Labor and Employment Law

Bhandari Law and Partners advises on the full range of labor and employment matters — litigation, transactional work, and day-to-day advisory — for both domestic and international clients. Labor disputes in Nepal rarely stay simple; a single termination can touch procedural, contractual, and trade union questions all at once, and our labour lawyers in Nepal work across all of it rather than treating each piece in isolation.

 

The Legal Framework

Employment relationships in Nepal are governed primarily by the Labour Act, 2074 (2017), which replaced the older 1992 Act and significantly widened its reach — the current Act applies to practically every organization, not just larger employers, and extends even to foreign enterprises hiring workers in Nepal. Alongside it sit the Labour Rules, 2075, the Contribution-Based Social Security Act, 2074 (governing SSF enrollment and contributions), the Bonus Act, 2030 (1974), the Trade Union Act, 2049 (1992), and the Sexual Harassment at Workplace (Prevention) Act, 2071 (2015).

 

Termination under the Labour Act follows specific, codified grounds and procedures rather than broad employer discretion — Section 144 requires prior notice except in misconduct cases, and retrenchment specifically requires 30 days' advance notice to the Labour Office and any recognized trade union or labor relations committee, along with a consultation process before it can proceed. Workplace misconduct itself is tiered into categories under Section 131, with punishment meant to be proportional to the level of offense, which matters a great deal in practice: a disciplinary action that skips a step or imposes a disproportionate penalty is exactly the kind of thing a Labour Court challenge is built around.

 

Collective bargaining has its own statutory structure too. Any entity with ten or more employees must form a Collective Bargaining Committee, either through trade union representation or, where there's no union, through representation of at least 60% of the workforce — and management-level staff are excluded from sitting on it. Disputes move through a defined hierarchy: the Labour Office first, then the specialized Labour Court, with a final appeal available to the Supreme Court within 35 days of the Labour Court's decision.

 

 

What We Do

 

Employment documentation

We draft and review employment agreements, employment handbooks, and workplace rules and policies, built to actually hold up under the Labour Act's specific requirements rather than generic templates.

 

Day-to-day employment guidance

We advise on hiring, grievance handling, disciplinary action, trade union and collective bargaining matters, employee layoffs, and the structuring of employee benefit packages.

 

Labor audits and due diligence

We conduct labor audits and labor law due diligence — including the annual labor audit requirement under Section 100 of the Act — to help clients identify compliance gaps before a regulator or an employee does.

 

Regulatory compliance documentation

We prepare the compliance documents employers need to meet their obligations under the Labour Act and related statutes.

 

Representation before labor forums

We represent clients in labor matters before the Labour Office, the Labour Court, and every level of the judicial and quasi-judicial system that hears employment disputes, through to the Supreme Court on appeal.

 

 

Additional Areas We Handle

We've conducted numerous human resource audits and analyzed workplace sexual harassment complaints under the Sexual Harassment at Workplace (Prevention) Act, advising clients on the legal process and on managing a company's potential liability where an employee-related dispute arises. We regularly advise multinational companies on cross-border employment issues, and represent clients across manufacturing, service industries, hotels, IT companies, development organizations, INGOs, and foreign diplomatic missions. We also routinely conduct staff training at client workplaces on labor law compliance — training that tends to prevent far more disputes than it resolves.