[Nankee Arora is a fourth-year law student at Jindal Global Law School] Mandatory arbitration clauses have become increasingly prevalent in employment contracts around the world. Employers seek to bind their employees to arbitration from the inception of their employment contract so in the event a claim arises they can take recourse to the speedier but more importantly confidential and largely...
Labour Law and the Gig Economy: Towards a Hybrid Model of Employment
[Sahaj Mathur is a IV year BA. LLB Student at the National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata] The status of gig workers has become a cause of growing concern in recent months. Niti Aayog’s report ‘India’s Booming Gig and Platform Economy’ estimates that nearly 23.5 million workers will be engaged in the gig economy by 2029. However, the report also notes how the gig economy has become...
Termination of Worker For ‘Loss of Confidence’ Does Not Amount To Retrenchment
[Madhusudan Bose and Nayantara Chauhan are Advocates at PRA Law Offices, Delhi] Indian law grants strong protection to certain types of employees (statutorily referred to as ‘workmen’, but for convenience herein as ‘workers’) against termination of their employment by employers (or ‘retrenchment’). A worker is entitled to retrenchment compensation at the rate of 15 days average pay for every year...
Legal Rights and the Vicissitudes of a “Comma”
“For want of a comma, we have this case”: thus began a judgment of the United States Court of Appeals For the First Circuit rendered earlier this week in O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy. The punctuation mark in question was more specifically the “Oxford comma”, which has been referred to as “an optional comma before the word ‘and’ at the end of a list”. This case involved a law enacted in...
The Compliance Conundrum under the Start-up India Action Plan
[The following guest post is contributed by Suprotik Das, a 5th year law student at the Jindal Global Law School, Sonepat, Haryana.] Introduction The Government’s efforts to enhance the ease of doing business through the Start-Up India Action Plan (the “Action Plan”) is a positive step toward an element of certainty and stability to the start-up ecosystem in India. It is known that...
Retrospective Amendments to the Payment Of Bonus Act
[The following post is contributed by Bhushan Shah from Mansukhlal Hiralal & Company] The Payment of Bonus Act, 1965 (“Bonus Act”) requires the payment of compulsory bonus to certain employees of an establishment which employs 20 or more persons. The erstwhile provisions of the Bonus Act provided for payment of bonus to the employees drawing a salary not exceeding Rs 10,000/- per...
Labour Market Reforms
The Government has donned the mantle of reforming labour laws, with this being one of several measures to ease the doing of business in India. Recent news reports indicate concrete proposals for reform in various labour legislation (here and here). On the academic front, a new paper “How Should India Reform Its Labour Laws?” by Simon Deakin and Antara Haldar explores the issue from a law and...
Subsistence Allowance during Adjudication
The Industrial Disputes Act, 1947 [“IDA”], provides for an elaborate system of adjudication of disputes between employers and workmen, and litigation over “subsistence allowance” is by no means uncommon, not only for tactical reasons, but also because it is often the only means of survival for an employee facing disciplinary proceedings. In this context, a single judge of the Bombay High Court...
Recent Comments