CITU calls for nationwide protests, burn copies of labour codes

A day after the Centre notified the final rules for all labour codes, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) has called for nationwide protests and burning copies of the legislation.

In a statement, the trade unions body claimed the labour codes strike at the heart of the workers’ interests and aim at enslaving the workers to squeeze them more brutally.

"In its third term of governance, the Modi regime with absolute majority in the parliament and followed by its victory in assembly elections, notwithstanding its lack of creditability, has become furiously more hyper-active, in the interests of its corporate masters, in implementing the labour codes, which is nothing but a comprehensive project of imposing conditions of virtual slavery on the working people as a whole," it said.

Giving effect to the new labour codes in full after having brought them in November 2025, the government on Saturday notified final rules for all four codes after a four-month gap from draft rules.

A national floor wage in consultation with an advisory board along with states; working day of eight hours with weekly cap of 48 working hours; mandatory wage slips; social security fund for unorganised sector and gig workers - these are some of the key provisions that will come into effect, with states to follow suit.

CITU General Secretary Elamaram Kareem said the decision of implementing labour codes is integral to the BJP's ongoing project of the monopoly corporate class to drastically curb the basic democratic and constitutional rights of the common people, including the rights to freedom of expression and assertion of dissent.

"Already events of criminal actions against workers and union leaders for collectively representing their grievance either to management or even to labour department have started taking place in many states implicating trade union leaders and activists in numerous cases. That was nakedly manifested in the recent gruesome crackdown on the workers’ spontaneous upsurges in the Delhi-NCR region and states around it," he said.

"Let us defy and resist not only to protect the hard-earned rights of the working class but to make them to understand the link between the attacks on their rights and the neoliberal policies being pursued by the Modi government only in the interest of employers’ class," he added.

The CITU statement said "As an immediate reaction to this anti-worker move by the Government of India, CITU calls upon the working class to come out in militant protest by organising rallies and burning the copies of the codes and rules".