LAHORE: The government and entrepreneurs in Pakistan must stop treating labour as a burden. Workers are not cost factors, they are partners in production. Sustainable growth cannot come from exploitation, it comes from empowerment.
Labor reform in Pakistan must begin with honesty. The state must admit that both labour rights and business competitiveness are being lost simultaneously. Trade unions must reform themselves too — from political platforms into professional voices that represent worker welfare, not party agendas.
A new framework should link wages to productivity, provide tax incentives for formal employment, and ensure that every registered worker is covered by social security, health and pension schemes. The enforcement must be digital, transparent and swift.
It is one of Pakistan’s greatest paradoxes — we celebrate Labour Day with loud political slogans, grand speeches, and a national holiday, yet our workers remain trapped in low wages, insecurity, and exploitation. Every political party, every civil society group, and every union vows to protect workers’ rights — but only in words. In practice, labour continues to be treated as a disposable cost, not a stakeholder in growth.
Wealth can indeed be created for a while by denying workers their due rights — but never sustainably. Nations that exploit their workers lose competitiveness over time because productivity stagnates when morale collapses. Our factories, fields and workshops are full of underpaid, overworked people whose only motivation is survival.
Governments boast of raising minimum wages every year, but in reality, each raise pushes many small and medium industries closer to sickness. The minimum wage increases have rarely been accompanied by productivity improvements, training programs, or technology upgrades. When cost pressures rise, the first victims are jobs. Each wage hike leads to silent retrenchments, unreported shutdowns and a shift towards contract labour.
In most industrial zones, permanent workers have become a rarity. Labour contractors, the new middlemen, dominate the system, supplying temporary workers without benefits, job security or accountability. This has institutionalised exploitation under the guise of ‘flexibility’.
Pakistan’s labour market is a strange duality. The documented sector — factories, multinationals and large-scale units — is bound by stringent labour laws that look progressive on paper but are poorly enforced. The informal sector — which employs the majority — enjoys near-total freedom to hire and fire, set arbitrary wages and extract long hours without compliance or oversight.
It is here, in this undocumented economy, that real flexibility exists — but it comes at the cost of dignity and safety. There are no unions, no contracts, no social protection, and no limits on exploitation. And yet, this same informal economy continues to absorb the country’s growing labour force, while the formal sector stagnates under the weight of outdated laws, rigid regulations and bureaucratic indifference.
This contradiction has given rise to a vicious cycle: investors see Pakistan’s labour market as rigid because of the laws — even though the implementation is toothless — and therefore stay away. The result is neither a worker-friendly system nor a business-friendly one.
We have ended up with the worst of both worlds: tough laws on paper that discourage investment, and lax enforcement on the ground that permits abuse. What Pakistan needs is the opposite — flexible, modern labour laws that encourage hiring and reward productivity, combined with strict enforcement to eliminate child labour, unsafe conditions and exploitation.
Even today, millions of children are working in factories, workshops, farms and homes. They polish shoes, stitch footballs, wash dishes, and carry bricks — all while being denied education and childhood. Each one represents a national failure — of policy, morality, and enforcement. Yet we continue to tolerate child labour as an economic necessity instead of recognising it as a social crime.