Opinion Piece
Chandigarh, Dec 3: For decades, India’s labour system functioned under a broken, colonial framework—44 central laws and hundreds of state rules that neither protected the worker nor helped industry grow. It was a maze designed for confusion, loopholes and exploitation. The new Labour Codes finally tear down that outdated structure and replace it with something India should have had years ago: a clear, modern, worker-centred framework.
Yet, instead of celebrating the biggest expansion of worker rights in independent India, the reforms have been met with protest slogans built more on old fears than facts.
The truth is simpler: these Codes are a transformative victory for India’s most vulnerable workers.
For the first time, every worker—from farm labourers to gig workers, from daily wagers to delivery riders—gets universal minimum wage protection. No state can go below the National Floor Wage. And timely payment of wages becomes a legal right, not a favour.
Equally historic is the inclusion of gig and platform workers. Companies that built billion-dollar valuations on the backs of drivers and delivery workers must now contribute to social security funds that cover health insurance, maternity benefits and accident compensation. This is the kind of accountability workers have demanded for a decade.
Women workers, too, gain in ways that critics conveniently ignore—equal pay as a legally enforceable principle, safer night shifts, mandatory crèche facilities and strengthened maternity protections. Migrant workers finally get portable benefits that travel with them across states.
Even the most controversial reform—raising the retrenchment threshold—has been twisted beyond recognition. The protests shout “hire and fire,” but global evidence shows the opposite: medium and small enterprises actually create more jobs when freed from archaic bottlenecks. At the same time, essential protections remain firmly in place: minimum wage, PF, ESIC, gratuity, appointment letters, working-hour caps.
If implementation is the concern, the solution is stronger monitoring—not discarding reforms that benefit the very people the protestors claim to defend.
India needed labour reforms that reflect today’s workforce, not the workforce of the 1970s. These Codes deliver that. They give dignity to informal labour, security to gig workers, protection to women workers and legal recognition to millions who lived outside the system.
The protests are loud. The facts are louder.
