A 17-member committee has been appointed to amend Sri Lanka’s labour laws, Deputy Minister of Labour Mahinda Jayasinghe has said.
The committee is chaired by the Secretary to the Ministry of Labour, Jayasinghe told NewsFirst. Several preliminary drafts have already been given to the trade unions represented on the National Labour Advisory Council, the tripartite body that brings together government, employers and the country’s most representative unions.
The Deputy Minister said the ministry expects to hold broad discussions with the unions on the proposals.
Measured against the government’s own timetable
The announcement is the first concrete structure put on a reform the government set a public deadline for in June.
In June, Labour Minister Anil Jayantha Fernando said Sri Lanka would introduce a unified labour code by the end of 2026, replacing decades of fragmented statutes with a single framework, and said a cabinet-appointed expert committee was already merging and updating the old acts. He said then that a draft would “soon” be opened for public and expert review.
Ten weeks on, that review has reached the trade unions in the form of preliminary drafts rather than a completed code, and the committee doing the work has 17 members chaired by an official rather than the cabinet-appointed expert panel described in June. NewsFirst did not report whether the two bodies are the same, when the committee was appointed, or what deadline it has been given.
With four months of 2026 remaining, the end-2026 target now depends on consultations that the ministry describes as still to be held.
What the reform is meant to do
Fernando framed the unified code in June as a competitiveness measure, arguing that with raw materials and technology available globally, labour efficiency had become one of the country’s few remaining levers. The code is a pillar of the Export Development Board’s five-year plan supporting the National Export Development Plan target of US$36 billion in exports by 2030.
The ministry has separately moved on factory safety regulations and on the import ban covering goods made with forced labour.
No other verified newsroom had reported the committee’s appointment at the time of writing.
