Walk into any major Indian airport and observe carefully. The CISF personnel who once staffed security and screening posts have been quietly replaced in many functions by private contractual workers. Ask them what they take home every month. You will rarely hear a number above Rs 25,000, and often it is closer to Rs 15,000. On paper, their salaries may be higher, but the outsourcing agencies that deploy them have their own disbursement arithmetic, and the worker bears the brunt of every deduction.

If this is the reality in one of the most visible public spaces in the country, where the state itself is the ultimate client, imagine the condition of a blue-collar worker in a nondescript factory in a mofussil town or a peripheral industrial estate. It is these workers who needed protection most urgently, and it is precisely these workers whom the Modi government’s four new labour codes have left the most exposed. Central rules for the new codes, implemented in November 2025, were notified earlier this month (on 8–9 May).

That’s not simplification; it’s legalising exploitation in the language of reform.

The consolidation of 29 labour laws into four codes is being marketed as a landmark achievement. Overlapping, contradictory statutes did impose real compliance burdens, especially on small businesses. Some of these changes have merit — for instance, universal minimum wages, formal recognition of gig workers and mandatory appointment letters. But reforms must be judged not by stated intentions but their architecture and these codes tilt structurally towards capital and corporate interests.

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An honest reading of labour reforms must also reckon with three decades of post-liberalisation experience. The labour law changes of the 1990s were based on an understanding that stringent pro-worker regulations led to lower investment, employment and productivity in registered manufacturing. It was a well-documented pattern, captured by the Besley-Burgess analysis of Industrial Disputes Act amendments between 1958 and 1992. This research became the intellectual scaffolding of the reforms.

But over the next 30 years, the informal sector in fact expanded. Wages stagnated while corporate profits soared. The lesson was that worker protections are not bad per se for........

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