Labour law, also known as employment law, is a body of
laws that regulates the relationship between employers, em-
ployees, and trade unions. It covers various aspects like
working conditions, wages, social security, and industrial re-
lations. In India, labour law encompasses a wide range of
laws, both at the federal and state levels, aiming to protect
workers' rights and interests.
Key Aspects of Labour Law in India:
• Working Conditions:
Laws like the Factories Act and the Shops and Establishments
Act regulate aspects like working hours, breaks, leaves, and
safety standards.
• Wage and Remuneration:
The Minimum Wages Act ensures a minimum wage for work-
ers, while the Payment of Wages Act mandates timely pay-
ment.
• Social Security:
Laws like the Employees' State Insurance Act and the Employ-
ees' Provident Fund and Miscellaneous Provisions Act provide
social security benefits.
• Industrial Relations:
The Industrial Disputes Act addresses disputes between em-
ployers and employees, and the Trade Union Act protects
workers' rights to form unions.
• Other Important Laws:
The Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, the Build-
ing and Other Construction Workers Act, and the Equal Remu-
neration Act are also significant.
Recent Developments:
• New Labour Codes:
The Indian government has introduced four new labour codes
(Code on Wages, Industrial Relations Code, Code on Social
Security, and the Occupational Safety, Health and Working
Conditions Code) to consolidate and streamline existing laws.
• Codification of Labour Laws:
The new codes aim to simplify and rationalize the existing
labour laws, reducing the number of laws and streamlining the
regulatory framework.
• Shram Suvidha Portal:
This online portal provides a platform for registration and li-
censing under various labour laws.
Note: While the new Labour Codes have been enacted,
their implementation is still ongoing, and some states are
yet to adopt
labour law, the varied body of law applied to such
matters as employment, remuneration, conditions
of work, trade unions, and industrial relations. In its
most comprehensive sense, the term includes social
security and disability insurance as well. Unlike the
laws of contract, tort, or property, the elements of
labour law are somewhat less homogeneous than
the rules governing a particular legal relationship.
In addition to the individual contractual relation-
ships growing out of the traditional employment sit-
uation, labour law deals with the statutory require-
ments and collective relationships that are increas-
ingly important in mass-production societies, the le-
gal relationships between organized economic inter-
ests and the state, and the various rights and obli-
gations related to some types of social services.
Labour law has won recognition as a distinctive
branch of the law within the academic legal commu-
nity, but the extent to which it is recognized as a
separate branch of legal practice varies widely de-
pending partly on the extent to which there is
a labour code or other distinctive body of labour
legislation in the country concerned, partly on the
extent to which there are separate labour courts or
tribunals, and partly on the extent to which an influ-
ential group within the legal profession practice
specifically as labour lawyers.
In the early phases of development the scope of
labour law is often limited to the most developed
and important industries, to undertakings above a
certain size, and to wage earners; as a general rule,
these limitations are gradually eliminated and the
scope of the law extended to include handicrafts, ru-
ral industries and agriculture, small undertakings,
office workers, and, in some countries, public em-
ployees. Thus, a body of law originally intended for
the protection of manual workers in industrial en-
terprises is gradually transformed into a broader
body of legal principles and standards, which have
basically two functions: the protection of the worker
as the weaker party in the employment relationship,
and the regulation of the relations between orga-
nized interest groups (industrial relations).
Factors in labour law
The general tendency in the modern development of
labour law has been the strengthening of statu-
tory requirements and collective contractual rela-
tions at the expense of rights and obligations cre-
ated by individual employment relationships. How
important these latter remain depends, of course,
on the degree of personal freedom in the given soci-
ety as well as the autonomy of both employer and
worker allowed by the actual operation of the econ-
omy. In such matters as hours of work, health and
safety conditions, or industrial relations, the statu-
tory or collective elements may define most of the
substance of the rights and obligations of the indi-
vidual worker, while with respect to such things as
the duration of his appointment, his level and extent
of responsibility, or his place in the scale of remu-
neration, these elements may provide what is essen-
tially a framework for individual agreement.
