The new labor laws, if implemented will bring a major change to the work culture of the country. This will include a 12-hour, four-days per week from the year 2022-23 as told by the labor ministry to meet the 48-hour work requirement. The labor codes will most likely be implemented on wages, Industrial Relations, jobs safety, and social security by the next fiscal year beginning from 2022, as told by a senior government official.
The codes will bring significant changes to the current work culture, employment routine, and the number of working days. The labor codes are also expected to reduce the take-home pay of employees. Employers will also have to bear a higher provident fund liability. The regulations will also restrict the current allowances to 50 percent which will make the salary to be half of the basic wages. These new laws will also change the way of calculating the Provident Fund. The contribution to the provident fund ( PF) will then be calculated as a percentage of basic wage that involves the basic pay and the dearness allowance. As of now, the employers are used to keeping the non-allowance part of the salary below 50 percent or more of total pay which results in high in-hand payment for employees.
Right now, India has a five-day work week so the new rules will bring much-needed relief to the work culture
The union government has already finalized the rules and regulations. The states are now expected to frame regulations because labor is a part of the concurrent list and the center cannot change it alone. Most states have given their consensus and drafted rules so that they can be implemented in one go.
The union labor minister, Bhupinder Yadav, talked about the same saying that the Occupational Safety, Health, and Working Conditions Code has the least number of 13 states that have been able to pre-publish the draft rules. These states are Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Arunachal Pradesh, Haryana, Jharkhand, Punjab, Manipur, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, and union territory of Jammu and Kashmir.
The center and the states are required to notify rules under the four codes to enforce the rules in their respective jurisdictions. There is also a requirement of publication of rules in their official gazette for 30 days or 45 days for public opinion.
These changes will hopefully bring up the work productivity by a lot. All over the world, the work culture has changed significantly in the last few years, it was high time that India caught up with it.
