NEW DELHI: Thousands of trade union workers across India staged protests on Wednesday against the government’s new labour codes, warning that the reforms would weaken worker protections, ease layoffs, erode their rights, and pave the way for greater exploitation.
The Indian government last week implemented controversial labour laws that will replace the earlier 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 were protesting on Wednesday outside factories and in many city centres.
“Workers have been blindsided by the government,” he told AFP. “We want fairness, justice and equity before the law, which are being denied under the new codes.”
The new regulations allow for longer factory shifts, making 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.
‘Deceptive fraud’
The move has sparked worry among trade unions Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government’s reforms 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”.
Modi has said the overhaul represented an opportunity to eliminate compliance-intensive labour laws, often seen as preventing the Indian economy from wooing foreign investors.
US President Donald Trump’s tariff blitz, partly sparked by the White House’s anger over New Delhi’s purchases of Russian oil, has clouded the country’s economic outlook and raised questions over its energy security.
