Pakistan is to draft a national occupational safety and health policy, with technical support from the International Labour Organisation (Dawn).
The Ministry of Overseas Pakistanis and Human Resource Development announced the initiative after an ILO-convened consultation.
Who it is meant to cover
Formal and informal sectors both: women, young workers, older workers, people with disabilities, migrants, home-based workers, domestic workers, agricultural labourers and digital platform workers.
That list is the ambition and the difficulty in one line. Most of those categories sit outside any workplace an inspector can visit, and several sit outside the definition of employment altogether.
The framework
Alignment with ILO Conventions 155 and 187, following the 2022 International Labour Conference decision recognising a safe and healthy working environment as a fundamental right at work.
What the officials said
Geir T. Tonstol, ILO country director: “The aim is not simply to produce another policy document, but to develop a framework that Pakistan’s institutions can implement.”
Federal secretary Nadeem Aslam Chaudhry said a stronger framework “can support safer workplaces, productive enterprises and Pakistan’s ambition”.
The sentence that concedes the problem
Tonstol’s remark — not simply another policy document — is unusually direct for an agency partner, and it identifies the actual failure. Pakistan does not lack safety rules. Labour inspection is devolved to the provinces, inspector numbers are small relative to registered establishments, and enforcement in the informal sector is close to theoretical.
A national policy can set standards. It cannot create the inspectorate that would apply them, and no funding or staffing commitment has been announced alongside it.
Why it lands this week
The Senate’s human rights committee spent Wednesday asking why no criminal case exists over a hospital fire that killed 14 newborns, and this newspaper has reported two building fires in public institutions in the past four days, both attributed to electrical faults.
Those are workplaces too, and they are ones the state itself runs.
What is not established
No workplace death or injury figures were cited. No timeline, budget or drafting deadline has been published, and it has not been stated how a federal policy will bind provincial labour departments.
[Image: AFP/File via Dawn]
