Employment Information and Monitoring

In one line

Employers can be required to report their vacancies to a career centre, but nobody is required to hire through it.

In exam wording: section 139 of the Code on Social Security 2020 empowers the appropriate Government to require employers to report vacancies to a specified career centre before filling them, while expressly providing that no obligation to recruit through the career centre arises merely because a vacancy has been reported; and section 140 excludes seven categories of vacancy and two further classes from the Chapter.

Why the law has this at all

Chapter XIII is the successor to the Employment Exchanges (Compulsory Notification of Vacancies) Act 1959, repealed by item 4 of section 164(1) of this Code. Its purpose then and now is information, not placement.

A labour market works badly when neither side can see the other. A worker in one district does not know that a factory two districts away is hiring; the factory does not know he exists. The State cannot plan training or measure unemployment without knowing what jobs are actually being advertised.

So the Chapter builds a statutory dataset of vacancies and nothing more. Section 139(3) is the sentence that defines the whole Chapter: reporting a vacancy imposes no obligation to recruit through the career centre. The employer must tell; he need not obey.

The change of vocabulary is deliberate and worth naming. The 1959 Act spoke of an employment exchange; the Code speaks of a career centre, defined in section 2(9), which reflects a shift from placement to information, guidance and counselling.

Some words this chapter uses

Career centre is defined in section 2(9). Vacancy is defined in section 2(87). Executive officer is defined in section 2(30) and is the officer with the inspection power in section 139(4). Requisition is the formal demand to report. Absorption of surplus staff means redeploying existing employees from elsewhere in the same establishment. Plantation is defined in section 2(59), and the distinction between it and agriculture decides one of the exclusions.

Section 139: reporting vacancies

Section 139(1), the obligation. The appropriate Government may, by notification, require that from a specified date the employer in every establishment, or any class or category of establishments, before filling up any vacancy in any employment, shall report or cause to be reported that vacancy to such career centre as the notification specifies; and the employer shall thereupon comply with such requisition.

Three things follow. The duty arises only on a notification, not automatically. It is a duty to report before filling the vacancy. And it can be imposed on a class or category of establishments rather than on all.