INDUSTRIAL LABOUR MIGRATION IN FAISALABAD: SOCIOECONOMIC IMPLICATIONS FOR WORKERS AND HOUSEHOLDS

Abstract

Faisalabad’s industrial growth has always depended, in part, on workers who move from villages and smaller towns into the city’s textile and manufacturing economy. That movement is not simply a one-way journey from poverty to prosperity. Migration can bring cash income, diversify household livelihoods, and broaden workers’ choices, but it can also push them into informal jobs, unsafe workplaces, and insecure urban housing. This article presents a narrative, review-based analysis of industrial labour migration to Faisalabad. It brings together migration theory, evidence on rural–urban mobility in Punjab, official population and labour statistics, and research on occupational health in Pakistan’s textile sector. Lee’s push–pull framework, Lewis’s dual-sector model, Todaro’s expected-income approach, the new economics of labour migration, and the aspirations–capabilities perspective are used to explain why people move and why the results of migration differ between workers and households. The review finds that the clearest local evidence concerns employment quality and occupational exposure. Migration may improve income and household welfare, yet social-protection coverage remains weak, and small weaving units face especially serious dust and safety risks. Evidence on migrant housing, recruitment through contractors, psychological well-being, and district-specific migration corridors is much thinner than policy discussions often suggest. The article therefore separates established findings from plausible but unverified claims and proposes a practical agenda for field research. It concludes that policy should make mobility safer—not attempt to stop it—through written employment records, portable social protection, enforceable occupational-health standards, affordable worker housing, and stronger rural livelihood options.