Fascist Assault on the Working Class
[This is a greeting message of AICCTU delivered by comrade Clifton D’ Rozario, All India Vice President, to the 18th All India Conference of CITU]
Dear comrades of the presidium, colleagues of the central trade unions, and delegates of the 18th All India Conference of CITU; on behalf of the All India Central Council of Trade Unions (AICCTU), I extend my revolutionary greetings to you all.
This Conference is taking place on the heels of the declaration of a veritable war on the working class by the Modi Government.
Private and foreign players have been permitted to operate in the nuclear power production, guaranteeing them profit and freedom from liability. 100% FDI has been allowed in the Insurance Sector, laying out a red carpet for foreign players to take over domestic insurance companies. In the pipeline are the Draft Seed Bill and the Draft Electricity (Amendment) Bill, 2025 which will wreak havoc on the agriculture sector, while adversely impacting domestic and MSME electricity consumers. MNREGA, acclaimed for the past two decades as the world's biggest public works and social welfare programme by economists all over the world, has been scrapped and replaced with a the Viksit Bharat - Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act 2025 (VB – Gram G Act), snatching away rights-based rural employment guarantee, especially when the people are reeling under extreme joblessness, shifting the fiscal burden onto the States, and banning the operation of the Act during harvesting season, ensuring cheap labour to the landlords and aimed at creating a vast army of cheap labour for industries as people will be forced to migrate to cities in search of employment.
Alongside all this are the four Labour Codes that spells death knell for workers’ rights has been brought into force on 21st November 2025. In fact, this day must henceforth be commemorated as the “Black Day for Workers”. The working class will face this challenge head on. The 12th February Strike against the draconian Labour Codes and the multi-pronged attack by the Union Government on the people’s rights and entitlements, shall mark a decisive moment in the history of the working-class movement.
Comrades, this conference is set against a backdrop of gaping inequality in India. We know the numbers well by now: India is amongst the most unequal countries in the world. A mere 1% of the country accumulated some 40% of its wealth. The top 10% of earners, namely the class and caste elite, capture 65% of income, while participation of women in the labour force remains shamefully low. This is not an accident, but the result of a deliberate neoliberal policy choice that has consolidated corporate loot, while weakening worker rights. The new Labour Codes, the repeal of the MNREGA Act, opening up of all sectors to private players, represent the latest front of a calculated and sustained assault on the lives of working people.
The Labour Codes represents a fundamental restructuring of labour relations to weaken workers’ bargaining power and strengthen employer control. By deliberately reorienting labour laws in favour of capital; the State has openly come out as the guarantor and enforcer of corporate interests against labour. However, two aspects need to be emphasised here. One, is that the Labour Codes constitute a blatant attack on federalism by centralising decision-making in the hands of the Union government and effectively reduce states to mere implementing agencies. States are stripped of meaningful legislative authority to tailor labour protections to their industrial conditions, regional realities, and workers’ needs. Labour is a concurrent subject and both, the Union and State governments, are empowered to legislate in this regard. However, what we are witnessing is forced centralisation weakening both workers’ rights and the autonomy of states.
Secondly, the Labour Codes have excessive and dangerous reliance on delegated legislation. The Codes lay down only vague and skeletal principles, while handing sweeping powers to the Executive through blanket rule-making powers. Core legislative functions from Parliament to the executive—particularly the Union government. Critical matters such as fixation of the national floor wage, eligibility and access to social security, inspection regimes, among others are removed from democratic legislative scrutiny and placed in the hands of the bureaucracy.
Comrades, the very architecture and design of the Labour Codes is fundamentally exclusionary. Higher thresholds are mandated which reduces the scope of coverage of these laws – lakhs of workers who enjoyed some rights under the existing labour laws, are now completely outside the scope of labour law protections. Alongside this is the relaxed safety regulations and a diluted inspection system, which reduce job security and workplace accountability. Wages are tinkered with, and the right to equal wages for women has been compromised. Minimum wages, which were to be mandatorily revised every 5 years under the Minimum Wages Act, 1948, can now “ordinarily” be done in 5 years. Although the Codes introduce a framework for gig and platform workers, they stop short of recognising them as employees, leaving millions without meaningful social security. These changes undermine constitutional guarantees of equality, dignity, and freedom of association, while pushing India towards a hire-and-fire regime already criticised for deepening inequality. The Labour Codes have nothing for the Scheme workers, domestic workers and other construction workers who have been on the streets demanding their rights.
Job security, under the new codes, is now an illusion. The Union government likes to use fancy words like “labour market flexibility”, but we all know what this means – nothing but institutionalized insecurity and tyranny over working lives.
