The Gujarat Assembly on Wednesday passed a Bill to amend The Factories Act, 1948, providing for increasing the daily working hours to 12 with a cap of 48 hours in a week. The Bill also stipulates the condition of written consent from a worker in this regard.
The amendment Bill has been brought by the BJP government to replace an ordinance it promulgated in July this year.
Bill provides that if a worker works for 48 hours in four days, then he will be entitled to two days’ paid leave in the week.
The Bill provides for overtime wages at twice the ordinary rate and raises the quarterly cap on overtime hours from the existing 75 to 125 hours, subject to the worker’s written consent.
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The Bill also proposes to allow women to work in factories between 7 pm and 6 am with 16 conditions that includes a woman worker’s written consent.
Labour is in the Concurrent List of the Constitution, so both the Centre and states could make laws on the subject. In all, there are over 100 state laws and 40 central laws regulating various aspects of labour, including the resolution of industrial disputes, working conditions, and wages.The Factories Act, 1948 allows the state governments to exempt factories from its provisions under certain conditions.
States have used two different provisions of the Factories Act to change work hours. These provisions include three-month exemption in case of a public emergency (Section 5), and exemption to allow factories to deal with an exceptional amount of work (Section 65).
At least 12 states including Assam, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, and Uttarakhand, have used the “public emergency” exemption to increase work hours in factories as Per PRS research paper.
A public emergency is defined as a grave emergency where there is a threat to national security by war, external aggression or internal disturbance.
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