Govt urged to properly implement new policy for home-based workers

Representatives of trade unions, employers, labour supporting organisations and civil society activists on Thursday demanded that the government must provide all labour and constitutional rights to home-based workers and the government should ratify Convention C-177 of the Home Work Convention, 1996.

The demand was raised at a one-day provincial conference on Home-Based Workers (HBWs) titled “Finalisation of the Implementation of Strategy for HBWs in Sindh” jointly organised by HomeNet Pakistan, Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (PILER) and Oxfam at the PILER Centre.

The conference, held to commemorate International Women’s Day, was attended by a number of home-based workers from different areas of Sindh.

Justice (Retd) Majida Razvi, Chairperson, Sindh Human Rights Commission (SHRC); Umm-e-Laila Azhar of HomeNet Pakistan; Habibuddin Junaidi, Convenor, Sindh Labour Solidarity Committee; Karamat Ali, Executive Director of PILER; Mahnaz Rahman, Director, Aurat Foundation; Zehra Goawala, Researcher; Majyd Aziz, President of Employers Federation of Pakistan (EFP); Ashraf Naqvi, Joint Director of Labour and Human Resource Department of government of Sindh; Dr Aly Ercelawn, a senior economist; Zulfiqar Shah, Joint Director of PILER; Irfana Jabbar and Rehana Yasmeen, representatives of home-based workers and others spoke on the occasion.

The speakers pointed out that an estimated 12 million poor women home-based workers were the least paid and most exploited in the value chain of production. All home-based workers, they demanded, must be provided the fundamental right of association to form unions. Home-based workers were invisible because they work at home and were unorganised due to nature of their work, they said. The speakers said that home-based workers of Sindh had welcomed Sindh’s initiative to launch the first-ever policy for home-based workers in Asia. It is, they stated, a step forward towards the recognition of home-based workers and urged the Sindh government to develop a comprehensive action plan for the implementation of the policy.

The provincial government was also asked to ensure participation of HBWs and allocate adequate budget including upgrading of homes of HBWs, which are also their work places; skill development (including re-skilling for alternative employment) and appropriate literacy programmes, including financial literacy; social protection, including occupational health and safety; access to credit and economic resources.

Right to association and social protection should be provided to all home-based workers. The speakers demand to issue social protection cards for women working in the home based informal economy. To create awareness on occupational safety and health and provisions of services at their door steps special sessions be held. Similarly, they demanded that the right to collective bargaining must be ensured.

Appropriate bargaining forums at the city level must be created, they must be enshrined in law, and there must be sufficient budgetary provision for them to function effectively. This requires designing the rules of participation, establishing criteria for determining the issues for negotiation, and envisaging how such new forums will engage with the wider policymaking and regulatory frameworks so that these become a meaningful part of participatory decision-making.

The speakers underlined the need that representation of workers from the informal sector to be ensured in the local government ancillary bodies giving 33 percent representation to women; workers from informal sector must be involved in the urban and town planning bodies, committees of local, provincial and urban planning cells/units.