December 3, 2025
This analysis was received from an activist in West Bengal
Introduction
The BJP led NDA government has replaced twenty nine labour laws with four consolidated labour codes, passed in Parliament but not yet fully implemented because the necessary rules have not been framed everywhere. With the exception of three states, including West Bengal, all states have already framed these rules. Earlier in 2025, the Union Ministry of Labour announced that the codes would come into force nationwide from 1 April. That deadline has passed, but the underlying legal architecture remains in place. Since labour is on the Concurrent List, the central government can at any time issue a notification extending central rules to those states that have not framed their own. When the codes eventually come into force across India, they will apply in West Bengal as well.
It is worth recalling that in 2020 the central government introduced three farm laws and four labour codes in the Lok Sabha as bills. The farmers’ movement, through a sustained and determined struggle, forced the withdrawal of the farm laws. Trade unions across the country did protest against the labour codes, but the intensity of that resistance was much weaker. It is this weakness of the workers’ movement that has allowed the labour codes to advance to the threshold of implementation.
This essay argues that the four labour codes represent a qualitative attack on the working class. They hollow out the specific protections embedded in earlier labour laws, push vast numbers of workers outside the purview of law, and seek to break class unity by turning workers into isolated individuals. They must be understood not simply as a technocratic “rationalisation” of labour regulation, but as a central component of the contemporary fascist project in India.
From specific protections to generic codes
The labour laws that came into being in earlier periods were not arbitrary or purely administrative. Each emerged from specific struggles and had a definite objective: regulation of contract labour, protection against arbitrary dismissal, recognition of trade unions, equal wages, and so on. By contrast, the labour codes stitch together widely different laws and subjects into four broad categories. In the process, the specific aims of each earlier law are diluted or removed.
The example of contract labour is instructive. The Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970, sought to regulate the employment of contract workers and to eventually put an end to the contractor system. Even though abolition was not fully written into the text, the law was drafted with that intention. It required contractors to obtain licences, obliged principal employers to pay wages on time, and mandated that contract workers receive certain benefits.
Under the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020, contract labour becomes just one issue among many under the broad rubric of “occupational safety, health and working conditions”. The specific purpose of protecting contract workers and restraining the contractor system disappears. The substantive meaning of the 1970 Act is effectively lost, even though some of its language is formally carried over.
Thresholds and exclusions: removing workers from the scope of law
A second, and even more far reaching, change lies in the new thresholds for coverage, which are clearly designed to push a majority of workers outside legal protection.
Under the Contract Labour Act, 1970, if twenty or more workers were employed under a contractor, the provisions of the Act applied. The new code raises this threshold to fifty. A contractor employing forty nine workers will remain untouched by the law. In most contemporary production processes, contract workers are spread across discrete steps, with different contractors responsible for different segments. It is quite rare for a single contractor to employ more than fifty workers at a time in one establishment. The predictable result is that most contract workers will now lie outside the scope of labour law.
A similar logic is visible in the redefinition of a “factory”. Previously, any establishment with electricity and at least ten workers, or without electricity and at least twenty workers, counted as a factory and was covered by the relevant labour laws. The codes double these numbers. Now an establishment with electricity must employ at least twenty workers, and one without electricity at least forty, to qualify. In a country where most factories employ very small numbers of workers, this shift will strip legal protection from lakhs of workers in one stroke.
Taken together, these changes are more than technical adjustments. They are mechanisms for removing workers from the purview of labour law, fragmenting what had once been an organised and legally recognised section of the class.
Fixed term employment and the end of permanence
The Industrial Relations Code, 2020, which replaces the Trade Unions Act, 1926, the Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act, 1946, and the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, introduces “fixed term employment” as a central category. A worker will now enter into a written agreement with the employer for a specified period. When that period ends, whether after a few months or a few years, the worker must sign a fresh contract.
This provision did not emerge from nowhere. After 2014, the Modi government first introduced fixed term employment for seasonal workers through executive notification. In 2018, a Gazette notification extended it to the textile sector. The labour codes now generalise fixed term employment across all industries, and give it full statutory backing.
