Constitutional Rights of Labour During Covid 19 Pandemic: A Study of India and Indonesia

The Covid 19 pandemic, and the legal sanction for lockdowns and curfews in 2020, had a profound impact on workers even as economic downturn, reduction of labour demand, unemployment, severe financial distress, forced migration or confinement, assailed the labour sector. The informal, contractual, migratory, daily wage, and blue-collar workers across the world were especially vulnerable and most deleteriously affected, by the pandemic. A review of the legislative, legal, and judicial responses to labour rights during the pandemic, in different States provides crucial insights into how the variegated national Constitutional philosophies regarding labour and associated rights, were originally conceived, and are presently perceived, negotiated, and implemented resulting in divergent outcomes in praxis. This article based on secondary sources, critically analyses the jurisprudence underlying the legislative, legal and judicial reflexivity to labour rights during the pandemic lockdown in 2020 and 2021 in India and Indonesia, which are the two hegemonic developing economies of Asia in their respective regions, to identify the lacunae and susceptibilities in constitutional conception and its legal articulation which may be amenable to reforms for making law more socially responsive for a more egalitarian and humane society.