Labour Codes Research Articles

Tests to determine employer-employee relationships in India: looking towards the future?

ABSTRACT The employer-employee relationship forms the foundation from which a host of social security benefits and labour rights emerge. Workers are traditionally classified as employees hired under a contract of service or independent contractors hired under a contract for service. Over the years, Indian courts have relied on the control, integration, and multi-factor tests to determine the correct nature of employment contracts. This article explores the evolution of these tests and examines whether the burden of proof in determining the existence of employer-employee relationships requires modification. It then dissects the efficacy of the current multi-factor test in emerging platforms and gig economies by looking at the standard form contract signed by a popular food delivery platform with its delivery partners in India. Finally, the article explores the ability of the newly enacted labour codes, particularly the Code on Social Security 2020, to address the classification conundrum and its consistency with precedents.

The interface between authoritarian innovations and labour: Implications for the Indian workforce

On assuming office in 2014, India's BJP-led government initiated an ambitious plan to facilitate the ease of doing business, aiming to make India an attractive investment destination. Interview data from 20 trade union leaders and an expert and published data from ILO, government and trade union documents and newspaper archives reveal that, to advance this neoliberal agenda, the government did not use direct and obvious repressive tactics as was the case during the 1976 Emergency, but rather, a combination of discourse, manipulation of democratic institutions like the Parliament and a strategy for disengaging and disempowering the unions that oppose reforms. The new Labour Codes provide a facade for tackling the perennial problem of union recognition and collective bargaining that has plagued Indian industrial relations, but in their implementation, these Codes are likely to weaken unions and erode working conditions. The government's practices attempt to obscure precariousness and silence civil society organisations by imposing unprecedented restrictions on them and disengaging with them. Today, more than ever before, employment in India tends towards informality. Rather than strengthening unions, the government has created fissures in the labour movement by using the unions affiliated with it to manufacture a democratic debate on various pertinent issues, like the Labour Codes.

K.R. Shyam Sundar: Critical Essays on Labour Codes, Labour Institutions and Labour Market Governance in the Post-Covid-19 Times in India

K.R. Shyam Sundar: Critical Essays on Labour Codes, Labour Institutions and Labour Market Governance in the Post-Covid-19 Times in India

Labour Laws and Human Rights: a Converging Agenda

India is an emerging nation that heavily relies on its unorganized sector. Throughout history, the workers in the nation have faced exploitation and have been deprived of their fundamental human rights. Following independence, various actions were implemented at various points to address this issue and ensure the prioritization of Human Rights. In furtherance to international conventions and Constitutional requirements, multiple statutes were enacted to guarantee the rights of workers. There were approximately 44 laws have been enacted in India since independence to improve the welfare of workers and enhance working conditions in the workplace. These statutes encompassed various rights such as Right to minimum wages, Right to Maternity Leave and benefits, Right to Bonus, Right to insurance and other medical benefits, Right to compensation for injuries, and Right to safe working conditions. The abundance of statutes resulted in a huge mess and a tangle of complexities. In order to enhance accessibility for workers, the government has consolidated the key legislation into 4 Labour Codes. Throughout the years, the judiciary has played a crucial role in safeguarding the human rights aspect of the labour laws. When determining cases, a purposive interpretation approach has been given to all the beneficial statutes while deciding cases. This research study thoroughly explains the evolution of labour laws in India, shedding light on the Human Rights aspect of labor laws through various judicial precedents and the rights guaranteed under statutes and newly introduced codes and this paper deepens our understanding of the relationship between labour law and human rights.

Beyond the law-in-the-books: Labour enforcement in Senegal

Abstract Extant research often assumes that the letter of labour codes is an adequate proxy for effective regulation. This paper empirically shows that such an assumption makes little sense for Senegal. We collect new objective measures of private and public labour enforcement, including workers’ awareness of their rights, access to the judiciary, penalties, and labour inspection resources and activities. We document that Senegal, as well as other countries in Francophone West Africa, is characterised by a combination of protective/stringent in-form labour codes and little enforcement efforts. Furthermore, we show that labour inspections target large and registered firms, while labour violations are more prevalent in small and unregistered firms, implying that the problem is substantially more complex than a lack of public inspection funding. We speculate it is mostly about the lack of effective representation of vulnerable workers in the policymaking process.

