The labour codes vs old laws argument has been running for years in a form that guarantees it can never be settled. One side announces that the four codes are the largest dilution of worker protection since independence. The other announces that they are the largest extension of worker welfare ever attempted. Both announcements are made about the same four statutes, by people who have read them, and both can be supported by quoting real provisions. The reason the argument never resolves is that each side is describing a different worker. The union speaker is describing the permanent factory worker in a large establishment, the person the old law protected most deeply. The government speaker is describing the gig worker, the migrant and the unorganised worker, the people the old law barely reached. Until the comparison is run worker by worker and statute by statute, the question “are the codes pro-worker or pro-employer” has no answer, because it has no fixed subject. This article runs the comparison that way, and its verdict follows from the count.
The method matters as much as the conclusion, so it is stated at the start. Every one of the twenty-nine central statutes subsumed by the four codes is mapped in the table later in this article to the code that absorbed it, with a finding on whether its substance was retained, changed or dropped, and a direction marker recording whether the change expanded worker protection, contracted it, moved in both directions at once, or was neutral. The verdict in this article is not an impression laid over that map. It is the map, counted. Where the prose asserts that a threshold rose or a right is new, the provision is identified and the figure is one that the statute itself carries. Where a matter belongs to a specialist article in this cluster, the article says so and links there rather than re-answering the question: the Code on Wages, the Industrial Relations Code and the Code on Social Security each have their own treatment, and this article’s business is the contrast between the two regimes, not the internal anatomy of either.
The question the comparison has to answer
A comparison article earns its length only if the comparison decides something. Here the decision is practical as well as polemical. An employer deciding how to structure a workforce after the codes needs to know which old obligations survived, which loosened, and which tightened, because the answer differs by establishment size in ways the slogans never mention. A union representative needs the same map read from the other end: which protections were genuinely lost, which were traded, and which supposed losses are actually renumbering. A practitioner advising on a dispute that straddles the repeal needs the continuity rule that governs whether forty years of case law on the old words still governs the new ones. An aspirant needs the consolidation held in a form that survives an examination hall. None of these readers is served by a verdict that refuses to specify its subject, and all four are served by the same discipline: compare provision with provision, name the worker affected, and let the tally fall where it falls.
What decides whether the codes helped or hurt a particular worker?
Two coordinates decide it: the size of the establishment and the form of the engagement. A permanent worker in a factory above three hundred keeps most of the old armour; one in the hundred-to-three-hundred band loses its structural half; a gig worker or unorganised worker gains recognition the old law never offered.
That is the article in miniature, and the rest of the article is its evidence: the codes are pro-coverage and anti-depth, extending legal recognition to far more workers than the old statutes reached while reducing the protection enjoyed by the minority the old statutes covered well. It is worth pausing on why both halves of that verdict are needed. A verdict of “pro-worker” alone cannot survive contact with the raised permission threshold for retrenchment, which withdraws a real protection from a real class of establishments. A verdict of “pro-employer” alone cannot survive contact with the universal minimum wage, which extends a legal entitlement to workers whom the old statute’s scheduling system left outside it in entire sectors. A verdict of “mixed”, offered without the deciding factor, is not a verdict at all but a refusal to compare. The deciding factor here is the identity of the worker: the reform redistributes protection between categories of worker, from the organised minority towards the unorganised majority, in principle. Whether that redistribution is real in practice depends on enforcement, and enforcement is the qualification that the closing sections of this article take up in earnest, because it is the strongest criticism available against the reform and it belongs to neither side’s slogan.
Labour codes vs old laws: what the two regimes actually are
The old regime was not a system. It was an accumulation: a century of statutes, each answering the pressure of its decade, layered over one another without any legislature ever standing back to consolidate them. The central corpus alone ran to some forty-four labour Acts on the count the Second National Commission on Labour worked with in 2002, and twenty-nine of them were the ones the four codes subsumed. The four that did the subsuming were enacted in two steps. The Code on Wages 2019, Act 29 of 2019, received assent on 8 August 2019 and absorbed four statutes: the Payment of Wages Act 1936, the Minimum Wages Act 1948, the Payment of Bonus Act 1965 and the Equal Remuneration Act 1976. The remaining three codes each received assent on 28 September 2020. The Industrial Relations Code 2020, Act 35 of 2020, absorbed the Trade Unions Act 1926, the Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act 1946 and the Industrial Disputes Act 1947. The Code on Social Security 2020, Act 36 of 2020, absorbed nine statutes spanning the Employees’ Compensation Act 1923 to the Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act 2008. The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020, Act 37 of 2020, absorbed thirteen, from the Factories Act 1948 to the Building and Other Construction Workers (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act 1996. Four and three and nine and thirteen make twenty-nine. The architecture of the whole field, its constitutional basis in the Concurrent List and its threshold logic, is the subject of the framework guide to India’s labour law, and this article takes that architecture as given.
Why were the codes organised by subject family rather than by industry?
Because the Second National Commission on Labour designed them that way in 2002: it grouped the existing laws under industrial relations, wages, social security, safety and welfare, so that definitions and machinery could be unified inside each family, and the four codes follow that grouping with the last two families merged.
That reorganisation is the change underneath all the particular changes, and it explains why the particular changes point in different directions. Consolidation was the vehicle; amendment rode inside it at chosen points. Some of those chosen points extended protection: the minimum wage escaped its schedule, the social security code recognised forms of work the old corpus had no words for, and the wage definition was unified in a way that raises the base on which wage-linked entitlements are computed. Some contracted it: thresholds that decide which establishments carry the heaviest obligations were raised, so the obligations themselves stop at the gate of a larger factory than before. And a great deal, the majority of the twenty-nine rows on the map, simply crossed over: the substance of the Employees’ State Insurance Act or the Maternity Benefit Act did not become more or less generous on the day it was renumbered into the Code on Social Security. Anyone who tells the story as pure dilution or pure welfare has to explain away at least half the map.
The seventeen years and the six years
The timeline is part of the comparison, because a reform’s passage conditions shape what its text can plausibly claim to be. The Second National Commission on Labour, appointed in 1999 under the chairmanship of Ravindra Varma, reported on 29 June 2002 and recommended that the existing set of labour laws be amalgamated into a small number of groups: industrial relations, wages, social security, safety, and welfare and working conditions. The four codes of 2019 and 2020 follow that grouping with the safety and welfare groups merged, which is why the reform can claim a bipartisan intellectual pedigree: the blueprint predates the governments that enacted it by a political generation. Seventeen years separate the recommendation from the first code’s assent in August 2019. The further interval, from enactment to operation, ran to a little over six years from the first code and a little over five from the other three: the codes were enacted with commencement left to notification, the notifications waited on the framing of rules at the Centre and in the states, and the four codes were finally brought into force together on 21 November 2025, with the Central Rules following on 8 May 2026 and state rules still incomplete for most establishments. The commencement history, and the question of what law governed during the wait, belong to the article on the labour codes’ implementation delay; here the delay matters for one comparison purpose only, which is that every verdict on the codes delivered between 2020 and 2025 was a verdict on a text that had not yet governed a single workplace.
The parliamentary handling of September 2020 requires plain statement because it is itself one of the contested facts. The Code on Wages had passed in 2019 through an ordinary parliamentary process. The three remaining codes were passed by the Lok Sabha on 22 September 2020 and by the Rajya Sabha on 23 September 2020, in the monsoon session, during sittings from which a substantial part of the opposition was absent in boycott, in protest at the passage of the farm legislation in the same session. The codes were therefore enacted by a Parliament in which the principal opposing benches were not participating in the division, and the assent followed on 28 September 2020. That is a fact about the conditions of passage. Critics, including the central trade unions, treat it as a defect of democratic legitimacy in the making of laws that govern hundreds of millions of workers. The government’s position was that the bills had been through the standing committee process in their earlier avatars, had been the subject of tripartite consultation over years, and were passed by the House as constituted. Both statements can be recorded without the article adopting either as its verdict; what the comparison needs from the episode is only the recognition that a consolidation of this size, carried at speed in a depleted House, placed unusual weight on the delegated legislation that followed, because points that a fuller debate might have settled in the text were left to rules.
The organised positions have been consistent and are part of the record. The central trade union federations, acting through their joint platform, opposed the codes from introduction, described the Industrial Relations Code in particular as a charter for hire and fire, and supported that opposition with general strike action, including the nationwide strike of 26 November 2020 in which the federations participated alongside the farm unions’ protests. Their case, at its strongest, is not that every provision dilutes protection but that the provisions that bite hardest on the organised workforce, the thresholds and the strike rules, were changed in one direction only, while the provisions that expand coverage are promises dependent on schemes, notifications and an enforcement apparatus that has never reached the informal sector. Industry bodies, including the Confederation of Indian Industry and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, supported the consolidation consistently, and their case, at its strongest, separates into two claims that are often blurred: a compliance claim, that twenty-nine statutes with separate registrations, licences, returns and inspectorates imposed a burden out of proportion to any protective purpose, and a flexibility claim, that the old exit and threshold rules pushed employers to stay small, stay informal or substitute contract labour for direct employment, so that the protections themselves were manufacturing the informality they lamented. The comparison that follows tests both cases against the text, dimension by dimension.
Coverage: where the codes reach further than the old law
Begin with the dimension on which the government’s case is strongest, because the verdict of this article depends on giving each side its strongest ground before weighing it. The old statutes rationed protection by category. The Minimum Wages Act 1948 applied only to scheduled employments, employments that a government had chosen to list in the Act’s Schedule, so a worker’s right to a statutory minimum wage depended on whether their occupation had been scheduled in their state. The Code on Wages abolished the scheduling gate: the minimum wage provisions apply to every employment, and the Code obliges the Central Government to fix a floor wage, below which no state minimum may fall, so that the entitlement runs with the worker rather than with the list. The detail of that machinery, the fixation methods and the floor wage’s binding force, is treated in the article on the Code on Wages 2019; the comparison point is simpler and larger. Under the old law the question was whether your job was on a list. Under the Code the question is what the rate is. That is an expansion of coverage of the first order, and it is not matched by any contraction elsewhere in the wages family: the Payment of Wages Act’s protections on the timing of payment and permissible deductions, which had been confined by a wage ceiling of twenty-four thousand rupees a month fixed by notification in 2017, were carried into the Code with no ceiling at all, so they protect the salaried supervisor whom the old Act’s ceiling had placed outside them, and the period for claiming unpaid wages was lengthened from the old twelve months to three years.