The implications are clear. The possibility of continuous employment is curtailed. Short term and insecure work, previously normalised in practice, is now fully legitimised by law. In order to make this system more palatable, the government has amended the law on gratuity. Under existing provisions, gratuity is payable after five years of continuous service. Under the fixed term regime, a worker becomes eligible for gratuity after just one year.
For many years, trade unions had demanded an amendment to the Gratuity Act so that workers would receive gratuity after one year rather than five. The government rejected these demands. It has now conceded the same demand, not as a gain for workers, but as bait to draw them into fixed term contracts. The moment the contract ends, the employment relationship ends as well. The worker receives gratuity but loses the possibility of permanence along with many other rights that accrued with long term employment.
Fixed term workers will live under continual fear. Any act of resistance vis-à-vis the employer can be treated as a violation of the written contract and used to justify non renewal. It will become harder for such workers to join unions or to participate in collective protest. Fixed term employment thus becomes a legally sanctioned system for eliminating permanent workers, stripping protections, and deterring unionisation.
The role of the state and the courts is simultaneously rolled back. Since workers obtain employment through an individual written contract with the employer, the government and labour department can claim that they have no responsibility. If a dispute reaches the courts, it will be argued that an adult has voluntarily accepted the terms of short term employment. From beginning to end, fixed term employment is structured as a system that favours employers and isolates workers.
It might be asked whether fixed term employment is really different from the contract work that is already widespread in many sectors. The underlying spirit may be similar, but there are two important differences. First, ordinary contractual work does not always involve a clearly specified term or a detailed written contract. Second, once fixed term employment is written into the labour code, it gains an authority that goes beyond informal practices. What was previously a precarious practice now becomes the legal norm.
Eroding the right to strike and to organise
The labour codes also reshape the terrain of industrial conflict.
Earlier, a strike was defined as a situation where a group of workers stopped work or refused to work collectively. The new definition adds that if more than half the workers in an establishment take leave on a given day, that too will be treated as a strike. Taking leave, however, is an independent right. Conflating the right to leave with the right to strike allows the law to label ordinary forms of absence as industrial action and to restrict them accordingly.
In the past, only workers in public utility services were required to give advance notice before going on strike. In other sectors, no such notice was needed. The labour codes extend the notice and conciliation framework in such a way that strike action can be delayed indefinitely. A union gives notice of a strike. The employer refuses to accept the demands. The matter goes as a dispute to the labour department. Negotiations begin. While they are underway, neither side is permitted to act unilaterally. In practice, the question of a strike can be tied up in an endless process.
In real workplaces, workers have often responded immediately to unilateral decisions by management by stopping work. Death or serious injury in an accident has likewise elicited immediate stoppages. Such quick collective reactions have repeatedly forced managements to retreat. These actions were not previously treated as illegal. Under the new framework, immediate stoppages without prior notice become much harder to undertake. The codes thus seek to shift workers’ struggles away from direct and spontaneous collective action into controlled and legalistic channels where management and the state retain the upper hand.
Trade union recognition is also recast. In any factory with more than one union, a union must now have the names of at least 51 per cent of workers on its muster roll in order to be officially recognised. If no union meets this threshold, a council will be formed on the basis of proportional representation to negotiate with the employer.
On the surface, a majority threshold may seem desirable. The problem lies in the absence of any clear procedure to determine whose names appear on which muster roll. In the absence of such procedures, the ruling party in the state and management will have a decisive role in shaping membership figures. They will seek to ensure that their preferred union crosses the 51 per cent mark. There is no statutory provision for elections to select a principal negotiating agent. Recognition is thus at risk of becoming an instrument of political and managerial control, rather than an expression of workers’ independent choice.
Standing orders, which codify the internal rules of a factory, are similarly restricted. Under the Industrial Relations Code, standing orders are only mandatory in establishments with three hundred or more workers. Yet standing orders have historically played an important role in determining the classification of workers (permanent, casual or substitute), working hours, shift patterns, break times, the timing of wage payments, the conditions for retrenchment, and the procedures for dealing with misconduct.