New Labour Codes and its Implications for Automobile Industries in Tamil Nadu: An Overview

The Second National Commission on Labour recommended to consolidate 29 labour laws and on its recommendation Ministry of Labour and Employment in 2019 introduced 4 bills in Lok Sabha during 2019. In Tamil Nadu, automotive industry is the pioneer in modernizing industrial relations and implementing strategies to promote mutual respect, open communication, and shared goals between workers and management.

An Analysis of Gig Workers and Challenges Surrounding Their Employment

The workforce in India comprises about 450 million informal workers, amounting to 92.4% of India’s workforce. In terms of employment, the unorganised sector employs about 83% of the workforce. Interestingly, a new sector of informal workforce has emerged in the last decade famously called the “gig workers” or “platform-based” workers. The term “unorganised worker” has been defined under the Unorganized Workers' Social Security Act, 2008, as a home based worker, self-employed worker or a wage worker. This definition, perhaps does not include gig workers but they fall under the second clause of the definition where the term has not been defined in any of the labour codes. They are addressed as platform workers, as they are employed by corporations via digital applications creating a platform-dependent employment system. Rajasthan was the first state in India to draft a bill, for the protection of gig workers and provide them with adequate regulatory mechanism to prevent exploitation of their freelance. This paper analyses various aspects of gig economy, taking into account the increasing need of platform workers. It also proposes certain measures to address the needs of these workers and suggests a well devised mechanism for smooth relations between worker and the aggregator. Much of the gig economy boomed during the COVID-19 pandemic, where it came in handy for delivery of food, essentials, and transportation services, which was hugely affected during the pandemic. The scope of the research is limited to discussing various issues faced by platform workers (workers employed by aggregators like Swiggy, Ola, Uber etc.) and suggesting certain solutions for the same.

Migration, Vulnerability, and Protection: Changing Labour Law Regime in Contemporary India

ABSTRACT This article undertakes a socio-legal analysis of India’s changing labour laws and situates migrant workers within the broader context of the changing relations between state, capital, and labour amid the reforms that were introduced in 2019–2020. It illustrates the precarity of migrant workers and the possibility of their legal exclusion from the revised labour codes, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic-led lockdowns. The new codes reduced the number of establishments under regulation and diluted provisions that can hold contractors and employers accountable, which increases the scope for exploitation of workers and has serious implications for the rights of migrants. The labour law reforms, we argue, appear to have favoured capital in its relations with workers and have increased the degree of informality in a wide range of industries. Inter-state migrant workers may find themselves excluded from protective provisions that hold employers accountable for their treatment and this may make them more vulnerable in the informal sector. The article concludes that this push by the state to boost the ‘ease of doing business’ via precarious forms of employment and whittling away the protections of inter-state migrant workers may be far more detrimental than expected.

‘Social compliance decoupling cascades’ in global supply chains: A review of the implementation of labour codes

AbstractAcross global supply chains, buyers enforce labour codes as a primary mechanism for ensuring suppliers’ social compliance with international labour standards and rights for workers in supplier facilities. Yet researchers have long documented empirical evidence of the inconsistent, weak implementation of labour codes. Therefore, the effective use of this social compliance mechanism requires examining what causes supply chain actors to exhibit failures in substantively implementing labour codes, or ‘social compliance decoupling’. We conducted the first systematic review of all available empirical evidence, both qualitative and quantitative, on the implementation of labour codes by actors at different stages of the supply chain, to identify and catalogue the root causes of social compliance decoupling. By integrating our findings, we propose a conceptual framework on ‘social compliance decoupling cascades’ that illustrates the causes of social compliance decoupling by supply chain actors at different stages and explains three pathways through which decoupling by an actor translates into decoupling by one or more adjacent actors (‘rewards–rights trade‐off’, ‘compliance capital scarcity’ and ‘code acontextuality’). We recommend opportunities for research and best practice around the recoupling of social compliance through multi‐stakeholder collaboration, mutual investment, relational sourcing and expansion of the scope of global supply chain social responsibility to drive effective labour code implementation.

