Thousands of Indian workers protest Modi govt’s new labour codes
New Delhi: Thousands of trade union workers across India protested today against the Modi led Indian government’s rollout of new labour codes, saying they would lead to corporate exploitation and erode their hard-won rights.
According to Kashmir Media Service, the Modi govt last week implemented long-awaited labour laws that will replace colonial-era legislation. The overhaul consolidates 29 existing labour laws into four key codes, with the number of rules being cut from more than 1,400 to about 350, but unions say the reforms will hurt workers’ rights.
Gautam Mody from the New Trade Union Initiative said workers from across all sectors protested outside factories and in many city centres. “Workers have been blindsided by the government,” he said. “We want fairness, justice and equity before the law, which are being denied under the new codes.”
While the new regulations boost safety standards, they also allow for longer factory shifts, make it tougher for workers to conduct strikes and easier for medium-sized firms to fire employees. A controversial key provision raises the threshold for firms that needed prior government permission for layoffs from 100 to 300 workers, which means companies with up to 300 employees can retrench staff without any approval.
The move has sparked worry among trade unions, who have called it a “deceptive fraud” against the nation’s working people.
The Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) said in a statement that the government wanted to portray these codes as “pro-worker” and “modernising”. But “in reality they constitute the most sweeping and aggressive abrogation of workers’ hard-won rights and entitlements since Independence, aimed at facilitating corporate exploitation, contractualisation and unrestrained hire-and-fire”.
