Bridging Legal Gaps in Pakistan’s Industrial Relations and Labor Inspection: A Provincial and Administrative Approach
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63056/Keywords:
Industrial relations, Labor inspection, Jurisdictional reform, Trans-provincial enterprises, Inspectorate professionalization, GSP-Plus complianceAbstract
This study interrogates Pakistan’s fragmented labor governance architecture after the Eighteenth Constitutional Amendment, weaving doctrinal analysis with administrative evidence to propose a fiscally realistic reform path. Drawing on statutory provisions, appellate judgments, and original monitoring data from the EU-ILO “Strengthening Labor Inspection System” project, it asks (I) how the Industrial Relations Act 2012 should be recalibrated to restore provincial access for precarious workers and (ii) whether professionalized inspectorates can curb rent-seeking and boost enforcement throughput. A mixed-methods design combining case-law parsing and risk-based inspection metrics shows that a revenue-and-employment threshold for “trans-provincial” status would eliminate 61 % of forum-shopping petitions, while inspectors with legal or scientific degrees file five times more prosecutions than patronage recruits. Financing the upgrade through ring-fenced penalty revenue keeps net fiscal outlays below 0.02 % of provincial GDP, and digitized inspection dashboards meet the EU GSP Plus traceability standards. The article concludes that statutory clarity and professional capacity are mutually reinforcing, offering a scalable template for federal systems grappling with devolved labor mandates and global due diligence pressures.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Muhammad Khurram Shahzad Warraich (Author)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.