Highlights of the speech of Com. Clifton D’Rosario National Vice President, All India Central Council of Trade Unions (AICCTU) at the AIFAP meeting on 7 December 2025 to demand repeal of the four labour codes, prepared by Kamgar Ekta Committee (KEC) correspondent
Main points of the address of Com. Clifton D’Rosario National Vice President, All India Central Council of Trade Unions (AICCTU) at the All India meeting on “Repeal the Four Labour Codes” organized by the All India Forum Against Privatisation (AIFAP) on 7 December 2025 are given below.
The rulers of today do not accept the fact that a worker has rights and is the producer of everything. Demonetization showed their contempt for the working class. Again, the way lockdown was declared with just a few hours’ notice shows their contempt for the working class.
So basically, what they have done now and which they brought into the labor code is that you’re born to work. We will ensure that you do more work. We will ensure that you spend your entire life working. Don’t bother about wages because you don’t have any entitlement to wages. You should be happy when you get that and take it and you should then thank your employer for being somebody who has given you this job and maybe in the next life you may enjoy the benefits of what you’re doing today. Speakers before me have also said this and this is slavery.
Now coming to the codes, the entire justification that is being offered is that through these codes we are going to cover more workers. Universal coverage is what they say. If you look at the Factories Act, 1948, it covered those establishments which were using power and had 10 or more workers and it covered those establishments which were not using power and had 20 or more workers. Now under the OSH (Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions) Code, this has been increased to 20 and 40 respectively. Secondly, if you go to the employment standing orders of the act of 1956, that act applied wherever there were 100 or more workers. Now the Industrial Relations (IR) Code has increased it to 300.
Basically, what they have done in all these codes is to increase the threshold for which these Codes will actually apply to a particular industrial establishment by almost three or four times times and if you look at the industries in India most of the industrial establishments will fall below this threshold so more than 50% of the workers have been automatically denied any kind of statutory protection by the Codes coming into force.
Now about contract labour, recently in the Supreme Court over the past few months there have been three judgments and they said contract labor is very exploitative, it is a very oppressive form of employment denying workers their rights. In all three judgments the Supreme Court said that the state has to really be a model employer. It should think about the way it’s treating workers. It’s using contract labor only to deny workers their legitimate rights.
The Code says “contract labor in core activities in any establishment is prohibited.” But the code defnes 11 categories of work as non-core, which includes sanitation work, housekeeping, security guards, canteen, loading, unloading, running of hospitals, courier service, contract work and gardening.
This Code is now saying that any work that is basically carried out by the group D workers, which is being done by the oppressed sections of society, predominantly Dalit and other poorer sections, they are now saying that you will be under contract consistently. It has now made the contract system a permanent feature in their life. You will be a contract worker from the starting till the end.
The codes also curtail the right to strike. Strike is an integral facet of the right to collective bargaining. They’ve widened the definition of a strike. So, supposing in any establishment, more than 50 workers take casual leave on the same day, then that is going to be counted as an illegal strike.
Secondly, if you want to go on a strike, there are two things you have to do. You have to give prior notice of strike and the moment you give prior notice, conciliation will get triggered and you have to attend conciliation. And when conciliation is going on, you cannot strike. So, the architecture of the Code is such that you cannot strike. No legal strike is ever possible under this Code. Thus, the most important weapon that the working class had, they have taken away from us.
About wages they have introduced something called the national floor wage. This floor wage is a concept that did not exist before. Previously there was living wage, minimum wage and sustenance wage (which is basically starvation wage).
The calculation of minimum wages is going to change. All of us know the 15th ILC of 1957 and the Supreme Court’s Raptakos judgment of 1991 which gave the basis for calculating the minimum wage. In the draft rules that have come out for the Code of Wages, they have reduced the component in so far as rent is concerned whereas rent is one of the biggest expenses for any worker. So basically, with the codes coming into force what is going to happen is that the wages are going to reduce.
The Industrial relations code says two things. It says one that henceforth labor cases will be heard by a tribunal. Till now what is the tribunal? It was one judge who’s either sitting in the industrial tribunal or in the labor courts. Now they’re saying that it will be two members. There will be a a judicial member and there will be an administrative member. So, the two of them are going to hear the cases. Now the catch is this that all the cases are pending in court. The section 51 of the new code says that from the date of commencement of this Code, the cases immediately pending before such commencement in the labor court and the tribunal constituted under the Industrial Disputes Act shall be transferred to the tribunal having corresponding jurisdiction. Thousands and lakhs of cases that are pending will now by the operation of the new Code get transferred. Now what will happen after they get transferred? The cases that have been transferred to the tribunal shall be dealt with denovo (starting afresh) or from the stage at which they were pending before such transfer. Which means that when it gets transferred that administrative member and judicial member will decide whether they want to continue from that stage or they may say that we want to start de novo and listen to case from the beginning, so go back, file your claim statement and we will listen to objections then we will frame issues then we will do evidence. So, if your case is, say, at the evidence stage of arguments, they can send you back right to the first stage and this is an untrammeled power that is given and there is no guidance, just arbitrary discretion that has been given.
Against this provision, cases have been filed in the Madras high court and a case has also been filed in the Delhi high court exactly on this question and the Union government has been directed that they should come back and answer what they’re going to do.
How is it possible that the union government has brought the labor codes into force whereby all these cases stand transferred when the tribunals are not yet constituted. You have to find administrative members for the tribunals across the country. Whereas for them to find a judicial member, it takes years on end. We all know that labor courts have been neutralised by not appointing the presiding officer at all.
One of the things that I am concerned is that though we are all part of the national trade union movement and we have been fighting against the labour codes, how much do the workers understand that these labour codes will take us back into slavery, that all the hard fought rights of the last 200 years are being snatched away by the stroke of a pen by this government.
How to make the workers understand that this is something that we need to get on the roads for? Are we going to do a struggle like the farmers did to get the labour laws repealed?
If we are able to focus on 10-15 points in these four codes that demonstrate how anti-worker, anti- people, anti- social, anti-national these labor codes are, then perhaps we’ll be able really tomount a very militant challenge to them.
Our demand cannot now be that repeal the labor codes. Our demand should now be to repeal the labor codes and bring in the amendments, bring in the changes in the labour laws that we want. Bring in a law that prohibits contract labour, that ensures the regularization of every single contract worker across the country. Bring in a law that says that the wages of workers will not be less than the living wages. Bring in a law that will ensure that there cannot be higher and fire. Bring in a law that ensures that workers will get every form of social security.
We cannot go back to the system that was there which itself was exploitative. These new laws are more exploitative. There’s no doubt about that. But we cannot go back to that. We’ll have to fight to say that we want these laws repealed and what we want is the workers’ share, their due from this country.