Legislative power

The Modi government passed three key labour laws on 22 and 23 September 2020 through undemocratic means, fundamentally rewriting Indian labour laws. The laws included the Code on Industrial Relations, the Code on Social Security, and the Code on Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions. The legislation was passed in Parliament without debate, as opposition parties were boycotting the house.

A coalition of trade union centres have criticised many features of the new laws, noting three key faults. The Code on Social Security did not make social security a universal right, leaving millions of people without clear social protection. The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code excluded huge areas of the economy, including agriculture, which employs 50 per cent of the total working population of India. The Industrial Relations Code protected industry at the cost of working people, in violation of the Constitution, by restricting the definition of “worker” and severely limiting the right to strike and the ability of working people to participate in a collective bargaining process.

Central trade unions in India came together in massive nationwide protests on 23 September, gathering millions.

On 5 October 2020, the Indonesian government passed, without any prior consultation with the national unions, an Omnibus Law which introduced sweeping changes to workers’ entitlements and environmental regulation. The law, which changed more than a thousand articles in seventy-nine existing statutes, chiefly removed important sick leave provisions (such as mandatory paid leave for childbirth), raised limits on overtime work, cut severance pay, and overall undermined job security for millions of Indonesians. The sheer scale, complexity and contents of the law were a violation of Indonesia’s responsibilities under international human rights law. The government justified these massive cuts into workers’ protections as necessary to make Indonesia more attractive to investors.

In Uruguay, the right to strike has been severely threatened by the new decree of the Executive Power of 15 October 2020, which granted the Ministry of Labour the power to order the immediate eviction by the police of any public office, private company or institution occupied by workers during a strike. It also allowed the Ministry to convene a compulsory conciliation meeting. These provisions gave excessive powers to the Ministry of Labour to pre-emptively block any strike action and thus deprive workers and unions of their means of action.

On 25 June 2020, a new penal code came into force in Honduras, posing a clear threat to fundamental freedoms, as its provisions severely curbed the right to peaceful assembly. Under the new code, public protests and assemblies were criminalised and sentences could amount to up to 30 years' imprisonment.

On 4 February 2021, the Slovak Parliament adopted amendments to the Labour Code which severely undermined trade unions in the country by modifying the rules regarding trade union presence at the workplace and by gravely interfering in trade unions’ freedoms to establish their own statutes and rules, to elect their representatives and to organise their activities.

These changes, which were adopted without prior consultations with the unions, were purposefully adopted to weaken the position of the Confederation of Trade Unions of the Slovak Republic (KOZSR) as the most representative body in tripartite dialogue and to allow access to completely non-representative workers’ organisations, especially those in favour of the Ministry of Labour.

In May 2020, the government of Mauritius amended clauses of the new Workers’ Rights Act to benefit employers. Trade unions fought to keep as much of the original law as possible, but only managed to block one of the amendments.

These changes came as a blow for Mauritian unions, including the Confederation of Workers in the Public and Private Sectors (CTSP), which had fought for sixteen years for a positive law amendment to be finally introduced in October 2019. A mere eight months after, the prime minister promptly discarded the progress made and gave way to the employers’ lobbying, indicating that the amendments would be returned to workers by 2024.

On 6 February 2020, the House of Representatives of the United States passed the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act (H.R. 2474), legislation that would increase protections for workers’ freedom of association, adding penalties for companies that retaliate against workers who organise (up to USD 50,000 per violation). The Act would also award workers’ compensation for the damages they experience when they are retaliated against, not just back pay and reinstatement, as they are currently entitled to.

Among other significant improvements, the PRO Act would grant some hundreds of thousands of workers collective bargaining rights and allow more people currently classified as contractors to be given the status of employees for the purposes of union organising, potentially paving the way for gig workers at companies like Lyft and Uber to organise. It would also weaken “right-to-work” laws in twenty-seven states that currently allow employees be exempt from paying fees to unions that represent them.

Passage of this bill follows years of stagnant wages for the majority of Americans, poor working conditions, and attacks on unions and workers’ rights in general by companies.

On 28 October 2020, the European Commission published its proposal for a directive on adequate minimum wages in the European Union. The Commission’s draft is two-pronged. It aims first at ensuring that workers across the European Union are protected by adequate minimum wages, allowing for a decent living wherever they work.

In addition, the Commission initiates, for the first time, legislative action to strengthen collective bargaining in the European Union. Against the background of declining coverage of collective bargaining, the directive aims to increase the collective bargaining coverage. Member States shall take measures in consultation with the social partners. The draft also provides a minimum target for adequate collective bargaining coverage: Member States where collective bargaining coverage is less than 70 percent of the workers shall in addition provide for a framework of enabling conditions for collective bargaining, either by law after consultation of the social partners or by agreement with them and shall establish an action plan to promote collective bargaining.