Firstly, hire and fire will be the norm, as the protections against lay-off, retrenchment and closure, which earlier applied to establishments with 100 workers now apply only to units with 300 workers. Thus, more than 87% of Indian industry will be unregulated and workers will be at the mercy of the employers.
Secondly, the Labour Codes entrench permanent job insecurity by legalising fixed-term employment across all sectors, even for regular and perennial work.
Thirdly, the Labour Codes institutionalise and legalise contract labour – what we call the modern day slavery. The contract system has been a tool for expropriation of the fruits of labour of impoverished workers to add to heaped coffers of capitalist establishments. Trade Unions have always sought for abolition of the contract system and yet, contract labour is now legally permissible under the new Labour Codes, in perennial and essential services such as sanitation, watch and ward, gardening, housekeeping, and even in certain core activities.
As Trade Unions, one major concern is that the two main weapons of trade unions movement – the right to strike and collective bargaining -- are severely undermined by the Labour Codes. In his opposition to the Industrial Disputes Bill in 1938, B.R. Ambedkar said: “A strike is simply another name for the right to freedom; it is nothing else than the right to the freedom of one’s services on any terms that one wants to obtain. And once you concede the right to freedom, you necessarily concede the right to strike.” However, under the new Labour Codes, strikes are virtually outlawed through a web of prohibitions. The right to form trade unions, protected by the freedom of association guaranteed under Article 19 of the Constitution, too stands undermined as the new Codes empowers the Registrar to withdraw or cancel the registration of a trade union “on the information received by him” regarding an alleged contravention of the code. The new system for recognising trade unions can potentially fragment and weaken trade union power and collective bargaining. The notion of the negotiating council mechanism, too, though sounding inclusive, enables employers to play unions against each other and reach agreements with more compliant unions while ignoring militant ones. This is a reiteration of the classic strategy of the colonial powers – to divide and rule.
The four Labour Codes are being presented as anti-colonial “labour reform”. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The struggles and sacrifices of countless workers have snatched workers’ rights from the hands of the British and those very rights and laws are consigned to the history books. This argument at decolonisation is a ruse to cover the essential reorientation of the state’s role in mediating class relations in the country. This is made clear in the draft “Shram Shakti Niti 2025”, the National Labour and Employment Policy of India, which declares work as a rajdharma (sacred duty) by drawing inspiration from the Manusmriti and other texts. This is essentially the codification into law of Golwalkar’s philosophy of labour rooted in moral responsibility and an insidious attempt to re-establish centuries-old caste-based hierarchies and occupational slavery.
This fascist assault on the working class comes at a time when the working class, world over, is confronted with old and new challenges. The intensifying crisis of capitalism is causing global economic turmoil, greater inequality, and harsher worker exploitation. This domestic unrest is directly linked to increasing international conflicts, imperialist wars, and foreign interventions. Ordinary people bear the brutal cost through poverty, joblessness, forced displacement, state repression, and the loss of hard-won rights.
As we battle on, class struggle is our guiding light; class unity is our strength. This is possible by evolving a paradigm of class unity and class struggle that does not stop shy of challenging caste, gender, and communal discrimination. The objective is ultimately to unite all workers, transcending caste and other lines, to stand up against all forms of injustice, discrimination, and oppression.
Over the years, we have witnessed the growing physical attacks on migrant workers, in particular Bengali Muslim migrant workers, across the country. Whether it is the lynching of West Bengal migrant worker Jewel Rana Sheikh in Sambalpur, Odisha or that of Chhattisgarh migrant worker Ramnarayan Baghel in Kerala, at the hands of Hindutva forces, the very lives of workers are now under threat. The communal polarisation is now a life threat to workers, and not just a divisive feature. Fighting caste and communal divisions among workers becomes an essential aspect of trade union activism and working-class consciousness.
The neoliberal economic order has pauperised working people and created the material conditions for the rise of fascist and authoritarian regimes worldwide. In this overall global climate of rise in reactionary bourgeois regimes, in India, Hindutva returns in the unconditional defence of a crisis-ridden capitalism. For workers seeking a life of dignity, resistance is not a choice, but a necessity. The urgent task before us is to revive militant trade union struggles and rebuild working-class consciousness to wage a collective fight for emancipation from exploitation by the ruling classes and the insecurities imposed by the labour market. Our immediate task is to make the 12th February Strike a great success and let us all build militant struggles of the working class against this concerted attack of the Modi government.
On behalf of AICCTU, once again greet the 18th All India Conference of CITU a grand success!