23/11/2025
Labour Codes Implementation: Codifying Modern Slavery For “Ease of Business.”
The Union Government on November 21 notified the implementation of the four Labour Codes, despite strong opposition from workers and the toiling masses. The four Labour Codes - the Code on Wages, 2019; the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020; the Social Security Code, 2020; and the Industrial Relations Code, 2020 - though presented in the name of “labour reform,” are essentially tools that codify modern slavery and exploitation for the benefit and profiteering of big businesses and corporate interests, all under the banner of “Ease of Doing Business.”
These Codes drastically dilute industrial safety compliance, wage and welfare requirements, and effectively dismantle hard-earned rights of workers, including the right to form associations and take collective action. The thresholds for implementing safety measures and welfare provisions have been raised in favour of business, pushing a large section of the working class into conditions resembling bo***ge and paving the way for further informalisation and contractualisation of labour. The objective and purpose of the four Labour Codes are not reforms, but to sn**ch away the rights and safety of workers in the name of facilitating corporate profiteering.
The Labour Codes, along with the recent draft Shram Shakti Niti 2025, reflect the regressive and anti-labour character of the Modi regime, which treats workers and the toiling masses of this country as expendable and attempts to push them into conditions of servitude.
Communist Party of India -Marxist Leninist- Liberation CPIML calls for the immediate withdrawal of these arbitrary and anti-people Labour Codes, and demands the convening of the Indian Labour Conference (ILC), which has been kept in abeyance by the Modi regime for the past ten years.
We call upon the people to extend their support and join the Day of Resistance and Defiance on 26 November 2025, called by the Joint Platform of Central Trade Unions and independent industrial federations, along with peasants led by the Samyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM), in opposition to the implementation of the Labour Codes and to demand the withdrawal of the draft Shram Shakti Niti 2025.