When the Parliamentary Oversight Committee on Labour and Employment sat down with the Sierra Leone Labour Congress, what unfolded was not a routine institutional engagement. It was a detailed, uncomfortable accounting of how thoroughly Sierra Leone’s labour protections have been failing the very workers they were designed to serve and how long that failure has been allowed to persist without adequate scrutiny from those with the power to act.
The committee, chaired by Hon. Bilo Shaw, opened the session with a framing that set the tone. Workers across vulnerable sectors, he said, cannot be left to carry heavy loads physical and economic while the systems meant to protect them exist only on paper. He questioned how grievances are handled, how institutions communicate with one another, and whether union dues paid by workers actually translate into tangible protection. They were the right questions. The answers that followed were damning.
Mohamed Salieu Bangura, President of the Sierra Leone Labour Congress, and his team laid out the landscape of a labour movement that operates independently funded through union dues rather than government subventions and that has, despite its constraints, managed to contribute to key legislation including the Employment Act. But Deputy Secretary General Edward Y. Kamara made clear that legislative progress has outpaced enforcement by a considerable distance.
The list of failures he placed before the committee was specific and serious. Multinational companies operating in Sierra Leone have been cited for sexual harassment and poor working conditions, with accountability conspicuously absent. In the banking and construction sectors, workers are routinely kept on temporary contracts well beyond the legally permitted period, denied confirmation and the protections that come with it a practice that is straightforwardly illegal and apparently routine. Minimum wage earners and workers receiving leave allowances are being taxed contrary to agreements that were supposed to protect them. Foreign workers consistently receive better conditions and benefits than their Sierra Leonean counterparts doing equivalent work. Collective bargaining agreements, the foundational mechanism through which workers negotiate fair terms, are being weakly enforced to the point of irrelevance.
Then there is the question of political interference influential figures, the Labour Congress alleged, who move behind the scenes to undermine union activities and blunt labour enforcement before it reaches those with something to lose. It is the kind of allegation that is difficult to prove in a public session and impossible to ignore.
The Congress also raised alarm about the expanding use of third-party employment arrangements a model in which workers are hired not directly by the companies they work for but through intermediary agencies, a structure that diffuses accountability, strips workers of bargaining power, and sits in direct tension with national labour law. That this practice is growing, rather than being curtailed, points to an enforcement deficit that goes beyond capacity constraints into the territory of institutional indifference.
“We are dealing with serious issues,” Kamara told the committee. “Workers are being denied their rights, and in some cases, the laws meant to protect them are ignored.”
The coordination gaps he identified compound the problem. The Labour Congress’s relationship with both the Ministry of Labour and the National Social Security and Insurance Trust carries unfinished business workers are not fully benefiting from the social protection schemes that exist in theory and are funded, in part, by their own contributions.
Hon. Shaw’s response was direct. The committee, he said, has the authority to summon institutions, investigate complaints, and push for corrective action — and it intends to use that authority. He called on the Labour Congress to formally document its key concerns, particularly around third-party employment, taxation anomalies, and workplace violations, so that structured engagement with the Ministry of Labour and relevant bodies can follow. He also pressed the case for the Local Content Policy, warning against the use of expatriate labour in sectors where qualified Sierra Leoneans are available and being passed over.
“If workers are not safe in their workplaces, then the nation itself is not safe,” he said.
That statement deserves to be taken seriously, because the evidence before the committee suggests the nation is not as safe as its labour statute book implies. Sierra Leone has laws. It has a Labour Congress fighting, on limited resources, to make those laws mean something. What it has lacked, for too long, is a Parliament willing to sit across the table from labour institutions and treat what they hear as a matter of urgency rather than protocol.
Read Also: SLRSA Retreat: Cooperation, Data, and a “Year of Action”
Whether this session marks a genuine turning point or becomes another entry in the record of well-intentioned meetings with inconclusive follow-through is a question only time and action will answer. The Labour Congress left with a commitment. Sierra Leone’s workers in the banks, on the construction sites, under the management of multinationals that know the rules and choose not to follow them will be watching what Parliament does next.
