Unfair Labour Practices

In one line

An unfair labour practice is any of the twenty-four things the Second Schedule lists, sixteen that employers must not do and eight that workers and their unions must not do, and section 84 forbids all of them to everybody, registered or not.

In exam wording: section 2(zo) of the Industrial Relations Code 2020 defines an unfair labour practice as any of the practices specified in the Second Schedule; and section 84 provides that no employer or worker or Trade Union, whether registered under the Code or not, shall commit any unfair labour practice specified in that Schedule.

Why the law has this at all

Module I established what a union may lawfully do and what an employer may lawfully do. Chapter XII is about the things that are lawful in form and destructive in substance.

Consider an employer who wants no union in his plant. He cannot prohibit one; article 19(1)(c) and Chapter III see to that. What he can do is subtler. He can promote the men who stay out of it and pass over the men who join. He can time a wage increase for the week the organisers are collecting signatures. He can start a union of his own and favour it. He can dismiss the secretary for a technical breach of the standing orders that he would overlook in anybody else. Every one of those acts is, taken alone, within his ordinary powers as an employer. Taken together they destroy the union without a single unlawful order.

And the same is true on the other side. A union cannot lawfully be prevented from picketing, but it can picket so that non-strikers physically cannot get in. It cannot be prevented from arguing for its members, but it can stage demonstrations outside a manager's house. It cannot be forbidden to work carefully, but it can work deliberately slowly and call it care.

So the Code does not attempt a general principle. It lists. The Second Schedule is a catalogue of the specific things experience has shown both sides do, and section 84 forbids them by reference. That technique has an obvious weakness, which is that a practice not on the list is not caught; and an obvious strength, which is that nobody has to argue about whether a listed practice is unfair.

Some words this chapter uses

Unfair labour practice, section 2(zo), means any of the practices specified in the Second Schedule. The definition is entirely by reference; there is no general test.

Victimisation, item I(5)(a), means punishing a worker for his union activity under cover of some other reason.

Colourable exercise of the employer's rights, item I(5)(b), means using a power for a purpose other than the one it was given for.