Social security shows the same direction in a different register. The old corpus recognised the employee, the workman, the insured person: categories built around a continuing employment relationship with an identifiable employer. The economy’s actual growth had been happening outside those categories, in app-mediated work and casual engagement, and the old law had almost nothing to say to the people doing it beyond the aspirational and largely unschemed framework of the Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act 2008. The Code on Social Security defines the gig worker, the platform worker and the aggregator as legal categories, requires the registration of unorganised, gig and platform workers as the gateway to benefits, and creates a funding route for gig and platform welfare through a contribution by aggregators fixed between one and two per cent of annual turnover and capped at five per cent of the amounts payable to their gig workers. The full anatomy of that design belongs to the article on the Code on Social Security 2020. For the comparison, the direction is unmistakable: an entire workforce that the twenty-nine statutes did not see stands named in the statute book. The qualification, and it is the qualification that recurs throughout this article, is that naming is not delivering. The gig worker’s entitlement runs through schemes to be framed and a fund to be fed, and the distance between the Code’s recognition and a rupee in a delivery rider’s account is administrative, not textual. The old law’s failure towards this workforce was a failure of silence. The Code’s risk is a failure of follow-through, which is a different failure but not a smaller one for the person waiting.
Why do unions and employers describe the same codes so differently?
Because each side’s description is drawn from the provisions that touch its constituency: the unions’ account is built on the thresholds and strike rules that govern the organised workforce they represent, and the employers’ account is built on the compliance machinery and exit rules governing their establishments, so both accounts are accurate reports of different chapters of the books.
That is the analytical key to the entire debate, and it is why the deciding factor in this article’s verdict is the identity of the worker. A reform that raises a threshold from one hundred to three hundred does nothing at all to a worker in a thirty-person workshop, who was never inside the permission regime to begin with, and everything to a worker in a two-hundred-person factory, who has just been carried out of it. A reform that recognises gig work does nothing for the factory worker and everything, potentially, for the rider. Aggregate verdicts that refuse to specify the establishment size and the employment form are not verdicts about the codes. They are verdicts about the speaker’s constituency, dressed as verdicts about the law.
Thresholds: where the codes stop earlier than the old law
Turn to the other side of the ledger, on which the unions’ case is strongest. Indian labour law is a law of thresholds: nearly every obligation switches on at a stated headcount, and the practical reach of a protection is set less by its content than by the number at which it begins. The codes raised several of the most consequential numbers. Under the Industrial Disputes Act 1947, Chapter VB required the prior permission of the appropriate government for layoff, retrenchment and closure in an industrial establishment employing one hundred or more workmen, a figure that had itself been lowered from three hundred in 1984 and had governed for four decades. The Industrial Relations Code sets the corresponding figure at three hundred. The standing orders regime, under which an establishment’s certified conditions of service are fixed in a quasi-public document policed by certifying officers, applied under the Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act 1946 at one hundred workers; the Code again sets three hundred. The numbers three hundred and one hundred are not abstractions. Every establishment employing between one hundred and three hundred workers, a band that contains a very large share of India’s organised manufacturing employment, has been moved by those two changes from the permission-and-certification side of the line to the notice-and-contract side. For workers inside that band, the reform is not a redistribution. It is a withdrawal, and the union description of it is accurate.
The safety code moved its threshold in the same direction. A premises was a factory under the Factories Act 1948 at ten workers with power or twenty without; the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code sets twenty and forty. Premises in the band between the old and new figures leave the factory chapter, and with it the licensing, inspection and welfare apparatus that the chapter carried. The contract labour threshold doubled as well: the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act 1970 applied at twenty contract workers; the safety code’s corresponding regime applies at fifty, though it retains the old Act’s central prohibition power, the power to bar contract labour in work of a perennial nature and in the core activity of an establishment, subject to stated exceptions. Set against these contractions, the architecture also contains threshold decisions that ran the other way or held still: the safety code’s general registration duty begins at ten workers, the provident fund line held at twenty employees, the state insurance line held at ten, and the building and construction regime held at ten. The pattern across the map is therefore not a uniform raising of the drawbridge. It is a selective one, and the selection is the story: the thresholds that rose are, in the main, the thresholds guarding exit, discipline and the organisation of the workforce, while the thresholds guarding contributions and registration stayed where they were. An employer reading the map learns that it became easier to restructure and no cheaper to default. A worker reading it learns the same thing from the other side.
How did the codes change the position of a worker in a mid-sized factory?
A worker in an establishment employing between one hundred and three hundred people lost the two structural protections that defined the old regime for that band, the requirement of government permission before retrenchment or closure and the discipline of certified standing orders, while keeping individual entitlements such as retrenchment compensation and notice pay intact.
That distinction, between the structural and the individual, runs through the whole comparison and is worth holding firmly. What the codes withdrew from the mid-band worker were collective and procedural protections: the state’s prior check on the employer’s decision, and the public fixing of service conditions. What they did not withdraw were the money entitlements attached to the event itself. Retrenchment compensation under the Industrial Relations Code remains fifteen days’ average pay for every completed year of continuous service, the identical measure the Industrial Disputes Act carried in Section 25F, with the same qualifying condition of two hundred and forty days’ service in the preceding year, and the Code adds a contribution by the employer of fifteen days’ wages to a re-skilling fund for the retrenched worker, a small but genuine addition that did not exist in the old Act. Notice and compensation conditions on retrenchment survived the repeal word for word in substance. The permission that preceded them, for the mid-band, did not.
The comparison by establishment size: four establishments
Thresholds are abstractions until they are attached to a gate and a muster roll, so the comparison is worth running through four establishments of different sizes, each facing the two regimes in turn. Take first the smallest, a workshop employing eight people. Under the old law this unit stood near the edge of the statute book: the Factories Act did not reach it if it worked without power in numbers below twenty, the provident fund did not reach it below twenty employees, state insurance did not reach it below ten, and the minimum wage reached it only if its trade stood in the state schedule. Under the codes the workshop’s position changes in one large respect and several small ones. The large respect is wages: the minimum wage binds for every employment, the floor wage binds beneath the state rate, and the payment protections of the wages code, timing, deductions and the three-year claim period, apply without the old ceiling. The registration architecture of the safety code begins at ten, so the workshop still stands outside the general establishment registration, and social security’s contributory chapters still begin at their old numbers. For the eight-person unit, the reform is the wages code arriving where no code had been, and little else.
Take next a unit employing forty-five people, working with power, using a dozen contract workers supplied by a contractor. Under the old law the unit was a factory at twenty with power, licensed and inspected as such; its contract labour arrangement was squarely inside the Contract Labour Act at twenty, with registration of the principal employer, licensing of the contractor and the standing possibility of an abolition notification if the work was perennial. Under the safety code the unit remains a factory, since the line with power stands at twenty, and its hours, safety and welfare duties continue in the code’s chapters. The contract labour position inverts. At fifty, the new threshold, this unit’s dozen contract workers no longer bring the arrangement inside the contract labour chapter at all: the registration and licensing apparatus falls away, and with it the abolition route, while the wage and safety duties owed to those workers run through the general chapters and the contractor’s status as employer. The same unit that keeps its factory obligations loses its contract labour obligations without a single worker’s job changing. No slogan about the codes captures that, and the establishment-size comparison captures nothing if it misses it.
Take the third establishment, a factory employing one hundred and eighty. This is the establishment the reform was fought over. Under the old law it sat inside every structural regime at once: certified standing orders under the 1946 Act, Chapter VB permission for layoff, retrenchment and closure under the Industrial Disputes Act, the works and welfare provisions of the Factories Act, contract labour regulation at twenty. Its workforce’s protection was thick in the particular way this article has described, prescriptive about the employer’s intentions before the employer could act on them. Under the codes the factory keeps its safety chapter, its wage obligations under the unified definition, its retrenchment compensation and its notice duties, its tribunal exposure after the fact, and loses the two prescriptive instruments entire: no permission before retrenchment or closure, no certified standing orders, the model standing orders operating in their place as a document the employer adopts. The one hundred and eighty-worker factory is the precise point at which the article’s verdict of redistribution stops being symmetrical, because what leaves this establishment is not given to anyone else. It is simply removed, on the reasoning that the removal will make such establishments likelier to grow past the line, a reasoning whose evidence belongs to the future.
Take the fourth, a plant employing nine hundred. Under the old law it carried every regime in the corpus. Under the codes it still carries every regime in the corpus, at thresholds it comfortably exceeds, and its comparison is a comparison of machinery and margins rather than of presence and absence: one registration in place of several, a negotiating union with statutory status where a majority union exists, direct tribunal access for its disputes, a strike notice discipline that binds its workforce as it binds every establishment, the wages definition raising its contribution base, fixed term employment available to it as a lawful channel with parity duties. For the largest employers the codes are best described as modernisation with a wages bill attached. The four profiles together are the verdict in concrete form: the smallest unit gained a wages floor, the small unit traded a licensing regime away, the mid-sized unit lost its structural protections, and the largest unit was consolidated. A single reform did all four of those things, which is why a single adjective cannot describe it.
Which establishment size felt the reform most?
The establishment between one hundred and three hundred workers, by a distance. Smaller establishments were mostly outside the old structural regimes and remain outside the new ones, gaining mainly the wages code’s arrival. Larger establishments remain inside every regime under both systems. Only the mid-band establishment crossed a boundary, losing permission and certification while its larger competitors kept theirs.
