EDITORIAL: Amnesty International’s latest report focusing on the plight of workers powering the garment sectors of leading South Asian economies, including Pakistan, exposes a labour system in which all employees stand vulnerable, but with women bearing the brunt of harassment, coercion and unsafe working conditions. It details how workers sustaining a core pillar of the country’s industrial base lack reliable safeguards, effective grievance mechanisms or institutional accountability. It is important to note that the conditions the report chronicles aren’t unique to the textile sector; the same troubling realities can be observed in factories across sectors, corporate workplaces, government offices and even in academic institutions.
The report underscores the fact that the absence of credible grievance-redress systems, impunity has become structurally embedded, and those who challenge abuses, whether over harassment, bullying, unpaid overtime or minimum wage violations, face retaliation. Moreover, unlike the other South Asian economies that the report focuses on, namely India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, Pakistan is the only one where women workers are in a minority, forming 28 percent of the garment workforce. This closely mirrors the country’s overall female labour force participation rate, which hovers around 22.6 percent, again lower than that of our South Asian peers. And, it is hardly surprising that women’s participation in the labour force trails the rest of the region when the very architecture of the Pakistani workplace is built to sideline them, consigning them to lower wages, longer hours, pervasive harassment and fragile informal contracts that strip away security, advancement opportunities and voice, even as their labour remains central to the functioning of their industries and the country’s economic life.
The bleak picture painted by the report is reinforced by this year’s Global Rights Index, an annual assessment of worker rights violations worldwide. Pakistan scored below the regional average across 97 indicators derived from ILO conventions. Although the Constitution guarantees the right to association, successive governments have tightly restricted it, with there being apprehensions regarding overly powerful unions becoming barriers to economic growth. The reality is that only 2-3 percent of the workforce is unionised. Informal workers in agriculture, cottage industries and other unregulated sectors remain largely unorganised and vulnerable, and even within the formal sector, companies routinely exploit temporary contracts to deny workers basic facilities, a safe working environment and collective bargaining rights. Labour law compliance is often seen as an obstacle to profitability, a mindset reinforced by a government suspicious of labour activism.
It is imperative that the federal and provincial governments urgently address the report’s concerns and implement its recommendations, including ratifying all 11 fundamental ILO conventions. The authorities must remember that complying with labour rights obligations will also be critical for retaining our GSP-plus status, which will be up for renewal soon. Therefore, guaranteeing a non-discriminatory minimum monthly wage aligned with international standards and equipping labour authorities with competent personnel to conduct timely, thorough inspections remain critical. Equally urgent is the full implementation of the Protection against Harassment of Women at the Workplace Act, alongside revising labour legislations that contravene international laws, including those that bizarrely treat “illegal strikes” as acts punishable under anti-terrorism legislation.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025