Home-based women workers in Pakistan

Although women working from their homes make significant contribution to national economy, their work is undervalued.

Women in Pakistan face a seemingly insurmountable array of obstacles which are preventing them from becoming productive and empowered citizens within our society. The situation of multitudes of women, who work from home to help ensure their households, survival, is no different. These home-based workers contend with varied problems, including restrictions on their physical mobility, inadequate education, a lack of skills, limited access to productive resources or credit and scant state support. Given these varied constraints, it should not be surprising to find most of this home-based workforce to be highly exploited.

Although women working from their homes make a significant contribution to the national economy, including export earnings, their work is undervalued and they are denied any form of legal protection, including a minimum wage guarantee or social security benefits.

Home-based women workers are not paid fixed wages but instead are remunerated according to a piece rate basis. They work long hours to produce different labour-intensive products, for which they receive very little overall remuneration, often as little as Rs50 per day.

Since these poor home-based workers lack access to formal sources of credit, it is not uncommon for them to become indebted to their contractors or employers in times of need such as sickness, accidents, childbirth, marriages or deaths, when they need to borrow money in advance. Often, this accumulated debt is difficult to pay off through the measly wages they earn, which in turn compels them to also put their children to work as well.

This scenario traps poor households in a vicious cycle of dependency and exploitation. In order to provide home-based workers a chance to earn a decent wage, it is necessary for their labour to be acknowledged and for government laws to apply to them.

There is no real justification for denying these poor women a minimum wage of Rs8,000 a month or offering them the same health and social security benefits which are legally supposed to be available in the formal sector.

For the past few years, women’s organisations had been preparing draft legislation called the ‘Home Based Women Workers Social Protection Bill’. While this bill was tabled in the National Assembly in 2007 and has undergone several revisions since, it has not yet been approved.

Recently, rights-based organisations gathered again, asking provincial labour departments to take the responsibility of ensuring home-based workers’ welfare. Bureaucratic oversight alone will, however, not suffice in ensuring this goal. Government departments need to work more closely with specialised organisations like the International Labour Organisation, and with non-governmental organisations and the private sector to develop a comprehensive action plan for ensuring home-based workers’ rights. There is also a need for setting up specialised entities or dedicated cells within the existing administrative set-up to undertake registration of home-based workers and to subsequently ensure that they receive social protection benefits.

If effectively implemented, such measures may indeed increase the price of products made by home-based workers. However, competitiveness can be maintained by placing greater emphasis on quality of products home-based workers produce, in effect, encouraging improvement of their existing skill levels, while simultaneously ensuring that the households of these workers derive greater benefit from the fruits of their labour.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 28^th, 2013.