October 29, 2014

Nobel laureate Malala wins World’s Children’s Prize

STOCKHOLM: Girl’s rights champion Malala Yousafzai, the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate in history, was awarded the World’s Children’s Prize on Tuesday, after a global vote involving millions of children.

Malala, 17, was shot in the head in 2012 by the Taliban near her home in Swat Valley for her advocacy of girls’ right to go to school.

“Millions of children have voted to award Malala this year’s World’s Children’s Prize for the rights of the child,” the organisation said in a statement.

“Nobody has ever received the Nobel Peace Prize and the World’s Children’s Prize – often dubbed the ‘Children’s Nobel Prize’ by the media – in the same year.”

The award was created in 2000 and is part of a worldwide educational programme in which children learn about global issues, democracy and their own rights.

The programme finishes with a global vote on who to give the prize to.

This year’s honorary awards went to former Microsoft executive John Wood, founder of the Room to Read literacy group, and Indira Ranamagar from Nepal, for her work for the children of prisoners.

Nelson Mandela, Graca Machel, Anne Frank and Kofi Annan have previously been honoured in the awards.

Malala will receive the prize at a ceremony in Mariestad near Stockholm on Wednesday.
This year’s laureates will share $100,000 to be used in their work for children’s rights.

Express Tribune

October 29, 2014October 29, 2014

Know your rights: Domestic servants

By: Ali Usman

LAHORE: There is a growing trend of engaging domestic help, particularly in cities. According to the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, 74 per cent of the labour work force is engaged in the informal sector, of which domestic workers are the biggest chunk.

Yet despite that, there are no clear laws to guarantee domestic workers their rights as they do not fall under the social security net. However, the following laws apply in certain cases.

Minimum wage rule

The minimum wage for a labourer in the Sindh is fixed at Rs11,000. However, because no law accepts domestic workers as labourers, this rule does not apply to them, even though their working-hours sometimes exceed those of a labourer’s. Their salaries remain far less.

Umme Laila Azhar, the executive director of HomeNet Pakistan, a non-government organisation working for home-based workers and domestic servants, said domestic workers are termed unskilled workers but they are not registered or acknowledged as such anywhere in Pakistan. “There is no mechanism to ascertain their salaries, perks, or terms of job,” she said.

Protection against Harassment of Women at the Workplace Act

Domestic workers can register harassment complaints against their employers under the Protection against Harassment of Women at Workplace Act. The procedural requirements, however, are not fulfilled in many cases because the first complaint has to be filed with an internal office committee. In case of domestic workers, this requirement would be impossible to meet. However, domestic workers can take advantage of this law to get an FIR registered against their employers.

Domestic child servants

Article 25-A of the Constitution states that it is responsibility of the state to extend the right to free education to every child. This is violated in the case of domestic child servants.

Most of them have to stay with their employers away from their homes. The situation is termed “contemporary form of slavery”, used to refer to domestic child labour in the country.

“They are not entitled to several basic rights, including the right to education, the right to medical treatment or the right to live with parents. In many cases, domestic child servants do not study. In the last three years, some 30 kids who worked as domestic servants have been killed or brutally tortured. “We have been campaigning to urge the government legislate on placing curbs on this and bringing domestic labour under some regulations. “However so far nothing has been achieved in this regard,” Iftikhar Mubarik, a child rights activist, said.

Express Tribune

October 29, 2014October 29, 2014

Home-based workers hold convention

HYDERABAD: Speakers at the All Sindh Home-based Women Workers Convention held here on Tuesday demanded that the Sindh government fulfil its promise of recognising more than five million homed-based women workers and give them due rights as per the Constitution and labour laws.

Delegations of home-based workers from various districts of Sindh and representatives of labour unions, social institutions and labour-related government departments attended the moot orgainsed by the All Sindh Home-based Women Workers Federation (HBWWF) at the Sindh Museum auditorium.

Presiding over the convention, HBWWF secretary general Zehra Khan said that in the country, the economy had been shifting from formal to non-formal sectors rapidly.

As a result, more than 90 per cent of labour force were deprived of all those basic rights that should have been given to them under the Constitution of the country, labour laws and different international labour conventions and standards.

