On Wednesday alone, Rajya Sabha passed three key labour reform bills on industrial relations, social security and occupational safety by voice votes; in total, Upper House had to hold 18 sittings but only 10 could be held due to fear of COVID-19 spread in Parliament

Rajya Sabha on Wednesday passed three key labour code reform bills even as protests by opposition parties on farm bills and suspension of eight MPs continued

Central Trade Union Organisations have programmes conducted all over India to protest codification of labour laws and other changes

Companies with not less than 300 workers will soon be allowed to hire and fire workers without seeking prior nod from the government

The Monsoon session in Parliament generally takes place around mid-July but this year it got delayed in the wake of rising coronavirus cases in the country

The organisation welcomed the government decision to fix the duration of working time to 8 hours a day instead of the 9 hours prescribed in the current Minimum Wages Act and the previous draft of the Wage Code

Latest job loss survey and national accounts statistics point to the need for strengthening PDS supply and cash transfers to reach more people, assisting self-employed/micro-enterprises, additional allocation for MGNREGS and a job scheme for urban areas

Easier and simpler labour laws, and flexibility to manage employees, can work wonders for businesses

While the RSS-affiliated BMS is satisfied with the Code for accepting many of its demands, the Left-affiliated CITU sees a paradigm shift with the power to formulate substantive provisions for social security being handed over to executive - thus, removing democratic and participatory content in legislations

Trade unions have raised several serious objections in the bill: from discretionary power of the executive to raising the threshold for lay-offs to making it virtually impossible to strike legally, restricting outsiders in the unorganised sector and extending fix term employment to the entire industry

The bill provides for vesting of powers with the government officers for adjudication of disputes involving penalty as fines thereby lessening the burden on tribunal

The central government is in the process of implementing Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions (OSH) Code, and Code on Wages

The first session of the 17th Lok Sabha elections had 37 sittings of total 280 hours, in which 36 bills were passed while 33 were introduced in the Lower House

According to the National Statistical Office's (NSO) Periodic Labour Force Survey 2017-18, a majority of workers in the country worked more than 48 hours in a week, which is more than the International Labour Organisation's prescribed time-limit.

In order to get a complete count of all economic units in the country, the government plans to kick off the mammoth task of conducting the Seventh Economic Census from Monday, July 29.

The government needs to carry out extensive consultations with all stakeholders and recast the entire code to ensure it is actually designed to achieve what it claims to do

For the new labour codes to be effective, definitions of worker, wage, organised-unorganised sector etc. need to be uniform and simple to enable data collection and applicability

Irrespective of their ideological persuasions, trade unions strongly contest several reform proposals that the industry thinks are progressive but will the government bite the bullet this time?

This is the second time BMS is opposing the policy moves of the re-elected NDA government. Last week, the organisation had opposed the government's plans to speed up the enactment of Labour Codes.