New Labour Codes & Better Management Skills Equals Ease of Doing Business

New Labour Codes & Better Management Skills Equals Ease of Doing Business

Labour laws in India: history, evolution and critical analysis

ABSTRACT This study carries out a comprehensive examination of the evolving landscape of labour laws in India, with a particular focus on the recent labour codes introduced in 2020. Through a historical analysis of labour regulations, we contextualize the present labour regulatory framework, emphasizing the influence of the Indian state on the shifting dynamics of labour relations. Our analysis reveals that over the years the government has significantly enhanced labour market flexibility through less conspicuous channels and backdoor policy adjustments, instead of outright amending the ‘protectionist’ labour legislations. We argue that the new labour codes are an addition to the series of ‘reforms by stealth’ carried out by the government, to enhance flexibility in the labour market in the guise of promoting employment generation and economic growth. The new codes continue to exclude the bulk of the workforce engaged in the unorganized sector and have limited applicability in the organized sector. They dilute the bargaining power of trade unions and ‘juridify’ industrial relations and the provisions for exemptions in the OSHWCC further subject workers to precarious and subpar working conditions.

An analysis of the impact of India’s Labour Codes on its organized and unorganized sectors

An analysis of the impact of India’s Labour Codes on its organized and unorganized sectors

Overplaying-Welfarism and Social Security: The Case of the Karnataka Building and Other Construction Worker’s Welfare Board

The Union Ministry of Labour and Employment notes that the unorganized sector of workers constitutes about 93% of India’s labour workforce. Despite the presence of a vast majority- the role of welfare policies and their impact on the unorganised labour workforce has largely been unascertained. This can be seen with the exclusion of unorganised workers with the various benefits under the new labour codes, despite substantive recommendations by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Labour on the same. The Building and Other Construction Workers (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1996 provides for the establishment of State Welfare Boards that use the construction cess collected to formulate various welfare schemes for the benefit of construction workers. The Supreme Court in the year 2012 expressed grave concerns about the ineffective utilization of funds by the State Welfare Boards, and in this regard, a Model Welfare Scheme was formulated in 2016. Using data from the annual reports of the Karnataka Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Board-this paper finds glaring inconsistencies in the current schemes formulated by the Karnataka Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Board, such as the inclusion of schemes not envisaged under the Model Welfare Scheme and not meeting the necessary conditions envisaged under the Model Welfare Scheme to name a few. The paper compares the schemes along with the ILO’s Convention 102 on Social Security- asserting that despite India being a non-signatory to the convention- its mandate on the minimum standards of social security needs to be followed. Such disparity in the formulation of welfare schemes not only ensures that the intended beneficiaries of such schemes continue to be left out of the result of welfare, but it also adds an unnecessary burden on the State both in terms of expenditure and resources. The paper recommends significant policy reforms such as the removal of schemes contrary to both the Model Welfare Scheme and the ILO Convention 102 on Social Security and larger transparency on scheme-wise expenditure for better implementation of welfare schemes by the Karnataka Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Board.

National Development and News Media: Constrained Frames of Labour Relations in India

This article narrates the conditions with which industrial workers in India have to contend with when bargaining for labour rights. It trains attention on restructuring of automobile manufacturing processes in India in the neoliberal phase and the erosion of labour rights through the recently introduced labour codes. The framing of labour action and protests as law and order problems in the public sphere, primarily through the news media, aided delegitimisation of unions and securitisation of labour relations, which, in turn, mounts steep challenges for workers’ strategies to start a social dialogue and force negotiation around labour rights and social security. The article scrutinises the political economy of media attention and the impact this has on the politics of protest. It argues that neoliberal processes and the discourse of national industrial development have inscribed tensions into the choice of protest strategies, making collective bargaining ineffectual.

Employee Relations in India: Current Context and Emerging Paradigm

Employee relations (ER) in India are impacted by seven relevant labour laws. These seven along with twenty-two other labour laws have been subsumed into four Labour Codes passed by the Parliament in 2019 and 2020. Once the Labour Codes are made operational, they will certainly impact ER in the country. Employee relations are enterprise specific; however, seven issues likely to emerge because of the changes are highlighted. The Labour Codes offer benefits, as well as deprive certain advantages to both the employers and the trade unions. Managements and trade unions must learn to develop amicable solutions to their ER problems through social dialogue.

