the Industrial Relations Code 2020, the Social Security Code (2020), and the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Condition Code 2020 – mark a paradigmatic shift in the labour administration in India. They have restructured the existing 29 labour legislations, separately governing aspects of wages, working conditions, industrial relations, industrial safety, and social security, into four codes with the stated intention of aligning the labour ecosystem with the changing economic realities.</p>.<p>The codes do not recognise the overwhelming presence of unorganised or informal workers in non-agricultural production sectors in India. These workers are unprotected, their workplaces are unsafe, real wages have been stagnant over the years, and living conditions are deplorable. A large section of them are inter-state migrants, employed in the deliberately fragmented production units across a host of sectors. A close reading of the four codes together reveals that the status quo of these workers is unlikely to see any improvement. A few gaps seem critical based on our experience of working with informal and migrant workers<br>in major migrant destinations across Gujarat and Maharashtra over the past 20 years.</p>.What the robot reveals about India’s education.<p>An important feature of the new codes is upward revision of legal employment thresholds across the board to aid compliance. Raising the applicable threshold for factories and contract labour from 20 to 50 workers might end up excluding large segments of workers from the ambit of meaningful legal protection. Similarly, raising the threshold for mandatory government approval for layoff/retrenchment from 100 to 300 workers might make businesses more agile, but it will compromise the job security of a large number of workers. Furthermore, the legal vigil over increasingly informal recruitment practices may get diluted because of the changes in the threshold on licensing of contractors for employment of migrant and contract workers.</p>.<p>The Social Security Code has many provisions targeted at unorganised sector workers, including gig and platform workers, self-employed workers, and home-based workers. The code pronounces schemes for life and disability cover, health and maternity benefit, old age protection, funeral assistance, education and skill upgradation, and provides broad-basing of the coverage of EPF and ESI benefits for workers in registered establishments, as also gig and platform workers. Paradoxically, it also allows establishments to exit the applicability of its provisions if ‘the employer and majority of the employees agree in writing’ (sub-section 5). This may open up enough room for employers to evade legal responsibility by co-opting workers’ consent.</p>.<p>The OSH Code limits the applicability of its provisions to factories employing more than 20 workers. This would deny justice to precarious workers in smaller establishments. It is widely known that the most vulnerable workers are employed in micro enterprises that form a dominant segment of India’s manufacturing landscape. Many industrial peripheries and corridors have come up over the last decades, teeming with tiny sweatshops located at the bottom of long supply chains. Our studies in clusters such as Jodhpur, Surat, and Mumbai have shown that lakhs of informal migrant workers labour dangerously amidst worn-out machines and hazardous materials in these establishments, constantly facing the threat of life-changing diseases, injuries, and accidents.</p>.<p><strong>A workforce alienated</strong></p>.<p>A crowdsourced database, the accident e-log that we have been compiling over the post-pandemic years to record workplace injuries and fatalities, reaffirms this. The smaller units that dominate sectors like metal, steel, automobile, and textiles often operate with very low margins and do not have the financial capability to provide basic safety measures to their workers. The State must support such units, technically and financially, to upgrade basic safety provisions and compensate the workers in case of injuries or death.</p>.<p>An apparently progressive provision like fixed-term employment is likely to be exploited by employers to deny permanent rights to workers and to dilute the power of unions. On the face of it, the flexibility allowed to employers to decide work schedules with the weekly cap of 48 working hours appears to be an enabling provision. However, this provision may introduce a significant degree of arbitrariness in work scheduling without reducing the burden of work for informal and migrant workers. A 12-hour workday is already the norm in many labour markets despite the apex court in India labelling it as an anti-labour practice.</p>.<p>If, after seven decades of independence, 90% of the country’s workforce is informal without access to social security benefits, the reasons for such entrenched infirmity need to be sought in the structural and institutional bottlenecks that perpetuate informality in the labour market. The country needs stronger and sensitive worker-facing policies, robust institutional architecture for policy implementation and enforcement, and active State oversight in all matters that concern the rights and dignity of the workforce. Reorienting labour inspectors as inspector-cum-facilitators may further weaken enforcement by diluting the regulatory authority required to ensure adherence to the labour code provisions. The major concern about the new codes is whether they would widen the schism between the State and workers by allowing employers a larger and unequal playing ground to function as they like.</p>.<p><strong>(The writers are Co-Founders and Directors at Work Fair and Free Foundation, an action-centric knowledge organisation working on informal and migrant workers)</strong></p><p><em>(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)</em></p>
