Labour law was one of the subjects that really intrigued me when I was in law school. There so many new issues around labour and employment law, but why do they teach us a bunch of mostly irrelevant and extremely outdated things in name of labour law in law school? Sure, we need to know the basic concepts, and they taught that in law school, but highly important and relevant issues of our times were left out.
I was going through a few syllabuses of some of the top law schools last year. Things have not changed.
The result is that labour law has a pretty bad image with budding (and even most of the grown up) lawyers. It is right next to CPC in being boring and maybe just above human rights law in terms of low potential for making money. At least that’s the perception that most lawyers and law students have.
I will tell you my experience. We began to offer a labour law course in 2016. It became popular quickly with HR managers, IR professionals, company secretaries and other compliance professionals. The percentage of lawyers who take the course is under 20%. All other law courses boast of at least 50% of students from the legal background.
However, it is a myth that labour law is boring or that you can’t make money as a labour lawyer. There is a huge amount of labour law work that is up for grabs, for several reasons, and the biggest reason an upcoming lawyer should consider becoming an expert of labour laws is that there is very low competition for it. Let the rest of the world think that labour law is not sexy and miss out the opportunities if you are looking for a break and willing to go for a relatively uncommon area of law, keep reading.
Labour law is changing
One of the biggest complaint of India Inc has been that labour laws are complex in India. On the other hand, a large part of the Indians employed in jobs do not have protections of labour law as it is old and focuses on the manufacturing sector more and leaves out the service sector, which employ a large number of people. That is slowly but decisively changing.
The Modi government has an agenda of simplifying the labour laws. While no sweeping reforms have been made, some of the recent amendments have changed the nature of the game. Take the Payment of Wages Act, for instance. The ceiling of salary, with respect to which employees it applies to, has been raised recently to INR 24,000, bringing a large number of employees under its umbrella and companies for whom it has suddenly become very relevant. Similarly, a very interesting situation has presented itself after the recent amendments to the Maternity Benefits Act as women now to have to be given 6 months of a paid holiday when they get pregnant while they are employed. Given that churn of employees leaving is high in the private sector, and employees often leave within 1 or 2 years of joining a job, it has very cumbersome for employers who don’t expect employees to stay beyond a year or two, to hire married women. Legal claims of maternity benefits being denied as well as companies looking to defend themselves against such claims is suddenly on the rise.
For a long time, labour law was not a very viable career unless you wanted to work for factories and labourers. That is not the case anymore. With every amendment and reforms, now you can expect more and more labour law/employment disputes involving white collar employees, where stakes are higher and volume is unprecedented.
And what is unfortunate, is that there are very few lawyers in the market to tap into these opportunities with any credible skills or knowledge of labour law.
Money Recovery Claims by employees are on the rise
There are over 64,000 crore rupees unclaimed provident fund dues lying with the government. The people to whom that money is owed do not know how to do the necessary paperwork. Ask any decent civil lawyer, they would be often approached by people who could not get their PF money. It could be because an employer fraudulently did not deposit with the government thought they were required to, or because they have lost some important paper.
It is a similar thing with gratuity, accident benefits, compensation under different statutes. We have an article on gratuity related laws in India on iPleaders blog, which is read by over 1000 people a day. Many of them leave queries about which lawyer can help them. See the comments if you don’t believe me. It is extremely difficult to find lawyers who are willing to or have the experience and skills to recover these amounts.
A similar case can be made about unpaid salary. We are swamped by requests from employees who have not been paid by employers or fired without due compensation to find them proper legal representation.
Do a simple math. If someone has INR 3 lakhs of unpaid salary or PF does, will they be willing to pay you INR 30,000 to recover it on their behalf? Do a little research right now for yourself and see if you had such a case, how easy or difficult will it be to find a credible lawyer who could do it at that price for you?
If you want to establish your own law practice, instead of chasing wild geese, money recovery for these people can be a golden practice. There is certainly no reason why a lawyer could not very rich helping out these rather helpless people if they would focus on the same and had the know-how to get it done.
In the New Economy, Employers desperately need help with labour and employment matters
For every new age company that relies on knowledge economy and highly skilled employees, there are dozens of cases of employees every year of not respecting non-compete or non-solicit obligations, or engaging in data theft, or simply running away with company property (such as laptop, mobile phones, client lists, sim cards, equipment provided to them) when they quit.
There are many more complex situations. Should a company have a dating policy? What about a conflict of interest policy? Do they need to change their agreement if they send an employee on secondment?
It is a major challenge for start-ups and SMEs, and for big companies. The big companies mostly rely on in-house lawyers to handle such things. SMEs have really few options. Lawyers who can help them to deal with such situations, write the correct policies, help them to fight false allegations from employees are really in demand. It’s easy to land retainer ship contracts with these companies for handling such situations.
In-house counsels need to be good with labour and employment laws
If you want to be an in-house counsel, at the entry level, there is no way to get around labour law. Unless you are a hotshot M&A lawyer hired at a senior level to run acquisitions for the group, expect about half of your work to involve employment and labour law work. There is a reason HR managers and IR professionals are taking up labour law courses in large numbers. You better stay ahead of the game if you want to work as a young lawyer as in-house counsel.
Every major manufacturing company needs labour lawyers
Want to work in the compliance department of a manufacturing company? You better be good with your labour laws. Good news is that manufacturing is seeing a comeback in India, with major investments being made over the last decade, and especially Make in India campaign. It is a focus of government policy, and while it is going through some tough times at the moment, it is bound to go up in the long run. If you want to work as a corporate lawyer in a large manufacturing company, you better sharpen you labour law skills. And you will definitely need a lot more than the 3-year labour law text book.
Reference-
- iPleaders
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