MOST significant labour laws – Industrial Disputes Act, Trade Union Act, Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act, Workmen’s Compensation Act, Payment of Wages Act, etc. – were enacted in the colonial period between 1926 and 1947 under the impact of Russian revolution and various other national liberation struggles in which the militant workforce was at the forefront.

The regulation of Indian industry began with the enactment of factory laws beginning in 1881 under pressure from the Lancashire industry which saw the Indian cotton mills’ unrestrained use of women and child labour and long hours of work up to 16 hours a day as ‘unfair competition’. Regulation remained weak and piecemeal till the completion of First World War, but interestingly we find in these ‘factory laws’ the beginnings of the practice of definitional thresholds so that a large part of the ‘traditional’ and small industries were deliberately kept out of the purview of regulation.

A major shift is noticeable post the First World War period in the 1920s. Goaded by the newly instituted International Labour Organization (ILO) and widespread industrial unrest following the war, the colonial state took the first measures to institute what we can call the modern labour law regime. The penal contract system was abolished and trade unions were given immunity against criminal prosecution for legitimate industrial dispute (1926). A series of welfare legislations such as the Workmen’s Compensation Act 1923, Maternity Benefit Act and Payment of Wages Act 1936 were enacted, alongside the revamped Factory Law of 1922. Common to all these laws, however, was the limited scope and definitional ‘threshold’ that excluded the vast majority of workers in establishments below a certain size or of a certain status.

The keystone of the emergent labour law regime, however, was the enactment of the Industrial Disputes Act of 1947. A spurt of industrial action in the late 1920s, chief among which was the famous seven month long general strike in the Bombay Cotton Mills in 1928 and 1929 led by the communist trade union, Girni Kamgar Union, led to the passage of the Trade Disputes Act of 1929 which formalized state intervention in industrial disputes, with provisions prohibiting strikes and lockouts in public utilities and specifying the process of adjudication by the establishment of a board of conciliation or a court of enquiry for arbitration and adjudication under state authority. That this act was passed when the communist trade union leaders were incarcerated for long periods under charges of conspiracy and sedition needs to be emphasized, as also the fact that in the Imperial Legislative Council moderate trade unionists like N.M. Joshi opposed the provisions of the act, tooth and nail. A significant incident associated with this legislation is that Bhagat Singh and B.K. Dutta threw a bomb and courted arrest, while it was being fiercely debated in the Imperial Legislative Assembly. The aim of the then proposed legislation was to tie down and channelize the rising working class movement
into legally approved channels away from militant strike action. It was only partially successful.