The “National Labour Conference” the Prime Minister inaugurated three days ago has drawn fire from an RSS-affiliated trade union that described the event as an instance of the Centre’s disregard for the tripartite consultation process.

The conference, organised by the Union labour ministry in Tirupati on Thursday and Friday, discussed the four contentious new labour laws with state labour ministers and officials but no trade unions representing employees were invited. The trade unions have been alleging the four labour codes were drafted without proper consultations with them.

According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) convention, labour issues have to be discussed in tripartite forums involving the employers, the employees and the government.

On Saturday, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), the RSS’s labour arm, said in a resolution: “The ‘National’ Labour Conference…, attended by only the representatives of Governments of both Centre and States, is the first deviation in the history of labour in India since Dr Ambedkar established the tripartite culture.”

The BMS resolution said: “This is also a serious deviation from India’s long tradition of democracy which the Central and State Governments are destined to follow. The BMS expresses its strong concern and displeasure for excluding trade unions from such a high-level Labour Conference, when several burning issues related to labour remain unsettled, including Labour Codes.”

The labour ministry had been holding an event called the Indian Labour Conference every year, largely without a break till 2015. For seven years, the conference has not been held.

The latest event was called the “National” Labour Conference, not the Indian Labour Conference, which will give the Centre the leeway to claim it was not meant to be the old tripartite programme.

In the past three years, Parliament has passed four labour codes — the wage code; the occupational safety, health and working conditions code; the industrial relations code; and the social security code. The codes have subsumed 29 labour laws in the country. The rules have not been notified, and the conference discussed the progress in finalising the rules.

There have been complaints that the employer-friendly codes have been pushed through by taking advantage of the insecure atmosphere that prevailed during the pandemic.

The Congress-supported Indian National Trade Union Congress (Intuc) secretary, Ashok Singh, said labour minister Bhupender Yadav had held a separate meeting with most of the trade unions. Intuc has demanded that the Indian Labour Conference be held.

The CPM-backed Centre of Indian Trade Unions (Citu) said the Tirupati conference could in no way be called a National Labour Conference as workers’ unions were not invited.

“The labour codes seek to impose conditions of slavery on the entire working people and empower the employers’ class with a vengeance,” Citu said in a statement.

The Left union described as patently untrue the claim of Prime Minister Modi that the labour codes would ensure empowerment of the workers through minimum wages, job security, social security and health security.

The CPI-supported All India Trade Union Congress (Aituc) said the labour codes would impose a new form of slavery on the workers, particularly on the unorganised, contract and outsourced workers who constitute more than 90 per cent of the workforce.