Providing some degree of flexibility on government permission for retrenchment and according a legal framework for fixed-term employment, the Industrial Relations Code Bill, 2019 is scheduled to be introduced by the Centre in the Lok Sabha Thursday. Labour and Employment Minister Santosh Kumar Gangwar will introduce the Bill to consolidate and amend laws relating to trade unions, conditions of employment in industrial establishments, investigation and settlement of industrial disputes, the list of business for the Lower House stated. The Bill — which proposes to amalgamate The Trade Unions Act, 1926, The Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act, 1946, and The Industrial Disputes Act, 1947 — is the third Code in the government’s proposed codification of central labour laws into four Codes. The Bill has retained the threshold required for government permission for retrenchment at 100 employees, as against the proposal for 300 employees in an earlier draft of the Bill which was opposed by trade unions. Instead, the government has now provided flexibility for changing the threshold through notification, which some experts say will make the law ambiguous and offer uncertainty. The rigidity of labour laws about laying off labour has often been cited by industry as the main reason limiting scalability and employment generation. At present, any company with 100 workers or more has to seek government approval for retrenchment. The Bill also proposes that a union will be recognised as the negotiating union only if it has the support of 75 per cent or more of the workers in an establishment as against 66 per cent threshold in the earlier version of the Bill. Further, the Bill proposes to reduce the compensation to retrenched workers to 15 days of average pay for every year of completed service as against 45 days proposed earlier.
