NEW DELHI — India’s labor codes have sparked a massive backlash, with 10 central trade unions calling for nationwide workplace protests and street marches across India on Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2025. Unions say the four-law package, which replaces 29 labour laws, favours employers over workers and reduces job security, putting them on a collision course with the state ahead of the November 23 demand to scrap the overhaul.
India’s labour codes come into force. The Code on Wages, Industrial Relations Code, Code on Social Security, and Occupational Safety, Health, and Working Conditions Code have come into operation after years of delay. Between them, they streamline 29 central laws into four and pledge a single, national framework for wages, hiring, firing, and workplace safety.
The government maintains that these changes offer more fundamental rights for workers, such as written job letters and a national minimum wage introduced in 2019. Additionally, benefits include maternity leave for women in all types of employment, previously unavailable, and provisions allowing women to work night shifts with adequate protection.
But the 10 central trade unions — INTUC, AITUC, HMS, CITU, AIUTUC, TUCC, SEWA, AICCTU, LPF, and UTUC — have called the India labour codes a “deceptive fraud” and a “war on working people,” adding that they relax 12-hour shifts and raise the layoff threshold for such approvals as well as make unionising and striking more difficult.
The unions have appealed for workers in factories, offices, transport hubs and gig platforms to hold gate meetings, tool-downs, marches and sit-ins at district headquarters on Nov. 26 in a joint call issued by all the central trade union leaders who addressed the rally here announcing an indefinite railway strike starting Dec. 11 against what they described as “the anti-worker” labour codes that all but four states had illegally rushed through their legislatures to ensure these don’t come under a national spotlight.
Farmer groups affiliated to the Samyukta Kisan Morcha and All India Kisan Sabha have been rallying behind the call for months now, asking villagers to burn symbolic copies of the codes and march to local centres, claiming that easier retrenchment, fixed-term contracts, and longer shifts will deepen rural precarity and joblessness.
Major flashpoints in the India labour codes include raising the threshold for mandatory government approval of layoffs and closures from 100 to 300 workers, allowing a four-day working week comprising 12-hour shifts, and making it harder for staff to go on strike, which unions say will create a “hire and fire” culture.
The Labour Ministry and industry allies argue that India’s labour codes usher in “one licence, one registration, one return,” slash red tape for companies, and bring the country into line with global practice.
The debate over India’s labour codes has simmered for more than a decade, from the 2002 recommendation of the Second National Commission on Labour for consolidation, to Parliament’s passage of the Code on Wages in 2019 and three complementary codes in 2020, while unions protested against weakened protections and complicated definitions.
Some scholars have also warned of long-term risks. For example, a 2019 analysis in Economic and Political Weekly suggested that the Wage Code could reduce protections, while a 2022 academic critique of the Industrial Relations Code cautioned that relaxed provisions on retrenchment and strikes may only further tip the balance of bargaining power toward businesses.
Trade unions have tested their muscle time and again on labour reforms, not least in a nationwide strike involving over 250 million workers in November 2020, when anger over farm laws and proposed labour changes shut down swathes of industry and transport across India.
There was a delay of several years in the implementation of the Indian labour codes as the Centre held back important rules and many opposition-ruled states resisted notification; their sudden rollout, late 2025, months ahead of crucial state elections, has blurred political lines, putting issues that have been given that much more depth for unions to rally around.
The size and intensity of Wednesday’s worker turnout will reflect more than protest logistics: it will serve as a test of public support for the unions’ challenge to the government’s labour codes—a de facto referendum on who shapes the future of work in India.
