Governing the Labor Market: The Impossibility of Corporatist Reforms

Muhammad Zahid Siddique, Javed Akbar Ansari and Qazi Mohammad Salman

The principal propose of labor market regulation is the production and sustenance of capitalist individuality—an individuality committed to the maximization of utility and profit. In the post war era two distinct regulatory regimes have been articulated to achieve this end. During the first phase (roughly 1945 to the early 1980s) ‘corporatism’ was institutionalized with an explicit recognition of labor’s collective rights in the appropriation of capitalist property. Since the early 1980s these regulatory regimes have been dismantled in many countries and capitalist individuation of labor is being promoted through the disempowerment of unions and the development of human resource management systems at the enterprise level. Labor’s collective participation in capitalist state decision making structures has been delegitimized.

This ‘post Fordist’ regulatory regime has been criticized by social democrats as it exacerbates income and power inequalities and alienates the worker from capitalist (civil) society. A partial resurrection of corporatist labor market governance structures is being contemplated in several Latin American countries—Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay etc. Pakistani social democrats will also press a future populist government to modify “post Fordist” labor governance structures (e.g. repeal IRO 2002).
This paper argues that a return to corporatist governance structures is impossible in Pakistan. Sec 1 outlines labor market regulation rationalities presented by three neo classical economists. Section II compares and contrasts Fordist and post Fordist modes of labor market regulation and section III seeks to establish the impossibility of institutionalizing corporatist governance structures in the labor markets of Pakistan.


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