The regulation of wages

Sindh Assembly on January 25 passed a law designed to regulate the minimum wages of workers

‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’ has been the watchword of the international labour movement for the last 150 years. Workers around the world for a century and a half have been trying to get their labour dignified by not just a fair wage, but a living wage — and the two are not necessarily the same thing. Wages in Pakistan, particularly at the lower end — daily-wagers and lowly-paid workers in salaried positions — are poorly regulated. Employers will try to pay as little as they possibly can get away with — a trait no less evident in the developed world than in the world that is still in development. The Sindh Assembly has now joined the debate and on January 25 passed a law designed to regulate the minimum wages of workers that are employed across a range of industrial and commercial enterprises.

In broad terms, this is legislation that is much to be welcomed and we would hope to see similar legislation in other provinces, but a host of questions lies beneath the good intentions of the legislators. It may come as a surprise to many reading these words that Pakistan has no shortage of perfectly good legislation, well written and entirely appropriate to the needs of the people — and in very large part completely ignored or un-enforced. The Sindh Minimum Wages Bill 2015 sets Rs13,000 per month as the minimum wage for the fiscal year 2015-16, which may be fine in principle and probably considerably more than many are currently being paid, but the underlying question is whether in these days Rs13,000 is a fair or sufficient wage for a month’s work? It is not for us to answer the question, but the debate needs to be opened up and not only in respect of those in formal employment. There are millions, many millions, who toil in the informal labour market, their wages unregulated other than by the whim of their employers and their terms and conditions of service equally so. Regulatory legislation by itself solves nothing. Minds have to change before behaviours are modified. 

Published in The Express Tribune, January 28^th,  2016.

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