On November 21, 2025, the Indian government implemented four labour codes through executive fiat. This would come as a surprise to only those who forgot that the Codes were passed in the parliament without debate while most of the opposition members were suspended for protesting the three farm bills passed the previous day. 

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has once again used its majority to change the face of labour legislation and jurisprudence in the country. In one sweeping stroke, the government has wiped away the struggles of millions of workers in the subcontinent over the last century and a half. 

From the time the Codes were legislated in September 2020 to now, the government has steadfastly refused to consult with trade unions, disregarding the tripartite process in its entirety, and even the state governments, defying the constitutional spirit that placed labour in the Concurrent List. The BJP government has even ignored the opposition from Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), their own fraternal organisation in the larger Sangh family. 

Constitutional rights under attack

There are three broad reasons why trade unions, irrespective of their differences, are opposing the codes – one, its attempt to redefine the Constitution and constitutional rights of working people; two, its attempt to further skew the balance of power between labour and capital by tilting the laws that protected basic labour rights in favour of capital; and three, its violation of the international labour standards as defined by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) conventions. 

Labour is a subject in the Concurrent List. Yet, the Codes grant the Union government sweeping powers to frame rules, override existing state laws and dictate regulatory structures. 

States have been reduced to mere implementing agencies with no meaningful legislative authority. This is a direct assault on the federal balance envisioned by the Constitution under Articles 246, 254 and the Seventh Schedule.

The Codes hand over essential legislative powers to the executive – particularly the Union government – through blanket rule-making authority. The power to decide the national floor wage, access to social security, inspection mechanisms, and thresholds for layoffs have been removed from Parliament and handed to bureaucrats. This violates the separation of powers and the principle that essential legislative functions cannot be delegated.

By creating arbitrary thresholds regarding the number of workers for applicability of the Codes, the new legislation has excluded the majority of India’s workforce. 

Additionally, the move towards fixed-term employment, relaxation of safety norms, and diluted inspection systems creates unjustifiable discrimination between workers performing the same work in the same establishments, thereby legalising inequality in violation of Article 14 of the Constitution. 

The Codes, for the first time, introduce the concept of a national floor level wage (NFLW) within the legal structure and state that no wage can be set below the NFLW. Under the Minimum Wage Act, no wage could be lower than the minimum wage and if it was so set, it was deemed to be forced labour and would be a criminal offense punishable by imprisonment. 

By creating a NFLW, the codes remove the criminal liability of non-payment of minimum wages, thereby allowing forced labour in violation of Article 23 of the Constitution. More crucially, the NFLW, which can be set arbitrarily by the executive, will make minimum wages extremely sticky and collective bargaining to raise it would be a herculean task.  

The Industrial Relations Code imposes unreasonable restrictions on union registration, majority status and the right to strike. By limiting who can represent workers and by creating near-impossible conditions for lawful strikes, the government violates the constitutional guarantee of freedom of association under Article 19(1).

And finally, by weakening safety provisions, increasing working hours in a day by stealth, allowing easy hire-and-fire, and dismantling social security mechanisms, the Codes strike at the heart of workers’ right to live with dignity guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution. 

Taken together, these changes amount to a systematic assault on our fundamental rights, undermining equality, freedom, and dignity as guaranteed by the Constitution.

Moving from de facto to de jure

Successive governments since 1991, irrespective of their political colour, have been under pressure from domestic and global capital to push for deregulation of labour. Efforts towards making these changes had been piecemeal at best until the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, led by A.B. Vajpayee constituted the Second National Commission on Labour (SNCL) in 1999. 

The SNCL was the first body to recommend the codification of all existing labour laws into six Codes. The SNCL was also mired by the fact that they did not include all the centrally recognised trade unions. 

In 2001, the government amended the Trade Unions Act, 1926, which set a minimum membership threshold for registration of a trade union. This membership would be verified by employers before granting registration to the trade union. 

This amendment made it difficult for unions to enrol members, especially precarious workers, who feared losing their jobs at the time of verification. A classic example of this was the repeated attempts made by Maruti Suzuki workers at the company’s Manesar plant to register their union in Haryana. 

