17 Feb 2017

…Trade unions play a crucial role in helping workers formulate and articulate their complaints. Claiming rights is an important driver for democratic change in a political environment characterized by the brutal repression of trade unions and labour rights under the military regime for over 50 years.

Unions are important vehicles that combine legal institution-building and democratization through worker participation. This is important in a context where the labour law, a key pillar in Myanmar’s transition to democracy, is not coherent and the same concepts and words have different meanings to different actors…

Law and trade union-building are tightly intertwined in Myanmar: labour disputes have become a key driver for trade union organizing. This takes three forms: solving disputes through workplace negotiations; supporting dispute settlements through arbitration; and more fundamentally the involvement of labour in the labour law reform process. Overall however, while trade unions are important for turning law into a social reality, considerable barriers remain, allowing employers to disregard decisions made by the arbitration council and other legal innovations…