‘Only 3% of the 45-million labour force in Pakistan are officially labourers’. PHOTO: SHAHBAZ MALIK/EXPRESS
Manzoor Ahmad was busy working at an under-construction plaza on Ravi Road on Wednesday (Labour Day) when trade unions, labour organisations and rights activists were busy taking out a rally on The Mall.
“Why would I go there and participate in a rally at the cost of a day’s wage? Some people have been rallying for labourers’ rights since decades but has that paid off?” says Ahmad, a construction worker who is in his late 40s.
“I do not count as ‘labourer’. I am a daily wage worker who, when he falls sick or can’t work for any reason, is not entitled to any money or medical treatment,” says Ahmad.
There are hundreds of thousands of daily wage workers like Ahmad and people working in the informal sector cannot be categorized as labourers under the law. In the Industrial Relations Act 2012, labourers are defined as those people who have an employer and have worked under that employer for at least a week. Trade unions and NGOs have been struggling to get the two included in labourers but their efforts are yet to bear any fruit.
Says Aima Mahmood, executive director of the Working Women Organisation,“This cannot be termed as a failure of the organisations working for the rights’ of labourers. We are fighting against industrialists, feudals and landlords who sit in the assemblies.” She told The Express Tribune that a policy on home-based workers and informal sector workers was submitted to the Punjab Cabinet but the government’s tenure ended before legislation could be drafted.
“Only three per cent of the 45-million labour force in Pakistan are officially labourers,” Mahmood said. In Punjab, if you don’t fulfill the criteria for a labourer in the Industrial Relations Act, you aren’t entitled to any of the rights,” she said.
Mahmood believes the official figures are much lower than the actual figures. According to the World Bank, she said, there are 22 million women working in the agriculture sector in Pakistan. “The total labour work force should be much more than 45 million,” she says.
She was part of a rally which was taken out from The Mall from Charing Cross to the GOP Chowk as was Yasir Gulzar Chaudhry, All Pakistan Trade Union Federation’s information secretary. “Capitalists, feudals and generals all connive together to maintain the status quo,” says Chaudhry.
At the rally, he vowed to “keep fighting against the injustices”.
Khurshid Ahmed, a trade union leader, said, “No political party in Pakistan has given a solution to the miseries of labourers in its manifesto.”
The participants of the Wednesday rally demanded that gas and electricity load shedding be eliminated so that labourers could earn a living.
The various organisations, in their combined charter of demand, asked that the minimum wage be set at Rs25,000 per month. They also demanded legislation to end child labour and bonded labour. The participants said that agricultural reforms were needed to end feudalism. Privatisation of state-owned enterprises was criticised and it was demanded that the privatisation of institutions be revoked. “These demands seem like a distant dream but it’s the dream we are striving for,” said Chaudhry.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 2nd, 2013.
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Child labour is banned in India but still lakhs of children work as labourers in tea shops factories who cares for the law and the children are compelled by circumstances to work they also want to go to school but where is the money needed for books,clothes and school .We are born to work and die working.