Labour law was first introduced in India, not as an outcome of militant workers’ struggle, as in most countries across the world, but as a colonial protectionist prescription. The Factories Act, 1889, which put in place a regulatory framework for working hours, overtime, night work for women, child labour, was introduced by Britain to primarily protect its own textile industry from competition in the global markets. But as industrial employment grew across the country, the prevailing deplorable conditions of work and wages led to sporadic spontaneous militant strikes in the industrial hubs. These strikes quickly turned into organised collective actions, culminating in the formation of the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) in 1920 led by prominent freedom fighter Lala Lajpat Rai. The demands of the union movement soon became synonymous with those of the freedom movement, where labour rights were articulated as integral to self-determination. This triggered the colonial state. They brought in the Trade Union Act, 1926 (TU Act) and the Trade Disputes Act, 1929 as a ‘carrot and stick’ strategy to regulate trade unions while criminalising militant trade union actions.Also read: How the Draft Social Security Rules Weaken Maternity RightsThe TU Act sought to regulate unions by offering limited immunity from criminal conspiracy and civil liability conditional to accepting a tightly controlled legal framework, while the Trade Disputes Act gave the government sweeping powers to declare strikes to be ‘illegal’, prohibited solidarity actions between unions and criminalised fundraising by unions for political causes. These two laws together were meant to suppress militant trade union actions and simultaneously delink the workers’ struggles from the freedom movement. In 1928, Lala Lajpat Rai succumbed to a head injury inflicted by a police baton during a protest he led against the Simon Commission in Lahore. It was against this Trade Disputes Act that Bhagat Singh and Batukeswar Dutt bombed the central legislative assembly hall for which they were arrested and sentenced for life. The constituent assembly debates after independence addressed labour laws as integral to securing economic justice as enshrined in the fundamental rights of the constitution. Ambedkar in the debates advocated for a robust future state with wider powers to legislate and enforce labour laws. The framers of the constitution wanted to depart from this brutal colonial legacy and frame laws that aimed at adjusting the structural inequity that exists between labour and capital by attaching criminal liability to violations of the law, especially in framing the Minimum Wages Act, 1948 to prevent forced labour. The state was also to act as a counterbalance to capital to protect labour against the disproportionate power of capital, including through the institutionalisation of the tripartite mechanism, to ensure some form of redistributive justice. Achhe Din or Return to the Raj?The 2014 manifesto of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) pushed a new vision of industrial relations – of unfettered economic freedom for people wanting to start or run a business in India, of a government that removes all hindrances to this end, and a capital-labour relations based on the notion of an ‘industrial family’ where the employer is the benevolent patriarch who has the best interest of his dependent workers always at heart. The labour codes fundamentally reflect this vision where the changes in the existing laws are drafted to ensure ‘ease of business’ as in the days of the Raj. The ‘industrial family’ model also fits perfectly with the larger Hindutva project of the BJP, which wants to legitimise the power of a few through the ‘moral obligation’ of the many, and not through any democratic process. Gender, caste and religious hierarchies are easier to establish within this framework wherein discipline is the norm, and dissent is anti-social. Remember Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham and how Raj (played by Shah Rukh Khan) had to finally come back to the family that had disowned him for marrying a girl of his choice? That is how workers are meant to behave – not fight for their rights, but come crawling back to the benevolent patriarch for ‘love’. These were blockbuster movies setting the stage for a society that glorified ‘families’ even when they were toxic. This framework conveniently obscures the structural violence and asymmetry of control that forces workers to sell their labour power to employers under capitalism at wages and working conditions not remotely in their control. By restricting the right to strike under the Industrial Relations Code, 2020 (IRC) the codes depart from the fundamental premise of the framers of the constitution that labour and capital do not negotiate on an equal footing. By extending mandatory notice periods for strikes, expanding the category of “essential services,” and prohibiting strikes during conciliation proceedings and adjudication, the IRC effectively criminalises strikes. The code further prohibits and penalises solidarity actions not just of unions but also individuals during a so-called ‘illegal’ strike. This echoes the Trade Disputes Act, 1929, which similarly criminalised collective action in the name of industrial peace reinstating the colonial suspicion of labour militancy, treating collective action as a disruption to production rather than a democratic right.The IRC also hollows out trade union autonomy by requiring a union to represent at least 51% of workers on the shopfloor to be recognised as the sole negotiating agent. With a highly fragmented and precarious workforce in most shopfloors this threshold is practically unattainable. The Industrial Disputes Act, 1948 for good reasons did not have a clause for recognition of unions on the shopfloor. It allowed for multiple unions to collectively bargain for their members, jointly or severally, ensuring workers were free to choose their own union, even if they did not represent a majority of the workers. To illustrate the effect of such a high threshold, we take the example of Bangladesh. The Bangladesh Labour Act of 2006 allowed workers to register a union only if they had the support of 30% of the workers. This was so high that the unionisation rate was less than 2% in the garment industry, the largest manufacturing sector in the country.It is only in 2025, the interim government, under immense international pressure, issued an ordinance reducing this threshold to a proportionate representation to show that they were committed to improving freedom of association in the country. Some unions in our country have welcomed the IRC provision of recognition not realising the sinister trap it sets to coerce workers towards a union that the employer is ready to recognise thereby restricting workers’ freedom of association. Also read: Do the New Industrial Relations Rules Make Strikes Impossible?The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 (OSHC) on the other hand institutionalises the “industry family” ideology by expanding employer discretion while reducing enforceable obligations. By raising applicability thresholds – for instance, excluding establishments with fewer than ten or 20 workers depending on the provision – the code effectively removes vast sections of India’s workforce from the purview of statutory protection. Protection is replaced by employer benevolence, reinforcing the paternalistic assumption that workers’ well-being is best secured through managerial benevolence rather than justiciable rights.The codes also abandon the redistributive role of the State, repositioning the State as a facilitator of capital rather than a counterbalance to it. Across the codes, inspectorates are converted into “inspector-cum-facilitators,” inspection regimes are weakened, and criminal liability for employers is replaced with compoundable offences and fines. This marks a break from the post-independence commitment to criminal liability as an instrument to enforce labour rights. The codes transform violations into negotiable transgressions signalling that exploitation is no longer a social evil, but a slip-up, if detected. Taken together, the Labour Codes enact a structural reversal of the post-Independence labour law framework. They abandon the constitutional premise that labour law exists to correct historical and structural inequality, and instead reframe labour regulation as a means of producing disciplined, flexible, and compliant labour for capital. The language of “ease of doing business,” “trust-based compliance,” and “industrial harmony” performs the same ideological work as the colonial industrial discourse of order and productivity – reframing domination as efficiency, coercion as consent, and resistance as disorder. Dithhi Bhattacharya is the vice president of Karnataka independent garment workers union, an affiliate of the new trade union initiative.