Reframing Industrial Peace in Pakistan: Alternative Dispute Resolution, Collective Bargaining, and the Architecture of Labour Justice

Pakistan: A common discourse on industrial conflict in Pakistan is that it only gains any legal significance when a strike commences or when a dismissal case is presented in a labour court. The opinion is not complete. The majority of disagreements in the workplace start much earlier: in grievances that are not yet resolved, ineffective communication, inability to negotiate, ambiguity about the status of the workers, and the lack of reliable settlement mechanisms. This paper contends that the labour regime in Pakistan already has stratified architecture of settling industrial disputes by negotiation, conciliation, arbitration, and specialized adjudication but the architecture is not utilised and is not well co-ordinated. The main argument of this paper is that industrial peace in Pakistan relies not so much on the development of wholly new forums but on the timeliness, credibility and legal consistency of the existing alternative dispute resolution mechanisms.