A PARADOXICAL SITUATION HAS RECENTLY EMERGED in the Indian employment landscape. On one hand, there are traditional bastions of ‘secured employment’ like Tata Consultancy Services (‘TCS’), which recently retrenched around 12,000 employees and halted the on-boarding of over 600 graduate trainees (‘GETs’) due to ‘skill-mismatch’ with AI advances (NITES, a trade union of IT workers also approached labor authorities to protect these retrenchments). On the other hand, in the government sector, the Haryana government recently notified The Haryana Contractual Employment (Security of Service) Act, 2024, to secure contract employment of thousands of contract/ad-hoc/outsource employees of up to 60 years of age under state government organisations.
On both sides of the employment spectrum, what is at stake is youth employment and its future. But perhaps, an equally important question to mull over is how technological disruptions and global transitions transform the space of contractual employment.
Today we are living in an age where the employment landscape is fast shifting due to continuous pressure to ‘learn, unlearn and then re-learn’ owing to the intensive skill driven nature of the employment world. In such a context, would legislations like the 2024 Act, be able to respond to the current requirements of the employment landscape?
Such ‘Security of Employment’ labour legislations are laudable in the absolute spirit of welfare-ism and social justice to protect all forms of precarious employment. Recent trends of short term contractual employment must be viewed as modern techniques to circumvent fairness under the labour laws and ensure performance at minimum wages. The Haryana government must be congratulated for this ground breaking initiative to ensure security of tenure and surety of benefits to thousands of youths employed under it on contract, ad-hoc or outsource basis.
