Photo: Collected
Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Anisul Huq has said workers of any factory can form a labor union from now on.
He said this while talking to reporters after a meeting with the US trade delegation in his office at the Secretariat on Monday (22 April).
“They mainly discussed the labor laws of Bangladesh, workers' rights and what we are doing. Their important question was - what is the current situation of the amendment of the Bangladesh Labor Act, what is being done? They wanted to know about eleven issues and how much progress has been made in this regard,” the minister said.
The delegation’s first question was about the threshold (percentage of workers required to form a trade union).
The minister also said, they informed the delegation about the new decision of keeping no threshold for forming a trade union.
“First, around 2016, it was 30 percent. When we went to the International Labor Organization (ILO) conference in 2017, it was decided to bring this threshold to 20 percent,” he said.
“During the last amendment, the first proposal was to bring it down from 20 percent to 15 percent. But there was a caveat, it would be applicable only for factories employing 3,000 or more workers,” said Anisul Huq.
But that limit has also been lifted, said the law minister, adding “We have informed the US representatives that too.”
The minister said that after hearing about the labor laws and rights, the US representative expressed satisfaction. “After this discussion, the US representatives told me that they were satisfied,” he said.
Messenger/Mumu
