Baseline rights of workers in India have traditionally been dealt with under numerous, often overlapping, labour laws and overseen by multiple regulators. The approach has mostly been a compliance (tick the box) exercise with hardly any emphasis on businesses’ accountability to improve labour conditions for a large section of the workforce.
The Indian government is now in the process of consolidating 29 existing labour laws into four labour codes (the Codes). These codes cover the critical rights of wages, social security, industrial relations, and safety, health and working conditions of workmen. The much-needed modernisation of labour laws is an opportunity for the government and business to move away from a prescriptive top-down approach to a more consultative and sustainable effort to address the core issue of protecting human rights of workmen. Further, their enforcement comes at a time when companies are increasingly being judged on their sustainable business and human rights (BHR) policies by regulators, courts and civil society.
However, there is concern in some quarters that the government’s emphasis on increasing the ease of doing business in India will dilute these baseline rights. In addition, there are questions as to whether the ‘new’ enforcement mechanisms implemented by the same set of regulators (but with different designations) will actually lead to a change.
Against this backdrop, this article considers the treatment of key BHR components under the Codes to measure whether workers’ baseline rights have been diluted or, on the contrary, enhanced.
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