Historical development of labour
law
The origins of labour law can be traced back to the
remote past and the most varied parts of the world.
While European writers often attach importance to
the guilds and apprenticeship systems of the me-
dieval world, some Asian scholars have identified
labour standards as far back as the Babylo-
nian Code of Hammurabi (18th century BCE) and the
rules for labour-management relations in
the Hindu Laws of Manu (Manu-smriti; c. 100 CE);
Latin American authors point to the Laws of the In-
dies promulgated by Spain in the 17th century for
its New World territories. None of these can be re-
garded as more than anticipations, with only limited
influence on subsequent developments. Labour law
as it is known today is essentially the child of suc-
cessive industrial revolutions from the 18th century
onward. It became necessary when customary re-
straints and the intimacy of employment relation-
ships in small communities ceased to provide ade-
quate protection against the abuses incidental to
new forms of mining and manufacture on a rapidly
increasing scale at precisely the time when the
18th-century Enlightenment, the French Revolution,
and the political forces that they set in motion were
creating the elements of the modern social con-
science. It developed rather slowly, chiefly in the
more industrialized countries of western Europe,
during the 19th century and attained its present im-
portance, relative maturity, and worldwide accep-
tance only during the 20th century.
The first landmark of modern labour law was
the British Health and Morals of Apprentices Act of
1802, sponsored by the elder Sir Robert Peel. Simi-
lar legislation for the protection of the young was
adopted in Zürich in 1815 and in France in 1841. By
1848 the first legal limitation of the working
hours of adults was adopted by the Landsgemeinde
(citizens’ assembly) of the Swiss canton of Glarus.
Sickness insurance and workers’ compensa-
tion were pioneered by Germany in 1883 and 1884,
and compulsory arbitration in industrial disputes
was introduced in New Zealand in the 1890s. The
progress of labour legislation outside western Eu-
rope, Australia, and New Zealand was slow until af-
ter World War I. The more-industrialized states of
the United States began to enact such legislation to-
ward the end of the 19th century, but the bulk of
the present labour legislation of the United States
was not adopted until after the Great Depression of
the 1930s. There was virtually no labour legislation
in Russia prior to the October Revolution of 1917.
In India children between the ages of 7 and 12 were
limited to nine hours of work per day in 1881 and
adult males in textile mills to 10 hours per day in
1911, but the first major advance was the amend-
ment of the Factory Act in 1922 to give effect to
conventions adopted at the first session of the Inter-
national Labour Conference at Washington, D.C., in
1919. In Japan rudimentary regulations on work in
mines were introduced in 1890, but a proposed fac-
tory act was controversial for 30 years before it was
adopted in 1911, and the decisive step was the revi-
sion of this act in 1923 to give effect to the Wash-
ington Convention on hours of work in industry.
Labour legislation in Latin America began in Ar-
gentina in the early years of the century and re-
ceived a powerful impetus from the Mexican Revo-
lution, which ended in 1917, but, as in North Amer-
ica, the trend became general only with the impact
of the Great Depression. In Africa the progress of
labour legislation became significant only from the
1940s onward.
The legal recognition of the right of associa-
tion for trade union purposes has a distinctive his-
tory. There is no other aspect of labour law in which
successive phases of progress and regression have
been more decisively influenced by political changes
and considerations. The legal prohibition of such as-
sociation was repealed in the United Kingdom in
1824 and in France in 1884; there have been
many subsequent changes in the law and may well
be further changes, but these have related to mat-
ters of detail rather than to fundamental principles.
In the United States freedom of association for
trade union purposes remained precarious and sub-
ject to the unpredictable scope of the labour injunc-
tion, by means of which the courts helped restrain
trade union activity until the 1930s. The break-
through for trade unionism and collective bargain-
ing was achieved by the National Labor Relations
Act (the Wagner Act) of 1935. In many other coun-
tries the record of progress and regression with re-
spect to freedom of association falls into clearly dis-
tinguished periods separated by decisive political
changes. This has certainly been the case with Ger-
many, Italy, Spain, Japan, and much of eastern Eu-
rope; there have been many illustrations of it, and
there may well be more in the developing world.