Standing orders can be based on a model drafted by the state or negotiated between employers and workers in the presence of the labour department. Removing the requirement for standing orders in smaller units effectively removes an important layer of structured protection and transparency in the majority of establishments.
Workers outside the organised sector
While the new codes shrink protections for workers in the organised sector, they also refuse to extend proper legal rights to the many categories of workers who already lie outside the traditional labour law framework.
The codes say nothing about the lakhs of domestic workers in India. There are no legal provisions for mid day meal workers or many other categories of low paid and feminised labour. New forms of work, such as those of gig and platform workers, are defined only to be excluded from core protections. The codes define gig workers as persons who perform work or participate in work arrangements and earn from such activities outside a traditional employer employee relationship. In other words, they are explicitly located outside the formal relationship that would give rise to enforceable rights. They are promised only access to a few schemes, not a legal framework that recognises them as workers.
The cumulative outcome is clear. The four labour codes are designed as an instrument to take away basic legal rights from virtually every layer of the working class, whether previously organised or not.
Labour law, class struggle and the global context
To understand the political meaning of this shift, it is necessary to recall the historical relationship between labour law and class struggle. With the rise of capitalism, workers began to organise against the onslaught of capital, from the early machine breaking movements to factory based and industry based unions. The struggle for the eight hour day and the commemoration of May Day symbolise a global process through which workers sought to unify as a class and force concessions from capital.
The Paris Commune of 1871 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 marked moments where workers moved from demanding rights within the system to challenging state power itself. These episodes reverberated across the world. Workers in many countries intensified their struggles for legal rights and for political transformation. Confronted with the possibility of revolutionary upheaval, sections of the bourgeoisie conceded legal protections to workers to preserve their own domination.
Labour laws, in this sense, were never free gifts from above. They were crystallisations of class struggles and compromises, and they always remained incomplete and contested. Wherever workers did win rights, they did so through organisation and united action. India’s organised industrial working class is no exception. Indian workers wrested significant legal rights even within a state dominated by domestic and foreign monopoly capital.
As the workers’ movement weakens, however, capitalists seek to claw back these gains. They lengthen working hours, erode permanent employment, compress wages, expand contract and casual labour, sack and suspend workers at will, and close units whenever convenient. The new labour codes are the juridical expression of this rollback.
Neoliberalism, fascism and the BJP
The political context within which these developments are taking place is equally important. From the nineteen nineties onwards, under the Congress government of Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh, neoliberal policies were introduced in India. These policies restructured the economy and society, deepened the power of monopoly capital, and intensified the commodification of labour.
In the same period, the Bharatiya Janata Party grew dramatically in strength. The most aggressive and predatory segments of Indian monopoly capital have come to support the BJP unconditionally. Fascism, as a political project, always treats the working class as its principal enemy. It seeks to break class unity, to fragment workers across lines of region, religion, caste and contract status, and to prevent them from acting as a conscious class.
There is a difference between authoritarian rule and fascist rule. Fascist rule is authoritarian, but not every authoritarian regime is fascist. Between 1970 and 1976, under the authoritarian rule of Indira Gandhi, three important labour laws were enacted: the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act in 1970, the Payment of Gratuity Act in 1972, and the Equal Remuneration Act in 1976. These laws did, to some extent, protect workers’ interests, even within a broader structure of repression.
In the eleven years since 2014, the Modi government has not passed a single law in the interests of workers. Instead, by compressing twenty nine labour laws into four labour codes, it has moved to strip workers of existing rights and to normalise employer domination. Most workers are pushed outside the scope of law. The minimal regulations that remain are increasingly aligned with employers’ interests on questions of strikes, trade unions, wages, gig and platform work, and more. Taken together, they represent the labour front of a wider fascist agenda that combines the power of monopoly capital with the coercive capacities of the state.
