Areas of Social Work Practice I (Labour Welfare, HRM and Industrial Relations): Industry as a Sub-System of Society, Labour Welfare, its Theories, Principles and Legislation with the Four Labour Codes; HRM, HRD, Performance Management, Six Sigma, ISO, TQM, CSR and Corporate Governance; and Industrial Relations, the ILO, Collective Bargaining, Job Analysis, Manpower Planning and OD

India's labour law grew as dozens of separate Acts. Among the most important are the Trade Unions Act 1926; the Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act 1946; the Industrial Disputes Act 1947, with its machinery of conciliation, arbitration and adjudication; the Factories Act 1948, which requires a welfare officer in factories employing 500 or more workers, a canteen where more than 250 are employed and a crèche where more than 30 women are employed; the Minimum Wages Act 1948; the Payment of Wages Act 1936; the Payment of Bonus Act 1965; the Equal Remuneration Act 1976; the Employees' State Insurance Act 1948; the Employees' Provident Funds and Miscellaneous Provisions Act 1952; the Payment of Gratuity Act 1972; the Maternity Benefit Act 1961; the Employees' Compensation Act 1923 (the Workmen's Compensation Act until it was renamed in 2009); the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act 1970; the Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act 1979; the Unorganised Workers' Social Security Act 2008; the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act 1976; and the Child and Adolescent Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act 1986 (so renamed by its 2016 amendment).

Human resource management is the management of people at work to achieve organisational goals while meeting employees' needs. It evolved from welfare work and personnel management, which were administrative and reactive, to HRM, which treats people as assets, and strategic HRM, which aligns HR with business strategy. Its scope covers acquisition (HR planning, recruitment, selection), development (training, career development), motivation (compensation, performance management) and maintenance (welfare, safety, employee relations). Its sub-systems are HR planning, recruitment and selection, training and development, performance management, compensation and benefits, employee relations and HR information systems. The Harvard model (Michael Beer and colleagues, 1984) links stakeholder interests and situational factors to HRM policy choices and to HR outcomes, the "four Cs" of commitment, competence, congruence and cost-effectiveness, and so to long-term consequences for individuals, the organisation and society. The Michigan or matching model (Charles Fombrun, Noel Tichy and Mary Anne Devanna, 1984) fits HR practices, selection, appraisal, rewards and development, to strategy; David Guest's model (1987) and the Warwick model (1990) followed. Theories of motivation underlie them: Maslow's hierarchy, Frederick Herzberg's two-factor theory (1959) of hygiene factors and motivators, and Douglas McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y (1960).

Human resource development, a term coined by Leonard Nadler around 1970, is the continuous process of developing employees' capabilities, their potential and the organisation's culture. In India, Larsen and Toubro set up what is usually described as the first HRD department in 1975, guided by T. V. Rao and Udai Pareek, whose HRD system included performance appraisal, potential appraisal, feedback and counselling, career planning, training, organisation development, rewards and quality of work life. Performance management systems range from traditional methods (ranking, paired comparison, forced distribution, graphic rating scales, and John Flanagan's critical incident technique, 1954) to modern ones: management by objectives (Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management, 1954), behaviourally anchored rating scales, 360-degree feedback, assessment centres and the balanced scorecard of Robert Kaplan and David Norton (1992), with its financial, customer, internal process, and learning and growth perspectives.

Quality approaches connect HR with operations. Total Quality Management makes quality the responsibility of everyone, through customer focus, continuous improvement (kaizen) and employee involvement; its founders include W. Edwards Deming (the fourteen points and the plan-do-check-act cycle), Joseph Juran (the quality trilogy of planning, control and improvement), Philip Crosby (zero defects; Quality Is Free, 1979) and Kaoru Ishikawa (the fishbone diagram and quality circles). Six Sigma, developed at Motorola in 1986, aims at no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities, using the DMAIC cycle of define, measure, analyse, improve and control, and trained "belts". ISO standards certify management systems: ISO 9001 for quality (current edition 2015), ISO 14001 for environmental management and ISO 45001 (2018) for occupational health and safety; SA 8000 (1997) sets social accountability standards for workers' rights.

Corporate social responsibility is the responsibility of a company for its impact on society and the environment, beyond its legal and economic obligations. Archie Carroll's pyramid (1991) arranges four responsibilities: economic (be profitable) at the base, then legal (obey the law), ethical (do what is right and fair) and, at the top, philanthropic (be a good corporate citizen). John Elkington's triple bottom line (1994) asks companies to account for people and planet as well as profit. Models of CSR include the ethical model rooted in Gandhi's trusteeship, the statist model of the post-independence public sector, the liberal model of Milton Friedman, who argued in 1970 that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, and the stakeholder model of R. Edward Freeman (1984), which holds that companies must balance the interests of all who affect or are affected by them. Its components include community development, employee welfare, environmental stewardship, ethical supply chains and responsible products, and its approaches range from philanthropy through strategic CSR, which links social investment to business strengths, to shared value.

