The ferocity and the suddenness of the recent workers protests in Noida took many by surprise. Agitated industrial workers took to the streets in leaderless throngs, overturning and burning police SUVs, blocking traffic and destroying public property. This scale and militancy of industrial protests have not been seen in years.
It’s a class of workers who have been taken for granted. Employed in small units in industrial clusters in the National Capital Region, they produce auto parts, garments, electronic items, labouring up to 12 hours a day, and earning barely Rs 10,000 to 15,000 a month.
A war in the Persian Gulf, thousands of miles away, made the simmering discontent boil over. The sudden shortage of domestic gas and the spike in prices of alternative fuel and food items brought these folks to the end of their tether. The immediate trigger was a recent 35% hike in minimum wages in Haryana.
The UP government’s response was heavy-handed. More than 300 workers were arrested and many beaten up. Blame for the violence was heaped on ‘external instigators’ and ‘Pakistani handlers operating through WhatsApp groups’.
However, better counsel prevailed and a late night interim 21% wage increase for Noida and Ghaziabad districts on 14 April has calmed tempers and industrial operations are slowly opening up.
New Labour Codes fail
We have seen similar blowups in the past. Over New Year 2026 lakhs of gig or app-based delivery workers went on strike for better wages, social security and most of all, against horrific work conditions like the ‘10-minute-delivery-promise’ that resulted in road accidents.
These flashes of industrial action show the Union’s government’s long-term legislative solution of annulling 29 labour laws and creating 4 Labour Codes in their place, is not working. Soon after the BJP government took power in 2014, it put the spotlight on the numerous and often over-lapping labour laws. Many of them from the pre-Independence era, and compliance to these laws was an investor’s nightmare.
Last November, the BJP government repealed these laws and notified a set of 4 labour codes, to take effect from 1 April, this year. These included the Code on Wages, 2019, the Industrial Relations Code, 2020, the Code on Social Security, 2020 and the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020. The government thinking was -- if India is to become investor friendly, the ‘chakravyuh’ of these labour laws would have to be broken.
The broad-brush arrangement worked out was -- while workers should have access to a minimum wage, basic social and occupational security and health assistance, the legal tools that supported unionization, industrial action, recourse to labour courts and other enforcement measures should be minimized and discouraged.
What effectively happened is the machinery for resolving industrial disputes was closed. A closer look at the Code of Industrial Relations, 2020 will reveal it gives a freer hand to industrial managements than its earlier avatar, the Industrial Disputes Act, 1948. For instance, small and medium units, employing less than 300 workers, now do not need permission from the government for retrenchment or closure of the unit.
Mandatory ‘conciliation proceedings’ under the new code have made a ‘legal’ strike virtually impossible. The introduction of "fixed-term employment," has allowed employers to hire workers for specific periods without facing stringent regulations for retrenchment as applicable for permanent workers. On the other hand, fixing and implementation of minimum wages by the states, a complex process based on cost of living in different regions, has been given the go by.
Leaderless protests
What we are therefore now witnessing is spontaneous, raw and violent protests. There is no organised trade union leadership, and collective bargaining has been stamped out. In its place workers are resorting to collective action hoping for instant results. No wonder the UP government sees these protests as the work of ‘instigators’ and ‘conspirators’!
This is true not only of the Noida protests. Violent worker agitations have broken out in Panipat, in Haryana, Singrauli in Madhya Pradesh earlier this year; and now the Noida protests have spread to Faridabad, Palwal and industrial estates in Rajasthan.
The Union government has been celebrating the fall in the number of industrial disputes and weakening of the trade union movement as signals of improvement in the business environment. The data supports this view. Formal industrial disputes (strikes and lockouts) have fallen from an annual average of 350 in the 2006-2014 period, to just 76 in the Narendra Modi period (2015-23). Unionisation density, meanwhile has dropped from about 30% in 1985 to 15% in 2024, with private-sector unionization plummeting to a mere 1.8%.
This is the result of two factors: the shift towards increasing contractualization of labour with no permanent status has taken away the workers’ bargaining power; and the economic policies of liberalization have seen to it that unionization is discouraged and seen as regressive to development and production.
While a docile workforce and a hire-and-fire regime works for corporates in the short term, the simmering discontent among workers has become a powder keg waiting to blow up anytime. Perhaps, the older more sophisticated system of dispute resolution through collective bargaining, with the option of recourse to labour courts by both management and workers, may work as a better safety valve.