Tag: home-based workers

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Plight of home-based workers

Home-based workers are contributing a lot to the economy of Pakistan as they are doing a tremendous job by locally producing homemade items, such as needlework, embroidery, quilts, etc.

Education brings a lasting change and enriches the skills of people to bring innovations in their work by researching and exploring the markets to market such items. But these artisans and skilled women get the golden chance to showcase their skills only at cultural events organised by development organisations, culture departments and at fairs at shrines of Sufi saints where stalls are set up to attract people from all walks of life to purchase their handicrafts at a high price owing to the high cost of travelling and raw materials.

Their constant exclusion from the minimum wage policy, life insurance and health insurance policy prompted the home-based workers both male and female to stage protests recently to press for their demands since they are not being given their due rights as safeguarded by the state.

The protests were supported by the human rights and women’s rights NGOs to influence the government to formulate a policy for home-based workers. The Sindh government took the lead in this by becoming the first province ever to have adopted a policy for home-based workers and passed the Sindh Home-based Workers Act of 2018. The Sindh government became the first province in Asia to have adopted a policy and legislative framework for the home-based workers that will likely benefit these skilled persons.

The passage of the Sindh Home-based workers Act of 2018 is the kind of initiative we expect from the federal government. It should announce a national policy for home-based workers so that the provinces implement the policy in letter and in spirit. The provinces should also legislate the policy framework for the workers and give market access to these home-based workers to sell their products at competitive prices that benefit them, especially women working at home.

This will at least contribute to the income generation and fix minimum wages to protect the rights of these workers.

There is also a strong need to establish skills development centres in rural areas as per the existing skills of rural women to help improve their economic condition and open opportunities for their work and income generation so that they may support their families and earn a respectable earning by working from home.

Working from home is getting popularity throughout world as technological advancement has bridged the gap between countries and opened infinite opportunities. The Ministry of IT and Telecom has taken the lead to introduce Digiskills.pk —a joint initiative of the Ministry of IT and Telecom and Virtual University of Pakistan named ‘Ignite’ to impart free skills-based training to the youth through online learning and the YouTube channel. This is a great initiative to impart skills to the youth free of cost and enable them to get jobs working as freelancers, digital marketers and accountants.

The Ministry of Labour, SMEDA and NAVTEC may come up with a similar project to build the skills of home-based workers in their respective fields such as tailoring and design-making, fashion designing, blanket and quilt making, at the grassroots level to transform their skills into income generation.

The government should come up with small-scale loans for these skilled domestic workers through commercial as well as microfinance banks so that these deprived communities may avail the financial assistance to set up their stalls and shops in villages, small towns and cities. In Sindh, the SRSO has done a tremendous job under the UC-based programme ‘Success’ and revitalised the income-generation ability of rural women. This training and access to market will engage these workers in the workplace and they can increase their earning potential if given proper advice and guidance.

It is high time that the government of Pakistan adopted a legislative framework for home-based workers so that the long-standing issues facing domestic skilled workers may be addressed.

The Express Tribune

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Women workers favour local governance for issues’ redressal

LAHORE: The district governments could play a very important role for the promotion of women home-based workers at grassroots levels which are from the informal sector of economy and lack some of the most basic facilities of life. This was highlighted during a day long ‘provincial consultation on local governance issues of home-based workers’ arranged by HomeNet Pakistan under the auspices of Oxfam and UN Women here Tuesday. Local bodies could greatly benefit the women workers, who need facilitation such as access to markets,transportation for their goods, skill trainings, along with health, sanitation facilities for themselves and education for their young ones. “We want empowered local governments that could truly facilitate the grassroots workers, especially the skilled women who work from homes”, said Begum Mahnaz Rafi, social activist and politician, who commended support by these workers for their families and contribution to the economy. These local governments must have funds according to demographic needs of the districts, she added. In truly democratic countries the need of local governance has been realised fully and translated into reality, she elborated, adding, “We must have reliable complete statistics quite from the UC levels which also reflect the skilled workers functioning in the informal sector of the economy.