Dismissal, closure and the shape of security
The closure comparison follows the same pattern and should be stated with the same precision. Under Chapter VB of the old Act, an undertaking in the covered band could not be closed without prior permission, applied for ninety days in advance, and the government’s refusal could keep a dying unit legally alive, a power the courts had upheld and employers had campaigned against for decades as the single clearest instance of exit being blocked. The Industrial Relations Code retains the permission institution: an industrial establishment at or above three hundred workers still requires prior permission for layoff, retrenchment and closure, still on ninety days’ application, and closure compensation for the workman still runs at fifteen days’ average pay per completed year. What changed is the population inside the institution, not the institution. Security of employment in India was always, in truth, the security of the large-establishment workforce; the codes have narrowed the definition of large. For the worker in the five-hundred-person plant, the dismissal and closure regime after the codes is recognisably the one before them, with modest procedural modernisation. For the worker in the one-hundred-and-fifty-person plant, the regime has changed in kind: from permission to notice, from the government’s discretion to the employer’s, supervised after the event by tribunals rather than before it by the state. Whether that is a liberation of a strangled sector or the removal of the one check that made the rest of the rights real is the value question at the centre of the debate, and it is not resolvable by counting provisions. What counting establishes is where the change sits, and it sits in the band.
Individual dismissal, as distinct from retrenchment, was governed under the old law by the standing orders and by the tribunal’s power under Section 11A of the Industrial Disputes Act to reappraise a domestic enquiry and substitute a lesser punishment, a power the courts built into a substantial jurisprudence of proportionality. The Code carries the tribunal’s reappraisal power forward in substance, since the Industrial Tribunal under the Code may still set aside a dismissal it finds unjustified and direct reinstatement or compensation. The disciplinary universe of the mid-band worker changes, however, because the standing orders that defined misconduct and procedure bind only at three hundred, with model standing orders supplied by the government operating below that line in a form the individual employer adopts rather than negotiates through certification. The employer’s disciplinary code for the smaller establishment is therefore more nearly a private document after the codes than before them, and the comparison on this dimension belongs on the contracted side of the ledger for the band, and on the neutral side above it.
Collective action and collective representation
The strike rules are the change the unions cite most, and the text supports the citation. Under the Industrial Disputes Act, a notice of strike was a statutory precondition only in public utility services, where Section 22 required notice within six weeks before striking and barred a strike during conciliation; in other industries the legality of a strike turned principally on the prohibitions in Section 23, against striking during the pendency of proceedings and settlements. The Industrial Relations Code generalises the notice: no person employed in an industrial establishment may go on strike without fourteen days’ notice, and the strike may not begin during conciliation proceedings or within seven days of their conclusion, nor during tribunal proceedings or within sixty days of theirs. The lock-out rules are mirrored for employers. A cooling architecture that the old law reserved for utilities covers every industrial establishment, and mass casual leave by half or more of the workforce on a given day is treated as a strike for this purpose. On any honest count this contracts the freedom of collective action as the old law defined it, and the article records it on that side without qualification.
Representation moved the other way, and it is the change the government’s speakers cite least, perhaps because it empowers the institutions doing the criticising. The Trade Unions Act 1926 provided for the registration of unions but contained no central machinery by which an employer was obliged to recognise or bargain with any of them; recognition at the central level rested on a voluntary code of discipline and on state legislation such as Maharashtra’s statute of 1971. The Industrial Relations Code creates the negotiating union: a registered union commanding fifty-one per cent of the workers on the muster roll is the sole negotiating union for the establishment, and where no union reaches that figure, a negotiating council is formed from unions commanding at least twenty per cent each. For the first time in central legislation, a union that can demonstrate majority support acquires a statutory seat at the table by right. The machinery is analysed in the article on the Industrial Relations Code 2020; the comparison point is that the codes simultaneously narrowed what a union may do in the street and widened what it may claim in the room. Which of those matters more depends on a judgment about where Indian industrial relations actually happens, and reasonable readers will weigh it differently, but a comparison that mentions only the strike notice and not the negotiating union has not compared. It has campaigned.
Dispute access completes the industrial relations ledger. Under the old Act, an industrial dispute reached a tribunal principally by reference: the appropriate government decided whether to refer it, and the government’s refusal was, subject to limited review, the end of the road for most collective disputes, though an individual workman could raise a dispute over dismissal directly after the 2010 amendment inserted that route. The Code replaces the reference as the ordinary gateway: a party may apply to the Industrial Tribunal after conciliation has failed, within the period the Code prescribes, and the tribunal itself is reconstituted as a two-member body with a judicial and an administrative member. The gatekeeping discretion of the executive over which disputes deserve adjudication, one of the oldest and most criticised features of the 1947 settlement, is substantially dismantled. On the map that is an expansion, and a structural one: it moves power from the government of the day to the parties and the tribunal. The unions’ critique answers, fairly, that access without the permission regime’s leverage may prove a paper right in establishments where the workforce fears to use it. That is an enforcement argument, and it is dealt with below on its own terms, because it applies with equal force to nearly every expansion the codes contain.
Dispute resolution compared: the door into the tribunal
The old law’s dispute machinery had a gatekeeper, and the comparison of that machinery is a comparison of who held the key. Under the Industrial Disputes Act, an industrial dispute reached a labour court or tribunal, outside a few excepted matters, through a reference by the appropriate government: the executive decided whether the dispute deserved adjudication, and its refusal ended the road for most workers unless a court could be persuaded to intervene on the refusal itself. Seventy years of practice built the predictable pathologies into that gate. References waited on administrative convenience and political weather. Governments declined references in disputes that embarrassed public employers. The conciliation officer’s report, which began the process, travelled slowly. The Industrial Relations Code removes the gatekeeper from the ordinary road: on the failure of conciliation, the worker or the employer may apply directly to the Industrial Tribunal, and the government’s role contracts towards the exceptional, the reference of disputes touching questions of national importance or establishments across states. Set beside the thresholds, this is the change that most complicates a simple pro-employer reading of the Code, because the reference power was the executive’s hand on the tap of industrial justice and the organised movement had complained of its use for as long as the Act existed.
What did not change in the machinery is as instructive. The conciliation-first sequence survives, so the state’s first response to a dispute remains an officer attempting settlement rather than a judge hearing argument. The tribunal’s remedial armoury in individual dismissal survives through the reappraisal power treated above. The award’s binding character and the prohibitions on altering conditions while proceedings run survive in their essentials. The tribunal’s composition changes at the margin, two members, one judicial and one administrative, sitting in the configurations the Code prescribes, where the old tribunals sat as single presiding officers drawn from the judiciary and senior administration; whether benches of two decide faster or merely deliberate longer is a question the institution’s record under the Code will answer. The voluntary arbitration route, present in the old Act and little used, is carried across and remains likely to be little used, since parties that cannot agree rarely agree on their judge. The honest comparison of the machinery is therefore a transfer of initiative from the government to the disputants inside a structure whose stages, settlements, awards and prohibitions an old practitioner will recognise on sight, and in dispute resolution, where delay was the old system’s deepest vice, the removal of a discretionary stage is worth more than any enlargement of the tribunal’s powers would have been.
The wages definition: the quiet change with the longest reach
Ask practitioners which single provision of the four codes will be felt in the most pay packets, and the answer is rarely a threshold. It is a definition. The old statutes each defined wages for their own purposes, and the definitions differed, so an employer could structure remuneration with a small basic wage and a large envelope of allowances, and every entitlement computed on wages, provident fund, gratuity, bonus, state insurance, retrenchment compensation, shrank with the base. The codes impose a common definition across the wages, industrial relations, social security and safety families: wages are the basic pay, dearness allowance and retaining allowance, and the components excluded from wages, allowances and payments in kind and the like, may not exceed fifty per cent of the total remuneration, with any excess deemed to be wages. The consequence is mechanical and large. Where allowances formerly made up seventy per cent of a cost-to-company package, the wage base for contribution and entitlement purposes rises towards half the package, provident fund contributions and the gratuity base rise with it, and take-home pay, unless gross pay is adjusted, falls correspondingly. For the employee this is an expansion of deferred and terminal entitlements purchased at the price of present cash, which is why the same provision is celebrated as a social security reform and resented as a pay cut, sometimes by the same person in the same week. For the employer it is a real increase in the cost of the formal employment relationship, which is why industry commentary on the codes, for all its welcome of the consolidation, treats the definition as the expensive line in the settlement. A comparison that counts only rights and thresholds will miss it. A comparison that follows the money will not.
Did anything important survive the consolidation untouched?
Yes, and the list is longer than either side’s rhetoric suggests: retrenchment compensation at fifteen days’ average pay per completed year, maternity benefit at twenty-six weeks on the qualifying service, the provident fund threshold of twenty employees, the state insurance threshold of ten, and the compensation code for employment injury all crossed into the codes in their old measure.
The maternity comparison illustrates what “retained” means on the map and why it matters to get it right. The Maternity Benefit Act 1961, as amended in 2017, entitled a woman with eighty days’ service in the preceding twelve months to twenty-six weeks of paid benefit for up to two children, with crèche obligations at fifty employees and protection against dismissal during absence. The Code on Social Security carries that entitlement forward in substance: same duration, same qualifying logic, same protections, renumbered into a chapter. No speaker describes the codes as having halved maternity benefit, because they did not, and the rows like this, seventeen of the twenty-nine, are the ballast of the comparison. They are also the reason the claim that the codes repealed worker protection wholesale cannot be maintained, and the reason the claim that nothing was lost cannot be maintained either, since the rows that did move include the ones the organised workforce used most.
The wages definition worked through a single pay packet
The definition’s effect is easiest to see on one packet, and the figures that follow are an illustration of the mechanism, not a report of any actual establishment. Take an employee whose total monthly remuneration is sixty thousand rupees, structured under the old practice with a basic wage of eighteen thousand and the balance in allowances, a structure the old definitions permitted because provident fund, gratuity and the rest were computed on the basic wage and dearness allowance. On that base, the employee’s provident fund contribution at twelve per cent is two thousand one hundred and sixty rupees a month, matched by the employer, and gratuity accrues on the same modest base. The codes cap the excluded components at fifty per cent of total remuneration, so the wage base for such an employee cannot fall below thirty thousand. The same twelve per cent contribution becomes three thousand six hundred rupees, matched again, and the gratuity base rises by the same two-thirds. The employee’s take-home pay falls by the increase in the contribution unless the employer raises the gross, the employer’s cost of the employment rises by the matching increase and the larger gratuity accrual, and the employee’s deferred and terminal entitlements grow correspondingly. Nothing in the illustration depends on generosity or meanness on either side. It is the definition operating, and it operates on every formal pay packet in the country whose structure leans on allowances, which is to say on the standard structure of salaried employment in the private sector.
