Report by Kamgar Ekta Committee (KEC) correspondent
While workers all over the country went on one-day All India strike on 9 July for their demand of scrapping of the anti-worker four Labour Codes, the Gujarat government has amended the Factories Act to allow further exploitation of workers.
The Factories (Gujarat Amendment) Ordinance, 2025, which came into effect from 1 July 2025 allows extension of work shifts to 12 hours. The quarterly overtime limit has been raised from 75 to 125 hours. The Amendment also allows employment of women in night shifts between 7 p.m. to 6 a.m.
The extension to 12 hour shifts allows capitalists to have only 2 shifts per day instead of three of eight hours each. This means that one-third of the workers will be rendered surplus. The extension of overtime limit will lead to further loss of jobs in our country, which has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, particularly of youth.
It is well known that long working hours have very adverse effects on the physical, mental and emotional health of workers. They ruin their family and social life. After being squeezed for 12 hours the workers have barely enough time to attend to their daily needs.
Lengthening the working day also makes it even harder to unite and fight to safeguard their rights.
The large army of unemployed workers serves to depress the wages of the entire working class. This contributes to increasing the profits of capitalists.
It is claimed that allowing women to do night shifts is a step towards removing gender differences. This is a big lie. Women are plagued by the same problems as men – paucity of jobs, extremely onerous working conditions, no job security, no social security, rising prices, inability to make ends meet. In addition, they face sexual violence everywhere, including at their work places and to and from work. When safe working conditions are not ensured even during the day time for women, night shift work will endanger their safety even further.
Capitalists want more women to join workforce as in most jobs they are paid less than the poor wages for men for equal work. Allowing women in night shift is not to help women but to help capitalists.
The anti-worker amendments to labour laws being carried out by the Gujarat government is in line with the four anti-worker labour codes promulgated by the Central government in 2019 and 2020. State governments across the country are competing with one another to legalise intensified exploitation of workers, by amending the labour laws in favour of the capitalists. Whether it is the Congress Party in Karnataka, the BJP in Delhi, the DMK government in Tamil Nadu or the BJP government in Gujarat, the state government are attacking the rights of workers and intensify their exploitation to ensure maximising of profits for the capitalist class.
Extending the working hours serves directly as a way to increase their profits. Workers of the world won the right to work 8 hours a day after a long struggle more than hundred years back. They won these rights after decades of struggles, which capitalists tried to suppress with force and violence. Workers insisted that they are human beings and not commodities to be squeezed dry by capitalists and thrown out once they are no longer fit to work.
The interests of the capitalists and those of the workers can never be reconciled! Higher the profits, the better it is for the capitalists and worse it is for workers. Higher the salaries and better the working conditions, better it is for workers, but the profits of the capitalists are lower in that case.
What exists in our country is the capitalist system, where the economy is directed towards maximising the profits of the capitalist class, that is of the ruling class. The governments of the day, of whatever party, have to implement the agenda of the ruling class. What various parties promise the people before elections are only empty words to fool the gullible and get their support to form the government.
What various parties actually have to do is decided by the big corporates who fund them to the tune of hundreds and eve thousands of crores. They have to implement their agenda.
We see this repeatedly. One of the biggest examples is the policy of globalisation through liberalisation and privatisation, which is totally in the interests of big capitalists, Indian as well as foreign. Ever since it was initiated by the Congress government in the nineties it has been implemented by all parties who have formed the government in the Centre and by almost all in the states.
We workers have to unite crossing all the barriers of union and party affiliations, by crossing all barriers of region, religion, etc. and fight for our rights and even to safeguard the rights that we have won through hard struggles involving innumerable sacrifices.
We must fight with the perspective of replacing the rule of the capitalist class by that of workers and peasants. Only then will we be able to reorient the economy to maximise the well-being of the toilers. Our fights to protect our rights need to be waged with the above goal in the perspective.