On the 14th of August 1947, Pakistan came into existence carrying with it something its founders had never intended to inherit: an employment law designed to keep workers in their place. The master-servant doctrine, a relic of nineteenth-century British jurisprudence, was built not around the dignity of the person who laboured, but around the authority of whoever paid the wage. Pakistan adopted it wholesale, renamed nothing, and moved on.
That inheritance has never been fully undone. Today, across textile mills in Faisalabad, brick kilns outside Lahore, and domestic households in Karachi and Islamabad, the same fundamental imbalance persists. Employers command. Workers comply. And when workers seek legal redress, they discover that the system was never constructed with them in mind.
Pakistani employment law rests on two distinct pillars. The first covers ‘workmen’—blue-collar industrial employees—through a web of provincial statutes enforceable in dedicated labour courts. The second governs everyone else: white-collar staff, domestic workers, contract employees, and the vast informal workforce. For this second group, the operative legal framework is not a modern statute but the old common law principle of master and servant, a relationship defined by contract, deference, and the employer’s near-unilateral right to terminate employment.
Since its founding, Pakistan has announced five national labour policies in 1955, 1959, 1969, 1972, and 2002 without dismantling this core structure. The 18th Constitutional Amendment of April 2010 devolved labour regulation from the federal government to the four provinces, giving Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Balochistan the power to legislate separately on most employment matters. In practice, this produced a patchwork system: some provinces moved faster than others, enforcement varied widely, and workers crossing provincial boundaries often found their protections inconsistent or entirely absent. The structural consequence is a two-tiered workforce. Registered factory workers may theoretically invoke labour courts, file grievances, and claim statutory benefits. Everyone outside that narrow category, and that includes the majority of Pakistan’s working population, is left to negotiate from a position of near-total legal weakness.
While registered factory workers can theoretically invoke statutory protections, the vast majority of Pakistan's workforce is left to negotiate from a position of near-total legal weakness
“According to the master’s mindset, the employee can be dismissed or terminated outrightly with good, bad, or no reason at all, without providing any opportunity of fair hearing.” — Justice Muhammad Ali Mazhar, Supreme Court of Pakistan, June 2024
In April 2024, the Supreme Court of Pakistan issued a judgment that laid bare the problem with unusual candour. The case concerned employees of the Punjab Provincial Cooperative Bank (PPCBL) who had challenged disciplinary actions taken against them. Because the bank operated under non-statutory service rules, the Lahore High Court had dismissed their petitions as inadmissible. The Supreme Court upheld that decision, but its reasoning went far beyond the outcome itself.
Justice Muhammad Ali Mazhar, writing a 13-page judgment, observed that under the master-servant framework, an employer may dismiss a worker “with good, bad, or no reason at all.” He described this arrangement as incompatible with the realities of modern employment and urged the legislature to establish a dedicated tribunal capable of providing workers with a swift and accessible remedy. The court noted that without such a forum, affected employees are forced to file civil suits and wait years for decisions, a path realistically available only to those who can afford it.
This was not the first such call. Following the Supreme Court’s Mubeen-ul-Islam ruling in 2006 (PLD 2006 SC 602), which struck down a 1997 legislative remedy as unconstitutional, non-statutory employees have remained without any dedicated legal forum for nearly two decades. Parliament has failed to address this gap in 2007, or 2010, or 2015, or since.
In Pakistan’s formal private sector, a widespread practice has emerged that uses the legal gaps within the master-servant doctrine as a deliberate business strategy. Corporations hire workers not directly, but through third-party staffing agencies. On paper, the worker is employed by the agency. In practice, however, they report to the corporation, follow its rules, and perform its work. The legal fiction of the intermediary strips away virtually every statutory obligation the corporation would otherwise owe.
A machine operator who identified himself as Ali and had been working at Yunus Textile Mills since 2022 described the arrangement in testimony submitted to labour rights investigators in August 2024:
“We are placed under a third-party contract system. We are neither registered with social security nor with the Employees’ Old Age Benefits Institution. The minimum wage is 32,000 rupees, but it is not being paid. Our ATM cards are held by the contractor, who withdraws the money and gives us only half, keeping the rest for himself.”
Ali’s account is documented, not anecdotal. Research by Labour Behind the Label found that workers hired through third-party contractors across Pakistan’s export-oriented garment industry are routinely denied minimum wage compliance, social security enrolment, pension contributions, written contracts, paid leave, and the right to form or join a union. Human Rights Watch independently documented forced overtime, denied leave, and short-term oral contracts even in the larger factories most likely to face compliance scrutiny.
If the third-party contract system represents the corporate face of Pakistan’s master-servant problem, the brick kiln sector represents its most extreme form. Across nearly 20,000 kilns operating throughout the country, more than four million workers, adults and children alike, produce bricks under conditions that meet the international legal definition of forced labour.
The mechanism is peshgi: an advance payment made to a worker or family during a moment of financial crisis. That debt grows faster than it can realistically be repaid, binding the borrower to the kiln owner indefinitely. A 2004 survey of brick kilns in Punjab found that close to 90 per cent of workers there were bonded. The International Labour Organization has confirmed that Pakistan, along with India and Nepal, accounts for more than 85 per cent of the world’s estimated 20 million bonded labourers. Among them, 18.7 million are exploited within the private economy, with women and girls making up 11.4 million of the total.
In Pakistan’s brick kilns specifically, roughly 70 per cent of bonded workers are children, more than one million in number, many of whom inherit their parents’ debt and are kept at the kiln as collateral if a family attempts to leave.
Pakistan abolished bonded labour by statute in 1992. The Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act declared all debt bondage void and made it a criminal offence. Yet a 2024 inquiry by the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Pakistani Minorities examined what three decades of that law have produced and reached a blunt conclusion: its implementation is effectively non-existent.
