By Rhea Sharma
The three new labour codes passed by the Government risk tilting the scale towards employers rather than protecting the rights of vulnerable workers. The Industrial Relations Code Bill, 2020 has clauses that provide more flexibility to employers to hire and fire workers without government permission. It has raised the threshold for requirement of a standing order, rules of conduct for workmen employed in industrial establishments, to over 300 workers which allows companies to have more freedom in imposing arbitrary service requirements. It elongates the legally permissible time frame before a worker can go on a strike to unrealistic numbers, making legal strikes practically impossible. The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code has lost the provision for temporary accommodation for workers near the worksites in its subsuming of earlier legislation.
And under the Factories Act, regular working hours were strictly plotted as eight hours a day but in the COSH, the limits to hours of work “may be notified by the appropriate government”. This is a negative shift away from solid legislation to arbitrary government discretion.
After a gap of 35 years, India has become chairman of the governing body of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and will play a key role in creating its policies and agenda. Labour Secretary Apurva Chandra will assume charge as chairman of the governing body. His tenure will end in June 2021. Earlier in 2020 the ILO expressed “deep concern” over India’s labour policies after ten central trade unions had written to the ILO on seeking its interventions and highlighting the plight of workers and the violation of ILO conventions by the the unilateral suspension of Labour Laws by the Central Government and multiple state governments in India to stoke economic activity during COVID19.
A few examples of the state decisions that incurred this letter are-
Gujarat:
Ordinance dated 7th April, 2020 extended working hours from 8 hours a day to 12 hours
Madhya Pradesh:
By Ordinance dated 6th May, 2020 had suspended most of the labour laws and notified extension of working hours from eight hours to 12 hours for a period of 1000 days.
Karnataka:
Daily working hours were extended from 8 hours to 10 hours through executive notification in May 2020.
Similarly, many other states changed the maximum time in the Factory acts from 8 hours to more. Now, with the COSH act, the 8 hour limit has been compromised. Article 2 of the C001 - Hours of Work (Industry) Convention, 1919 (No. 1) states
“The working hours of persons employed in any public or private industrial undertaking or in any branch thereof, other than an undertaking in which only members of the same family are employed, shall not exceed eight in the day and forty-eight in the week.” Leaving the time limit to state discretion could enable violation of this convention.
In their letter to the ILO, the trade union wrote that: “The states of Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat are ceasing application of Trade union Act, 1926 which is main plank of Freedom of Association and Industrial Disputes Act which provides scope for collective bargaining and also right to strike, along with other substantive labour laws for a period of 3 years.” In these new labour codes, the right to legally strike has also been practically eliminated. They also wrote about the danger of the COSH subsuming the Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act, “The Occupational Safety Health & Working Conditions Code 2019 (OSHWC Bill 2019) proposes to repeal this Act on the claim that provisions of the Inter State Migrant Workmen Act 1979 have been subsumed in the Code Bill, which is not at all correct as can be verified from the Code Bill 2019, read with existing Inter State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act 1979. All the migration specific protective provisions like registration of the migrant workers as well as establishments and contractors employing them, provisions of separate identity of migrant workers, principal employer’s obligation to payment of wages to the migrant workers deployed through contractor etc are done away with or thoroughly diluted in the proposed OSHWC Bill 2019 which is a matter of record. Moreover the definition of migrant workers in the OSHWC Bill 2019 has been made more restrictive through incorporation of the threshold employment ceiling and wage ceiling to push out the majority of the migrant workers out of the purview of any protective legislation, wholly at the mercy of the employers. Such move of the Government of India also tantamount to violation of basic ILO standards, principles of decent work, besides being in violation of human rights, it is also not in conformity with U.N agenda 2030 on sustainable development goals for which India is also committed. These actions are quite contrary to the objectives of U.N agenda 2030 as well.” The violation of Convention 144 on tripartite consultation was also cited.
With the labour policy in India in need of great reform, it is interesting to observe how India will contribute to International labour Policy through this chairmanship. Hopefully, this chairmanship will be an impetus to further reform.
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