From Wage Regulation to Workplace Governance: A Business Management and Social Justice Lessons from Pakistan’s Minimum Wage Litigation

Abstract

Minimum wage regulation is conventionally treated as a legal or macroeconomic policy issue. This study reframes minimum wage compliance as a business and management governance challenge (Dobbins, 2023), examining why violations persist despite clear statutory mandates and repeated judicial enforcement. Adopting a qualitative, theory-driven design, the study conducts a systematic thematic analysis of judgments from the Pakistani labour court, High Court, and Supreme Court spanning nearly three decades. Judicial decisions are analysed as empirical data reflecting organizational wage practices, managerial rationalizations, and institutional enforcement dynamics. The analysis is guided by an integrated framework drawing on Organizational Justice Theory, HR Governance Theory, and Institutional Theory.Four dominant themes emerge: (1) wage governance and managerial compliance failure, (2) structural misalignment between minimum wages and living wages, (3) disproportionate wage injustice affecting vulnerable and gendered occupations, and (4) courts functioning as reactive, corrective governance mechanisms. The findings show that minimum wage violations are systemic rather than incidental, reflecting weak HR governance, fragmented accountability through outsourcing, and institutional decoupling between legal norms and organizational practice.