Labor Laws in Pakistan

 Pakistan inherited the basis of its laborlaws from British India prior to the 1947
partition that made Pakistan a sovereign country. A series of domestic decisions and
advances in international labor standards have elaborated on and reformed the country’s
laws since its independence. Pakistani law provides considerable protections for workers
on paper--workdays and weeks capped at international standards, paid leave, specific
laws prohibiting forced or child labor--but labor violations abound. Caught between
business interests that would prefer a blind eye and scarce government resources, law-
enforcement officials have difficulty enforcing labor laws.

Work Week
 According to the Factories Act of 1934, no adult (defined as over 18 years of age) can
be required or permitted to work in any business for more than 9 hours a day or 48 hours
a week, unless the factory is seasonal, in which case the limit is 10 hours a day and 50
hours a week. Young people (between the ages of 15 and 18) cannot work more than 7
hours a day or 42 hours a week. The Factories Act also sets out provisions for paid leave,
applicable to workers who have been employed at the same business for more than a
year.

Hiring and Dismissal

 The Constitution of Pakistan protects the right of every individual to freely choose
their work and freedom of association. Employers must present possible employees with
a written contract stating the terms of employment, including wages, benefits and term.
The employer must pay one month’s wages in severance to legally end a contract with a
permanent employee, unless the reason for dismissal is misconduct.

Bonded Labor
 Pakistan’s Constitution prohibits slavery, forced labor and human trafficking;
unfortunately, all of these practices exist in contemporary Pakistan. After a 1988
Supreme Court decision, Pakistan passed the Bonded Labor Abolition Act in 1992, which
abolished the bonded debt system (known as “peshgi,” where a creditor advanced money
to an individual who then had to work off the debt) that had perpetuated forced labor for
decades. However, bonded debt continues in many parts of Pakistan, despite a penalty of
two to five years and a fine of 50,000 rupees for convicted violators.
Child Labor
Pakistani law defines a “child” as anyone under 15 years of age, and the Constitution
prohibits employing children in factories, mines or any hazardous occupation. The
legal age for working in most areas is 14, though a minimum of 15 is imposed for
railways and mines. The 1991 Employment of Children Act outlines safety measures
and limitations on the employment of minors. (For example, children cannot work
overtime or in industries hazardous to their health, such as firework manufacturing.)
Pakistan signed the U.N. Rights of the Child and an International Labor Organization
convention on minimum ages in industry. However, the Department of Labor
estimates that anywhere between 2 million and 19 million children work illegally in
Pakistan.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of child

labor?
Child laborers can bring money to the family as well as the child gets to learn a trade that
can be of use later in their life. The bad thing is that they are not educated so once they
become crippled from working in fields or in front of a loom their whole life, they have
nowhere to go.

• Increased brand capital

• Higher consumer/customer reputation and loyalty
• Higher quality of goods
• Reduced health and safety risks
• Reduced risk of "anti" campaigning
• Support of global socially responsible investors

Pros and cons of child labor

Child labor does exactly what is says on the tin. It is the use of workers under the age of
16 to do tasks that would otherwise be allocated to unfortunate adults. The word labor of
course suggests that the tasks these children have been provided are physically strenuous
such as mining, farming of repetitive factory work. These jobs are described as being in
the primary and secondary sectors (jobs including the creation of raw materials and the
processing of them, respectively).

Within the collection of developed nations there are tough laws regulating the use of
child labor, this is partly down to UN conventions which suggest legal standards
regarding child labor. However the majority of the work done to protect children is done
by the governments working within the countries. The earliest laws in the United States
concerning child labor began to be enforced in 1918. Similarly laws in the UK began to
be introduced at the beginning of the 19th century as a means to protect young children
working in factories during the industrial revolution. The "International Labour
Organisation" set up the Minimum Age Convention in 1973, which suggested that all
developed nations stated a minimum age at which a child could begin employment
without a parent's fully informed consent. This age has been allocated at between 14-16
years in all nations which have conformed to the guidelines. All of these laws and
conventions have been introduced as a means to protect the welfare and education of a
country's youngest members.

We are forgetting of course that there are many nations which have yet to enforce a
minimum age for which children can undertake regular employment and that at one time
or another all nations have relied upon children as an active part of their workforce. There
are then presumably many advantages of child labor, otherwise it would not have been
used in the first place. Using this logic there must therefore be many disadvantages which
have led to its downfall and abolishment within developed nations.

*The Pros*

Child labor's main advantage is that compared with employing an adult it is remarkably
cheap. This means that a business expense can be driven down be expanding its child
workforce. This in turn increases a business profits, which is the ultimate goal in any
economical climate. Child labor can be a key cog in a system which ultimately provides a
nation with more money, which in turn grants it greater political power and a higher
likelihood of being able to deal with the more advanced, richer nations in the West which
tend not to use child labor.

Child labor is a prevalent driving force in countries such as China and Vietnam and it is
easy to imagine the scope of goods that are manufactured from such regions. Good which
are produced in bulk such as toys, packaging, furniture and clothes are all mainly
produced in these countries and others like them, due to the low cost of manufacturing
which is a result of child labor. A major benefit means that consumers in developed
nations will theoretically pay less for the goods which they purchase.

A final advantage of using child labor is that children often prove very useful in
primary and secondary sectors, as outlined in the introduction. Repetitive tasks which
require specific skills are easily picked up by children; this is because they are innately
designed to learn. Also, in farming communities families often encourage their own
children to work as a means of supporting the welfare and the continued existence of the
family and the society as a whole. Children are also adapted very well to jobs which
adults are physically ill-suited for. There are notorious examples of children doing jobs
such as chimney sweeps and working down narrow mine shafts because of their small
size.

*The Cons*
The first, and most obvious, con involved within child labor is that of the ethical issues
involved. Children are correctly depicted as being largely defenceless. Since children
have younger, more innocent minds and a smaller physical presence than that of an adult
they are much more liable to exploitable by employers. This is why they are so poorly
paid for often very hard jobs in poor working conditions, such as those generally present
within "sweatshops". Another negative factor of having children working is that they are
often prone to physical and mental abuse as a means to force them to work harder or with
fewer mistakes. Whilst this drives up the productivity of the children it also damages
impressionable minds and ruins a period of a person's life which should otherwise be full
of adventure, innocence and discovery.

Child labor can also be interpreted as a vicious cycle. Children are stuck doing poor
quality, hard and mundane jobs in relatively unrewarding industries, and because of this
they miss the chance to ever acquire a proper education, even at the taken-for-granted
level that is provided at kindergartens and primary schools in the developed nations. This
impairs even the most basic literary and numeracy skills from developing. In turn this
will reduce the amount of workers that can work within the tertiary and quaternary
industries. These industries typically deal with providing public services and the use of
information technology; these industries are not accessible to nations with generations
without proper education.

Having written this article I would, of course, like to point out that I am firmly against
child labor and that I am a firm believer in Fair-trade goods and the proper treatment of
children within society and their absence from full-time employment.