Gujarat is a revealing laboratory for this agenda. Trade union activity remains comparatively strong in both Gujarat and Tamil Nadu. Despite the passing of the labour codes, workers’ protests have delayed the framing of rules and their practical implementation nationwide. In this context, the Gujarat government has issued an ordinance permitting twelve hour working days instead of eight, even though the weekly limit of forty eight hours remains on the books. In effect, the ordinance simultaneously normalises twelve hour days and introduces a nominal four day workweek that no real industry can operate on. The remaining days become a grey zone where illegal practices are effectively legitimised.
Gujarat has long been a base for the political forces driving this project. It is not accidental that it is used as a testing ground to gauge the social reaction to legalising twelve hour days. The experiment offers a preview of how the codes will work in practice elsewhere.
The ebb of the workers’ movement
If the labour codes are part of a deliberate political project, why has resistance remained limited? The answer lies in the current condition of the workers’ movement.
For many years now, the movement has been passing through an extended phase of ebb. On one side, monopoly capital, backed by the state, has been launching continuous attacks and introducing new methods of production that weaken workers’ bargaining power. On the other side, rights that were once won are being slowly eroded. The protections that the labour codes now threaten to dismantle have, in reality, been under attack for a long time: permanent jobs replaced by contract and temporary work, longer working hours, unhealthy conditions, arbitrary retrenchment and suspension, wage cuts, and state repression against any attempt to strike or resist.
From information technology to manufacturing and services, temporary workers and longer hours have become the norm. New categories of workers, such as gig and platform workers, remain outside the scope of legal rights. Domestic workers, mid day meal workers and many others continue to labour without any protective framework. Crores of people produce wealth without enjoying legal recognition as rights bearing workers.
It is not that there are no struggles. There have been localised protests and a recent nationwide general strike in which almost all parliamentary parties (BJP excluded), their affiliated unions, many smaller unions, Naxalite organisations and independent unions participated. The strike produced an important political image. Yet, at the base, among the lowest strata of workers, the stir was limited. In the automobile sector in Gurgaon, for instance, most workers attended work as usual. In West Bengal, jute mills and engineering factories showed a mixed picture.
The strike did not generate a sustained, living movement. It lasted one day and was not followed by a coherent plan of further action. It became an event rather than a turning point.
Behind this lies a deeper problem. On one side stands the relentless assault of monopoly capital. On the other side, the leadership of many parliamentary parties has adopted a compromising attitude, repeatedly restraining struggles. India has a long history of uncompromising workers’ movements. Workers have often been prepared to move forward, but central leaderships have betrayed them, including in the railways, where workers twice voted in secret ballots for continuous strikes that were never called. In many industries, leaderships have acted as mediators between capital and labour rather than as instruments of workers’ self activity.
In practice, what should be a two sided relationship between employers and workers, with unions representing workers, has become a three sided relation: employers, trade unions and workers. The autonomy of workers’ organisation has been weakened. The spontaneity and depth of struggle have suffered. Meanwhile, capital continues to change the organisation of production without encountering adequate resistance.
Tasks for struggle
In this situation, any serious struggle to repeal the labour codes will have to proceed along a long and difficult path. There are no ready made formulas. Several tasks are nevertheless clear.
First, the concrete changes introduced by the codes have to be patiently explained to all sections of workers. Workers do not always pay attention to the details of labour law, but the codes are directly entangled with their lives, from the length of the working day to the security of employment and the possibility of collective organisation. That connection must be made vivid in everyday agitation and education.
Second, political exposure of the labour codes and of the wider fascist project that they serve must continue from above, in parties, unions and public fora. At the same time, struggles must be organised from below around specific aspects of the codes: thresholds for coverage, fixed term contracts, the right to strike, recognition of unions, the situation of contract, gig and domestic workers, and so on. Different sectors and regions will require different methods. The key is to connect workplace based struggles with a broader understanding of class and political stakes.
Finally, it is essential to locate the struggle against the labour codes within a wider anti fascist struggle. The conversion of twenty nine laws into four labour codes is not a neutral administrative exercise, but a deliberate step in a fascist agenda that seeks to disarm the working class as a class. To fight the labour codes is therefore not only to defend specific legal rights, but to resist a political project that aims to fragment, discipline and silence workers in the interests of monopoly capital.
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