Malawi and India are developing countries with industrial relations systems where workers, at times, stage strikes without following required procedures. This paper, using comparative analysis approach, examines legal industrial dispute procedures of the two countries to explore their complexity and find common cause of staging illegal strikes. The paper reports that the problem of illegal strikes in Malawi and India is mainly due to confirmed complexity of the industrial dispute procedures. Considering the severe impacts of strikes on countries’ economies, the authors, however, recommend that the complexity is reasonable, necessary and suitable for developing countries and thus must be preserved to ensure that the law framers’ intention to use strikes/ lockouts only as actions of last resort is strictly upheld.