The Employer's Responsibility for Health, Safety and Working Conditions

In one line

The employer must maintain the health, safety and working conditions the Central Government prescribes, and section 23 lists ten heads those rules must cover, from cleanliness to separate latrines for male, female and transgender employees.

In exam wording: section 23 of the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 makes the employer responsible for maintaining in his establishment such health, safety and working conditions as the Central Government may prescribe, and empowers the Central Government to prescribe for ten listed matters including cleanliness and hygiene, ventilation, potable drinking water, lighting, separate latrine and urinal accommodation for male, female and transgender employees, and effective treatment of wastes and effluents.

Why the law has this at all

Because the conditions that make a workplace habitable are not dramatic and are therefore the first things to be cut.

Nobody argues that a factory should have no fire escape. Plenty of employers will run one with no drinking water, no working fan and one latrine for two hundred people, because none of those causes an accident anybody has to report. Section 23 exists so that they are legal obligations rather than matters of decency.

But the section is worth studying for a second reason, which is what it tells you about the design of the whole Code. The Factories Act 1948 set out these requirements in the Act: sections 11 to 20 of that Act specified cleanliness, disposal of wastes, ventilation and temperature, dust and fume, artificial humidification, overcrowding, lighting, drinking water, latrines and urinals, and spittoons. This Code reduces all of that to ten heads and a rule making power.

That is a real trade and an answer should state both sides. The gain is that a requirement can be revised as technology changes without amending an Act. The loss is that the actual content of the obligation is no longer in the statute at all, so a worker cannot read the Code and learn what he is entitled to.

Some words this chapter uses

Hygiene is the practice of maintaining conditions that prevent disease. Noxious means harmful or poisonous. Humidification is the artificial increase of moisture in the air, used in textile mills, which is why the Code names it separately. Potable means fit to drink. Overcrowding here means too many people for the cubic space available. Effluent is liquid waste discharged from a process. Transgender is used in the Code's own words in clause (viii).

Section 23(1): the responsibility

The employer shall be responsible to maintain in his establishment such health, safety and working conditions for the employees as may be prescribed by the Central Government.

Two words to note. The duty is owed in respect of employees, the wider class under section 2(1)(t), not merely workers. And the standard is what is prescribed by the Central Government, so the section is empty until rules are made, though section 6 continues to impose the general duty in the meantime.