Reforming Labor Laws

India has for several decades now got itself into a situation of denial and delay in the matter of reforming the labor laws. The laws were passed some before independence and some after on the mistaken analogy of a developed industrialized country with a majority of its workforce in large factories. Socialist thought, reformist as well as revolutionary, had the industrial worker at its centre. The capitalist system was supposed to be sustained by exploitation of the worker-the proletariat - and hence regulation of the employer-worker relationship took prime place in reform legislation.