Tag: Domestic workers

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Employer of minor girl booked for ‘torturing’ her in Islamabad

ISLAMABAD: On the direction of the Ministry of Human Rights, the Kohsar police have registered a case against a citizen on the charge of torturing her 11-year-old maid.

The police said the girl was working in a house at F-7/4. About a month ago, her woman employer tortured the girl after she broke a glass. The girl also sustained burn injuries on her body.

Later, she managed to reach her native town of Faisalabad. Her family then approached the Child Protection Centre in Faisalabad and lodged a complaint, said the police.

In response, the centre brought the issue in the knowledge of the Ministry of Human Rights.

In a letter to the capital police, Mohammad Yousaf, an assistant director of the ministry, asked for an investigation.

The police said the girl was currently in her native town and police were collecting details about her as well as her employer.

Newspaper: Dawn

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Skills development: 4,000 women being trained, says minister

LAHORE: Minister for Women Development Hameeda Waheedud Din said on Thursday that a programme for training 4,000 women had been launched under the Punjab Skill Development Fund. She said 10,000 domestic workers would be imparted training under the Domestic Workers Programme.

She was talking to a delegation of the Canadian High Commission. The delegation discussed steps taken by the government for welfare of women and their economic uplift and protection. The minister said that the government was providing soft loans under a self-employment scheme. She said Rs4.8 billion loans had been distributed so far, 40 per cent of these going to women. She also mentioned the Women on Wheels campaign.

Express Tribune

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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

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Female domestic servants

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THE death of another female domestic servant prompted me to write these lines. It all started in the 1990s when I returned to Pakistan after an absence of more than two decades and we needed urgent help of female domestic servants to look after my ailing wife.

The turnover of these young helpers was frequent due to many reasons, but what I want to share with readers is their family background, their previous experiences as domestics and the attitude of employers as revealed to my late wife

Some of these kids belonged to broken homes where their mothers dispatched them to some unknown but well-to-do families to clear their own way to marry again. The mothers hardly ever saw them to ask how they were being treated. The former would just see the employers to collect the pay of their daughters and never had the time to listen to their problems, for example, the girls’ food intake, their sleeping arrangements, behaviour of male members of the family and of male servants in the house towards these 11-12-year-old souls. Many had to work for late hours without getting proper rest and were given leftover food in shameful utensils.

I see girls of similar age group working in our neighborhood even now. Some of the elderly female servants told us that quite a few of these girls are ‘ hired ‘ from their parents usually on a one-year contract. The employer pays one year’s agreed salary in advance to the desperately poor parents, who hardly ever bother to inquire about the living conditions of their daughter for months on end. I see these kids washing the floors of the porches in all kinds of weather – some time just at sunrise while the children of the family, who are of approximately the same age, still try to wake up from their cosy beds to go to school.

The situation demands we rethink about the whole scenario and somehow relieve them of their misery.

M. Masud Butt
Lahore

DAWN

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Maid to suffer

Most middle and upper class families employ maids in Pakistan. Although these women are working, the environment they work in does not really do much to empower them. Hired below minimum wage with no respect for labour laws, it is no wonder that so many cases of domestic help being abused are routinely discovered. The 20th of this month has been designated as World Social Justice Day, and in light of that, the International Labour Organisation (ILO), along with the Punjab Women Development Department (PWDD) is providing training to domestic workers and then assigning them jobs in households.

While the effort must be applauded, one can only wonder if this training will actually help improve the conditions of the work environment for these women. One of the biggest issues for these women is that they do not get nearly enough money for the work they do. Half of them have full time jobs at rich households and then come back home and do the same work all over again for free, with no freedom in using the money earned. What sort of training are the ILO and the PWDD planning to give to these women that will empower them when they will still be working in houses? How will their rights be safeguarded after the training process? Why will people want to hire ‘trained’ domestic workers for a higher price if they have cheaper alternatives available?

Both organizations claim that this training will improve the employability and the working and living conditions of women, but they fail to mention how this will be practically implemented. The plight of domestic workers is linked directly to the mindsets of the people who employ them, and though a stand taken by one side will help the situation, it is the attitude towards servitude that is most in need of reform. Targeting this modern form of slavery is what World Social Justice Day is all about. The labour laws of minimum wage and protection from abuse at work are only there in name. Alternative means of employment for these women after training would be a better way to tackle the problem, instead of sending them back into the houses that sustain the cycles of abuse.

The Nation

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