LAHORE: Employees of the Lahore High Court Bar have not been paid their salaries for four months, leaving the Bar in the grip of a severe financial crisis.
According to the employees, the suspension of salaries has brought their households to the brink of going hungry, and staff are in serious distress after four months without pay.
The employees said that running domestic expenses has become difficult because salaries have not been paid, and they have demanded the immediate payment of their wages.
According to sources, the Lahore High Court Bar is facing a financial crisis because funds have not been received from the federal and Punjab governments.
Bar associations in Pakistan occupy an unusual financial position. They are statutory professional bodies rather than government departments, and their recurring income comes principally from membership subscriptions, enrolment and licensing fees, library and hall charges, and revenue from facilities operated on their premises.
That base is rarely sufficient to cover the full cost of running a large bar. The Lahore High Court Bar Association is among the country’s biggest, with a membership running into the thousands and a support establishment covering library staff, clerical and record personnel, canteen and hall staff, IT support and maintenance workers.
The gap is conventionally bridged by grants from the federal and provincial governments, typically routed through the law department, and by development allocations for specific projects such as chambers, library expansion and IT systems. When those transfers are delayed, the shortfall falls first on the salary head, because it is the largest recurring line item and the only one that cannot be deferred without immediate human consequence.
The staff affected are not lawyers. They are salaried employees — clerks, library assistants, record keepers, sanitary workers, security guards and support personnel — who are generally at the lower end of the wage scale and who have no professional practice to fall back on.
Four months without wages in a period of sharply rising fuel, transport and food prices compounds the pressure considerably. Transport fares on Lahore’s inter-city and intra-city routes have risen in the past week alone following consecutive petroleum price increases, while milk, chicken and LPG are selling well above the rates recorded in our daily market rate list.
Employees have demanded immediate payment. Resolution ordinarily requires either the release of pending grants by the federal and provincial governments, or an internal decision by the Bar’s elected office-bearers to meet the salary bill from its own reserves and subscription income pending the transfers.
The episode also raises a broader question about the funding model itself. A professional body whose administrative staff can go unpaid for a third of a year because of a delay in intergovernmental transfers is structurally exposed, and bar leaderships have periodically argued for a predictable, statutorily protected grant rather than discretionary annual allocations.
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