Label Behind the Label, a UK-based advocacy group, recently released a report painting a grim picture of Pakistan’s garment export sector. Wage violations. Forced overtime. A culture of fear so entrenched that social audits supposedly can’t do their job.
These are heavy allegations. Any credible industry needs to sit with them rather than wave them away. But the report itself is a misframed snapshot, not a story. It can’t capture the full arc of an industry that has spent the better part of a decade rebuilding its compliance architecture from the ground up.
Look at the data and a different picture starts to emerge. The ILO’s Better Work Pakistan Synthesis Report (2022 to 2025) is not a one-off survey but an independent, multi-year assessment, and it found that non-compliance among export-oriented factories has narrowed considerably.
Just 4.6% of factories fell short on minimum wage payments in 2025. Overtime non-compliance sat at 2.3%. That’s not what a sector in systemic collapse looks like. It looks like isolated gaps being closed by a maturing regulatory and audit ecosystem. International buyers seem to agree: a third of those surveyed said they plan to increase sourcing from Pakistan in the coming years. That’s a hard number to square with an industry supposedly defined by fear and retaliation.
Here’s what actually sets Pakistan’s leading exporters apart today. It isn’t just ticking boxes on a buyer’s code of conduct. It’s how deeply labour rights and worker welfare have been folded into corporate identity itself.
Interloop Limited is a good place to start. Women hold 44% of its board seats and a quarter of its executive leadership positions, figures that would turn heads in any global manufacturing context, let alone in a sector often stereotyped as resistant to gender parity.
Add to that its scholarship partnerships with Government College Women University Faisalabad and its mobile health clinics serving cotton-growing communities, and you get a model of compliance that clearly extends well past the factory gate.
Gul Ahmed tells a similar story. Its Child and Forced Labour Prevention Policy, its whistleblowing mechanisms, and a public commitment to reach 15% female workforce representation by 2026 all point toward the kind of forward-looking governance that regulators and buyers now expect under emerging EU human rights due diligence rules.
Masood Textile Mills has gone even further, weaving the EU’s CSRD and CSDDD requirements directly into its supplier assessments and human rights monitoring. That’s a company anticipating regulation, not scrambling to react to it once it lands.
Inclusion has become a genuine differentiator too, and not in a token way. Soorty Enterprises’ PRISM Project has trained over a hundred individuals with hearing and speech disabilities.
Sapphire Finishing Mills employs more than 150 deaf individuals through its partnership with the Deaf Reach Programme. Liberty Mills, meanwhile, supports employment for roughly 200 differently abled workers and funds rehabilitation for 1,500 differently abled children. None of that shows up on a standard social audit checklist. It happens anyway.
Maybe the strongest case against the “compliance theatre” narrative is simply the scale of welfare infrastructure these companies have built, often with no buyer standing over their shoulder.
Soorty runs a psychiatric institute at JPMC and a paediatric centre treating roughly 40,000 patients a year. Liberty Mills reaches 1.4 million patients annually through its healthcare outreach. Crescent Bahuman provides on-site housing, childcare, and financial literacy training.
You don’t build things like this to fool an auditor. You build them because worker welfare has become part of how the business plans for the long term.
And it isn’t only the largest players. Kamal Limited works with PESSI to get ration cards to eligible employees and partners with the Motorway Police on driver safety training. Gohar Textile Mills runs OHSAS 18001-aligned safety systems and has picked up CSR recognition for it.
Diamond Fabrics was named Best Place to Work in Pakistan’s textile industry by PSHRM. Put these together and a pattern emerges: compliance culture is spreading well beyond the biggest exporters into the wider supply chain.
None of this is meant to wave away the concerns labour advocacy groups have raised. A 4.6% non-compliance rate on minimum wages might sound small, but it still means real workers facing real violations. Pakistan’s industry, and its regulators, cannot afford to get comfortable. Real accountability means holding two things true at once. Meaningful, independently verified progress has been made. And the job is not finished.
What the evidence does push back against is the idea that Pakistan’s textile sector treats compliance as cosmetic and retaliation as routine. Falling non-compliance rates. Rising buyer confidence. Expanding welfare infrastructure. A growing, proactive alignment with frameworks like the ILO’s core conventions, the UN Global Compact, and the EU’s due diligence directives.
Taken together, these point to an industry genuinely in transformation, one still operating under Pakistan’s continued commitment to the GSP+ framework.
For young people across Pakistan whose futures are bound up with this sector’s credibility and growth, that distinction isn’t academic. An industry that is imperfect but improving, honest about its gaps, and increasingly answerable to international standards deserves a fuller hearing than one critical report can give it.
