Agricultural land, fisheries, poultry farms and other work places in the agricultural sector just became better places for women workers. On Thursday, the Sindh Assembly unanimously passed a law which recognizes women in the agricultural sector as formal labourers and grants them the same rights as industrial labourers. In real terms, the Sindh Women Agricultural Bill 2019 will protect the social security rights of women by enabling them to access financial assistance from funds such as the Benazir Income Support Programme, to write out contracts determining their conditions of work when they believe this is necessary and gain the right to collective bargaining, social welfare including child health, and other rights available to those working in the formal sector.
The Bill has been before a select committee for some time and its passage has been termed by the Sindh chief minister as a historic moment. Whether this will prove to be the case depends largely on the ability of women, most of them illiterate and impoverished, to benefit from the rights enshrined in the law. This has been the consistent problem with much of the legislation in the country in the past. The presence of the law is however significant in itself. While women perform a large portion of the work in this sector, including sowing fields, taking care of cattle and poultry and in some cases ploughing fields, their work has had no formal recognition. It is almost always unpaid and the workers are guaranteed no rights unlike their counterparts in the more organized industrial sector. This is also true of women workers in other informal sectors. This new law at least makes their situation clear and a point of attention for all stakeholders in farming.
Sindh has recently passed a number of landmark bills. The difficulty of course is in enforcing them. However, they do set an excellent example and we must hope that other provincial assemblies in the country including Punjab are inspired by these laws and choose to follow up on them so that a larger number of people are able to benefit and there is greater uniformity in the laws governing the country. This would be an important step which also draws attention to the situation of women whose work is often overlooked. Female agricultural workers in Sindh are integral to running the land estates and farms of that province. They need a guarantee of social protection for the labour that they perform.
