On January 29, 2026, the Chief Justice of India (CJI) reportedly observed that trade unionism has been "largely responsible" for hindering industrial growth in India. The remark, sweeping and unqualified, is striking for both its content and the institutional location from which it emanated. Coming from the highest judicial office of the republic, such remarks cannot be treated as a casual aside or an offhand economic opinion. They inevitably acquire a constitutional resonance. The bench went further in expressing scepticism toward the relief sought by domestic workers' unions, with the CJI warning that "if you fix minimum wages, people will refuse to hire, and this will further contribute to their hardship”. The remarks suggested that the very mechanism of minimum wage protection, a globally recognised labour standard, was considered as a threat to employment by the judges and not as a safeguard against exploitation. We need to bear in mind that domestic workers are among the most vulnerable sections of our workforce. The bench ultimately disposed of the plea without relief.
The right to form associations under Article 19(1)(c) was not grafted onto the Constitution as a decorative liberty, nor was it conceived as a concession subordinate to market convenience. It was grounded in the recognition that in an unequal society, individual freedom without collective power is a hollow promise. To describe trade unionism as an impediment to growth is to reduce this constitutional value to an economic irritant and, in the process, to flatten history into ideology.
One need not look far for evidence of the value of collective associations: the judiciary itself houses multiple associations—the Supreme Court Bar Association, various High Court bar associations, and others at various levels with a range of concerns. Have these bodies been a drag on the institution's functioning, or have they served as crucial mechanisms for articulating collective concerns? The answer is self-evident. Or is it the case that only the privileged, like lawyers and industrialists – one is thinking here of bodies like FICCI and ASSOCHAM – may legitimately form associations while the poor and vulnerable must negotiate their conditions atomistically, stripped of collective voice?
India’s labour law architecture is unintelligible without the long and often bitter struggles of organised labour. The Factories Act of 1948, enacted in the immediate aftermath of Independence, was a response to the brutal working conditions inherited from colonial industrialisation; long hours, unsafe workplaces, and the routine sacrifice of worker health at the altar of productivity. The Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, sought to civilise industrial conflict by recognising collective bargaining, regulating layoffs and retrenchment, and creating mechanisms for dispute resolution. The Minimum Wages Act, 1948, was an explicit acknowledgement that the labour market, left to itself, does not guarantee subsistence, let alone dignity.
Trade unions have been instrumental in securing fundamental workplace protections that now form the bedrock of middle-class employment security. The eight-hour workday, weekend rest, and paid annual leave, now considered basic entitlements, were won through decades of union struggle. Collective bargaining established the principle of employer-provided health insurance, pension schemes, and provident fund contributions that underwrite middle-class financial planning. Unions fought for maternity and paternity leave, workplace safety regulations, protection against arbitrary dismissal, and grievance redressal mechanisms. Statutory benefits, including gratuity, overtime compensation, sick leave, and workplace accident compensation, all emerged from union advocacy. Even ostensibly managerial protections, like notice periods, severance pay, non-discriminatory hiring practices, and protection against wage theft, trace their legal recognition to labour movements. The very distinction between "permanent" and "contract" employment, and the protections afforded to the former, reflects union efforts to establish employment security as a workplace norm rather than employer largesse. None of these legislations, or the rights and privileges that emerged from them, is due to state benevolence or charitable industrialists. They were wrung from power through collective pressure: strikes, negotiations, and political mobilisation led by trade unions that refused to accept exploitation as destiny.
To frame trade unions as a drag on industrial growth is therefore to invert the causal narrative. It was not trade unionism that distorted a naturally just economic order; it was unregulated industrial capitalism that necessitated trade union intervention in the first place. Growth that depends on suppressed wages, precarious employment, and the silencing of worker voice is not growth in any constitutional sense; it is accumulation without accountability.
The Constitution does not privilege growth over justice. It insists on their coexistence, and there is no contradiction of any nature in this arrangement. The Directive Principles of State Policy repeatedly emphasise just and humane conditions of work, living wages, and worker participation in management. Courts have historically recognised that labour rights are not merely statutory entitlements but flow from the deeper constitutional commitment to dignity under Article 21. To speak now as though trade unions are external to this moral universe is to forget that constitutional democracy is not neutral between power and vulnerability. India's constitutional framework has never treated growth and rights as mutually exclusive, nor has it conceived of justice as subordinate to economic expansion. Instead, it insists that growth be anchored in justice and that power, whether of the state or the market, be subject to collective accountability. Trade unions remain mechanisms through which workers exercise agency in contexts of structurally asymmetric power.
The danger of judicial amnesia lies in its consequences because when the highest court appears to echo the impatience of capital with labour’s collective voice, it subtly shifts the moral baseline of public discourse. The worker is no longer a rights-bearing citizen but a factor of production; the union is no longer a democratic instrument but a nuisance. Once this shift is normalised, the erosion of labour protections appears not as a constitutional loss but as an economic necessity. There is also a deeper jurisprudential unease at play. When judges pronounce on economic phenomena using the language of blame rather than balance, they risk collapsing the distinction between adjudication and ideology. Courts are, of course, not insulated from economic reasoning, but constitutional adjudication demands an awareness of asymmetry between capital and labour, between individual bargaining and collective action, between formal freedom and substantive inequality. Trade unions exist precisely because this asymmetry is structural, not accidental.
Trade unions, like all institutions, warrant critique. Instances of exclusionary practices, political capture, and resistance to necessary change exist. But reform is not the same as delegitimisation. A constitutional approach would ask how unions can be democratised, made more representative, and adapted to new forms of work, including gig and platform labour. A market-centric approach simply asks how they can be weakened or bypassed.
What makes the CJI’s remark particularly troubling is its timing. Over the past decade, India has witnessed a systematic dilution of labour protections under the rubric of “reforms.” The consolidation of labour laws into four labour codes has been accompanied by the weakening of collective bargaining, the expansion of fixed-term employment, and the effective normalisation of informality. The language of rights has steadily given way to the vocabulary of “flexibility,” “competitiveness,” and “ease of doing business.” In this context, a judicial endorsement, implicit or explicit, of the idea that trade unions are obstacles rather than democratic counterweights risks becoming an ideological accelerant for executive overreach.
The author is Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha) and a member of Rashtriya Janta Dal.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.