The comparison point is that the old law contained the seeds of this result and never generalised them. Courts had, in particular provident fund litigation, read the fund’s wage definition against artificial splitting of pay, and the Supreme Court’s 2019 decision in the provident fund appeals treated allowances that were universally and necessarily paid as part of basic wages for contribution purposes. But judge-made correction reaches the litigated case and the attentive employer; a statutory ceiling on exclusions reaches the payroll code of every establishment at once. Whether the redistribution inside the packet, from present cash to deferred entitlement, is a gain for the worker depends on the worker’s distance from retirement and appetite for present income, which is the article’s deciding factor appearing again in miniature, inside a payslip.
Non-standard work compared: how each regime saw the worker without an employer
The deepest difference between the two regimes is not in any threshold but in a theory of what a worker is. The old corpus was built, statute by statute, around a paradigm: a person employed by an identifiable employer, in an identifiable establishment, for a continuing period. Worker after worker who matched the paradigm was protected, sometimes superbly. Worker after worker who did not match it, the home-based beedi roller, the head-load worker, the agricultural labourer, the construction hand hired by the day, was reached, if at all, by a small sector statute of the welfare-fund kind: a cess collected on an industry, a board constituted, benefits disbursed at administrative discretion, with no individual entitlement a court could enforce in the manner of a wage claim or a compensation award. The construction workers’ legislation of 1996 was the fullest expression of that model, and the Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act 2008 generalised its weakness, authorising schemes for the unorganised sector while creating few rights a worker could demand as an entitlement. When the old law is praised for its protections, the paradigm workers are meant. When it is indicted, the indictment is that the paradigm described a small and shrinking share of the country’s work.
The codes keep the paradigm for the organised core, which is why the core’s chapters read as re-enactment, and they attack the perimeter with a different instrument: the named category plus the registration gateway plus the scheme. The gig worker and the platform worker are defined by the work’s organisation, through an aggregator’s platform, rather than by an employer’s premises, and the unorganised worker is defined residually, by exclusion from the organised categories, with registration on the national portal as the act that makes the worker visible to the state and schemes as the vehicle by which benefits are to travel. The comparison with the welfare-fund model is closer than the government’s language of novelty admits, since a scheme-based entitlement delivered through a fund remains, in structure, a descendant of the cess-and-board pattern of 1996, with the aggregator’s contribution standing where the construction cess stood. The differences are of scale and of legal texture: the categories are in the parent statute rather than in notifications, the registration is individual and portable in design, and the funding route is written into the Code with a percentage range rather than left to a separate cess Act. Whether those differences amount to a new settlement or to the old welfare model in national dress is the comparison on which the codes’ reputation will ultimately turn, and it cannot be resolved from the texts, because the texts deliberately leave the operative content to schemes. A reader marking the map honestly marks the row expanded, since a defined category and a statutory funding route are more than 2008 offered, and writes beside it the article’s standing qualification, that an expansion awaiting its schemes is a promise whose value the delivery system will fix.
Fixed term employment and the flexible margin
The old law had a hole at its centre where flexible engagement was concerned. An employer who needed labour for a season or a project could engage contract labour through a contractor, governed by the 1970 Act, or could appoint on a fixed term and watch the appointment shade into permanence arguments at its end, or could simply keep the engagement informal. The Industrial Relations Code names the thing directly: fixed term employment is a defined engagement on a written contract for a fixed period, and the fixed term employee is entitled to the same hours, wages, allowances and benefits as a permanent worker doing the same work, with gratuity payable on a pro-rata basis where the engagement runs to a year or more rather than after the five years the Payment of Gratuity Act demanded. The direction of this change is genuinely double-faced, and the map marks it within the Industrial Relations Code’s rows rather than pretending a single direction exists. To the worker engaged for a fixed term who would otherwise have been a contractor’s employee with no direct claim on the establishment, parity is an expansion. To the permanent workforce, a statutory channel through which engagements can be kept permanently temporary is a dilution of the expectation that continuity ripens into permanence, and the unions’ description of fixed term employment as institutionalised insecurity is a description of the same provision from the other chair. The honest comparison marks the ambiguity rather than resolving it by slogan, and notes only that the old system’s way of achieving the same flexibility, through contractors and informality, delivered the flexibility without the parity.
Safety and working conditions: consolidation with additions
The safety code consolidated thirteen statutes whose worlds had grown apart: factories, mines, plantations, docks, construction, motor transport, beedi work, cinema work, sales promotion, migrant work and the two working journalists Acts. Consolidation itself is directionally neutral, but the code used the occasion to add duties the old corpus did not impose uniformly. It requires the employer to issue appointment letters, a formality the old central law largely left to standing orders and state shops legislation. It provides for a free annual health check-up for workers above the prescribed age. It permits overtime only with the worker’s consent and at twice the ordinary rate. It rewrites the position of women: the Factories Act had barred women’s employment in factories except between 6 in the morning and 7 in the evening, relaxable by the state within limits that stopped short of the night hours; the Code permits women in all establishments and in work of every kind, including before 6 in the morning and after 7 in the evening, with their consent and subject to conditions of safety, holidays and working hours to be prescribed. That is an expansion of women’s access to employment purchased by replacing an absolute prohibition with a consent-and-conditions regime, and it is assessed by its defenders as equality and by its critics as the removal of a protection, a division that reproduces the article’s whole argument inside a single provision. The inter-state migrant provisions widened their own reach, extending the definition beyond contractor-recruited migration to the worker who migrates directly, with the wage ceiling for the definition notified at eighteen thousand rupees a month. Against these additions stands the threshold movement already recorded, twenty and forty for the factory chapter and fifty for contract labour, and the net direction for the safety family is therefore mixed in the strict sense: fewer premises inside the perimeter, more duties imposed on those within it.
Women and the protected categories compared
The comparison for women runs through three distinct provisions and points in three distinct directions, which is why it cannot be summarised in a sentence that begins with the word women. On equal pay, the codes carry forward the Equal Remuneration Act’s duty in the wages code’s general provisions, prohibiting discrimination in wages and in recruitment for the same work or work of a similar nature, and the row is neutral: a duty restated, with the old case law on what counts as similar work travelling with it. On maternity, the social security code preserves the 1961 Act’s settlement as amended in 2017, twenty-six weeks, qualifying service, crèche at fifty, dismissal protection, and the row is neutral again. On presence in the workplace itself, the direction reverses into expansion: the old corpus regulated women’s work through exclusion, most completely in the Factories Act’s evening bar treated in the safety section and in the Mines Act’s prohibition on women’s employment below ground and its restriction of their hours above ground, exclusions defended for generations as protection and attacked for as long as a rationing of women’s earnings by law. The safety code’s settlement replaces exclusion with entitlement and conditions: women may be employed in all establishments and all kinds of work, including underground work in mines and work before and after the ordinary hours, with consent and with the safety, holiday and working-hour conditions the appropriate government prescribes. The protective instinct of the old law survives in the conditions power; the exclusions do not. A comparison that values protection as its only currency will score this as loss, and a comparison that values access will score it as the code’s clearest gain, and the disagreement is not really about the code at all but about which of those currencies labour law should trade in.
Two neighbouring protections sit instructively at the consolidation’s edge. The child and adolescent labour statute was not subsumed, so the prohibition on employing children below fourteen and adolescents in hazardous work continues in its own Act, while the safety code carries its own prohibitions on the employment of children in the establishments it governs; the two instruments overlap as they did when the Factories Act coexisted with the child labour legislation, and the comparison records coexistence rather than change. The workplace harassment statute of 2013 likewise survives outside the codes, its internal committees and local committees untouched by the consolidation, a reminder that the four codes, for all the talk of a single labour code in the singular, never aspired to contain the whole of the law that governs a working life. The consolidation’s boundary is itself a finding: Parliament grouped what could be grouped by family resemblance, wages, relations, security and safety, and left standing the statutes whose logic was protective of a person rather than regulative of an employment.
Compliance architecture and the penalty philosophy
For the employer, the most tangible comparison is not in rights at all but in machinery. The old regime multiplied registrations and licences: a factory licence under one Act, registration under the contract labour Act, separate establishments codes for provident fund and state insurance, certified standing orders, and returns under each statute in its own form and season, policed by inspectorates whose powers of entry and prosecution were the everyday face of the state in industrial life. The codes substitute a design of single registration for the establishment, a single licence for the contractor operating across states, common returns, and an inspector renamed inspector-cum-facilitator, whose first statutory posture is advisory and whose inspections are to be assigned through a randomised, web-based scheme rather than by local discretion. Alongside the machinery, the penalty philosophy changed direction. The old statutes leaned on imprisonment for a long tail of contraventions, most of them procedural. The codes move the centre of gravity to monetary penalties, raise several fine levels substantially, provide for the compounding of offences that are not punishable with imprisonment alone, and reserve prosecution for the graver and repeated defaults. Decriminalisation of this kind is claimed by the government as ease of doing business and suspected by critics as the removal of the only sanction employers feared. The comparison supports a narrower finding: the sanction that remains is likelier to be collected, because a penalty that an inspector-cum-facilitator can impose and compound is a more credible instrument than a prosecution that took a decade and usually failed, and credibility, in enforcement, is the quality that matters. How far that finding travels depends, once again, on the apparatus that has to operate it.
