Government seeks to expand consultations before adding preamble to strike law

Despite labor unions insisting on including a preamble in draft regulatory law 97.15, which defines the conditions and procedures for exercising the right to strike, Minister of Economic Inclusion, Small Business, Employment, and Skills, Younes Sekkouri, announced on Friday that the government remains procedurally firm in rejecting the proposal.

The Minister promised “broader legal consultations in the time remaining before the text is submitted to a general legislative session.”

During a meeting of the Education, Cultural, and Social Affairs Committee in the House of Councilors, to vote on the amendments, Sekkouri emphasized that “the government has discussed the matter and does not oppose the preamble in principle, but there are procedural constraints.”

He added, “we have 16 regulatory laws without preambles,” insisting on the rejection while launching legal consultations and collaborative work to decide on this issue and settle the debate.

The minister urged the majority parties to withdraw the amendments to the first article, which the government considers to be a preamble in terms of form, reassuring the unions that “if there is an agreement later, before the plenary session, regarding the preamble, the amendment will be made in a matter of minutes after collective reflection.”

This came amid signs of tension between the Moroccan Labor Union (UMT) group and the Istiqlal Party’s Unity and Egalitarianism group, with the latter hinting that the union had violated procedure after the minister gave his final response and president of the UMT parliamentary group Noureddine Salik took the floor.

Salik rejected, “the mechanical approach to amendments,” and he was backed by Khalihan El Karch, a councilor from the Democratic Confederation of Labor, who also pushed back against the “pressure being placed on social representatives during the passage of this law.”

El Karch insisted that the law must include a preamble, arguing that “this text will represent Morocco in the eyes of many international organizations.”

The Minister stated that “regardless of the legal and formal arguments, it is difficult for such a law to exist without a preamble, due to its implications,” noting that “its provisions are not based solely on international experiences, but on an important part of national practice and the constants we have in the country, as well as the choices that our country has made, especially under the reign of King Mohammed VI.”

He also stressed that “several principles that the unions want the law to be based on, to enshrine union freedom, balance, non-discrimination and respect for occupational health and safety conditions, deserve to be mentioned as a preamble.”

Sekkouri emphasized that ‘the law regulating the right to strike includes the standard measures that require us to develop an agreed application of these contents,” adding, “they are mentioned in various aspects of the Constitution, not only in Article 29 of the 2011 document.”

The minister also spoke of the historical and moral significance of the right to strike, describing it as “fundamental to Morocco, perhaps more so than in advanced democratic countries where strikes have not historically followed the same path as in our country,” considering it necessary for the draft law to guarantee and take into account “practices specific to the Moroccan experience and not found in other countries.”

He noted that “Morocco’s non-ratification of ILO Convention 87 was not due to disagreement with its content, as evidenced by the fact that most of what it stipulates is at the heart of the Moroccan Labor Code.”

Sekkouri said that “Morocco’s non-ratification comes because it includes provisions that explicitly contradict the constitutional structure that we unanimously voted for in 2011, and it is a fundamental convention that cannot be ratified procedurally while expressing reservations about some articles.”