As recently as a week ago, students at the World University of Bangladesh (WUB), a private tertiary institution in Dhaka, set a precedent.
A lecturer of law at WUB, Md Fahmedul Islam Dewan, who is also my former student, received an unexpected termination letter from the university registrar while he was teaching a class. It was not an unlawful termination per se, but one with ill intent.
However, Dewan has made history because his students, almost the entire department of law, sat outside the authorities’ office with placards and slogans in protest against the termination.
Dewan was not allowed to leave the campus by his students, who ensured that his tears were tears of joy, not grief. WUB was forced to rescind his termination, and Dewan emerged a hero.
Having known Dewan for almost a decade now, I can well imagine that he must have gone the extra mile for his students, motivating and supporting them to become future lawyers or social engineers. Alongside me, he has been a pillar, willing to take bullets for his students during the July Revolution that ousted Sheikh Hasina’s dictatorial regime.
But most private university teachers do not share Dewan's fate. Termination letters are common, and teachers are made to bow their heads and leave quietly.
Legal but malicious
Universities obviously ensure that they remain “legally correct.”
Now, I would not get into the reasoning WUB provided, nor Dewan’s casual talks (or gossip) with me about his office politics. But readers should be assured that he committed no misconduct, which led to any sort of “dismissal.”
The idea behind this piece is to evaluate the legal protection available to private university teachers when the rules they are supposed to abide by can be altered at any time the university authorities deem necessary.
The regulations
The law in Bangladesh excludes certain types of organizations from its scope. The list includes government organizations and educational institutions, among others.
The relationship between the Labour Act and service rules is not one of competition but of hierarchy. Service rules serve as a supplementary framework, but they can never diminish the protections afforded by labour law.
Service rules refer to an internal framework of an establishment that falls within the purview of labour law, akin to a constitution. They outline an organization’s formal guidelines for regulating employees’ operations, conduct, and overall discipline. Any establishment can create its own service rules to regulate operations and employee behavior.
Now, for instance, if someone works at a large multinational corporation, whether the nature of their job is white-collar or otherwise, would they be subject to the provisions of the Labour Act of 2006? Yes. Then what might be the reason for the same employee to be required to abide by another set of service rules imposed by the company?
It is likely that an existing service regulation would be more flexible and pro-employee than the minimum standards set by the Labour Act.
This means that, provided employee benefits, leave, or any other components of the corporation’s policies are contradictory to, or place employees in a worse position than, what is mentioned in the Labour Act, such policies would be challengeable in a court of law.
Chapter II, Section 3 of the Labour Act of 2006 states that service rules for workers must comply with the provisions of the Act. It further states in subsection (1) that any service rules must not be less favourable to workers than the provisions of this chapter.
Moreover, in 2015, the Ministry of Labour and Employment adopted the Bangladesh Labour Rules under Section 351 of the Labour Act. Rule 3(3) of the Bangladesh Labour Rules, 2015, states that these service rules must reflect the provisions of the relevant Act and cannot be less favorable to workers than similar provisions prescribed by law.
However, the main concern of this writing is whether service rules in organizations (such as private universities) that fall outside the scope of the Act can be drawn up without any consistency with the Act.
For the sake of understanding the depth of the matter, let us look at an example: Provided that a female university teacher (exempted from the ambit of the Act) is entitled to maternity leave of three months in accordance with university service rules, whereas the minimum standard set by the Act for a female RMG worker is four months -- does this not strike one as unfair?
Furthermore, what would happen in an instance where the same teacher feels that a penal decision has been wrongfully imposed on her by the university authority?
The service rules usually contain provisions mentioning where appeals may lie. However, in reality, since appeals are made to workplace superiors anyway, she would likely not receive the remedy she desired.
Above all, when service rules contain provisions stating that they are subject to the discretion of a board (of directors, trustees, or others)/ authority, the university’s service rules might change overnight.
Thus, it is safe to say that employees who solely depend on their institutions’ rules (and are not protected by the Act) are among the most deprived.
Servants of university trustees?
As private university teachers, our service rules can bend to the authorities’ will at any time, with no opportunity for us to go to the labour court to at least make ourselves heard.
So, unless there is a kind of mob -- and I mean it in a positive sense here -- formed by students, and unless we emerge successful like Dewan, we as teachers are never truly unbowed.
An overlooked provision
But there is actually a specific provision in the Labour Act that often goes unnoticed.
In fact, I was unable to find significant case precedents either. The last part of Section 3(1) of the Labour Act mentions that “establishments to which the Act does not apply shall not make any policy, rule, or house policy providing benefits less than the benefits provided in the Act.”
In the case of Md Abdul Malek and Ors vs Government of the People's Republic of Bangladesh and Ors (2013), there was a conflict between statutory law and service rules.
The Public Corporation (Management Co-ordination) Ordinance, 1986, allows workers in public enterprises to serve until the age of 60, while the Service Rules of Government-Owned Enterprises mandate retirement at 57. The Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh, in that case, held that:
“We further find that Service Rules of government-owned enterprise or corporation as to retiring their workers after completion of 57 years of age is not conducive for the workers and, as such, the provisions of the Proviso of section 3(1) as well as section 336 of Labour Act, 2006 will operate here in these cases to make the petitioners entitled to be in their respective service till they complete 60 years of their respective age.”
From this, we can deduce that service rules cannot legally undermine the protections afforded by statutory laws such as the Labour Act, even though the organization may technically fall outside the ambit of the Act.
Therefore, hope for us, private university servants, still exists.
Saquib Rahman is a political analyst and the Editor of Progress Magazine. He teaches law at North South University.