The inspector compared: the state’s face in the factory
For most establishments, labour law was never a text. It was a visitor. The old corpus maintained separate inspectorates under its several statutes, the factory inspectorate the most professional of them, each armed with powers of entry, inspection, examination and the initiation of prosecution, and the visitor’s discretion, which register to call for, which contravention to notice, which to compound informally by a warning, was the operative law of compliance for all but the largest employers. The codes redraw the visitor. The inspector becomes the inspector-cum-facilitator across the wages, relations and safety families, charged in terms with advising employers and workers on compliance as well as enforcing it, assigned to inspections through a scheme that allocates visits by randomised, web-based selection rather than by the inspector’s own choice of rounds, and directed in several of the codes, for a first contravention of specified kinds, to give the employer an opportunity to comply within a stated period before prosecution follows. The comparison cuts both ways and should be stated in both directions without flinching. In favour of the redesign: the discretion that made the old visit an occasion for negotiation, and sometimes for extraction, is narrowed by allocation the officer does not control and by a statutory first posture of advice. Against it: advice is not inspection, a facilitator carrying targets for facilitation may find violations a distraction, and the workforce’s experience of the old inspectorate, for all its faults, included complaints taken, registers demanded and prosecutions that occasionally landed. What the redesign does not do, and no redesign of nomenclature could, is increase the number of visitors. The ratio of inspectors to establishments was the old system’s binding constraint and remains the new system’s, untouched by anything in the four codes, and a reader who wants one number-free sentence to carry away from the machinery comparison can take this one: the codes changed what the visitor is for, and did not change how rarely the visitor comes.
The penalty philosophy compared in operation
The shift from imprisonment to money deserves a closer look than the slogan of decriminalisation gives it, because the old system’s severity was largely theoretical in a specific way. A prosecution under the old Acts had to be set in motion by a complaint, usually by an inspector, had to be tried in the ordinary criminal queue, and had to prove the contravention to the criminal standard against an employer who could litigate for years. The recorded pattern across the old corpus consisted of prosecutions launched in small numbers relative to the scale of default, convictions in fewer, and fines at levels fixed in statutes whose figures had often stood unrevised for decades, so that the older Acts threatened prison in their text and delivered, in practice, a small fine after a long delay or nothing at all. The codes attack that pattern at its joints. Penalties are restated at higher monetary levels. Composition is offered for the run of offences, converting the contravention into a payment without a trial. The inspector-cum-facilitator’s advisory first posture means the compliant employer encounters guidance while the defaulter encounters a penalty that an administrative process can actually deliver. Imprisonment is not abolished: it survives for the gravest defaults, in the safety code above all where a contravention results in death or serious bodily injury, and for repeat conduct across the codes. The philosophy is legible once stated plainly. The old law reserved its real anger for the paperwork of the formal sector and expressed that anger in a sanction it rarely used. The codes price the paperwork, reserve prison for harm, and rely on the probability of payment rather than the severity of an improbable sentence to do the deterring. A critic can still object that pricing a contravention lets the wealthy employer buy the right to commit it, and the objection has force wherever the penalty is small beside the saving from default. The comparison does not settle that objection; it establishes only that the objection must be measured against an old baseline in which the sanction’s severity existed mainly on paper, which is a baseline the union argument tends to describe as if it had been real.
The floor wage compared: a national minimum in two senses
One comparison inside the wages family deserves separation because it shows the codes legislating by converting practice into law. Under the old regime, the statutory minimum wage was a state and scheduled affair: the 1948 Act’s rates bound only in listed employments, and the only all-India figure was the national floor level minimum wage, a number the Centre announced and revised as guidance from 1996 onwards, which states were exhorted to respect and which no worker could enforce as a statutory entitlement. The Code on Wages writes the floor into the statute. Section 9 obliges the Central Government to fix a floor wage, taking into account the minimum living standards of a worker, permits different floor wages for different geographical areas, and binds the states from below: a state minimum wage may not be fixed lower than the floor. The architecture matters more than the number. The old arrangement distributed the decision across dozens of schedules and notifications and left the floor hortatory; the new one makes coverage universal, makes the floor statutory and leaves the quantum, where politics actually lives, to governments. Critics note correctly that a floor wage set low is a ceiling in disguise for the poorer states whose rates cluster near it, and supporters answer correctly that a statutory floor beneath every worker in every employment is a different legal world from a guideline above some workers in some. Both are describing Section 9. The map marks the Minimum Wages Act’s row expanded, and the floor wage is half of the reason.
The floor also changes the comparison between states, which the old regime conducted without a common measure. State minimum wages under the 1948 Act diverged enormously, reflecting state politics, state prices and the accident of which employments each state had scheduled, so that the same work commanded a statutory rate in one state that was a multiple of the rate across a border, and an employer choosing a location, or a worker choosing a migration, met the divergence as a fact of geography. The codes do not abolish divergence, since states fix their own rates and the Centre may fix different floor wages for different geographical areas, but they fence it: the floor is statutory, the rates above it are the states’ own, and the comparison a worker makes between states is at least a comparison of rates for the same coverage, every employment in every state, rather than of a scheduled patchwork against a different scheduled patchwork. For the migrant worker, whose statute in the safety code also widened, the practical consequence is that the destination state’s minimum is a legal entitlement on arrival rather than a question about whether the destination had listed the job.
The inventory of what did not change
The neutral rows of the map are not uniformly dull, and an inventory of the survivals shows how much of the working law a practitioner carries across the repeal without adjustment. Retrenchment compensation stands at fifteen days’ average pay for every completed year of service, on a qualifying service of not less than one year computed through the two hundred and forty days rule, exactly where Section 25F of the Industrial Disputes Act left it, and layoff compensation and notice periods follow the same pattern of preservation. The requirement of notice before changing conditions of service, the old Section 9A discipline, is carried into the Industrial Relations Code in substance, so an employer altering service conditions still gives the prescribed notice and still faces the bar on change while a dispute on the subject is pending. The unfair labour practices, listed in the old Act’s Fifth Schedule and litigated for decades, are reproduced in the Code with their prohibitions and penalties, so the case law on victimisation and interference with union activity retains its statutory home. The grievance machinery has a line of descent as well: the grievance settlement authority that a 2010 amendment wrote into the old Act becomes the Code’s Grievance Redressal Committee, required in establishments employing twenty or more workers, with worker and employer representation and a duty to complete its proceedings within the prescribed period. Bonus continues on its old architecture of allocable surplus, minimum and maximum rates and eligibility by wage ceiling left to notification. The compensation chapter for employment injury carries the dependants, disablement and commutation structure of the 1923 Act across in recognisable form. The state insurance and provident fund chapters keep their contributory design, their thresholds and their funds. The division of the field between Centre and states through the appropriate government, under which railways, mines, oilfields, major ports and central undertakings answer to the Centre and the rest to the states, is reproduced. The Apprentices Act, the child labour Act and the workplace harassment Act stand outside entirely. Set out in a row, the inventory is the comparison’s quiet half: the codes are a radical reorganisation of the statute book and a conservative revision of the substantive entitlements, and any account that gives only one of those sentences has told only half of the reader’s story.
The states in the comparison
Labour sits in the Concurrent List, and the comparison has a federal layer that a Delhi-centred account misses. The codes did not move the constitutional furniture: Entries 22, 23 and 24 of the Concurrent List still ground both Union and state legislation on trade unions, industrial disputes, social security, employment and welfare of labour, and the codes leave the states holding their own statutes on shops and establishments, which govern the weekly holiday, opening hours and employment conditions of the commercial workforce the factory chapters never reached. State law also wrote part of the codes’ content in advance, as the Rajasthan amendments of 2014 show, and several of the codes’ most contested numbers, three hundred for permission, twenty and forty for factories, fifty for contract labour, had been operating as state law with the President’s assent while the central texts still carried the old figures. For workers in those states the codes partly levelled the rest of the country up, or down, to a settlement already made locally.
The federal layer also governs what happens next, in two senses. The codes are framework statutes whose operative detail is delegated, and the states must frame their own rules for the subjects administered by them; the Central Rules of 8 May 2026 therefore completed only the Centre’s half of the subordinate legislation, and the comparison an establishment actually experiences is with its own state’s rules as and when they settle. And state experimentation did not end at commencement: the state power to amend, the state schemes under the social security code, and the state shops legislation all continue, so the single national comparison this article draws will keep differentiating itself state by state underneath. The map’s twenty-nine rows are national. The law a worker meets is increasingly, as it was under the old Acts, the national text as locally completed.
The continuity question: what happens to the old case law
For the practitioner, the most valuable part of the comparison is neither the verdict nor the tally but the rule for the library. Seventy years of adjudication sit on the words of the repealed statutes: the triple test for industry from Bangalore Water Supply and Village Panchayat Association v A. Rajappa in 1978, the proportionality doctrine built on Section 11A, the compensation jurisprudence on the Employees’ Compensation Act, the gratuity cases, the bonus cases. Repeal does not burn the library, and the codes themselves say so in their savings provisions, but the practitioner’s rule has to be applied provision by provision. Where the successor text reproduces the predecessor in substance, the construction placed on the old words follows them into the code, because Parliament is taken to legislate against the settled meaning of the language it re-enacts. Where the successor text changes the substance, by raising a threshold, widening a definition or dropping a condition, the old construction stops at the point of change, and citing it across the change is an error. The classification exercise is therefore the practitioner’s first task on any code question: is this clause a re-enactment, an amendment in the course of re-enactment, or a new provision wearing old clothes. General Clauses Act savings preserve rights accrued and liabilities incurred under the repealed Acts, and proceedings pending at commencement continue under the old law, which is why the repealed statutes will be litigated for years after their repeal by lawyers who must keep both regimes open on the desk.
The mechanics of the transition repay a paragraph of their own, because they decide live files. Each code carries a repeal and savings section, and the pattern across the four is uniform: the listed statutes are repealed, things done under them are treated as done under the corresponding provisions of the code, registrations, licences and appointments made under the repealed law continue as if made under the code, and rights, obligations and liabilities acquired or incurred under the old law are preserved. Layered over the codes’ own sections is Section 6 of the General Clauses Act 1897, the standard savings rule of Indian statute law, under which a repeal does not affect a right accrued, a liability incurred, or a legal proceeding in respect of them, and such proceedings may be continued as if the repealing Act had not been passed. The practical consequence is a long twilight that the comparison must state honestly: prosecutions for contraventions committed under the Factories Act are tried under the Factories Act, references made under the Industrial Disputes Act are decided under the Industrial Disputes Act, and claims that accrued under the Payment of Wages Act are pursued under its limitation and its forum, for as long as the pre-commencement world takes to work itself out of the registries. An establishment’s compliance history therefore does not reset at commencement, and the adviser comparing regimes for a client with pending exposure is comparing three bodies of law at once: the repealed Act for the past, the code for the present, and the savings provisions that allocate each file between them.
