Iron women: Les Misérables of Peshawar

How a young girl becomes one of 5,000 female labourers at Hayatabad Industrial Estate, underpaid, with nowhere to go.

PESHAWAR: In a small rented room on Warsak Road in Peshawar lives Farzana and her two younger sisters. The steel resolve of these three women is the tie that binds them to their 30,000 counterparts in the province. And a lack of opportunities for women, especially from impoverished backgrounds.

Thirty-year-old Farzana and her sisters are here for a purpose. Originally from Shabqadar, the trio left their home to earn for their family and found work at a medicine factory at the Hayatabad Industrial Estate. Going against the norms of the more conservative face of Pukhtun society, the sisters faced one obstacle after another since the moment they crossed their threshold.

(Not) playing house

Farzana says she was still playing with dolls when her parents married her off to a relative.

“I was 11 years old and a cousin asked my father for my hand in marriage,” she recalls. “He had everyone convinced of his love for me – he said he would take care of me.”

She also remembers what made it all the more easy to marry her off – money, rather the lack of it. “My father was confined to a wheelchair because of a disability and we were never well off, so he easily agreed and gave me away.”

The factory worker shares it was in their third year of marriage when the couple started quarrelling. What started as a one-off beating became a daily affair of battering and before Farzana knew it, she was restricted to her room, which she would not leave for months.

“I have four children, three sons and a daughter. My husband would often stay away from home,” she shares.

“This one time he went missing for two weeks before I heard he had married another girl. On his return, I confronted him and after the beating of a lifetime, my husband finally divorced me.”

“But this was not the end of my troubles,” says Farzana as she starts pacing the room, her eyes brimming with tears. “I returned to my father’s house with my children in tow except there was no income – we had to leave again to make a living.”

Since none of the three sisters is educated, they were forced to seek employment in the medicine factory as labourers, where they each earn Rs4,000 a month.

“It is not enough to fulfil even basic needs,” one of Farzana’s sisters complains.

Unfortunately, these three women are not alone in their plight. At least 30,000 females, aged 15 to 35, work in factories across Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) – 5,000 of them in the same Hayatabad Industrial Estate, where they work at medicine, tissue, matchbox producing units. And not many can speak highly of their work conditions.

Another worker at a medicine factory, requesting anonymity, said the behaviour of the factory owner with his employees is very harsh. “We are no better than slaves and our working conditions are deplorable,” she says wearily. “All the girls who work with me have been driven here by poverty. Their fathers are either dead or drug addicts.”

The worker adds nobody cares or asks if a worker is injured during work hours. In the past three years, she says, her salary has only gone up by Rs1,000, barely enough to survive. She alleges factory owners quote inflated salaries to inspection teams which visit once in a while.

“Two of my sisters who were also working with me at the Industrial Estate remain bed-ridden since the past six months,” says Ruqaiya, who is 25 and also works at a medicine factory in Hayatabad. “They developed respiratory complications from their job. The third one has quit. Our father is dead, even my very young brothers are forced to work in workshops.”

While the plight of these women sounds familiar to those of their male counterparts, the tales of workplace harassment stand apart as does the journey of unwanted daughters or wives forced out of home and hearth.

An act of words

According to K-P Directorate of Labour’s Inspector of Factories Wajid Ali Khan, after the 18th Amendment, the K-P Assembly passed seven employment-related acts in 2013. These include the Payment of Wages Act, 2013, Minimum Wages Act, 2013, Factories Act 2013, Maternity Benefits Act 2013, Workers Compensation Act 2013, Industrial and Commercial Employment (Standing Orders) Act, 2013, and Industrial Statistics Act, 2013. The names suggest many of these could enshrine much-needed rights but the tales suggest they remain on paper only.

Khan shares the number of registered running factories in K-P stands at 781 where 54,485 male and female labours are employed. There could be more workers, just not within the system. He reminds The Express Tribune that the minimum wage is Rs 10,000 per month and the factories are bound to provide food at least once a day as well as medical facilities to their employees.

The directorate does inspect these workplaces from time to time, insists Khan and takes immediate action against owners who do not fulfil these. But these employees are also negligent in filing complaints, says the inspector.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 8^th, 2014.