The workers failed to register their union on two occasions and when they finally managed to do so, the employer came down heavily on them, leading to the 2012 incident in which 13 workers were sentenced to life for allegedly ‘killing’ a manager. 

Though the SNCL recommendations got shelved when the United Progressive Alliance came to power in 2004, the battle to dilute labour rights continued in courtrooms and states. 

The reinterpretation of the Contract Labour (Regulation & Abolition) Act, 1970 (CLRA Act) by the Supreme Court in the SAIL (2001) and Uma Devi (2006) cases made it difficult to seek regularisation of contract workers under the law. 

Once the courts began ruling in ways that strengthened employers’ hands, companies across the country – global as well as domestic – started employing workers through a range of temporary and non-permanent contracts. These shifts have made it easier to close and move factories and allowed employers to hire and fire workers with greater ease. 

But once in a while, employers faced resistance from unions that fought on the ground and in courtrooms. Many of these battles stretched out for years and a few were won. In 2017, the Supreme Court of India upheld an industrial tribunal and high court ruling that regularised over 2,700 contract sanitation workers of Mumbai Municipal Corporation after a 25-year battle fought by their union, the Kachra Vahatuk Shramik Sangh. These victories created case law, which then created legal precedence. 

In 2014, the BJP was voted back to power on the promise of ‘acche din’ for the people. But they also promised, in their election manifesto, to: “Take all steps; like removing red-tapism involved in approvals, to make it easy to do business… and undertake labour reforms, besides other steps to create a conducive environment for investors”. While the people still wait for the ‘achhe din’ to come, the framing of the Labour Codes was one of the key steps taken by the government to legalise ‘achhe din’ for employers. 

While the BJP government at the centre mulled over implementation of the Codes, the BJP governments in the states began to roll out the key provisions of the Codes to test waters.

In 2014, the Vasundhara Raje government in Rajasthan increased the threshold limit for applicability of the Factories Act, the Contract Labour Act and the Industrial Disputes Act. They also put limitations on collective action and union recognition. Lauded as the Rajasthan model, other BJP ruled states – such as Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana and Karnataka – began to adopt it.  This paved the path for the inter-state race to the bottom on labour standards to attract investment, putting non-BJP ruled states under political pressure. Thus started the process of changing the law to suit the existing conditions established by employers due to the imbalance of power between labour and capital. What used to be violations of law followed by impunity by employers has now become law. 

A law divorced of morality

In the guise of ‘simplification, rationalisation and making (labour laws) less cumbersome’, the Codes have diluted the basic labour rights guaranteed  by the 29 laws they subsumed. 

The Codes have simultaneously put in place a framework of legal protection for employers as well as simplifying entry and exit from businesses. The labour codes consistently protect the right of employers to profit against the right of workers to a dignified life. 

Let us take the example of the registration process for a factory under the OSH code and that of a trade union under the IR Code. 

Even if we say, for argument’s sake, that the process by law of natural justice should be the same, we can see how the Code ensures ‘ease of business’ while creating impediments in the registration of unions that will represent workers’ interests. 

Under the OSH Code, factories can make electronic applications for registration of the establishment. 

The registering officer, on receipt of this application, shall register the establishment and issue a certificate of registration. The Code has no mandatory provision for the officer to conduct verification of the premises and its facilities to meet the safety requirement as prescribed under law before issuing the certificate. This has been done in the name of removing ‘inspector-raj’. 

Further, if the officer fails to issue the certificate within a specified period as in the rules, the establishment will be deemed to be registered and an auto-generated certificate will be issued. 

However, this puts hundreds of workers’ lives at risk as the government withdraws from its responsibility of regulating capital and allows self-certification by employers. 

This gets compounded when we add the amendment to the provision of the factory inspectorate. The inspectors, under the code, have been diluted to ‘inspectors-cum-facilitators’. As the name suggests, the inspectors are now supposed to facilitate the process in which employers can comply with the law. The power of the inspectors to take punitive action against employers violating the law has been removed. 