Pakistan’s Textile Industry Is Redefining Labour and Sustainability Standards Despite Allegations
Label Behind the Label, a UK-based advocacy group, recently released a report painting a grim picture of Pakistan’s garment export sector. Wage violations. Forced overtime. A culture of fear so entrenched that social audits supposedly can’t do their job.
These are heavy allegations. Any credible industry needs to sit with them rather than wave them away. But the report itself is a misframed snapshot, not a story. It can’t capture the full arc of an industry that has spent the better part of a decade rebuilding its compliance architecture from the ground up.
Look at the data and a different picture starts to emerge. The ILO’s Better Work Pakistan Synthesis Report (2022 to 2025) is not a one-off survey but an independent, multi-year assessment, and it found that non-compliance among export-oriented factories has narrowed considerably.
Just 4.6% of factories fell short on minimum wage payments in 2025. Overtime non-compliance sat at 2.3%. That’s not what a sector in systemic collapse looks like. It looks like isolated gaps being closed by a maturing regulatory and audit ecosystem. International buyers seem to agree: a third of those surveyed said they plan to increase sourcing from Pakistan in the coming years. That’s a hard number to square with an industry supposedly defined by fear and retaliation.
Here’s what actually sets Pakistan’s leading exporters apart today. It isn’t just ticking boxes on a buyer’s code of conduct. It’s how deeply labour rights and worker welfare have been folded into corporate identity itself.
Interloop Limited is a good place to start. Women hold 44% of its board seats and a quarter of its executive leadership positions, figures that would turn heads in any global manufacturing context, let alone in a sector often stereotyped as resistant to gender parity.
Add to that its scholarship partnerships with Government College Women University Faisalabad and its mobile health clinics serving cotton-growing communities, and you get a model of compliance that clearly extends well past the factory gate.
Gul Ahmed tells a similar story. Its Child and Forced Labour Prevention Policy, its whistleblowing mechanisms, and a public commitment to reach 15% female workforce representation by 2026 all point toward the kind of forward-looking governance that regulators and buyers now expect under emerging EU human rights due diligence rules.
Masood Textile Mills has gone even further, weaving the EU’s CSRD and CSDDD requirements directly into its supplier assessments and human rights monitoring. That’s a company anticipating regulation, not scrambling to react to it once it lands.
Inclusion has become a genuine differentiator too, and not in a token way. Soorty Enterprises’ PRISM Project has trained over a hundred individuals with hearing and speech disabilities.
Sapphire Finishing Mills employs more than 150 deaf individuals through its partnership with the Deaf Reach Programme. Liberty Mills, meanwhile, supports employment for roughly 200 differently abled workers and funds rehabilitation for 1,500 differently abled children. None of that shows up on a standard social audit checklist. It happens anyway.
Maybe the strongest case against the “compliance theatre” narrative is simply the scale of welfare infrastructure these companies have built, often with no buyer standing over their shoulder.
Soorty runs a psychiatric institute at JPMC and a paediatric centre treating roughly 40,000 patients a year. Liberty Mills reaches 1.4 million patients annually through its healthcare outreach. Crescent Bahuman provides on-site housing, childcare, and financial literacy training.
You don’t build things like this to fool an auditor. You build them because worker welfare has become part of how the business plans for the long term.
And it isn’t only the largest players. Kamal Limited works with PESSI to get ration cards to eligible employees and partners with the Motorway Police on driver safety training. Gohar Textile Mills runs OHSAS 18001-aligned safety systems and has picked up CSR recognition for it.
Diamond Fabrics was named Best Place to Work in Pakistan’s textile industry by PSHRM. Put these together and a pattern emerges: compliance culture is spreading well beyond the biggest exporters into the wider supply chain.
None of this is meant to wave away the concerns labour advocacy groups have raised. A 4.6% non-compliance rate on minimum wages might sound small, but it still means real workers facing real violations. Pakistan’s industry, and its regulators, cannot afford to get comfortable. Real accountability means holding two things true at once. Meaningful, independently verified progress has been made. And the job is not finished.
What the evidence does push back against is the idea that Pakistan’s textile sector treats compliance as cosmetic and retaliation as routine. Falling non-compliance rates. Rising buyer confidence. Expanding welfare infrastructure. A growing, proactive alignment with frameworks like the ILO’s core conventions, the UN Global Compact, and the EU’s due diligence directives.
Taken together, these point to an industry genuinely in transformation, one still operating under Pakistan’s continued commitment to the GSP+ framework.
For young people across Pakistan whose futures are bound up with this sector’s credibility and growth, that distinction isn’t academic. An industry that is imperfect but improving, honest about its gaps, and increasingly answerable to international standards deserves a fuller hearing than one critical report can give it.
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