The definition of industry is the worked example the whole profession watched. Section 2(j) of the Industrial Disputes Act, read through the Rajappa triple test, systematic activity, organised cooperation between employer and employee, and the production or distribution of goods and services for human wants other than the merely spiritual, governed the threshold question of the old law for nearly five decades, and the correctness of that reading was referred to a nine-judge bench. The Industrial Relations Code defines industry in Section 2(p) in language that carries the old definition’s structure forward, with stated exclusions. Judgment on the reference was delivered on 20 August 2026: the triple test was held correct for the statute it interpreted, disputes pending under the repealed Act continue to be governed by it, and the Code’s definition falls to be read independently on its own text. The comparison consequence is the one this article’s rule predicts. Because the Code’s words descend from the old words, the enormous margin jurisprudence of the Rajappa era, the hospitals and universities and clubs and research institutes, remains the starting point for reading them, and because the Code’s exclusions are its own, it is only the starting point. Continuity in Indian labour law after the codes is neither the government’s fresh start nor the unions’ bonfire. It is a clause-by-clause inheritance, and the map’s retained and changed columns are, for the working lawyer, the index to it.
The definitions compared, term by term
Definitions are where consolidations quietly legislate, and four of the codes’ definitions repay direct comparison with the words they replaced. The term of art for the protected person in the Industrial Disputes Act was the workman, defined by Section 2(s) through the work done and the exclusions endured: managerial and administrative staff were out, and supervisory staff were out once their wages passed a ceiling that a 2010 amendment fixed at ten thousand rupees a month. The Industrial Relations Code speaks of the worker, keeps the shape of the definition and its exclusions, and raises the supervisory ceiling to eighteen thousand rupees a month, a change that quietly returns a band of lower-paid supervisors to protected status while repricing the boundary for everyone above it. The wage definition has been treated at length in its own section and is the largest of the changes. The employer and establishment definitions move in the direction of breadth: the safety code’s establishment is any place where an industry, trade, business, manufacturing or occupation is carried on and ten or more workers are employed, a general registration hook the old corpus, which defined its units statute by statute, factory here, plantation there, shop nowhere at the Centre, never possessed. The social security code’s categories have likewise been treated: employee in its contributory chapters descends from the old insured person and fund member, while the gig worker, platform worker and unorganised worker are additions with no ancestors. The pattern across the four terms is consistent with the article’s tally. The definitions that govern the organised core were redrawn at their edges, ceilings lifted, names tidied. The definitions that govern the perimeter were written new. Consolidation, as a legislative technique, turns out to mean exactly this: the centre is renumbered, the margin is where the lawmaking happens, and a reader who wants to know what a consolidation did should read its definitions first and its press releases last.
The contrasts in one passage
Before the map states the comparison row by row, its contrasts can be held in a single passage, and an examination answer or a board minute could do worse than to keep them in this order. The old law was organised by statute and the new by subject family. The old law covered the minimum wage by schedule and the new covers it universally, above a statutory floor. The old law defined wages twenty ways and the new defines them once, with exclusions capped at half of remuneration. The old law asked the government’s permission before retrenchment at one hundred workers and the new asks at three hundred. The old law certified standing orders at one hundred and the new at three hundred. The old law required strike notice in public utilities and the new requires it everywhere. The old law left union recognition to voluntary practice and state law and the new creates the negotiating union at fifty-one per cent. The old law routed disputes through the government’s reference and the new lets the disputants apply to the tribunal themselves. The old law licensed factories at ten and twenty and the new licenses them at twenty and forty. The old law regulated contract labour from twenty and the new from fifty, keeping the abolition power. The old law had no words for the gig worker and the new defines the gig worker, the platform worker and the aggregator, with a contribution route for their welfare. The old law barred women from factory evenings and mine depths and the new admits them with consent and conditions. The old law punished default with prison on paper and the new prices it in money, reserving prison for harm and repetition. Twelve contrasts, each of them checkable against a provision, and together they are the whole distance between the two regimes: nothing in the list is a mood, and nothing outside the list, in the codes’ four hundred pages, outweighs what is inside it.
A note on the evidence this comparison uses
A comparison is only as good as its refusal of bad numbers, and this one has declined several that circulate freely in the debate. It has not quoted a figure for the workforce covered by the old law, because the estimates in circulation measure different things, registered factories, insured employees, persons in scheduled employments, and cannot be carried from one definition to another. It has not quoted a figure for the cost of the wages definition to industry or for the benefit of the codes to growth, because such figures are projections by interested parties wearing the dress of findings. It has not resolved the contested statistics of the passage debate, the numbers of workers alleged to be affected by the thresholds, into a single figure, because the honest statement is a range with the disagreement visible. What the comparison has used instead is the class of fact that can be checked against a text: the words of the repealed Acts, the words of the codes, the dates of assent and commencement, the thresholds each instrument carries, and the stated positions of the federations and the chambers, attributed to their holders. Where the two regimes’ own documents conflict with each other, as the record of the nine-judge reference conflicted with older summaries of it, the article has followed the owner articles in this cluster and the delivered judgment rather than the summaries. This discipline narrows what the article can say, and it is the reason the article can say the rest with confidence: a verdict built on twenty-nine checkable successions will survive the discovery that any particular statistic in the surrounding debate was wrong, because the verdict never rested on it.
The twenty-nine to four map with direction of travel
The table states the whole comparison in one place. Substance records whether the code retained the predecessor’s scheme in substance, changed it at identified points, or dropped the standalone provision into the codes’ scheme framework. Direction records the net movement for worker protection: expanded, contracted, mixed where the same succession moves both ways at once, or neutral where the substance crossed over without a material change in protection. The direction markers are the verdict’s evidence, and they are counted in the section that follows.
| Subsumed statute | Absorbed by | Substance | Direction of travel |
|---|---|---|---|
| Payment of Wages Act 1936 | Code on Wages 2019 | Changed: wage ceiling dropped, claim period extended to three years | Expanded |
| Minimum Wages Act 1948 | Code on Wages 2019 | Changed: scheduling gate dropped, universal coverage, floor wage added | Expanded |
| Payment of Bonus Act 1965 | Code on Wages 2019 | Retained: bonus entitlement and rates carried across, ceilings left to notification | Neutral |
| Equal Remuneration Act 1976 | Code on Wages 2019 | Retained: equal pay duty and recruitment discrimination bar restated in the Code’s general provisions | Neutral |
| Trade Unions Act 1926 | Industrial Relations Code 2020 | Changed: registration retained, negotiating union and council machinery new in central law | Expanded |
| Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act 1946 | Industrial Relations Code 2020 | Changed: certification threshold raised from one hundred to three hundred | Contracted |
| Industrial Disputes Act 1947 | Industrial Relations Code 2020 | Changed: permission threshold raised to three hundred, strike notice universal, direct tribunal access and fixed term employment new | Mixed |
| Employees’ Compensation Act 1923 | Code on Social Security 2020 | Retained: no-fault employment injury compensation carried across in substance | Neutral |
| Employees’ State Insurance Act 1948 | Code on Social Security 2020 | Retained: contributory medical and cash benefit scheme carried across, thresholds unchanged | Neutral |
| Employees’ Provident Funds and Miscellaneous Provisions Act 1952 | Code on Social Security 2020 | Retained: fund architecture and twenty-employee threshold carried across, wages definition unified | Neutral |
| Employment Exchanges (Compulsory Notification of Vacancies) Act 1959 | Code on Social Security 2020 | Retained: employment exchanges recast as career centres, notification duty carried across | Neutral |
| Maternity Benefit Act 1961 | Code on Social Security 2020 | Retained: twenty-six weeks’ benefit and dismissal protection carried across in substance | Neutral |
| Payment of Gratuity Act 1972 | Code on Social Security 2020 | Changed: pro-rata gratuity for fixed term employees new | Expanded |
| Cine-Workers Welfare Fund Act 1981 | Code on Social Security 2020 | Dropped: standalone fund statute absorbed into the Code’s welfare scheme framework | Neutral |
| Building and Other Construction Workers’ Welfare Cess Act 1996 | Code on Social Security 2020 | Retained: construction cess carried across in substance | Neutral |
| Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act 2008 | Code on Social Security 2020 | Changed: registration gateway built, gig and platform workers recognised as categories | Expanded |
| Factories Act 1948 | Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 | Changed: factory thresholds doubled to twenty and forty, health check-ups and consent-based night work for women new | Mixed |
| Plantations Labour Act 1951 | Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 | Retained: sector provisions consolidated into the Code’s general and special chapters | Neutral |
| Mines Act 1952 | Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 | Retained: mining safety regime consolidated, substance of duties carried across | Neutral |
| Working Journalists and Other Newspaper Employees (Conditions of Service) and Miscellaneous Provisions Act 1955 | Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 | Retained: working journalists carried into the Code’s special provisions | Neutral |
| Working Journalists (Fixation of Rates of Wages) Act 1958 | Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 | Dropped: standalone wage fixation machinery not reproduced as such | Neutral |
| Motor Transport Workers Act 1961 | Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 | Retained: hours, welfare and leave substance carried across in the Code’s chapters | Neutral |
| Beedi and Cigar Workers (Conditions of Employment) Act 1966 | Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 | Retained: home-based and premises provisions consolidated into the Code | Neutral |
| Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act 1970 | Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 | Changed: applicability threshold raised from twenty to fifty, core activity bar retained | Contracted |
| Sales Promotion Employees (Conditions of Service) Act 1976 | Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 | Retained: category carried into the Code’s general establishment provisions | Neutral |
| Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act 1979 | Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 | Changed: definition widened to directly recruited migrants, allowances retained | Expanded |
| Cine-Workers and Cinema Theatre Workers (Regulation of Employment) Act 1981 | Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 | Retained: sector provisions consolidated into the Code | Neutral |
| Dock Workers (Safety, Health and Welfare) Act 1986 | Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 | Retained: dock safety regime consolidated into the Code’s chapters | Neutral |
| Building and Other Construction Workers (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act 1996 | Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 | Retained: registration and safety duties consolidated, ten-worker threshold unchanged | Neutral |
Count the markers. Of twenty-nine successions, six expand worker protection: the two wages statutes whose coverage gates fell, the trade union statute that acquired recognition machinery, the gratuity statute that acquired the fixed term employee, the unorganised workers’ statute that acquired categories and a gateway, and the migrant workmen statute whose definition widened. Two contract it outright: the standing orders statute and the contract labour statute, both by the raising of the number at which protection begins. Two move in both directions within a single succession: the Industrial Disputes Act, whose permission threshold rose while tribunal access widened, and the Factories Act, whose perimeter shrank while its duties deepened. Two standalone statutes were dropped as separate instruments without a material change in the protection they delivered, and seventeen carried their substance across in neutral form. The tally is the finding: the reform’s centre of gravity is continuity, its expansions cluster on the coverage of workers the old law did not reach, and its contractions cluster on the structural defences of workers the old law reached best. Broader and shallower is not a slogan laid over the evidence. It is what the evidence, counted, says.
