Editorial
The new labour law
Why such a hurried passage?
It was a most awkward way, to say the least, in which the labour bill was passed in the parliament. Without so much going into the contents of the bill, the manner in which the bill was put up for the MPs of the ruling coalition to vote it into law has left a very bad example of our parliamentary practices. The manner adopted indicates ignoring by the government of parliamentary norms that one sees in a participative legislature, where popular consent and not steamrolling of legislations, is taken to be the norm. A bill, which relates to the labour sector, is of immense importance to the country and one would have expected that the process laid down in the parliamentary procedures would have been invoked to elicit public opinion on this issue. Moreover, we do not know whether the views of the labourers were taken into consideration and whether labour representatives were consulted while drafting the new provisions, or while the bill was being scrutinised in the parliament. Lamentably, the bill, made up of 169 pages, was passed in matter of less than ten minutes. Surprisingly, not even the note of dissent of the opposition legislators to the committee report was attached in the relevant document, not to speak of allowing discussion on the bill to which as many as 56 amendments were proposed by the opposition. Not surprisingly this has caused serious misgivings in the public mind, not only because they see the parliament being turned into rubber stamp body where legislation is effected by the use of brute majority in the parliament, the new law has all the potential of creating unrest in the labour sector in the future, as we notice in the comments of the labour leaders who have rejected the new law out of hand. The misgivings about the new labour law may not be ill founded as some of provisions may be out of consonance with the ILO provisions while some may directly affect the workers employment such as the one related to the their retirement age, among other things. One wonders what might have been the compulsion of the government that necessitated such a hurriedly passage of a bill that affects the most important segment of our economy.
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