Austerity for minimum wagers
Nine years. That's how long the nation's hardworking, self-sacrificing, people-loving parliamentarians have bravely endured the cruel injustice of frozen salaries and allowances. Imagine the horror: no special allowance top-ups, no cost-of-living adjustments for their relentlessly rising grocery bills, no relief in sight while they burned the midnight oil passing important legislation. Truly, our elected elite were left out in the fiscal cold.
Thankfully, salvation is here.
In a move sure to warm their hearts—and their wallets—the government has proposed to increase the salaries and allowances of cabinet members and parliamentarians. The Finance Minister, with a straight face and perhaps a tear in his eye, explained that even lawmakers face 'hardships.' And it's only fair they get a raise, seeing how their wages haven't been revised in nine whole years.
Except, that's not exactly true.
The combined employment-related expenditure of the National Assembly and Senate has gone from Rs3 billion in FY17 to a proposed Rs15 billion in FY26. That's a 5x jump. Even more astonishing, the number has nearly tripled in the past four years alone. While some of this includes the pay of officers and staff, the bulk goes to the honourable members themselves. Exponential, you say? No wonder their 'hardships' needed such generous budgetary intervention.
Now contrast this with the wages of actual workers—say, the kind Pakistan Bureau of Statistics tracks weekly for the construction sector. Those have merely doubled over the same nine years. And the federal minimum wage? Stuck at Rs37,000, with no increase proposed in the new budget. Because apparently, raising it might upset our fragile exporters and make our bedsheets less competitive.
But let's not get distracted by technicalities like inequality.
It's important to remember that the federal minimum wage, though non-binding, often acts as a cue for provinces to set their own. So when it's left unchanged, it sends a clear message: tough luck, workers. And let's not even get into enforcement. Provincial wage data by industry shows widespread violations. Most manufacturing sectors are happy to quote the minimum wage at job interviews—before paying well below it in practice.
Meanwhile, as the Finance Minister tiptoes around industry lobbies and export competitiveness when asked about worker pay, he has no such reservations when it comes to ministerial kitchen budgets. After all, parliamentary pantries don't stock themselves.
One wonders—if minimum wage hikes hurt competitiveness, do parliamentary allowance hikes make Pakistan more productive? If construction workers earned less, would parliamentarians legislate better?
Perhaps it's time we face a hard truth: austerity is not for everyone. In Pakistan, it's a privilege reserved for the powerless. The rest can rest easy—preferably on freshly redone parliamentary benches.
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