The verdict, by reader
For the employer and the adviser, the comparison yields a practical order of business. The compliance consolidation is real but should not be oversold at home: one registration and common returns simplify the calendar, yet the operative obligations are set establishment by establishment through thresholds, and the threshold that governs your workforce is the first question in any advice. An establishment between one hundred and three hundred workers has exited the permission regime and the standing orders certification regime, and should nonetheless price the retained entitlements, retrenchment compensation, the re-skilling contribution and the unified wages definition, which will raise the contribution base for any workforce whose allowances exceed half of total remuneration. Readers preparing the comparison itself for a board or an examination can review the twenty-nine to four map as a slide presentation through the ReportMedic PPT viewer, which is the quickest way to walk an audience through the direction markers row by row.
For the union representative and the worker, the comparison yields a different order of business, and it is not the one the federation posters print. The losses are specific and should be argued specifically: the mid-band permission withdrawal, the standing orders line, the universal strike notice, the contract labour threshold. The gains are also specific, and conceding them costs the argument nothing while buying it credibility: the negotiating union is a statutory asset no central law had ever given, direct tribunal access removes an executive veto the movement complained about for seventy years, and the universal minimum wage and the gig categories are organising territory, millions of workers whom the law names and whom a union may recruit with the statute in its hand. A movement that argues only the contracted rows will lose the workers in the expanded rows, and there are more of them.
For the aspirant, the consolidation is directly examinable and the comparison is the form in which it is examined: not the contents of any single code, which belong to the codes’ own articles, but the shape of the whole, four codes, twenty-nine statutes, the 4, 3, 9, 13 distribution, the Second National Commission’s authorship of the design, the September 2020 passage, the November 2025 commencement, and the verdict discipline of naming which worker a proposition is about. The candidate who can say, of any claimed change, which statute carried it, which code received it and which direction it travelled will answer the questions this subject actually sets.
Where does the general verdict not hold? In three places, and they should be named. It does not hold above the three-hundred line, where the organised worker’s regime after the codes closely resembles the regime before them, so that for the largest establishments the honest verdict is continuity with modernisation. It does not hold in the states that had already moved their own thresholds by amendment under the President’s assent, Rajasthan being the leading example from 2014, because there the codes partly ratified a state-level settlement that preceded them, and the comparison for such a state’s workers is with its own amended old law, not with the unamended central text. And it does not hold for any worker whose entitlement runs through a scheme: for the gig worker, the platform worker and much of the unorganised workforce, the comparison is between an old law that promised little and delivered it through the same weak apparatus, and a code that promises more through an apparatus yet unbuilt, so the verdict for them is suspended on evidence that does not yet exist.
A further qualification belongs to the services economy, where much formal employment growth sits in offices, warehouses, hospitals, hotels and information technology establishments rather than on factory floors. For such establishments the old corpus was already a partial presence: the Factories Act did not govern them, the Industrial Disputes Act governed their disputes through its wide definition of industry, and the working conditions of their employees ran substantially through state shops and establishments legislation, which the codes leave in place. Their comparison is therefore tilted towards the wages and social security families: the universal minimum wage and floor, the unified wage definition on their allowance-heavy salary structures, the payment protections without a ceiling, and the compliance consolidation, with the industrial relations changes relevant chiefly at the point of dispute. A services employer reading the union account of the codes will find little of it recognisable, and a services employee reading the government account will find the wages definition, rather than any threshold, is the provision that reaches the payslip. The deciding factor appears once more, in sector dress: the codes are four instruments, and different sectors live under different subsets of them, so a verdict formed in manufacturing and announced for the whole economy commits the same error as a verdict formed about one category of worker and announced for all.
The enforcement qualification, which decides whether the verdict is real
Every expansion in this article’s tally shares one property: it is coverage on paper, delivered through registration, inspection, adjudication and scheme administration. Every contraction shares the opposite property: it is self-executing. A raised threshold needs no inspector to take effect; the permission simply stops being required on the day the code commences, and the standing orders simply stop being certified. An expanded entitlement needs the whole chain to work: the worker must be registered, the establishment must be found, the contribution must be collected, the claim must be processed by an apparatus that, in the informal sector where the newly covered workers overwhelmingly are, has historically not arrived. The old law’s coverage failure was not principally textual. The Minimum Wages Act was evaded on a vast scale in employments that were scheduled, by workers who were covered, under rates that were fixed, because the inspectorate was thin, the penalties were small and the workforce was afraid. Nothing in the four codes, of itself, thickens that inspectorate, and the renaming of the inspector as a facilitator, whatever its merits for the compliant employer, does not add a single officer to a district. This is the strongest criticism of the reform available, stronger than the union case because it does not depend on disputing the text, and stronger than the industry case acknowledges because it applies to the expansions the industry also claims to support. The redistribution the codes enact, from the organised minority to the unorganised majority, is real as legislation. As fact, it is contingent on administrative capacity that the statute book cannot supply, and the final verdict on the codes will be delivered not by their commentators but by the registration counters and tribunal registries of the next decade. The general position described in this article is legal information and analysis; it is not advice on any individual establishment or dispute, and anyone acting on a threshold or a limitation period should take advice on their own facts, because in this field the numbers decide outcomes and the numbers are establishment-specific.
The argument can nonetheless be settled eventually, and the tests that will settle it are worth naming, because they tell the reader what evidence to watch for rather than which speech to believe. The first test is registration: whether the unorganised, gig and platform workers the social security code names appear in the registration system in numbers bearing some proportion to the workforce everyone agrees exists, because a category that nobody registers under is a definition and nothing more. The second test is the tribunal door: whether direct application after conciliation shortens the life of a dispute in fact, which the disposal record of the Industrial Tribunals under the Code will show against the reference era’s record. The third test is the mid-band establishment itself: whether employment in the hundred-to-three-hundred band grows as the reform’s defenders predicted, on the reasoning that the permission regime was suppressing it, or whether the band’s workers simply experience the thinner regime with no compensating expansion, which employment data read honestly, with the counterfactual admitted, will distinguish. The fourth test is the pay packet: whether the unified wages definition moves the deferred share of formal remuneration upward across the economy, as its arithmetic requires, or whether employers restructure gross pay to neutralise it, which contribution collections will reveal. The fifth test is the states: whether state rules and state schemes complete the framework or leave the codes as a central text with local absences. None of these tests can be passed by assertion. All of them will be answered by records that either exist in five years or conspicuously do not, and a comparison written from the texts can do no more, and should attempt no less, than to hand the reader the tests along with the tally.
The comparison therefore closes where it opened. Asked whether the labour codes are pro-worker or pro-employer, the record of twenty-nine successions answers that the question is malformed: the codes are a transfer, widening the law’s reach to workers it had never named while thinning the armour of the workers it had protected best, with the deepest single uncertainty, enforcement, still outstanding. The deciding factor is which worker you have in mind. Name the worker, and the codes have a verdict. Refuse to name the worker, and the argument can run for another five years without either side being wrong, which is exactly how it ran for the last five.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What actually changed when twenty-nine laws became four labour codes?
Four statutes absorbed twenty-nine: the Code on Wages 2019 took four, the Industrial Relations Code 2020 took three, the Code on Social Security 2020 took nine and the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 took thirteen. In substance, seventeen of the twenty-nine crossed over with their schemes intact in all but name. Six successions expanded protection, led by the minimum wage escaping its schedule of listed employments and the recognition of gig and platform work. Two contracted protection by raising thresholds, two moved both ways at once, and two standalone statutes were dropped into the codes’ scheme framework. The codes commenced together on 21 November 2025.
Q: Are the labour codes pro-worker or pro-employer?
Neither description survives the full comparison, because each is true of a different population. For the unorganised, gig and platform workforce, whom the old statutes barely reached, the codes are an expansion: a universal minimum wage, legal categories for their work, a registration gateway to benefits. For the permanent worker in an establishment between one hundred and three hundred workers, the codes are a contraction: the permission regime for retrenchment and closure and the standing orders certification no longer apply there. The deciding factor is which worker is meant. Counted across all twenty-nine successions, the codes are redistributive, broader in coverage and shallower in depth.
Q: Which worker protections were reduced in the labour codes?
The reductions cluster on the structural protections of the organised workforce. The threshold for prior government permission before layoff, retrenchment or closure rose from one hundred workers to three hundred under the Industrial Relations Code, and the standing orders threshold rose by the same measure. The factory definition’s thresholds doubled, from ten and twenty workers to twenty and forty, and the contract labour regime’s threshold rose from twenty to fifty. The strike notice, required under the old Act only in public utility services, became universal at fourteen days. Individual money entitlements were not reduced: retrenchment compensation, notice pay and closure compensation kept their old measures.
Q: Which rights are new in the labour codes?
The genuinely new rights are mostly rights of categories the old law did not name. Gig workers and platform workers acquired legal definitions and a route to welfare schemes funded partly by aggregator contributions. Every worker in every employment acquired the minimum wage entitlement, freed of the old scheduling list, with a national floor wage beneath state rates. Fixed term employees acquired parity of wages and benefits with permanent workers and pro-rata gratuity. Unions acquired the negotiating union, a statutory bargaining status for a majority union. Workers acquired the right to approach the Industrial Tribunal directly after conciliation fails, and women acquired access to night work with consent and prescribed safeguards.
