The Principal Labour Court, Chennai recently awarded reinstatement with full backwages to Mr. Thirumalai Selvan, an employee of TCS, and in a seven-year legal battle. The case must be seen as an important victory for this section of workers.
(inputs from Bibek Das)
The mass-scale exploitation of tea plantation workers in Assam and across the country has been well documented over the years. Recently, certain orders of the Hon’ble Supreme Court and the One Member Committee constituted by the Court to look into the issue of pending dues of these workers, highlights even further the abysmal situation the workers are forced to survive in, and the wholescale violation of their statutory and constitutional rights.
Now, Sir, it has been said that there is no such thing as the right to strike. My reply is that this statement can come from a man who really does not understand what a strike is. If members are prepared to accept my meaning of the word “strike” as being nothing more than a breach of contract, then I submit that a strike is simply another name for the right to freedom ; it is nothing else than the right to the freedom of one’s services on any terms that one wants to obtain.
Authorities as Agents and Perpetrators of Bonded Labour!
Over the last several years, there has been a steep decline in the security of tenure of working journalists in India. The large number of journalists getting retrenched by major newspaper managements have been widely reported. , In an important report on attacks on journalists during 2014-19, it was noticed that “With the increasing corporatisation of the media, journalists on the frontlines of newsgathering are dogged by acute and increasing precarity, i.e. lack of job-security and increasing job losses.
The stated objective of the Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act, 1946, was two-fold – firstly, it was thought to be expedient to require employers in industrial establishments to define with sufficient precision the conditions of employment under them and secondly, that the said conditions be made known to workmen employed by them.
In this series, various changes sought to be brought in by the proposed labour codes are being discussed. It comes as no surprise that the Codes, brought in clearly show the corporate nature of the state. While issues such as the overbroad exemptions, the excessive delegation and the definitional changes have been discussed previously, this note considers the changing face of the grievance redressal machinery in the Industrial Relations (IR) Code.
“It is true that where the State refrains from intervention what remains is liberty. But this does not dispel of the matter. One more question remains to be answered. To whom and for whom is this liberty? Obviously, this liberty is liberty to the landlords to increase rents, for capitalists to increase hours of work and reduce rate of wages… In other words what is called liberty from the control of the State is another name for the dictatorship of the private employer.”
-Dr B.R. Ambedkar
[Some points of AICCTU objections to the Draft Industrial Relations (Jharkhand) Rules, 2021]
These Rules unfortunately commit the blunder of pushing ease of business at the expense of the working class. It is drafter shoddily and hastily, resulting in a number of safeguards being done away with. AICCTU seeks for a total overhaul and revamp of the rules in light of the fact that labour legislation is intended to be welfare legislation that protects the rights of the working class and not to defeat their rights.