Political economy of every nation requires naturally an adequate combination of politics, economic
activities and socio-cultural realities in order to speed up the overal process of development. The Nepali
context of politics is always in such a transition that economic agenda has never been given emphasis by
the ruling parties. Thus lip-service has been dominant in the overall scenario and hence the issues of
labour have not been considered by the state power. Based on the imported policy norms, policy
makers have been basically guided by the IFI prescriptions and ground realities of the nation & working
people are being ignored all the time.
In this context as a responsible trade union confederation, GEFONT Nepal has been in continuous efforts
to interven in policy matters. With its approach of policy intervention for achieving a pro-worker state
by changing the state-character of capital-tilt, GEFONT started its move to gain power through
unionization & mobilizatiion of overwhelming mass of agricultural wage workers in addition to the
formal sectors of employment, so that the stagnant character of Nepali society could be shaken
adequately. So it moved forward with a policy of minimum wage declaration in every village body of the
government, which compelled the national government to declare national minimum wage for
agricultural workers in 1999. Strategy of organizing the informal economy workers in order to compel
the government and policy makers to think also in a labour-angle and to diversify their technocratic
approach of looking at capital , investment, business class and FDI. For instance the Nepali economy is
currently based on remittances from abroad, but ruling groups and policy makers are focussed on
statistics of remittances and not even bothering for a moment about the hardships of the remittance
senders.