PAKISTAN’S first comprehensive occupational safety and health (OSH) profile exposes the inadequacies of worker protection in a country where over 72m people constitute the formal workforce. It arrives against a backdrop of preventable industrial tragedies: the 2012 Baldia factory fire in Karachi, which claimed 264 lives, stands as the most devastating indictment of our failed safety standards. Workers trapped behind locked exits in a building with no emergency escapes perished — a catastrophe that should have revolutionised industrial safety compliance. Yet the cycle continues. The 2015 Sundar Industrial Estate collapse in Lahore, claiming 45 lives, and the 2016 Gadani shipbreaking yard inferno that killed 26 workers, show how little we have learned. These are not mere statistics; they represent families shattered by preventable workplace disasters.

The findings suggest we remain perilously unprepared. Despite existing labour laws, implementation of safety standards is lacking. Most concerning is the virtual absence of protection in the informal sector, where millions toil without basic safety guarantees. The farm sector, employing 37.4pc of the workforce, accounts for nearly a third of all workplace injuries. Particularly worrying is the dramatic spike in female worker injuries in the manufacturing sector, jumping from 6.4pc in 2018-19 to 24.8pc in 2020-21. This trend suggests that as women enter new sectors of the economy, our workplace safety infrastructure is failing to protect them. Insufficient inspection mechanisms, understaffed regulatory bodies, and inadequate training institutions are to blame. Most small industries remain unaware of mandatory accident reporting procedures, while labour departments lack the resources to enforce existing regulations effectively. Pakistan’s economic ambitions cannot be realised on the backs of an unsafe workforce. The victims of Baldia, Sundar, and Gadani deserve more than performative reforms. We need complete OSH overhauls, stringent enforcement, and genuine accountability. The human cost of inaction is already too high.

Published in Dawn, December 31st, 2024