CII against proposal to lower companies welfare officer hiring threshold

NEW DELHI: Confederation of Indian Industry has urged the government to drop a proposal to lower the threshold for companies to mandatorily employ welfare officers, saying the change would severely impact margins of small and medium enterprises.

Provisions in the proposed Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2019 (OSH Code) will make it mandatory for firms employing more than 250 people to have welfare officers, against the current threshold of 500.

“Extending the OSH Code’s provisions to smaller enterprises will add to their costs and impact their margins,” Chandrajit Banerjee, director general of CII, said on Tuesday. “It would also adversely affect expansion, which is seen to have a strong relationship to creation of new jobs.”


Instead, the industry body has suggested that the government set up common facilities for establishments in a locality on cost basis. It also urged the labour ministry to revisit the penalties proposed for contraventions so that the focus is on compliance and deterrence.

The OSH Code should aim at facilita ting the MSME sector, CII said. “Ease of doing business and simplification and rationalisation of provisions will help smaller enterprises to scale up and create more jobs,” it said.

“Irrespective of the person nominated for and entrusted by a company with the responsibility of compliance, all contraventions/non-conformities which are non-compoundable should be handled by labour courts and not criminal courts.”

CII also requested the government to revise the definition for private sector companies and bring it on par with that for central/state government units, PSUs, and autonomous government units.

“This would essentially mean that the responsibilities for compliance with requirements under the new unified code may be appropriately assigned by the employer to person or persons who have full operational control and accountability for the units they run in different parts of the country,” it said.