India at 75: Towards Inclusive Growth through Labour Market Reforms

The policy of free hiring and firing, leading to a high labour turnover is in nobody’s interest: employers lose industrially accumulated useful skills while workers lose jobs and incomes. Yet job security is a major concern for a worker for perfectly valid reasons. There are very few “good” jobs and there is no social security in an unorganized sector job. At the same time, job security provisions, particularly those relating to the legal provision for retrenchment, have led to an accumulation of surplus labour in large enterprises. This necessitates rethinking on employment security in the context of economic reforms and globalisation. [Gyansadhana]