The government must act as a model employer to demonstrate its commitment to India’s labour codes

The objective was to simplify labour laws and make them effective—for the benefit of workers as well as employers.

Reforming these laws has been part of the governance agenda of every successive government since 1991, when India’s economy underwent broad reforms in various other domains.

Given the multiplicity of labour laws enacted since independence, the idea of revising them was also to make them enforceable (or justiciable) and reflect the contemporary reality of changing labour relations. The four labour codes may be a step in that direction, but their effectiveness would critically depend on their enforcement on the ground.

The fact that it took the government about half a decade to even announce the codes’ implementation can be taken as a comment on its commitment to genuine reforms in this domain. A lack of will to implement its own commitments made in the four codes has been apparent over the years.

Take the Code on Wages. It promises a national floor level minimum wage (NFLMW) applicable to all workers in the country. This is not a new measure. It was proposed in 1991 by the National Commission on Rural Labour (NCRL) and has been operational since 1996. Given inflation, the minimum wage was being revised upwards regularly until 2017, when it was fixed at ₹176 per day. Since then, however, the government has abandoned the practice of revising the NFLMW.

The Code on Wages also requires the government to set up an expert committee to determine minimum wages. The last time this panel was created was in 2017 under the chairpersonship of Anoop Satpathy. In the report it submitted in February 2019, the committee recommended a NFLMW of ₹375 per day (or ₹9,750 per month) for July 2018.

In current prices, adjusted for inflation, it would be ₹529 per day (or ₹13,760 per month). Yet, not only did the government not revise the NFLMW after 2017, but even refused to acknowledge or implement the Satpathy Committee report’s advice.

Currently, minimum wages in all Indian states are lower than the levels recommended by the expert group. There are 310 million workers registered on the government’s E-Shram portal. By the Centre’s own data, 94% workers reported getting less than ₹10,000 per month, which is lower than the inflation-adjusted minimum proposed by the Satpathy panel.

Wages under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), a safety net for the poorest of our workers, are also lower than the expert group’s NFLMW in almost every state, with current payouts at around ₹250 for a day’s work in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

Governments are not just India’s largest employers in the organized sector, but also a source of income for millions of rural wage workers through MGNREGA. Adoption of the labour codes will first require minimum wages being paid to people in government employment, be it in the formal or informal sector.

The Code on Social Security is another example. Over 6 million workers, almost all of them women, are in state employment as anganwadi workers, mid-day-meal workers, ASHA workers and so on. Most of them are not treated as full-time workers, even though their time commitments are often greater.

Classified as honorary workers, they do not get minimum wages. In many states, they get only about one-third of the minimum. Most of them are also deprived of social security provisions of the kind outlined by the code on this subject. They are eligible neither for maternity leave nor other statutory benefits.

Since labour is also a state subject of legislation, the absence of corresponding rules by state governments further compromises the promises made on paper to workers. But a far more serious problem is that financial allocations to meet new obligations under the labour codes are yet to be made.

Even the institutional and infrastructural requirements mandated by these codes are still to be put in place. Provisions for gig workers, who form one of India’s largest groups of people at work today, are also yet to see actions aimed at their fulfilment by the government.

While reforming India’s labour laws has been a long-standing demand, the four labour codes that have lately drawn so much attention and commentary appear to be more of an academic exercise to rationalize what exists on paper than a commitment to provide a level playing field to all workers, protect their rights and ensure their social security and well-being.

Merely declaring the codes’ implementation is unlikely to be of any help without the enabling institutional and financial structures that must accompany them.

To show its commitment to the codes, the government should act as a model employer. It should ensure that all workers in state employment—especially the poor and voiceless—are duly granted minimum wages and social security in accordance with official guarantees.

The author is associate professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University and visiting fellow at the Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi.