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Pakistan’s Trade Unions in 2022

Published in Dawn, May 1st, 2022.

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.” — Albert Einstein

THE Covid-19 pandemic, which destroyed the livelihoods of billions of workers, exposed the widening inequity in the world between the rich and poor as never before. An important lesson to emerge in the aftermath is the need for a “just transition into the future” and the need to go “towards a more protected and empowered workforce” as was said in a recent ILO report. This lesson may not have been grasped yet by the employers and workers in our country, but it has created a ripple in the world of work at large. Let us hope our employers, labour unions and state officials realise these needs, if not today, then tomorrow.

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Nobel Prize and Minimum Wages

Published in Dawn, October 27th, 2021.

The Nobel Prize for Economics for the year 2021 awarded to David Card for his contributions to scholarship on minimum wages has vindicated trade unions, labour and human rights advocates and pro-labour economists the world over. Card’s work in 1994 refuted the long-held hypothesis that increases in minimum wage reduces employment. At the time, 90 per cent of professional economists believed that a hike in minimum wage was bad for the economy. In Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage, Card and Alan Krueger presented evidence that minimum wage hike has either no effect or a positive effect on employment.

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Minimum Wages in the Time of Globalization

Early June is the time the workers in Pakistan hope for some respite in managing their meager household budgets and look forward to a raise in minimum wage announced with the annual budget of the country. The minimum wage for unskilled workers currently in Punjab, Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is Rs10,000 per month, while in Balochistan it is Rs9,000.

With the current family size of 6.8 and 1.5 earning members per family in Pakistan, a monthly income of Rs10,000 translates into Rs73.52 (less than one dollar) per person per day in the household. The picture gets gloomier when we look at the national average monthly wages reported in Pakistan Labour Force Survey 2012-2013 — 20pc workers earn up to Rs5,000 and 41.73pc make an income between Rs5,000 to Rs10,000. With a 9pc inflation rate, minimum wages in real terms amount to even less.

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