Inspectors can no longer conduct random and surprise inspections in factories. They are supposed to inform the employers before visiting a factory that is randomly selected by an algorithm. This will make it impossible for inspectors to conduct inspections based on information from workers or other whistleblowers. By providing a notice before inspection, the inspectors will now allow employers sufficient time to fix their violations or coach and intimidate their workers before the inspection is conducted. This not just dilutes the power of the inspectors, it also dilutes the power of workers and their organisations. This dilution of the powers of the inspector is also in violation of the ILO Convention on Labour Inspection (C081) ratified by India in 1949. 

On the contrary, in the case of trade union registration, the Code maintains that the membership of the trade unions will be verified by the Registrar of Trade Unions. This means that the Registrar will verify with the employer about the employment status of the workers who have joined the union. This opens the workers to intimidation and harassment at the workplace. 

For the purpose of verification, the Registrar may ask for documentation other than those required under the law regarding office bearers and members. There is no provision of a time limit within which the Registrar has to conclude this verification process and neither is there a provision of automatic registration in case of delays. 

Thus, workers may wait for months or even years for the registration of their union that would protect their lives and dignity, while a factory can be registered without any verification, which poses mortal risk to the lives of workers. 

To take another instance, the IR Code dilutes the provisions of Chapter VB of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1948. The Act provided special protection for workers in establishments with more than 100 workers, regulating lay-off, retrenchment and closure, requiring prior government permission and notice and compensation for such actions, preventing sudden job losses in big factories, mines and plantations. 

The IR code increases this threshold limit to establishments with more than 300 workers at a time when factories are getting increasingly automated and the number of workers required on the shopfloor are falling. 

Despite all claims by the government that the Codes will apply to more workers than those under the earlier laws, the Codes will apply to a smaller number of workers given these changes. 

On the other hand, the same IR Code makes it impossible for workers to engage in collective action, including strikes. The right to strike is the last resort of workers to exercise their power to push employers to negotiate. 

Under the Industrial Disputes Act, 1948 (ID Act), workers of a public utility had to provide notice to employers before they engaged in strike action. The underlying reason for this was the fact that withdrawal of services in a public utility could result in disruption of public life for which the government, which was earlier the sole provider of public utility services, had to make alternate provisions. 

The IR Code extends this mandatory requirement to provide notice of strike action to employers in all establishments, irrespective of their production motive. The Code even increases this notice period from 42 days (six weeks) in the ID Act to 60 days in the Code. This mandatory notice period provides employers with sufficient time to intimidate workers, and prepare means to replace the workforce with other temporary workers during the strike action, rendering the strike ineffective. 

Equating not-for-profit public services to profit-making establishments is not merely an act of simplification, it is clearly an attempt to protect employers’ right to profit at the cost of their workers. 

If the workers still decide to go on strike, the Code puts the following restrictions on this action: No worker can go on strike 

1. within 14 days of providing this notice;
2. before expiry of the date of strike as specified in the notice;
3. during conciliation proceedings and 7 days after conclusion of the proceeding;
4. during proceedings at a tribunal and 60 days after conclusion of the proceeding;
5. during arbitration and 60 days after conclusion of the proceeding;
6. during any period when a settlement is in operation. 

These restrictions provide no time to workers in which they can ‘legally’ engage in strike action. Under these conditions, if we consider the case of an establishment employing less than 300 workers, the employer can declare a closure and conclude it within a month, while the workers at that establishment will have to keep waiting for two months to strike ‘legally’ against this closure. 

Despite this, the government would like us all to believe that the labour codes are merely an attempt to simplify and rationalise the voluminous labour laws existing in our country. It would be foolish to fall for this dangerous claim. 

The Labour Codes represent a structural rupture. They attempt to rewrite the relationship between labour, capital and the state in favour of employers, while hollowing out constitutional guarantees of equality, dignity, federalism and freedom.

These Codes legalise insecurity, normalise precarity and institutionalise inequality. They transform what were once violations of law into the law itself.

The struggle now is not only to restore old rights but to defend the very idea that workers are citizens with constitutional protections, not merely inputs in a cost-minimising production system. 

The fight against the Codes is, therefore, not just a labour struggle. It is a struggle to defend the Constitution, democracy and the dignity of those who produce the wealth of this country.

The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.