The stakes
Sri Lanka is in the middle of rewriting its entire labour law regime.
The proposed Employment Act would consolidate thirteen existing statutes some of them colonial-era into a single unified law governing termination, trade unions, working hours, maternity, gratuity, and dispute resolution.
The substance may well be defensible.
The process has not been.
The legal obligation
Tripartite consultation is not a courtesy. It is a legal obligation.
Sri Lanka is a State Party to ILO Convention No. 144 (Tripartite Consultations, 1976), which requires governments to consult employer and worker organisations through their most representative bodies before adopting labour standards.
Conventions 87 and 98 both ratified by Sri Lanka protect the right of workers to organise and bargain through chosen representatives.
National practice requires labour reforms to be published in Sinhala, Tamil and English at the consultation stage.
The process that was not
In May 2023, the Ministry of Labour circulated a draft Employment Act. The same month, four longstanding trade unions including the Free Trade Zones and General Services Employees Union and the Ceylon Mercantile Union were removed from the National Labour Advisory Council, the tripartite body through which consultation is meant to be conducted.
The draft was not published in Sinhala and Tamil at the consultation stage. International rights organisations, the ILO, and Sri Lankan unions have raised these procedural failures since 2023 under the previous government and under this one.
The objection is not partisan. It is procedural.
The closing
A law that determines who can be dismissed, who can strike, who can join a union, and on what terms cannot be drafted with
one party at the table.
When the consultation procedure is suspended, the law that emerges does not carry the legitimacy the procedure was designed to provide. It carries only the authority of whoever happened to be drafting it.
The need for labour law reform is real.
But the process is the protection.
A labour law made without labour is not a labour law. It is an instruction.
The rule of law does not only govern what laws say. It governs how laws are made.
Delan De Silva
Attorney-at-Law
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