Labour Market Governance

For many years, the Palestinian Authority and the social partners have been engaged in a process to reform the Palestinian Labour Law No. 7 of 2000 (the “Labour Law”) – a necessary condition for improving labour protection and promoting labour rights in line with international labour standards. Yet, extensive bipartite and tripartite social dialogue has been unable to bridge disagreements and reach consensus on issues such as maternity protection, working time, managing enterprise restructuring and dismissals, and end of service payments. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the Palestinian labour market further slowed the process. A recent ILO evaluation of the social dialogue landscape in the OPT pointed to persistent structural impediments. Importantly, there was no solid institutional basis for peak-level national social dialogue, except for the tripartite Labour Policies and Wages Committees, which met sporadically. Furthermore, dialogue rarely extended beyond the national level to the regional, sectoral or workplace levels, which was a bottleneck to informing and implementing peak-level agreements. In terms of gender disparity, discrepancies between male and female participation in the labour force persist, coupled with a 70 per cent gap in the daily wage. Gender inequalities and gender-based violence exist across the various economic sectors and informality continues to grow. Progress has been sluggish on legal reforms to align Palestinian regulations with international labour standards and international human rights treaties, including on equality and non-discrimination. Draft amendments to the current Palestinian Labour Law (No. 7 of 2000) were finalized in 2020 by a specialized tripartite legal drafting committee and with support from the ILO, but not submitted to the Council of Ministers, pending examination by the tripartite partners. Similarly, steps to finalize the draft Trade Union Organization Law made little progress, and, in the absence of tripartite consensus, the draft law remained on hold. Approving the Labour Law and Trade Union Organizations Law is critical for improved labour market governance, gender equality at work, sectoral social dialogue, and collective bargaining, and is considered necessary by the Ministry of Labour for social partner organizations to operate effectively. In regard to labour administration, the national tripartite committee on OSH developed a national OSH profile and a diagnostic of the OSH situation in the OPT in 2021 to plan for prevention and mitigation of occupational hazards that have further emerged during COVID-19. The Ministry of Labour has worked on developing two draft regulations to operationalize Decree Law No. 3 of 2019 on Occupational Safety and Health Committees and Supervisors in the Enterprises and has held ten workshops to train labour inspectors on matters relating to COVID-19 and the state of emergency. Although the ILO in OPT has been providing multidimensional support in terms of building the national capacity in OSH and LI, there continues to be serious weaknesses undermining overall performance, necessitating fundamental institutional development of the labour inspectorate and its structure.

Project symbol

PSE/22/02/KWT

Admin unit

RO-Arab States/DWT-Beirut

Start date

14/11/2022

End date

31/12/2025

Total allocation

977629

Total expenditure

Status

Active

539792

Development Partners

Kuwait, Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour

Country/Countries

State of Palestine

Outcomes

Outcome 5: Gender equality and equality of treatment and opportunities for all
Outcome 1: Strong, modernized normative action for social justice