India made CSR spending mandatory through section 135 of the Companies Act 2013, in force from 1 April 2014. It applies to a company with a net worth of ₹500 crore or more, or a turnover of ₹1,000 crore or more, or a net profit of ₹5 crore or more in the immediately preceding financial year. Such a company must constitute a CSR committee of the board (except where the obligation is small, as the rules provide) and spend at least 2 per cent of its average net profits of the three immediately preceding financial years on activities listed in Schedule VII, such as eradicating hunger and poverty, education, health, gender equality, environmental sustainability, rural development and disaster relief. Amendments in force from 2021 require unspent amounts to be transferred to a Schedule VII fund or, for ongoing projects, to an unspent CSR account, and provide penalties for default. Corporate governance is the system by which companies are directed and controlled, a definition from the Cadbury Report (1992); in India it is shaped by the Companies Act 2013 (independent directors, audit committees and, for specified companies, at least one woman director), SEBI's Listing Obligations and Disclosure Requirements Regulations 2015 and the reports of the Kumar Mangalam Birla (1999), Narayana Murthy (2003) and Uday Kotak (2017) committees.

Industrial relations are the relations among employers, employees and their organisations, and the state, in the workplace and the wider economy. Their objectives are industrial peace, productivity, fair terms of employment, workers' welfare and industrial democracy; their scope covers trade unions, collective bargaining, disputes and their settlement, grievance handling, discipline and workers' participation in management. Their determinants are economic, technological, social, political, legal and institutional; their reflectors or indicators are the frequency of strikes and lockouts, absenteeism, labour turnover, grievances, disciplinary cases and productivity. John Dunlop's systems model (Industrial Relations Systems, 1958) sees an industrial relations system as made up of actors (managers, workers and their organisations, and government agencies), contexts (technology, market or budgetary constraints and the distribution of power), and a shared ideology, which together produce a "web of rules". Alan Fox distinguished unitary, pluralist and radical frames of reference; the Oxford school of Allan Flanders studied the institutions of job regulation; the human relations approach grew from Elton Mayo's Hawthorne studies (1924–32); and the Gandhian approach, rooted in trusteeship and arbitration, was practised in the Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association founded in 1920.

Globalisation has changed industry and industrial relations: global value chains, competition and technology have brought flexible and contract employment, informalisation, platform and gig work, and weaker unions, while raising demands for labour standards in supply chains. The International Labour Organization was created in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles, with headquarters in Geneva, and became the first specialised agency of the United Nations in 1946; it is unique in its tripartite structure of governments, employers and workers, it received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1969, and its Declaration of Philadelphia (1944) affirmed that "labour is not a commodity". Its functions are setting international labour standards through conventions and recommendations, supervising their application, technical cooperation and research, and promoting its Decent Work Agenda (1999). Its fundamental conventions, ten since the addition of occupational safety and health in 2022, cover forced labour (C29, C105), freedom of association and collective bargaining (C87, C98), discrimination (C100, C111), child labour (C138, C182) and occupational safety and health (C155, C187). India has ratified six of the original eight, those on forced labour, discrimination and child labour, but not C87 and C98.

Collective bargaining, a term from Sidney and Beatrice Webb's Industrial Democracy (1897), is negotiation between employers and workers' organisations over wages and conditions; Richard Walton and Robert McKersie (1965) distinguished distributive bargaining (dividing a fixed sum), integrative bargaining (solving shared problems), attitudinal structuring and intra-organisational bargaining. Job analysis collects information about a job to produce a job description (duties, responsibilities, conditions) and a job specification (the qualifications, skills and qualities required), through observation, interviews, questionnaires, critical incidents and work diaries. Manpower or human resource planning forecasts demand for and supply of employees, identifies gaps and plans recruitment, training, redeployment and succession, using trend and ratio analysis, the Delphi technique and Markov analysis. Organisational behaviour studies individuals (perception, personality, attitudes, motivation), groups and the organisation (structure, culture, change). Organisation development, in Richard Beckhard's definition (1969), is a planned, organisation-wide effort, managed from the top, to increase effectiveness and health through planned interventions using behavioural science knowledge; it draws on Kurt Lewin's unfreezing, changing and refreezing, and its interventions include sensitivity training (T-groups), survey feedback, team building, process consultation (Edgar Schein), Grid OD based on Robert Blake and Jane Mouton's Managerial Grid (1964), job redesign, quality circles and third-party peacemaking.