Page 33 - DCOM207_LABOUR_LAWS

Labour Laws

Notes costs low. Employers’ costs can increase due to workers organizing to win higher wages, or by
laws imposing costly requirements, such as health and safety or equal opportunities conditions.
Workers’ organizations, such as trade unions, can also transcend purely industrial disputes, and
gain political power - which some employers may oppose. The state of labour law at any one
time is therefore both the product of, and a component of, struggles between different interests
in society. The purpose of this Unit is to enable the students to comprehend basic expressions.
At the end of this unit you should be able to understand various concepts regarding the concept,
origin, objectives and classification of Labour Legislation.

3.1 The Concept of Labour Legislations

Society evolves institutions to abhor vacuum created by changes. Industrial Revolution is an
epoch-making event, which completely changes the lifestyles of society from agricultural and
pastoral to industrial and materialistic one. The industrial society brought about, in its wake,
excessive exploitation of the working classes by the employer who took advantage of the individual
dispensability of the worker and wanted maximum profit on his investment. The golden rule of
capitalism that “Risk and Right” go together provided them with prerogatives to “hire and fire”.
The other legal concepts which were then available were those of Master and Servant and carrot
and stick etc. The principle of common law was in operation. The law of contract used to govern
the relation between worker and the employer in which individual contact was struck, the terns
of contract were usually verbal and mostly used in cases of breaches, leading to prosecution
and imprisonment of workers. Labour and Migration Act was another legislation which gave
rise to the “Indentured labour system”. Anti-Combination legislations were in vague treating
‘combination’ of workers as act of criminal conspiracy. Longer hours of work, abysmally low
wages, no safety and welfare provisions, and no insurance - the exploitation at large. State was
adopting the policy of Laissez-faire (let not interfere) and employers abused workers, taking
advantage of the situation.
Every society on its onwards march revises, reviews, refurbishes and reinvents its legal concept
and civilised ways of living. The changes brought about by the industrial revolution created
some gaps and it became the responsibility of the society to fill-up those gaps. Society went for
certain social devices to take care of the gaps, which are known as labour legislation.
The labour legislations are the products of Industrial Revolution and they have come into being
to take care of the aberrations created by it. They are different from common legislations, because
they come to alleviate special disorders created by specific circumstances. Therefore, they are
specific and not general in orientation, philosophy and concept.

3.1.1 The Main Ingredients of Labour Legislations

Labour legislation regards individuals as workers, whereas the general legislation regards him
a citizen. The principles governing labour legislations are more influenced by the postulates of
social justice than general justice. Workers are the weaker class of industrial society and have
suffered long at the hands of employers. Therefore, these sets of legislations go out of way in
protecting workers and securing justice to them. The influences of ‘discriminative justice and
distributive justice’ can be clearly seen over them. All the labour legislations are heavily skewed
towards labour and they are specifically designed like that.
Labour legislation seeks to deal with problems arising out of occupational status of the
individual. Consequently, such problems as hours of work, wages, working conditions, trade
unions, industrial disputes etc. come to be the main, subject matter of labour legislations. Thus,
the behaviour of the individual or his groups is the function of labour legislation as of any other
legislation. But under labour legislation, the individual is affected in the capacity of a worker
or an employer. Therefore, the persons who are neither the employers nor the workers are least
affected directly by labour legislation. To make the point clear, a few examples are necessary.

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