Minimum Wage, Floor Wage, and the Politics of Conflation in the Indian Labour Law Jurisprudence

This paper examines the normative foundations and contemporary transformation of wage determination in Indian labour law jurisprudence, with particular focus on the introduction of the floor wage under the Code on Wages, 2019. Tracing the evolution of minimum wage regulation from the Minimum Wages Act, 1948 to the present Code, it argues that the minimum wage in India has historically functioned as a need-based, rights-oriented entitlement grounded in constitutional values of dignity and social justice, rather than as a market-responsive standard. While the statutory framework for wage fixation was supplied by the 1948 Act, its substantive content was shaped through policy consensus, most notably the Fair Wages Committee and the 15th Indian Labour Conference, and later consolidated through judicial interpretation in landmark decisions such as Unichoyi and Reptakos Brett, which insulated minimum wages from considerations of employer’s capacity to pay. Against this doctrinal backdrop, the paper critically evaluates the floor wage introduced by the Code on Wages. It contends that while the floor wage holds the potential to operate as a subsistence-level safety net for workers beyond the effective reach of minimum wage enforcement, this potential is contingent upon maintaining a clear conceptual separation between the floor wage and the need-based minimum wage. The analysis demonstrates that this distinction is increasingly under strain, both structurally, through the repeal of scheduled employments and weakened revision mechanisms, and conceptually, through expert discourse that conflates need-based minimum wage and floor wage. The paper warns that conflating the floor wage with the minimum wage risks hollowing out decades of labour jurisprudence, and reorienting wage fixation toward empirically observed consumption patterns and poverty management. To address this, it proposes a wage pyramid framework that preserves the normative hierarchy between minimum, fair, and living wages, while deliberately locating the floor wage outside this structure. It concludes that preserving the distinction between need and subsistence is essential to safeguarding the minimum wage as a non-negotiable entitlement to life with dignity.