South Asia Citizens Web

Women from India and Pakistan Appeal to our Governments to support Afghan women and protect their rights at the ‘intra Afghan talks in Doha so as to build a stable peace in Afghanistan and for all of us in the region.

Today, in 2020, some of you receive death threats on the social media when you express certain opinions. Certain media are openly targeted by international terrorist organisations. States exercise pressure on French journalists “guilty” of having published critical articles.

In a matter of three or four hours of parliamentary time, labour rights won by workers over a century and a half were wiped away and replaced by the Codes on Industrial Relations, on Social Security and on Occupational Health, Safety and Working Conditions. The BJP’s ‘maximum governance’ comes with a brutality that turns over labour rights entirely in favour of capital.

Writing about global labor at a time of escalating nationalism, trade wars, and anti-immigration policies seems like bad timing, unlike during the heyday of neoliberal globalization when some currents in unions and pro-labor academics pondered about labor’s possible contributions to an alternative globalization. Many contributions to this debate saw globalization as the trigger of a race to the bottom in which nation-states lost their ability to intervene on the side of workers.

Amidst the micro and macro-economic crisis of the last 5 years, the union government has aggressively pushed the agenda of labour law reforms — purportedly to simplify India’s ‘complex’ labour legislations, improve the business environment, and augment growth and employment. These changes, driven primarily by the business fraternity, have been aimed at improving India’s ranking in the ‘Ease of Doing Business’ (EDB) index and FDI flows. However, workers and trade unions have called these reforms anti-working class, pushing India back to the ‘British Era’ when slavery was a norm. It is ironic that while there was an outpouring of national sympathy from state and industry for migrant workers during the COVID-19 lockdown, both have turned their backs on the workforce by backing appalling anti-work legislation. In the history of independent India, the passage of labour laws that protect workers has involved long, difficult struggles by the working class. However, in one stroke, the government intends to put the last nail into the coffin of labour protection.