Social protection within the framework of labour legislation reform in Myanmar

Myanmar has engaged in recent year in a number of important legal and political reforms. Since 2011, the Government of Myanmar has requested ILO’s support for its major legal reform process and in the last few years an impressive number of laws and regulations were adopted. In this context, the ILO conducted a review of labour legislation in 2014 with a view to develop a comprehensive approach to support the progressive drafting of a labour code.

The labour legislation in Myanmar is currently composed of a number of old labour laws passed during colonial time and new laws adopted since the beginning of the reform process. The review of labour laws concerns mainly (i) the adaptation of the old laws to the new reality of the labour market and (ii) the revision of the laws which encounter implementation issues (i.e. either because they were drafted at a time the country did not have empirical experience in the matter or because they overlap with new frameworks).