Presently, there are more than 12 million home-based women workers in the country and of them about five million working in Sindh in different sectors like glass bangle making, footwear, embroidery, traditional clothe making, textiles, garments, dairy farming and agriculture.

She said that for industrial development in the country, it was necessary that all home-based workers should be legally accepted as workers by giving them better wages, relaxing their working hours and giving them basic facilities of social security, pension, education and healthcare.

All Pakistan Wapda Hydro Electric Worker Union central president Abdul Latif Nizamani said inclusion of women workers, especially the home-based women workers, would revive the dying labour movement in Pakistan. To achieve this target, the worker movement of Pakistan should include the demands of the home-based workers in its agenda so that a bigger and stronger labour movement could be launched in the country.

Home-Based Women Bangle Workers Union general secretary Jameela A. Latif demanded that tripartite labour conferences should be held in all provinces, especially in Sindh, and in such conferences, participation of representative federation of the home-based women workers should be ensured. The cooperatives formed by this federation should be spread throughout whole province.

National Trade Union Federation (NTUF) Pakistan deputy general secretary Nasir Mansoor said the bid to divide the labour movement of Sindh on linguistic and rural-urban basis was a conspiracy. He said this representative moot of labourers rejected the idea of division of Sindh.

The moot also demanded that the Sindh government should immediately announce the provincial policy for the home-based workers. In the labour laws, home-based workers should be recognised by giving them due legal protection and the right of collective bargaining.

The home-based workers should be registered with EOBI, Sindh employees’ social security institution, workers welfare board and government-run social security departments, it demanded. The moot said special training centres should be formed for the home-based women workers and sale centres for their products should be opened in all big shopping centres.

DAWN

October 29, 2014October 29, 2014

Pakistan second to last in gender equality report

GENEVA: Ranked 141 of 142 countries in the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Gender Gap Report, Pakistan emerged second to last in terms of gender equality worldwide. The report, published on Tuesday, quantifies the magnitude of gender-based disparities and tracks their progress over time.

It seeks to measure one important aspect of gender equality: the relative gaps between women and men across four key areas — health, education, economy and politics.

According to the report, Pakistan is ranked 141 in terms of economic participation and opportunity for women, 132 in terms of education attainment, 119 for health and survival and 85 for political empowerment. Since 2006, when the WEF first began issuing its annual Global Gender Gap Reports, women in Pakistan have seen their access to economic participation and opportunity fall from 141 from 112.

Workplace gender gap

The WEF said the worldwide gender gap in the workplace had barely narrowed in the past nine years. While women are rapidly closing the gender gap with men in areas like health and education, inequality at work is not expected to be erased until 2095, the report added.

“Based on this trajectory, with all else remaining equal, it will take 81 years for the world to close this gap completely,” the WEF said in a statement. The world would be better served to speed up the process, according to WEF founder and chief Klaus Schwab.

“Achieving gender equality is obviously necessary for economic reasons. Only those economies who have full access to all their talent will remain competitive and will prosper,” he said.

Report

The report looked at how nations distribute access to healthcare, education, political participation and resources and opportunities between women and men. Almost all the countries had made progress towards closing the gap in access to healthcare, with 35 nations filling it completely, while 25 countries had shut the education access gap, the report showed.

Even more than in the workplace, political participation lagged stubbornly behind, with women still accounting for just 21 per cent of the world’s decision makers, according to the report.

Yet, this was the area where most progress had been made in recent years.

“In the case of politics, globally, there are now 26 per cent more female parliamentarians and 50 per cent more female ministers than nine years ago,” said the report’s lead author Saadia Zahidi. “These are far-reaching changes,” she said, stressing though that much remained to be done and that the “pace of change must in some areas be accelerated.”

The five Nordic countries, led by Iceland, clearly remained the most gender-equal. They were joined by Nicaragua, Rwanda, Ireland, the Philippines and Belgium in the top 10, while Yemen remained at the bottom of the chart for the ninth year in a row.

The United States meanwhile climbed three spots from last year to 20th, after narrowing its wage gap and hiking the number of women in parliamentary and ministerial level positions.

France catapulted from 45th to 16th place, also due to a narrowing wage gap but mainly thanks to increasing numbers of women in politics, including near-parity in the number of government ministers.

Express Tribune