Rethinking India’s Labour Laws for Informal Work: Assessing The ‘Inclusivity’ Of Labour Codes

The Second National Commission on Labour, which published its report in 2002, recommended a demarcation and simplification of labour laws into four distinct Codes: on Industrial Relations, Wages, Social Security and Occupational Health and Safety. After two decades of this recommendation, India is currently in the process of reworking and replacing the regime of labour laws in India, which came up to over 44 Central Legislations and over a hundred laws enacted by the States, with streamlined, and inclusive ‘Codes’ that are divided on the nature of their subject matter. The main crux of this exercise, in addition to rationalisation and ease of compliance, was the coverage of unorganised workers, who make up the significant majority of the workforce in India and have hitherto remained largely outside the ambit of labour law protections. Using this criterion of ‘inclusivity’ as the tool for analysis, this paper examines the four Labour Codes on two levels: first, on the conceptual framework that forms the foundation of the Codes and the process of their enactment, and second, issues of exclusion in specific provisions across the four Codes. The paper argues that many of the issues in the present Codes can be traced back to a reliance on a pre-existing framework of labour legislation designed for formal, industrial labour, and the retention and expansion of exclusionary provisions in such laws. An alternative framework to the current system of labour laws necessarily involves re-centering the discourse to informal workers, who remain uncovered by labour legislations, while safeguarding the protections that are provided for formal sector workers.