KARACHI: Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah announced that the provincial government, with the support of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), will develop a unified labour law.

This initiative aims to consolidate, simplify, and rationalize the existing labour laws through consultations with social partners. During a meeting at CM House, CM Shah discussed the project with a six-member ILO delegation led by Country Director Geir Tonsto.

The delegation also included Guillermo Montt, Elena Gerasimova, Ivo Spauwen, Sadia Hameed, and Sean Cooney.Key provincial ministers, including Nasir Shah, Saeed Ghani, Shahid Thahim, along with Chief Secretary Asif Hyder Shah, Secretary Labour Hafiz Abbasi, Secretary Law Ali Ahmad Baloch, and other officials, were present at the meeting. Murad Shah thanked the ILO for providing technical assistance in drafting the Labour Code of Sindh.

“The draft Labour Code consolidates, simplifies and rationalises the 21 laws regulating matters such as occupational safety and health, industrial relations and working conditions,” he said.

The draft Labour Code addresses the comments of the ILO supervisory bodies provided to Pakistan on ratified Conventions, related to legislative amendments, including those raised in the observations and direct requests of the Committee of Experts on Conventions and Recommendations (CEACR).

The LLR committee and the national and international experts agreed that a proper codification would not simply be a “cut and paste” of existing laws, stringing them together.

That would lead to no meaningful improvements in modernization, efficiency and fairness. Rather, a codification involved reorganizing the provisions of existing laws in a coherent, up-to-date manner by rewriting and redrafting the provisions, keeping in view the aims of simplification, internal consistency and rationalization.

Published in The Daily National Courier, June, 01 2024

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