Labour historians and experts (like @saurabhbhbhbh and @ShankarGopalak) will have more to say on this, but the dismantling of the industrial dispute resolution mechanism is particularly serious, for the following reason. Brief thread:

(1/n) https://twitter.com/someshjha7/status/1258960716561674240

*Most* people accept that the market economy is marked by a serious imbalance of power between workers and the owners of capital, and legal measures need to be taken to mitigate this imbalance in the interests of fairness/workers' rights/dignity. There are two broad models. (2/n)

The first model is to strengthen the workers through law, so that they can face employers as equal bargaining partners. You do this through strong trade unions, and through industrial democracy models where, for example, workers have positions on governing boards. (3/n)

This for e.g. is the model followed in Germany ("co-determination") and some other countries (see e.g., Piketty's latest for more on this).

The second model is that you pass laws to protect workers, and the State serves as a "neutral arbiter" between labour and capital. (4/n)

So labour remains structurally the weaker party, but that weakness is balanced not by trade unions and building labour power, but through rights-oriented laws and a State that enforces them.

At the time of Independence, rightly or wrongly, India went with Option 2. (5/n)

So Indian labour law is not very union-friendly, the right to strike has a whole series of restrictions placed upon it, and so on. On the other hand, there is a whole web of laws (that you keep hearing about), and a very elaborate State enforcement machinery. (6/n)

So when you remove the laws and also remove the industrial dispute mechanism, you take away both the legal protection and the enforcement machinery, the two things that were meant as *counterweights* to the power imbalance between labour and capital. (7/n)

And that takes you, essentially, to a 19th century position, where economic power of the employer, with no counter-balance, gives it unilateral authority to set terms and conditions. (8/n)

Postscript: At Independence, Ambedkar recognised this problem and wrote about it. In his "Note" on Fundamental Rights, he warned specifically about the dictatorship of the employer, and the role of Constitutions in preventing it. See pp. 98 - 102, Shiva Rao, Vol. 2 (9/9)