Q: Do the labour codes make hiring and firing easier?
Hiring became more flexible at the margin and firing became less supervised in one band, and the two halves should not be merged. On hiring, fixed term employment gives a statutory form with parity duties attached, and the compliance consolidation lowers the administrative cost of employing formally. On firing, an individual dismissal still faces tribunal reappraisal, and retrenchment still requires notice and compensation at the old rates. What changed is the state’s prior permission, which establishments between one hundred and three hundred workers no longer need before retrenching or closing. Above three hundred, permission survives. Firing is easier where the permission used to bite, and unchanged where it did not or still does.
Q: Is compliance genuinely simpler under the labour codes?
In design, yes; in a given district, that depends on the rules beneath the codes. The design replaces the old stack of separate registrations, licences and returns with a single registration for the establishment, a single licence for contractors, common returns and an inspector-cum-facilitator whose inspections are assigned through a randomised scheme. One statute book per subject family, with one definition of wages across all four, also removes the old compliance trap of the same word meaning different things in different Acts. The reservation is that the operative detail sits in Central and state rules, the Central Rules arrived on 8 May 2026, and state rules remained incomplete after commencement, so the simpler design is still being assembled underneath the employer.
Q: Which old labour law judgments still apply?
The judgments that construed words the codes re-enacted in substance still apply, because Parliament legislating in the same language takes the settled construction with it. The gratuity, bonus, compensation and provident fund case law largely survives on that basis. Judgments construing provisions the codes changed, a threshold, a widened definition, a dropped condition, stop at the point of change. The leading illustration is the definition of industry: the nine-judge bench held on 20 August 2026 that the Rajappa triple test was correct for the Industrial Disputes Act and governs disputes pending under it, while the Industrial Relations Code’s definition in Section 2(p) falls to be read independently, with the older margin cases as the starting point rather than the answer.
Q: Did any central labour law survive the codes?
Yes. The codes subsumed twenty-nine central statutes, not the whole central corpus. The Apprentices Act 1961, the Child and Adolescent Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act 1986 and the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act 2013 are the leading survivors, continuing outside the codes because their subjects, training, child protection and workplace harassment, were left outside the consolidation’s four families. State labour legislation also survives in its own sphere, including state shops and establishments Acts, and state rules under the repealed central statutes continue so far as they are consistent with the codes until replaced. Survival is therefore the rule outside the twenty-nine, not the exception.
Q: Which workers gained the most from the labour codes?
The workers the old statutes did not see. A delivery rider or app-based driver gained a legal category, a registration gateway and a claim on welfare schemes funded in part by the aggregator, where the old corpus offered only the unschemed framework of the Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act 2008. A worker in an unscheduled trade gained the minimum wage itself, which the old Act withheld until a government listed the employment. A fixed term employee gained parity and pro-rata gratuity. A migrant who travels directly for work, rather than through a contractor, gained the inter-state migrant provisions. The gains are real as entitlements; their conversion into money depends on schemes and registration, which is the reform’s open question.
Q: Which workers lost the most from the labour codes?
The permanent workforce of the mid-sized establishment. A worker in a factory or mine employing between one hundred and three hundred people lost the requirement that the employer obtain government permission before retrenchment or closure, lost the publicly certified standing orders that fixed conditions of service, and works under a universal fourteen-day strike notice that the old law imposed only on public utility services. Workers in premises between the old and new factory thresholds lost the factory chapter’s licensing and welfare apparatus altogether, and contract workers in establishments below fifty lost the contract labour regime’s registration and abolition machinery. Their individual entitlements, compensation, notice and gratuity, survived; what they lost was the structure that policed the employer’s decisions before those decisions were taken.
Q: How did weekly hours and overtime change under the codes?
The weekly ceiling held and the daily ceiling tightened. The Factories Act permitted forty-eight hours a week with a daily limit of nine hours, and overtime beyond that at twice the ordinary wage. The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code sets the day at eight hours within the same forty-eight-hour week, keeps overtime at twice the ordinary rate, and adds a condition the old factory law did not impose in terms: overtime requires the worker’s consent. Leave with wages also continues on the earned pattern of the old law. The change is therefore modest in hours and real in principle, since consent converts overtime from a management prerogative exercised within limits into an engagement the worker must accept.
Q: Which code changed the law the most, and which changed it least?
The Industrial Relations Code changed the law the most, because it holds the thresholds, the strike notice, the negotiating union, fixed term employment and direct tribunal access, the points at which daily industrial life is actually governed. The Code on Wages runs it close through the universal minimum wage and the unified wages definition. The Code on Social Security changed the law the least in its operative chapters, since the provident fund, state insurance, compensation and maternity schemes crossed over substantially intact, and its revolution is confined to the new categories at its edge. The safety code sits between: its consolidation was the largest, at thirteen statutes, while most duties it imposes were already owed under one predecessor or another.
Q: Did the labour codes decriminalise violations of labour law?
Substantially, yes, though not completely. The old statutes attached imprisonment to a long tail of defaults, many of them failures of paperwork: unfiled returns, unmaintained registers, unlicensed premises. The codes shift the centre of enforcement to monetary penalties, raise several fine amounts, and allow offences that are not punishable with imprisonment alone to be compounded on payment, reserving prosecution for graver defaults and repeat conduct. The inspector’s redesign points the same way, towards facilitation first and penalty after. Critics answer that a fine is a price a large employer can pay where a prosecution was a risk it feared. The comparison supports the narrower point that a penalty actually imposed deters more reliably than a prosecution that habitually failed or was never launched.
Q: How did the rules on women working at night change under the codes?
The old factory law prohibited the employment of women in factories except between 6 in the morning and 7 in the evening, and state governments could vary the limits but not into the night hours, a prohibition framed as protection that also excluded women from shifts, overtime earnings and whole occupations. The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code replaces the prohibition with permission: women are entitled to be employed in all establishments and in work of every kind, including before 6 in the morning and after 7 in the evening, with their consent and subject to conditions relating to safety, holidays and working hours that the appropriate government prescribes. Whether the exchange of an absolute bar for a consent regime protects women better is contested; that it widens their legal access to employment is not.
Q: Which change do trade unions criticise most, and which do employers welcome most?
The unions’ sharpest criticism falls on the Industrial Relations Code’s thresholds and strike rules: the rise of the permission and standing orders lines to three hundred, and the fourteen-day strike notice extended to every industrial establishment, which the federations describe as the substance of a hire-and-fire charter. Their criticism of passage, that three codes were enacted in September 2020 in a House the opposition was boycotting, runs alongside it. Employers’ warmest welcome is for the machinery rather than the thresholds: single registration, a single licence, common returns and the inspector-cum-facilitator, followed by the unified wages definition’s predictability, even though that definition raises contribution costs. Each side’s favourite point confirms the article’s premise that the debate describes different chapters of the same books.
Q: How can a practitioner use the twenty-nine to four map?
As a classification index before anything else. The map’s substance column tells the practitioner, for any provision in issue, whether the code re-enacted the predecessor, changed it or dropped it, and that classification decides the authority question: constructions of re-enacted language carry forward, constructions of changed language stop at the change, and dropped provisions leave only their savings and accrued rights behind. The direction column then frames the advice, because a client in the contracted rows, the mid-band establishment or the sub-fifty contractor arrangement, faces a different regime from one in the retained rows. Used this way the map is a working tool rather than a summary: it tells the lawyer which library to open, the old reports or the new text, before the argument begins.
Q: What does enforcement capacity have to do with whether the codes help workers?
Almost everything, because the codes’ expansions and contractions work asymmetrically. A contraction such as a raised threshold executes itself: the permission stops being required the day the code commences, and no official has to act. An expansion has to be delivered: the gig worker must be registered, the aggregator’s contribution collected, the scheme framed and funded, the minimum wage inspected in establishments the inspectorate has never visited. The old law’s deepest failure was not its text but its reach into the informal sector, and the codes do not by themselves add inspectors, tribunals or registration counters. The redistribution the codes promise, from the organised minority to the unorganised majority, is therefore genuine as legislation and contingent as fact.
Q: How did the codes change the position of an employer planning a closure?
The employer’s route depends entirely on headcount. In an industrial establishment with three hundred or more workers, the old discipline survives in substance: prior permission of the appropriate government, applied for ninety days in advance, with closure compensation at fifteen days’ average pay for every completed year of service. Between one hundred and three hundred workers, where the Industrial Disputes Act also required permission, the permission requirement is gone, and the employer proceeds on notice and compensation, answering afterwards to the tribunal rather than beforehand to the government. Below one hundred the position is broadly what it was. The comparison that matters to the planner is therefore not old law against new in the abstract but the establishment’s own number against the new line.
Q: Who counts as a worker under the codes compared with the old Acts?
The codes widened the cast while tidying the names. The old statutes spoke of the workman, the employee, the insured person and the employed person, each defined for its own Act, and a person’s protection could fail on a definition before it reached a right. The codes standardise within each family and then add categories the old law lacked: the gig worker and platform worker in the social security code, the fixed term employee in the industrial relations code, the directly recruited inter-state migrant in the safety code. The industrial relations definition of worker retains the old exclusions for managerial and higher-paid supervisory staff, with the supervisory wage ceiling raised to eighteen thousand rupees a month, so the core organised category is recognisably continuous while the perimeter has moved outward on every side.
Q: Why did the codes change less in Rajasthan than in other states?
Because Rajasthan had already enacted much of the threshold reform on its own. Acting through state amendments that received the President’s assent in 2014, Rajasthan raised the Industrial Disputes Act’s permission threshold to three hundred, lifted the factory thresholds to twenty and forty, and raised the contract labour threshold, years before the codes adopted near-identical figures nationally. For a Rajasthani factory worker, the codes therefore ratified a settlement already in force rather than imposing a new one, and the honest comparison for that worker is with the amended state text, not with the unamended central Act of 1947. The episode also explains where several of the codes’ numbers came from: the state experiment supplied the template the Centre generalised.