Tashfin Ailya Rasool
The minimum wage is a tool that ensures workers operating in a low-wage labour market are protected by a wage floor. It is thus a tool that guarantees the welfare of disadvantaged workers. In Pakistan, not only is the legislated monthly minimum salary not implemented and inadequate for just subsistence, but parlance of this welfarism in terms of a monthly salary as opposed to hourly rate, conceals extensive unpaid work practices while enabling wage theft. Due to a consistent failure of the implementation of existing legislation, both blue-collared worker sectors, the formal and informal, exploit workers by normalizing eighty-four hour workweeks while remunerating below the paltry federal wage floor of Rs 20000.
The year is 1996 and 9-year-old Khurram has already joined the Pakistani workforce. He works as a dishwasher at a roadside diner, conveniently located to catering truckers. At an age when this child’s mind has increased their attention span to carry out elaborate instructions and experiment with logical problem solving, they are spending 12 hours a day standing on a stool, fatigued and convex, scrubbing flatware and hollowware. At the end of this child’s weary day, he returns home with a Rs. 20 as daily wage and the traumatic ordeal of evading the lascivious advances of men.
To put this into perspective, Khurram would have needed to earn five percent more to buy one liter of petrol every day in 1996. In other words, the energy expended by Khurram on this twelve hour shift was valued at less than the utility of one liter of petrol. Someone doing the same job in 2021 will earn Rs 300 per day for a twelve hour shift, and Rs 2100 for a seven day workweek where they perform eighty-four hours of labour. This informal sector job pays fifty-eight percent less than the prescribed federal minimum wage of Rs 20,000, but unbelievably it was not the lowest paying eighty-four hour workweek informal sector job I could find in Islamabad. Attendants at petrol stations in the capital that rush to make sure the customers windscreen is spick and speck, work the same eighty-four hour weekly shifts and are paid up to seventy percent below the minimum wage.
If the global standard of what constitutes a full-time workweek (forty hours from Monday to Friday) is applied to Pakistan’s monthly minimum wage, the hourly minimum wage can be calculated at Rs 125 per hour. If the global standard of what constitutes overtime is applied to workers pocketing Rs 300 per day for 12 hour shifts is calculated, with at least time-and-a-half wages for the four overtime hours, these workers are cheated of Rs 1700 daily on weekdays and Rs 2700 on weekends and public holidays.
Does Pakistan have a legally defined workweek?
Section 34 of The Factories Act 1934 categorically states that “No adult worker shall be allowed or required to work in a factory for more than forty-eight hours in any week, or where the factory is a seasonal one, for more than fifty hours in any week”. While section 36 of the same act states that no adult worker would be allowed to work more than “nine hours in a day”. Meanwhile section 8 of The Shops and Establishments Ordinance 1965 states that “no adult employee shall be required or permitted to work in any establishment in excess of nine hours a day and forty-eight hours a week”. Furthermore, both the mentioned laws also mandate overtime pay with The Factories Act 1934 section 49 (b) prescribing “twice the rate of ordinary pay”, while the 1965 ordinance also calculates overtime rate at “double the ordinary rate of wages payable”- with only the 1934 law permitting a weekly maximum of fifty-six hours. Thus, not only is there a defined workweek in Pakistani law but the hourly rate is technically set at Rs 104 federally, and overtime being twice that.
It is pertinent to point out that these laws in practice have better chances of safeguarding formally contracted workers, such as those in a factory. Albeit, wage dispersion is common in this sector as well, and demands from unions to abolish these varying wages are met harshly by capitalists. An example from March ‘18 of such an interaction is that of the murder of Gojra Power Loom Union (GPLU) leader Abdul Khaliq Sher, who was gunned down by his factory owner for demanding the same pay for his union as workers in the power loom sector in nearby Faisalabad. Though a case was registered, no arrests were made until June ’19. I was unable to get in contact with GPLU members to find out if any arrests and convictions occurred at all. This year, the GPLU has been demanding overtime compensation from factory owners but their demands were promptly rejected.
The persistence of a morally derelict culture:
Every government in Pakistan’s history, be it a democratically elected one or a military dictatorship, has failed to implement existing laws that prevent the level of exploitation and wage theft that blue-collar Pakistani workers face. All governments have served the propertied capitalist class, with occasional favorites for a given administration. The working-class of the country has consistently been kept busy doing back-breaking unpaid work, while the political discourse focuses on an inter-elite feud and war-mongering. The setting of a minimum monthly salary is an exercise that oscillates between being a deceptive decision where multinationals, industrialists, small business owners – as well as- domestic worker hirers, get away with exploitative labour practices with impunity; and a decision made for optics. The hourly minimum wage is a moral issue for a society to consider seriously as it speaks volumes about the value we place on work as a political community. If I am charitable, I’d say Pakistani society remains largely oblivious to the rights of workers, but that won’t explain why even those of us without capital want to keep domestic help for below the minimum wage and beyond the workweek. As long as we keep speaking in monthly salary terms instead of the hourly rate, such immoral and illegal employment practices will remain cloaked.
Art Work: Fatima Shehzad
