WORKERS AND WORKER’S RIGHTS ARE ALWAYS UNDER ATTACK in the profit system. In our country, far too many workers do not receive the minimum wage and work many hours longer than eight each day without overtime pay or a weekly off. There are today more contract workers in formal workplaces than there are regular or permanent workers.
Trade union recognition is very hard to come by. The mechanisms for social security make it difficult to access and are both restrictive and discriminatory. Additionally, all labour legislations are open to interpretation and subject to multiple jurisdictions. Despite these weaknesses in the law, sustained workers’ agitation through much of the twentieth century, led by strong democratic trade unions, brought gains that came to be upheld by the courts including the Supreme Court. Hence labour law came to be read more closely with the case law or legal precedents set by courts. The judiciary, in some measure, though without questioning the profit system, recognised that the unequal power relationship between employers and their employees must be taken into account in a democracy that seeks a modicum of fairness in employment relations.
Since the 1990s, with the changing geopolitical map of the world which shifted the balance of force, this recognition of the imbalance in power relations has come under challenge. In 1991, India moved from a dirigiste economy to one that privileged the profit system over all else and especially workers. This process went forward in the workplace as the tripartite labour machinery declined at all levels, and with changes in the views of the judiciary, even as there were no significant changes in labour legislations in our country. Both the executive, that entirely abdicated its responsibility for ensuring fairness and worked determinedly to attract investment, and the judiciary, that protected the executive, have provided employers, including government itself, the impunity to do as they pleased.
