Recent protests across Noida, Manesar, Gurugram, and Panipat – now extending into adjoining industrial clusters – might appear episodic but carry the weight of the longstanding simmering anger of the working class. The scale and spread of the protests across different sectors, with their convergence of demands, point to a structural crisis within India’s labour regime.At the centre of these mobilisations is a workforce that is increasingly young and significantly composed of women workers. Their demands are not novel in legal terms; rather, they are drawn directly from existing statutory and constitutional guarantees. These include the enforcement of higher minimum wages, the eight-hour working day, and overtime compensation and transparency in the transactions of their salaries. Each of these demands is already embedded within India’s statutory labour law framework, including the Code on Wages, 2019, the Minimum Wages Act, 1948, and the Factories Act, 1948. Yet their continued articulation as demands on the street rather than as entitlements secured through institutional mechanisms reveals a critical disjuncture between law on paper and law in practice.What workers are effectively placing before the state, then, is a more fundamental question about ways in which the labour law continues to operate meaningfully. If the rights currently being asserted are already embedded within statutory and constitutional frameworks, yet remain unrealised in practice, the relevance of labour law itself is called into question. Moreover, when the law fails to secure these entitlements and is perceived, at times, to be weaponised against workers, the question arises as to what institutional recourse remains available to them. These tensions become evident in the two core issues raised by the workers’ protests, which this article highlights.Wage disparities and the cost-of-living in NCRThe National Capital Region (NCR) functions, in practice, as a deeply integrated labour market where workers routinely move between Delhi, Noida, Gurugram, Manesar, and surrounding industrial zones for employment. Consumption patterns – rent, food, transport, fuel – remain broadly similar across these jurisdictions. Yet, minimum wages continue to be determined on fragmented grounds across states. Following the April 2026 revisions owing to the protests, an unskilled worker in Noida earns approximately Rs 13,690 per month, while in Gurugram the figure stands around Rs 15,200. In contrast, Delhi’s notified minimum wage exceeds Rs. 18,400 for unskilled workers, with higher rates for skilled categories.Although these figures reflect recent upward revisions – Noida increasing wages from about Rs 11,313 to Rs 13,690 and Haryana from roughly Rs 11,274 to Rs 15,220 – the adjustments remain marginal when measured against the actual rise in the cost of living across the region.To understand why this gap persists, it is necessary to return to the legal and institutional framework governing minimum wages. Under the Code on Wages, 2019, minimum wages are to be composed of a basic wage and a variable dearness allowance, periodically revised to reflect inflation. In principle, this mechanism is designed to ensure that wages track changes in the cost of living. In practice, however, revisions in states such as Uttar Pradesh and Haryana have not consistently kept pace with increases in expenditure on rent, food, transport, and fuel. As a result, real wages have steadily eroded even when nominal wages have been revised upward.This gap becomes more pronounced when viewed across the NCR as a single economic space. Workers routinely move across Delhi, Noida, and Gurugram for employment, and the structure of consumption – housing, food, transport costs – remains broadly similar across these jurisdictions. Despite this, wage determination continues to rely on state-wide averages, which often include lower-cost rural data. This methodological choice has the effect of statistically lowering the benchmark wage in high-cost industrial and urban clusters such as Noida and Gurugram.The consequence is a set of wage levels that diverge sharply within the same labour market without a corresponding difference in cost of living. A worker performing identical tasks in Delhi and Noida may receive nearly Rs. 5,000-Rs. 6,000 less per month, despite facing comparable prices for essential goods and services. This raises a serious question of arbitrariness under Article 14 of the Constitution, since the distinction is not grounded in any demonstrable difference in economic conditions.Further, Section 9 of the Code on Wages, 2019 provides for the fixation of a national floor wage by the Union government, intended to operate as a minimum baseline below which state-level minimum wages cannot be set. However, because this floor operates only as a lower limit and is set at a relatively modest level, it does not meaningfully harmonise wage levels across states. Instead, it allows variations to persist even within an integrated labour market like the NCR.Consider this example: If the national floor wage for a worker is Rs X per day, neither Delhi nor Uttar Pradesh can go below it. But Delhi may fix its minimum wage at Rs X + 100, while Uttar Pradesh keeps it at Rs X + 50. As a result, a worker in Okhla (Delhi) and another in Noida – just a few kilometres apart and often doing identical work – may still earn different wages. This shows how the floor wage prevents wages from falling below a baseline but does not meaningfully reduce wage disparities within the same labour market.The Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on minimum wages provides an important constitutional benchmark for evaluating this framework. In Workmen v. Management of Reptakos Brett & Co. (1992), the Court held that minimum wages are not confined to bare subsistence but must account for a worker’s basic social needs, including housing, healthcare, education, and a measure of social participation. This interpretation, read alongside Article 43 and Article 21, establishes that minimum wages must be ‘need-based’ and must reflect a dignified standard of living rather than mere survival.Measured against this standard, the wage structure in the NCR reveals a significant