When workers walk out of their factories and shop floors, not to negotiate but to pick up stones and set fire to their workplaces, we must recognise a fundamental breakdown has taken place in the employer-employee relationship, and in the business itself. Such violence is a desperate signal that the worker no longer feels they have a stake in the enterprise’s survival. They see no future in their labour. And they are angry at a place where there is no respect for them as human beings, and their essential contribution through the fruit of their labour.

While the management of these factories must ask why they failed to invest in the human beings behind their machines, the state must look deeper. When this pattern repeats across industrial hubs — from Manesar to Bhiwadi — it is no longer a localised grievance. It is a systemic rejection of a policy framework that has pushed India’s working class beyond the point of precarity.

The ‘Conspiracy’ Diversion

The official discourse often hides behind the convenient bogey of “conspiracy” to explain away protest and unrest. This time is no different. But if we look past the smoke, we find workers earning barely enough to feed themselves, let alone the families they left behind in rural India, to fuel the city and the nation’s growth — a monthly wage of Rs 10,000 in the National Capital Region is not a living wage; it’s not even a minimum wage —it is a starvation wage. It bursts the myth that labour is “unavailable.” Labour is present, but it is being forced into what the Supreme Court has rightly termed “conditions of forced labour” — working for less than the statutory minimum wage.

The Mirage of the Labour Codes

The new Labour Codes........

© Indian Express