Does the OSH Code Deliver a Worker-Centred Safety Right?

India's occupational safety architecture was, for decades, spread across a patchwork of separate laws: the Factories Act, 1948, the Mines Act, 1952, the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970, and the Building and Other Construction Workers Act, 1996, among others. Each law covered a narrow category of establishment or worker, leaving large parts of the informal and contractual workforce without a uniform safety standard. The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 (OSH Code) was enacted to consolidate 13 of these central labour laws into a single framework. It is one of four Labour Codes, along with the Code on Wages, 2019, the Industrial Relations Code, 2020, and the Code on Social Security, 2020, that together replace 29 central labour laws. Because labour sits in the Concurrent List, the codes need matching rules from both the Centre and the states before they can be enforced, which has stretched implementation well beyond the year of enactment.

The Code's treatment of workforce categories connects to an older reform. The Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Central (Amendment) Rules, 2018 had already introduced fixed-term employment, allowing employers to hire workers for a defined period with statutory benefits at par with permanent workers of the same category, but without the notice-of-termination requirement that applies to temporary workmen. The OSH Code operates on top of this same layered workforce, comprising permanent, regular, fixed-term, casual, contractual, and ad-hoc employees. This layering is precisely what makes a uniform safety net difficult to build. A permanent worker's job security gives them room to raise a safety concern. A contractual or fixed-term worker, whose continued engagement depends on the employer's goodwill, has much less room to do so.