ABSTRACT
The enactment and eventual notification of India’s four Labour Codes — the Code on Wages, 2019, the Industrial Relations Code, 2020, the Code on Social Security, 2020, and the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 — represents the most far-reaching restructuring of Indian labour jurisprudence since Independence. These four Codes consolidate twenty-nine central labour statutes, several of which trace their origins to the colonial period, into a unified architecture intended to rationalise definitions, widen coverage and improve the ease of doing business.[1] This paper undertakes a doctrinal examination of the four Codes, situates them within the constitutional framework of Articles 14, 19(1)(c), 21 and the Directive Principles contained in Articles 38 to 43A, and evaluates them against the backdrop of established labour jurisprudence, including the Supreme Court’s exposition of the term “industry” in Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board v. A. Rajappa, its treatment of associational freedom in All India Bank Employees’ Association v. National Industrial Tribunal, and its approach to contract labour in Steel Authority of India Ltd. v. National Union Waterfront Workers. The paper argues that while the Codes achieve a genuine simplification of a notoriously fragmented statutory landscape and extend, for the first time, a statutory framework of social security to gig, platform and unorganised-sector workers, they simultaneously raise substantial concerns regarding the erosion of collective bargaining strength, the normalisation of fixed-term employment, and the recalibration of thresholds that determine the applicability of protective labour standards. The paper concludes with an assessment of the implementation trajectory following the Codes coming into force on 21 November 2025, and offers recommendations for a rights-consistent implementation.
Keywords: Labour Codes; Code on Wages 2019; Industrial Relations Code 2020; Code on Social Security 2020; Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020; labour law reform; collective bargaining; gig workers; constitutional law; India.
- INTRODUCTION
Labour legislation in India has historically developed in a piecemeal and reactive fashion. Beginning with the Factories Act, 1881 and continuing through instruments such as the Trade Unions Act, 1926, the Payment of Wages Act, 1936, the Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act, 1946, the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, the Minimum Wages Act, 1948, and the Employees’ Provident Funds and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1952, successive Parliaments enacted more than forty central statutes, each addressing a discrete facet of the employment relationship.[2] Overlapping and sometimes contradictory definitions of “wages”, “worker” and “employer” across these statutes created a compliance environment that was, in the words of successive policy reviews, both inconsistent and opaque.
It was against this backdrop that the Second National Commission on Labour, constituted in 1999 and submitting its report in 2002, recommended that the multiplicity of labour laws be rationalised and grouped into a small number of broad, functionally coherent codes.[3] That recommendation lay dormant for over a decade and a half before Parliament acted upon it: the Code on Wages was enacted in 2019, followed in 2020 by the Industrial Relations Code, the Code on Social Security, and the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code. Together, these four instruments — hereinafter “the Labour Codes” or “the Codes” — subsume and repeal twenty-nine pre-existing central enactments.
The Codes remained substantially dormant for want of central and state rules for close to five years. The Government of India, through a press notification, brought all four Codes into force with effect from 21 November 2025, while noting that certain provisions and state-specific rules would continue to be operationalised in a staggered manner.[4] This delayed and staggered commencement itself illustrates a structural feature of Indian labour governance: because “labour” falls within Entry 22 to 24 of the Concurrent List under the Seventh Schedule to the Constitution, the Codes require harmonised rule-making by both the Union and the States before they can operate with full effect, a process that has proceeded unevenly across jurisdictions.
This paper is organised as follows. Part II traces the historical and policy rationale for codification. Part III provides a structured overview of the substantive content of each of the four Codes. Part IV examines the pre-existing body of judicial doctrine — developed principally under the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947 and the Trade Unions Act, 1926 — that continues to inform the interpretation of the new Codes. Part V situates the Codes within India’s constitutional framework. Part VI analyses the principal reforms introduced by the Codes and the controversies they have generated. Part VII offers a comparative and international perspective with reference to the Conventions of the International Labour Organization. Part VIII surveys the principal criticisms voiced by trade unions and scholars. Part IX reviews the implementation trajectory since November 2025, and Part X concludes with recommendations.
[1]The consolidation figure of twenty-nine central labour enactments and the colonial-era ancestry of several of the subsumed statutes is widely acknowledged in contemporary policy literature; see PIB, “Government Makes the Four Labour Codes Effective to Simplify and Streamline Labour Laws” (Press Information Bureau, Ministry of Labour and Employment, Government of India, 21 November 2025).
[2]For an account of the historical proliferation of central labour enactments in India, see B.R. Ghaiye, Labour Legislation: A Historical and Comparative Study (Deep & Deep Publications) and the discussion of legislative fragmentation in the Second National Commission on Labour Report (2002), Ministry of Labour, Government of India, Vol. I, Ch. VI.
[3]The four-Code structure adopted by Parliament between 2019 and 2020 traces its policy lineage directly to the recommendation of the Second National Commission on Labour (2002) that existing labour laws be broadly grouped into four or five codes; see Drishti IAS, “Nationwide Implementation of India’s Four Labour Codes” (25 November 2025).
[4]PIB, “Government Makes the Four Labour Codes Effective to Simplify and Streamline Labour Laws” (21 November 2025); see also DLA Piper GENIE, “New Labour Codes Usher in a New Era of Compliance” (2025), noting that central and state-specific rules were expected to follow within forty-five days of the notification.