A labor law exists for one primary purpose i.e.to stand as a statutory shield between a worker and the unchecked exploitation that occurs in the absence of oversight. It is designed to establish an unyielding floor under wages, a strict ceiling over working hours, and a fundamental guarantee that the body executing the labor remains a body worth living in at the end of the day.
That is the essential promise of labor jurisprudence. It does not promise prosperity or comfort. It simply offers the baseline assurance that the act of earning a living will not cost you your health, your safety, or your life.
By Sagarika ivy Khadka, Kathmandu Nepal
In Nepal, this institutional promise is codified in the Labor Act of 2017 a piece of legislation celebrated internationally as a model of progressive reform. Yet, empirical reality tells a vastly different story .84.6% of Nepal’s workforce operates entirely outside the jurisdiction of this law, navigating an informal economy so pervasive that it cannot be dismissed as a mere aberration. It is, in fact, the defining narrative of the country’s economic landscape.
Nowhere is this legislative failure clearer than in the brick kilns operating just outside the Kathmandu Valley.
Here, mothers spend their days molding wet clay into the structural blocks that will eventually become someone else’s residential home, someone else’s corporate office, or someone else’s infrastructure. Their own children sit nearby in the same dust, left with no alternative care and no other space to occupy. If we ask what these women are genuinely constructing, the honest answer extends far beyond bricks. They are building the physical foundation of a so-called Naya Nepal, every structure raised, every wall poured, quietly dependent on hands that the law completely fails to reach. A nation measures its progress by its skyscrapers while systematically forgetting to account for the labor that baked the bricks within them.
Does a state possess the right to define this as development? Can infrastructure raised on wages that collapse below the legal minimum whenever the production season slows truly be categorized as growth? The Labor Act explicitly sets the statutory minimum wage at NPR 19,550 a month. However, this number exists merely on paper and dissolves entirely in practice, because employers compensate workers by the brick, by the basket, or by the piece. When production declines, the baseline income a family relies on for survival vanishes. What is the systemic value of a wage floor if the state refuses to audit who is actually standing on it?
Yet, this represents only the beginning of the structural breakdown. If the Labor Act cannot protect an informal worker who lacks a written contract and the resources to travel to a government office to file a formal complaint, what does it say that the law simultaneously fails those who face none of these socioeconomic barriers?
This month, in Kathmandu, roughly 13,000 intern doctors, medical officers, and resident physicians vacated their wards to gather in protest at Maitighar Mandala. Their grievance was not rooted in financial compensation alone; they were demanding the basic right to stop working 36-hour consecutive shifts. Many were logging nearly 100 hours a week without a guaranteed day off, a blatant violation of a statute that explicitly caps daily duty at 12 hours and weekly duty at 72 hours. These are individuals who trained for a decade to earn the right to practice in a hospital. They are educated, highly organized, visible, and impossible for the state to ignore yet they are still forced onto the street to demand the enforcement of a law that has sat on the books since 2017.
If a profession specifically trained to preserve human life cannot compel its own government to apply statutory protections to state institutions, what hope is left for the worker in the kiln? She cannot read the text of the law, cannot leave her shift to seek legal recourse, and has no colleagues in white coats to stand beside her in solidarity. What does legal protection mean if even the most credentialed workers in the country are denied its security?
Many of us undoubtedly spent celebrating Spain’s World Cup victory, the trophy lifted, a new champion crowned, and a global tournament concluded. But let this milestone serve as a reminder while the celebration is still fresh the preceding World Cup cycle was built, in significant part, by migrant workers from Nepal and neighboring developing nations, whose labor and lives were treated as disposable collateral for the spectacle. Nepal’s own Foreign Employment Board documented approximately 2,200 Nepali migrant worker deaths in Qatar in the fifteen years leading up to that tournament. The vast majority of these fatalities were attributed to sudden heart attacks and cardiac arrest, a pattern independent researchers have directly linked to unprotected, strenuous manual labor executed in extreme thermal conditions.
They were not the only nationality to pay this heavy price. Yet, four years later, spanning an entire World Cup cycle, a new host nation, and a new champion, how many of those families have actually received formal compensation? How many fatalities were subjected to rigorous forensic investigation instead of being quietly categorized as natural causes? How many fathers lie awake because the primary income their household depended on is buried in a foreign jurisdiction that has never been held accountable?
Nepal is now governed by a new administration, elected on the rhetoric of systemic change. The international community has crowned a new football champion. Yet, what tangible reality has shifted for the families who have waited since 2022 for the state to acknowledge the true value of their sons’ lives? The International Labour Organization has repeatedly warned the Government of Nepal that its national labor inspection system is fundamentally broken. How many formal warnings must a sovereign state receive before its administrative silence becomes an explicit policy choice?
The state’s very survival rests upon this workforce sustained by the internal taxes it generates, the external remittances that prop up the national economy, and the infrastructure photographed as evidence of modern progress. How, then, does a state that depends so completely on its laborers manage to protect so few of them? How many mothers must raise their children in the dust of brick kilns, how many physicians must collapse from exhaustion mid-shift, and how many coffins must pass through Tribhuvan International Airport before the question of labor rights ceases to be rhetorical?
Because right now, it remains an unanswered indictment.
