Implementation and Enforcement Mechanisms for Cameroonian Labour Law: An Eye View on Some Labour Institutions, Best Practices and Some Impediments
Keywords:
Implementation & Enforcement Mechanisms-Cameroonian labour law-labour institutions-best practices-impedimentsAbstract
This piece of work has as main objectives to critically carry out a comprehensive analysis of the various implementation and enforcement mechanism with regard to Cameroonian labour law, to off root some of the various impediments involves and to provide measures on how to deal with it. It however, demonstrates that Cameroon, like many other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, from time immemorial has established a principal legal framework governing both individual and collective labour relationship and has equally tries to strengthen its implementation and enforcement mechanism for labour law across the national territory. But despite her effort, the rate of implementation and enforcement mechanism for labour law is still not satisfactory at all. As a matter of fact, there still exist some sort of workplace exploitation such as workers not receiving the correct payment for work done, overdue salaries, workers being unfairly dismissed, exposure of workers to unsafe working conditions, instances of female workers being sexually harassed at places of work [1], the absent of a unified national standards to coordinate between the different implementation and enforcement mechanisms; and the resolution of dispute using the “arbitration approach before the trial court” has always been controversial in Cameroon. In connection with our above objectives we adopted an in-depth content analysis which is based on primary and secondary sources of data collection imperative to the study
References
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2. In labour relations in Cameroon, this has been preserved by sections 1 31-155 of the Labour Code 1992 (in case of individual dispute) and sections 157 -164 of same code (in case of collective disputes).
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18. Natural justice, which a worker can get for the legal injury s uffered by a worker, can only be gotten from a judicial and/or quasi-judicial organ. However, it is opined that for a long lasting peaceful solution, the choice of method of dispute resolution should be that of the disputants by way of an agreement or a compromise adopting either adjudication or alternative dispute resolution (ADR) methods.
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40. That is, before any collective dispute goes to the competent arbitration board for arbitration, which in this instance seats in the Court of Appeal of the place of residence or employment of the employee, the dispute must go through conciliat ion. As was held in the Total Fina Case, the collectiveness of the dispute must be ascertained.
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61. Ibid, section 159 (1).
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66. Ibid section 157 of the 1992 Cameroonian labour code.
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76. According to section 161 of the Cameroonian labour code, the arbitration board is composed as follows: Chairman who is a judicial officer of the competent court of Appeal; members made up of an employer assessor and a worker assessor. The two assessors shall be designated by the chairman of the arbitration board from among assessors appointed to the high court for the area.
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79. Xie, Zengyi. 2010. Studies on the power of labour administrative organs to order employers to undertake civil responsibilities, Contemporary Law Review 3: pp.111–117. Cite this Article Tasiki Desvarieux Ntobengwia, Ndung Chantal Mbong, Nzalie Joseph EBI . Implementation and Enforcement Mechanisms for Cameroonian Labour Law: An Eye View on Some Labour Institutions, Best Practices and Some Impediments . Law. November 2020; 3(2): 1–16p.