deficit. Workers in Noida and Gurugram face similar costs for rent, food, LPG, clothing, and transport as workers in Delhi, yet receive substantially lower statutory minimum wages. The use of diluted averages that incorporate rural consumption patterns further weakens the link between wage fixation and actual urban expenditure. The result is not merely a variation in policy but a structural underestimation of the cost of living in industrial urban centres.The recent labour unrest in April 2026 and Haryana’s subsequent emergency revision of approximately 35% – raising wages to around Rs 15,220 – effectively acknowledges that prior wage levels were misaligned with economic realities. However, the continued lag in Noida, with wages remaining at approximately Rs 13,690, sustains a situation of downward divergence rather than convergence across the region.Within this context, the persistence of large inter-state wage gaps in a de facto single labour market raises serious concerns of indirect discrimination and arbitrariness. If workers face broadly identical living costs and perform identical work, the justification for materially different statutory minimum wages becomes difficult to sustain.It is in this backdrop that the demand for a revised minimum wage of approximately Rs. 23,500 emerges from the Trade Unions. This figure is not arbitrary; rather, it is derived from applying the recognised components of minimum wage calculation – basic nutritional requirements (including the 2,700-calorie standard), housing and clothing norms, transport costs, and the 25% adjustment for education, healthcare, and social contingencies recognised by the Supreme Court in Reptakos Brett. When aligned with actual NCR market prices rather than averaged rural data, these components collectively indicate a significantly higher baseline than current notified wages.Contractualisation and the institutionalisation of economic precarityThe worker protests cutting across garments, refinery, automobiles industries, along with the participation of gig and warehouse workers, including protests in Noida by women workers deployed in Instamart and Urban Company, reflect a pattern of mobilisation across sectors. It suggests that these are not isolated violations but systemic outcomes of a prevailing employment model that normalises their economic precarity. For many workers, these conditions increasingly resemble forms of unfree labour, where economic compulsion and the absence of viable alternatives severely constrain meaningful choice.Over the past few decades, workers engaged in continuous and core production processes have been increasingly employed through intermediaries or contractors. This reorganisation of labour under the logic of flexibilisation has displaced permanence with contractual, outsourced, and platform-based arrangements. Here, employers retain control over production and resources, while legal responsibility is diffused across layers of contractors and third-party intermediaries.Workers frequently report wage deductions, delayed payments, commissions extracted by intermediaries, and informal payments to contractors to secure continued employment. These practices deepen economic vulnerability and entrench dependency on intermediaries for access to work.For instance, in a case involving sanitation workers in a prominent central government hospital in Delhi, engaged through a contractor named Sulabh International Social Service Organisation, it was reported that workers were classified as ‘volunteers’ engaged in ‘social service’. This nomenclature was then used to justify payments below statutory minimum wages, effectively bypassing wage protections.Similarly, in another case from the National Capital Region (NCR), workers described a practice where contractors retained control over their bank cards. While the statutory minimum wage was formally credited into their accounts to ensure compliance on paper, a fixed amount was subsequently withdrawn by the contractor. Although bank statements recorded these transactions, workers had little practical ability to contest them due to their dependence on the same contractors for continued employment.This framework of contractualisation has been legitimised by the legal regime, entrenching marginalisation and precarity. The labour codes, notified in November 2025, while presented as worker-friendly reforms by the government, formally recognise fixed-term employment and expand the scope for flexible hiring. While the law provides for parity in wages and benefits, its implementation remains uneven. At the same time, the regulatory intent of the erstwhile Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970 – now subsumed within the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 – to prohibit contract labour in perennial and core activities stands significantly diluted.State response to the protestsThe response to worker protests has, in several instances, taken the form of a crackdown with hundreds of workers having been arrested and sent to judicial custody, with numerous FIRs filed across districts. Arrests have been carried out without immediate communication of the grounds and families have been left searching for missing workers, moving between police stations and jails with no clear information, while simultaneously attempting to arrange bail bonds and sureties under conditions of urgency and distress. Equally troubling is the framing of these protests as ‘conspiratorial’ or linked to ‘Naxal’ elements or external handlers. Such narratives displace attention from substantive grievances and recast labour assertions as threats to public order, foreclosing meaningful engagement with workers’ demands.Labour law must carry within it the interests of workers, for it was never meant to be neutral between unequal positions but to act as a framework of protection. If the state withdraws from this responsibility, law becomes an empty form, detached from the life it claims to govern. In that silence between promise and practice, labour law ceases to be law at all. To characterise such incidents as ‘violent unrest’ without their structural context is therefore to mischaracterise the nature of these struggles.Kawalpreet Kaur is a lawyer based in Delhi.