Speaking to European investors in the Netherlands this week, Union minister Piyush Goyal offered what he saw as India’s selling point. “Nobody in India will tell you it’s 5 o’clock,” he said. “And certainly, no Indian will ever remind you it’s the weekend.”Astonishingly, he actually meant it as praise. The irony never hit him that instead of marketing the skills or talent of Indian workers, he was glorifying their silence towards misery and exploitation as national character. Their drudgery was offered up as a national identity.Those words should have sparked consternation and indignation across the country. They were not the musings of an industrialist at a dinner party. They were spoken by a senior minister, on foreign soil, in the name of the mighty Indian state. And that state, constitutionally speaking, is the arbiter between capital and labour. It is the custodian of labour laws. It is meant to be the last shelter of a worker who has nothing to sell but his time. Here was its minister advertising that the Indian workers are on the offering for similar exploitation by the global corporates too!Yet the outrage was muted. A few unions issued statements, and the news cycle moved on. The silence is more troubling than the remark. It tells us that labour laws have been weakened so steadily, and for so long, that the state no longer even pretends to stand with the worker. Rather, it sees virtues in exploitation and drudgery.Even the state is an exploiter nowThe state does not merely look away when private employers cut corners. It does the same when it is itself the client.Take the airports. Security there was once the job of the Central Industrial Security Force. Increasingly, CISF personnel are being replaced by contractual staff hired through agencies. Some guards who now check your bag at the gate may have no social security, no secure job, no regular increments and no yearly allowances. After the contractor takes their cut, the cash they take home ranges between Rs 8,000 and Rs 15,000 a month. They guard one of the most sensitive installations in the country, yet they cannot be sure of their job.The story repeats across the public sector. Nearly five lakh guest and contract teachers teach in our government schools. Most earn between Rs 10,000 and Rs 25,000 a month, without provident fund, health cover or paid leave, and can be dismissed without notice.In government hospitals, contract nurses, ward attendants and orderlies do the work of permanent staff for a fraction of the pay. Office support services, almost everywhere, have been handed to agencies wholesale.Municipal services may be the cruellest example. A survey of contract sanitation workers in Gujarat’s cities found daily wages of Rs 200 to Rs 333, against a legal minimum of Rs 452. Contractors held the bank passbooks and ATM cards of four in ten workers and withdrew their wages themselves. More than half received no social security at all.Earlier, PSU would set benchmarks for salaries, that the private sector was forced to follow. Now, with decline of PSUs, there is no pressure on the market for increasing the salaries, which are stagnant for last 12 years. All the instruments for negotiations with companies are now blunt.Also read: ‘Dock Workers Do Not Work For War’ Could Show How to Fight Both Genocide and CapitalismUnions without a voiceWho will speak for them? Trade unions have been weakened to a point where their voice is feeble. They are no longer at the centre of agitational politics, nor of electoral politics.There was a time when George Fernandes could bring the railways to a halt, when Datta Samant could shut down the mills of Bombay, when Indrajit Gupta and Gurudas Dasgupta rose in parliament to hold the government to account for every lost job. Labour was the nursery of politics. Today there are hardly any trade union leaders of repute in Parliament or in the assemblies.The Indian Labour Conference, the country’s apex tripartite forum where government, employers and unions sat at one table, has not met since 2015. A decade of silence says everything about labour’s place in the national conversation.Exploitation dressed as patriotismNow a debate is being manufactured to normalise longer hours. It began with certain corporate leaders calling for 70 and 90 hour weeks as a duty to the nation. It has grown into a argument for a working day of 12 to 14 hours. Exploitation is now dressed up in the garb of patriotism. To ask for rest is made to sound unpatriotic.Into this vacuum, labour law has been chipped away bit by bit. The four Labour Codes, enforced from November 2025, made it easier to retrench workers and harder to strike. They normalised fixed term employment. A nationwide strike by central trade unions did little to slow them down.The law has followed the rhetoric. The Codes leave daily hours to governments and permit overtime with the worker’s consent. Gujarat, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh now allow 12 hour days in factories. Several states have nearly doubled the overtime ceiling, from 75 hours a quarter to 144. On paper, all of this is voluntary. In practice, consent means little to a worker whose contract can end with a phone call. The Labour Codes have ended up legitimising forced overtime in the name of volunteering. The 12 hour shift is fast becoming the norm.Why the unions are losingThe weakness of the unions is not only a failure of will. They face challenges no earlier generation of labour leaders confronted.The first is technology. Every earlier industrial revolution enhanced human skills. Steam did. Electricity did. Digital did. The fourth is different. For the first time, artificial intelligence surpasses our capacity to process knowledge and makes most human skills redundant. The office boss in the AI will be an algorithm. Possibilities of human empathy will increasingly disappear with the rise of AI driven, non-human, bot- managers, and there will be no one across the table to negotiate with.The second is that contract work is no longer the exception. Data from the Annual Survey of Industries show that 42 percent of workers in organised manufacturing are now on contract, the highest share in over 25 years. A vast workforce is neither blue collar nor white collar in any real sense. It stretches from the IT professional to the gig worker. Working hours extend into bedrooms, on the laptops. Social security is thin or absent. Such workers are scattered and hard to organise.Also read: India’s Labour Codes Need a Living WageThe third is political. Liberal politics surrendered to the theory that markets would look after workers, and abandoned them. The far right walked into that space. It did not offer wages. It did not offer rights. It offered an enemy: the migrant, the minority, the foreigner.The fourth is social media, which builds silos of information and feeds rumour and imaginary enemies, keeping out the alternative views that once sharpened workers’ understanding of their own condition.The fifth is the rise of big tech companies that are reshaping the very idea of the nation state, and with it restricting the State’s capacity to regulate the employer.The promise of freedomNone of this would have seemed possible to those who fought for India’s freedom. The independence movement did not seek only to replace a British ruler with an Indian one. It sought a life with dignity for every Indian. In 1931, the Congress at Karachi resolved that free India would secure a living wage, limited hours of labour and the right to form unions. In 1942, B.R. Ambedkar, as Labour Member, brought the working day down from 12 hours to eight.The Constitution carried that promise onto its very first page. The Preamble pledges justice, social, economic and political. It pledges fraternity, assuring the dignity of the individual. The Directive Principles ask the State to secure humane conditions of work and a living wage with full enjoyment of leisure.Leisure is in the Constitution. More than 80 years later, the 12 hour day that Ambedkar abolished is returning, and a minister boasts that Indians do not ask for rest. That edifice of dignity is being dismantled, brick by brick. The trade unions, once its guardians, seem helpless bystanders.It is, in truth, the measure of how far we have strayed from the promise of freedom. A nation that is proud its workers never ask for rest has forgotten why it fought to be free.Gurdeep Singh Sappal is Permanent Invitee, Congress Working Committee.