Sources from the host organisation informed that a national policy draft for homebased workers has already been presented to the Punjab government and the dialogue was ongoing. Another proposal that calls for allocating space for home based women workers in Sunday bazars in the towns of Lahore has also been presented to the Punjab government, it was learnt.

According to a survey by HomeNet,Pakistan has a very large informal sector in which 20 percent growth was recorded in 2007. According to conservative estimates out of $ 160 billion size of country’s econom,$ 32 billion plus is in the informal sector”. A number of community based district coordinators, women workers, along with representatives of labour and social welfare departments were present on the occasion and came up with various suggestions to improve their income generating activities. Some women workers from Lahore while talking to this scribe regretted that middleman, in their case middle women, get lucrative returns as they have direct access to markets which they do not have. The situation in the small towns is even worse,they regretted.

Daily Times

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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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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

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Women workers threaten sit-in outside Punjab Assembly

LAHORE: Home-based women workers have threatened to stage a sit-in outside the Punjab Assembly if the provincial government does not pass the draft HBWs bill within a month.

The threat was made at a one-day national convention of the HBWs organized by the Labour Education Foundation here on Monday.

More than 800 HBWs from across the country attended the moot, which marked the home-based workers day observed across South Asia on Oct 20.

The draft law has been lying with the provincial authorities concerned for the last one-and-a-half years without any progress, while a similar law has been passed in all other provinces.

Give deadline to pass draft HBWs bill

Perhaps taking a cue from the success of the dharna politics that managed to get a murder FIR registered against state officials as high as the prime minister and the chief minister, the women workers from the informal sector decided to try the same strategy.

The workers from Punjab were so charged that they suggested reducing the deadline against HomeNet Pakistan executive director Umme Laila Azhar’s plea for extending it by one more month.

Labour deputy secretary Maleeha Rasheed, however, told the audience that the draft law had been received from the law department and a summary for the chief minister’s approval was being prepared before formal law-making.

LEF director Khalid Malik sought earlier law-making, warning that otherwise over 5,000 HBWs would stage the sit-in for an indefinite period after the deadline was over.

Although a thumping majority of the participants, mostly young and some of them carrying their kids, was either illiterate or poorly literate, they were confident and well-aware of their social, economic and political rights.

Teenaged Shamaiza, finance secretary of Kasur unit of HBWs union, said that over 400 workers had joined the union there and were regularly contributing to the union fund, a remarkable act keeping in view their meager earnings through piecework.

Inspiring to see were the women from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa who were usually not allowed even to step out of their homes what to talk of attending a trade union activity hundreds of miles away from their houses.

The KP workers have also taken lead over their counterparts in Punjab by getting registered their provincial level union some three months ago.

Tajmeena, the leader of an HBWs delegation from Mardan, KP, said: “The women grab the opportunity whenever they get a chance to raise a voice for their rights.

“Earlier, the women were afraid of assembling even at some colleague’s house, disunited, unaware of their rights and were going unrecognized as workers. Beginning the organization work from 2008, we did not look back again… The registration has given us an identity as well as enabling us to claim on fringe benefits like social security and EOBI.”

Though listening to speeches full of statistics used to be a boring activity, particularly for those who seldom step out of their houses, the participants of the Monday’s moot maintained a remarkable discipline throughout the day.

Mr Malik said it was the third national convention of HBWs and the gathering was swelling each time.

Office-bearers of the Progressive Home Based Workers’ Federation, established a day before, also took oath of their offices.

A charter of demands was also presented during the moot which included fixing minimum wages also for HBWs, recognizing them as workers, extending them EOBI and social security covers, providing them modern vocational training to add value to their work, offering them health and educational facilities as well as giving them access to market.

Ms Azhar informed the participants about the struggle so far made for winning rights for the HBWs, impacts of the drastic increase in the informal sector all over the world in general and in South Asia in particular.

Punjab Commission on the Status of Women chairperson Fouzia Viqar said the commission was a bridge between the civil society and the government and she promised to try her best for resolving the HBWs issues at the earliest.

Political activist Mehnaz Rafi, occupational health and safety expert Dr Huma Tabassum, All-Pakistan Workers Confederation president Rubina Jameel, and South Asia Partnership’s Irfan Mufti also spoke.

DAWN

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