An Examination of the Impact of the New Labour Codes on Shaping a New Paradigm for the Next Generation

More than 200 state laws and 40 central laws create collaborating jurisdictions; thus, reforms were necessary to put them all under a unified framework for the protection of a few of the mother law codes. Disputed termination of employment is addressed in several new sections added to the code. In a first in the history of labour law, social security rights have been extended to workers in the unorganised sector, including Migrant Workers, Platform Workers, etc. The Central Government would establish a "Social Security Fund" for Unorganised workers, as stated in this code. Workers from other states have also been given access to the benefits of the Public Distribution System. In addition, we must ensure that migrant workers have access to adequate housing and financial services. A statute that secures the employment rights of women in both the city and the country. As per the cultivation of the paper, it is explored that Labour Reform desperately needed. Working hours need to be changed, and a new work culture needs to be established in light of the current climate. Additional protections need to be defined for migrant workers, and particular legislation needs to be adopted to secure the safety and security of women in the workplace.

Imbalancing Act: India's Industrial Relations Code, 2020.

The ruling National Democratic Alliance regime in India pushed through three labour codes in September 2020 namely the Code on Social Security; Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code; and the Industrial Relations Code. These alongside the Code on Wages approved earlier in 2019 amalgamate several labour laws. This study is an endeavour towards a critical examination of the Industrial Relations Code, 2020. It engages in a comparative analysis of the various provisions of the Code vis-à-vis the laws which were its predecessors. Some key features of the Code as well as their ramifications are probed. Further, their potential impact on trade unionism and the right to strike is discussed. The relationship between capital and labour is adversarial rather than complementary. This paper argues that reforms in the real sense must seek to balance the interests of both parties rather than that of employers alone.

RIGHTS OF LABOUR IN INDIA

In a labour-intensive country like India, where more than 90 percent of the 450 million-strong labour force work in the informal sector with low wages, no social security, no bonuses, and some are even deprived of fundamental rights guaranteed by the Indian constitution due to illiteracy and poverty even though such workforce is considered as the backbone of the economy. In India, workers' fundamental rights have traditionally been governed by a plethora of labour laws, many of which overlap and are regulated by a broad range of authorities. The approach has generally been that of compliance while placing little emphasis on the employers' duty to improve labour conditions for a significant portion of the workforce. In this paper, the details of the rights that workers in India enjoy under the "Indian Constitution" as well as the 27 laws passed by the central government that have now been optimized and codified into four labour codes that are universally applicable within the Indian borders are discussed. This study seeks to discover every improvement in labour rights brought by the government or by the Hon'ble Supreme Court, High Courts and tribunals through their judgements over the years. In India, both central legislations and the constitution provides to protect labour rights and eliminate exploitation. Most workers are unaware of the rights that have been developed specifically for them to protect their interests. This paper attempts to compile all of the laws and provisions that a worker should be aware of.

Flexing in the Gig Economy Ripple Effect

The entire gig ecosystem is pioneering the evolution of a workforce based on a simplistic business model of Flexing; of flexible talent or freelancers. Talent and valued skills are made available on free will by the service provider for a task specified by the service seeker. The sentiment of ‘being your own boss’ plays a crucial role in such an economy. The advent of digital technology has not only multiplied its outreach potential but also carved a way for the emergence of growth opportunities across businesses. However, ensuring the sustainability and security of employment is a challenge. The dexterity of gig workers is to be channelised for a secure future for the informal workforce, which is occurring on an incremental basis with small steps in all major industries, shaping the future trends of workforce formalisation. The recomposition of the workforce is underway with government interventions to provide social security. In this article, we aim to furnish insights on the need for formalisation and its impact on India Inc. We focus on areas like employment of women in the formal sector, the role of new-age start-ups, the implications of newly formed labour codes, the point of view of unions and others that are part of this ecosystem. We explore the potential upgrades on policy changes and industry-specific insights on the gig world covering all the major industries. We propose that it is imperative to deliberate the policies required for ensuring the sustainability of this ecosystem.

Ushering thin welfare regimes at the cost of thick labour jurisprudence: A tale of new labour codes in India

The Indian Parliament repealed 29 labour legislations, and created four labour Codes (Code on Wages, Industrial Relations Code, Code on Social Security, Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code) in September 2020. The present reforms unsettle an entire century of labour jurisprudence dating from before India’s independence, accumulated through tussle between labour and capital, State intervention and judicial pronouncements. We analyse the new labour Codes with a focus on social security provisions and labour welfare. While the pronounced goal of these legislations is simplifications of complex labour laws, our analysis shows that rights of labouring class are deliberately weakened to advance neo-liberal agenda. This paper is providing historical context to this development, and assessing the likely impact of these legislations for the welfare of working class in India.