The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government has plans to bring into effect new labour laws across the country from April 1.
"We intend to implement the new labour codes from April 1. We have begun the process of giving shape to the rules that are to be framed under the codes and we are confident of finalising them in last quarter of this fiscal year," Union Labour and Employment Secretary Apurva Chandra said here on Wednesday.
Industries will have to file single return to the authorities under the new labour law regime. Further, the number of minimum wages that industries have to comply with are set to reduce to 12 from 540 under central labour laws and to 180-200 under the state laws, compared to over 9,000 at present.
However, an important task would be that the States also frame their rules by March, 2021. The new codes give powers to the State governments to make rules as they will have jurisdiction over most of the establishments.
On its part, the Central government, which has jurisdiction over sectors such as coal, mining, banking, civil aviation, will make public the draft rules under three labour codes by November this year. The rules will be open for public comments for a period of 45 days.
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The labour secretary has written to the chief secretaries of all the States earlier this week asking them to frame the rules soon so that the new Codes can be implemented timely.
Though the Codes enables the Central government to implement the new labour laws in phases, the government is looking for executing them at one go.
Twenty-nine labour laws have been converted into four codes.
The three codes on – industrial relations, social security and, occupational safety, health and working conditions will subsume 25 labour laws. The codes got approval of the Parliament during the monsoon session when the Opposition organised a boycott to oppose the farm Bills.
The fourth one, code on wages, which combined four labour laws became a law in August 2019. However, the government is yet to make the law effective as it plans to introduce all the four laws together.
Apart from rationalising various provisions of the law and unifying workplace-related definitions, the government has brought about key changes to the labour laws. These include: easier retrenchment norms, flexibility in hiring contract workers, equal social security benefits for fixed-term and permanent staff, social security cover for gig and migrant workers and relaxation to smaller factories from labour laws.
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