MUMBAI: Quess Corp and TeamLease, two of the country’s largest staffing firms, have said that India needs reforms in labour laws to make compliance simple and easy, but diluting certain aspects of the laws, as some states have done, is not the right way to go about it.
They said labour law exemptions announced by Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat, except those relating to wages and safety, for a period of three years is a knee-jerk decision and it may not necessarily attract new investment.
“I haven’t seen one industry body which has come forward and said it is euphoric about the announcements that these states have made,” said Lohit Bhatia, president for workforce management at Quess Corp. “We need simpler, easier, cheaper forms of labour legislation, but we don’t have to do away with them.”
Labour law reforms are much more than “hire and fire”, said Ashok Reddy, managing director of TeamLease. It has more to do with simplification of laws, reducing the multiplicity of various compliances, and digitising compliance rather than having an inspector visit, he said.
There are over 1100 Acts and 58,000 compliances regarding labour across sectors, and on average there could be 8-10 changes every day, Reddy said. Ensuring compliance is so complex that TeamLease has an 85-member team that only looks after compliance, he said. Reddy blamed the complexity of the regulatory framework for driving industries towards informal employment in the country.
Source: Economic Times
