Thousands of trade union workers protest India's new labour legislation

Mumbai, India.

Thousands of trade union workers across India protested Wednesday against the government’s implementation of new labour regulations, claiming that they will lead to corporate exploitation and undermine their hard-won rights.

Last week, the world’s fifth-largest economy enacted long-awaited labour rules to replace colonial-era legislation and simplify a maze of complicated regulations.

The revision consolidates 29 existing labour laws into four core codes, reducing the number of rules from over 1,400 to around 350, but unions argue that the reforms will jeopardise worker rights.

According to Gautam Mody of the New Trade Union Initiative, workers from all industries were protesting on Wednesday outside workplaces and in numerous city centres.

“The government has taken workers completely by surprise,” he told AFP.

“We want fairness, justice and equity before the law, which are being denied under the new codes,” according to Mody.

While the new regulations improve safety standards and require guaranteed social security benefits for gig workers, they also permit longer factory shifts, make it more difficult for workers to strike, and make it easier for medium-sized businesses to terminate staff.

A contentious major clause lowers the bar for corporations that require prior government clearance for layoffs from 100 to 300 workers, allowing companies with up to 300 employees to retrench without consent.

• ‘Deceptive Fraud’ –

Trade unions linked with opposition parties to Prime Minister Narendra Modi have expressed concern over the move, calling it a “deceptive fraud” against the country’s working people.

According to a statement from the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), the government intended to depict these regulations as “pro-worker” and “modernising”.

Nevertheless, “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 stated that the revision provides an opportunity to reduce compliance-intensive labour rules, which are widely regarded as impeding the Indian economy’s ability to attract global investors.

He has hailed the measures as “one of the most comprehensive and progressive labour-orientated reforms since Independence.”

India remains the world’s fastest-growing major economy, but a slowdown over the previous year has kept it from reaching the eight per cent growth rate that most economists believe is required to create millions of well-paying jobs for its citizens.

US President Donald Trump’s tariff blitz, spurred in part by the White House’s displeasure with Delhi’s purchases of Russian oil, has harmed the country’s economic prospects and increased concerns about its energy security.

Nomura analysts stated in a recent note that the labour law reform was an “attempt to modernise disparate, arcane, and compliance-intensive labour laws”, which have emerged as one of the “major challenges to the ease of doing business”.

However, they stated that this was “part of a broader trend by the government to hasten economic reforms, especially in the wake of the 50 percent Trump tariffs”.