Iftikhar Ahmad

Principal Investigator

Iftikhar Ahmad is the Principal Investigator for the Fairwork project in Pakistan. He is a comparative labour law expert and the founder of the Centre for Labour Research, Pakistan. He obtained his Master’s from the Industrial and Labour Relations School at Cornell University as a Fulbright scholar.

He has served as a member of the Labour Expert Group, constituted on the advice of the Prime Minister of Pakistan, to provide social protection to the informal economy. He is currently a member of the Federal Government’s Task Force on National Youth Employment Policy. He has worked with the Government of Pakistan (Ministry of OP&HRD) and ILO as Senior Adviser on the labour market and legislative reform issues.

He has recently launched the second edition of his pioneering work on the first de jure Labour Rights Index, comparing labour laws of 135 countries on more than 40 evaluation criteria. The work is done as a collaboration between the WageIndicator Foundation and the Centre for Labour Research. Iftikhar has co-authored Islamic Labour Code which provides an insight into Islam’s teaching on workers’ rights.

Iftikhar develops and leads the Fairwork project in Pakistan. This includes implementing the Fairwork principles within the Pakistani context, analysing the evidence and developing platforms’ scores/ranking, disseminating the results through publications, and engaging various stakeholders including government departments in dialogue.