The inquiry cited a case from March 2024 in which a Christian worker was discovered dead inside a kiln owned by politically connected individuals. No meaningful prosecution followed.
“The bricks these workers make go into our houses, hospitals, schools, universities and the parliament. But the workers themselves are shelterless, without education or health facilities.” — Ghulam Fatima, Founder, Bonded Labour Liberation Front
Estimates of Pakistan’s domestic worker population range from 4.4 million to 20 million. For most of the country’s history, this workforce, overwhelmingly women and girls, often from rural and minority communities, operated under virtually no formal legal protection at all. They were hired verbally, paid irregularly, dismissed without notice, and denied any enforceable right to a contract, a minimum wage, a weekly day of rest, or recourse against abuse.
The legislative picture has improved, though unevenly. Punjab’s Domestic Workers Act 2019 requires employers to register workers with the District Vigilance Committee, provide a written employment contract, pay at least the provincial minimum wage, set at Rs 37,000 per month from July 2024, grant one rest day per week, and provide written grounds for termination. Sindh enacted comparable protections in 2018.
Yet as of 2024, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan had still not passed equivalent legislation. Child labour prohibitions technically apply across all provinces, but without broader domestic worker statutes in those two provinces, enforcement of other rights remains largely unachievable.
In early 2024, the governments of Punjab and Sindh introduced draft Labour Codes proposing to consolidate more than two dozen existing provincial labour laws into unified statutes. Officials described the exercise as modernisation and linked it explicitly to attracting foreign investment through what they called an “ease of doing business” framework.
Labour rights analysts interpreted the framing differently: as a signal that the purpose of reform was to lower labour costs and increase employer flexibility, rather than strengthen protections for workers.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) subjected the Punjab Labour Code 2025, introduced before the Punjab Assembly as Bill No 85 of 2025, to detailed scrutiny in its Legislation Watch Cell Report published in November 2025. The HRCP concluded that the code falls short of both Pakistan’s constitutional obligations and its commitments under International Labour Organization conventions.
Among its findings, the draft was prepared without adequate participation from trade unions or workers’ representatives, in breach of the Tripartite Consultation Convention. It grants employers broad discretion to define what constitutes an unfair labour practice and permits employers to bring in replacement workers during strikes, effectively undermining the right to collective action.
The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics released its Labour Force Survey for 2024–25 in November 2025, the first conducted under updated ILO statistical standards. Its findings place the scale of the crisis in sharp relief. Pakistan’s total labour force numbers 83.1 million people. Of non-agricultural employment, 72.1 per cent falls within the informal sector. In rural areas, the figure rises to 75.5 per cent. These are workers without written contracts, without registered social security, and without any realistic path to a labour court.
Enforcement of the laws that do exist is itself a profound failure. Labour inspection departments across the country remain chronically underfunded, understaffed, and, according to multiple independent assessments, vulnerable to corruption. Inspections are reactive rather than systematic, triggered by complaints instead of scheduled oversight. In practice, this means that an employer who violates the minimum wage, denies social security registration, or dismisses a worker unlawfully faces an almost non-existent likelihood of consequences.
The United States State Department’s 2024 Country Report on Human Rights Practices in Pakistan noted that union registration rates remained low across all provinces, limiting workers’ ability to organise collectively. Provincial and federal authorities were also found to possess broad powers to deregister or dissolve unions administratively, often without judicial oversight.
Pakistan’s constitutional protections for workers are, at least on paper, robust. Article 11 prohibits slavery, forced labour, and child labour in all forms. Article 17 protects freedom of association, including the right to form and join trade unions. Article 25 guarantees equal protection before the law regardless of background. Article 9 protects the right to life, a provision that legal advocates argue must logically include the right to safe and dignified work.
The HRCP’s 2025 assessment of the Punjab Labour Code captured the contradiction at the heart of the system: Pakistan’s labour laws were enacted with minimal input from workers, amended with minimal input from workers, and continue to operate in ways that privilege employer discretion over employee protection, placing them in direct tension with the constitutional rights they nominally exist to enforce.
The Supreme Court’s April 2024 judgment in the PPCBL case, though it ruled against the workers before it, outlined a clear legislative agenda: create a dedicated tribunal for non-statutory employees, grant it fast-track jurisdiction, and require employers to provide documented justification before dismissal. Parliament has the roadmap. It has simply not begun the journey.
Alongside judicial reform, four specific legislative actions are both necessary and achievable. First, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan must enact domestic worker protection laws matching the standards already in place in Punjab and Sindh. Second, the peshgi loopholes within the Punjab Labour Code 2025 must be removed before the bill advances further. Third, third-party contracting arrangements that strip workers of statutory entitlements must be regulated and penalised, rather than tacitly permitted. Fourth, the federal minimum wage must be accompanied by credible enforcement, because a wage floor that exists only on paper protects no one.
A legal doctrine designed in nineteenth-century Britain to regulate the relationship between a factory owner and his workforce has no legitimate place at the centre of twenty-first-century Pakistani employment law. Yet it remains there, not because no one has noticed, but because those with the power to remove it have consistently chosen not to.
The workers in Pakistan’s brick kilns, garment factories, domestic households, and informal economy are not asking for privileges. They are asking for the rights their own Constitution already promises them: to be treated as citizens, not as servants.
The judiciary has pointed the way. The International Labour Organization has measured the gap. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has documented the failures in real time. What remains absent is not legal argument, evidence, or even political vocabulary. It is the will to act.
Until that will arrives, the master-servant doctrine will continue to do precisely what it was built to do.