The four labour codes and the diminishing labour rights

There has been a debate regarding the labour reforms for economic efficiency, and “ease of doing business” for a while in India.

The clubbing of 29 labour laws into four labour codes, The Code on Wages (2019), The Industrial Relations Code (2020), The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code (2020), and The Code on Social Security (2020), are being pitched as monumental reforms to modernise India’s labour laws by the union government.

However, the fate of millions of labourers across India, especially those engaged in the informal sectors seems to be direly affected by them. These formulations come off as an attempt to diminish and reduce the labour rights of the working class won by rigorous struggles and decades of toil.

These codes are prejudiced against the interest of the working class and are systematically veiled under the shroud of administrative reforms in favour of capitalism. In the long run, they could potentially restructure the class configuration of the Indian society.

The ambiguous and implicit language of these codes reorganises labour relations for the capital. The entire exercise seems to stem from a neoliberal structure where workers are perceived as lesser mortals with specific rights suitable to their existence and as a cannon fodder for the juggernaut of accumulation.

The German philosopher, Karl Marx in Das Kapital wrote, “capital is dead labour, that, vampire like, only lives by sucking labour.” The modern arrangement of these labour codes closely identifies with this observation.

Labour power could be extracted with the help of a weakened protection against exploitation and security of the workers in the guise of efficiency and flexibility.

Earlier law used to have a threshold of 100 workers for mandatory government permission for layoffs, retrenchments, and closures. The same has been raised to 300 under The IRC (Industrial Relations Code).

In execution, companies employing less than 300 workers now have the right to dismiss them without any government approval thus paving the way for a hire-and-fire policy.

The British American academic David Harvey correctly observes that, “neoliberalism is a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites.”

The “reforms” of these labour codes vindicate him in the given context as the arrangement reduces the bargaining power and strengthens the authority of the capitalists, the owners, who acquire power while workers lose legal protection.

The Industrial Relations Code also makes the right to strike conditional even in the non-public utility services. This enormously disturbs the balance between the labour and the capital. More than just a tool to ensure economic security, the right to strike consists of a democratic right of a worker who is deprived of political or capital influence to ensure dignity and bargaining power. Curtailing the workers’ right of a collective action gives a free hand to the employer to dominate and exploit the working class.

Arguments against the “rigidity” of the earlier labour laws ignores the structural realties of Indian capitalist class. India has an enormously vast workforce in an informal sector. The issue has never been about the rights of the workers, it has rather been the absence of enforceable rights of the vast majority. These four labour codes move forward to institutionalise informality instead of addressing it.

Although the codes on Social Security formally recognises platform and gig workers but their language remains ambiguous and unclear. There is no guaranteed pension, healthcare, job security. This is quite significant since it is estimated that by the end of this decade, India’s gig workers will exceed 23 million in numbers. The precariat is only going to be consolidated by recognising contractualisation and informalisation under state recognition.

The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code hints toward the class priorities etched in these new reforms. There are provisions aimed at diluting the inspection mechanisms by encouraging self-certification practices. In a country like India where accidents like deaths of workers in factories, mines, and construction sites remains a common phenomenon, reducing oversight is a risky affair for the working class.

The labour movement has been against the model of self-regulation by the owners of the modes of production in India due to its incompatibility with the workers’ safety. Such concerns have a historical genesis in the Indian context. Right from the colonial mills to mine collapse, modern day factory fires and so-on, capital has rarely given any weight to the interests of the working class.

Friedrich Engels observed in The Condition of the Working Class in England, “when one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such an injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; but when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death…its deed is murder.” In the Indian context, this observation seems fairly relevant where profitability of the capitalists predominantly takes a precedence over the safety of the workers. 

The reforms intensely centralise the labour governance which has historically been a concurrent subject in India due to delegated legislation and administrative rules. The neoliberal policies in the developing countries create a footloose labour where workers find themselves in a vicious circle of insecurity and instability. The new labour codes in India are pushing to intensify this feeling among the proletarians.

The formulation of these codes has also arrived at interesting times when India is undergoing a massive disparity between the capitalists and the proletarians. Wealth concentration is at its historic high at one end while at the other, deprivation continues to haunt the working class in the form of unemployment and informalisation. According to World Inequality Database, 40 percent of India’s national wealth is owned by the top one percent. The wealth percentage of the richest one percent between 2000 to 2023 has increased by a whopping 62 percent. In such a situation, labour deregulation has to be understood in tandem with the broader political economy of capitalism.

Capitalism is an evolving force of wealth and capital that perpetually continues to yield new methods of accumulation and it invents dispossession and deprivation simultaneously. Shift toward more neoliberal reforms through flexible and capital friendly legislations cede away the gains of the proletarian struggle. 

The interests of the working class cannot be sacrificed in return of investments. Uncertain working conditions, job security, insurances, social security, and pension only makes a worker weak instead of empowering them. Advance capitalism shapes a populace incapacitated of resistance by imbibing domination in their lives. The uncertainty of labour is a systemic tool aiding that end. Proletarians struggling and barely surviving have no appetite for political awakening and organisation.

India’s labour movement, thus stands at a crossroad. The four labour codes are an extension of a neoliberal regime curated to suit the surplus capital accumulation. At its nucleus, the questions circling these labour codes are very simple to understand. Who produces wealth and who capitalises it? Labour, although the source of value under capitalism is deliberately kept alienated from its dividends.

The paradox becomes evidently visible when we view the situation in the backdrop of our economic realities amid rising inequality. One may welcome the arrangements for a smooth investment but the working class should not be the only one bearing the cost. The accumulation of surplus wealth at the top whereas the expansion of precarious labour at the base exhibits the ruthless tendency of modern capitalism more than an organic outcome of a policy.

A centralised economy where workers are depleted and worn beyond their extent without suitable rights, social security, dignity and wages does not have a very bright future to look at. The reforms of the labour codes are exactly taking India in that direction. The consolidation of power over the weak and dispossessed labour is being institutionalised and put under a legal sanction and unless resisted collectively, they may well define a future in which India’s workers are rendered more disposable than ever before.

(Sheikh Imran is a freelance columnist based in Kishtwar, Jammu and Kashmir. Email: imu3133@gmail.com)