Social protection at last

Sindh government appears to be taking a key step towards bringing brick kiln workers into the social safety net.

The true measure of a society’s morals is how it chooses to treat the least fortunate amongst itself. And if ever there was a category of Pakistanis who fit that description, it is brick kiln workers, who toil in appalling conditions for pay so low as to elicit howls of horror from any human with a heart. Hence, the Sindh government’s decision to grant them with social security cards so that they can access a whole range of essential government services meant for the poor is a significant step in the right direction.



The number of labourers being granted the cards is small. But the Sindh government appears to be taking a key step towards bringing this previously completely neglected class of workers into the social safety net. Much more work is needed on this front, but the effort is laudable.

Since its electoral drubbing last year, the Pakistan Peoples Party has been struggling to recover its place in the nation’s political spectrum. Yet, recent speeches and now such policy measures seem to suggest that the party is trying to rediscover its roots as the party of Pakistan’s downtrodden. This is probably the right course of action for the party to take. By almost unanimous consent, one of the most successful policy ideas implemented during the Zardari Administration was the Benazir Income Support Programme. Now, if the Sindh government can prove that it is capable of offering essential social services to Pakistanis who most need it, the party will have a platform from which to appeal to a much wider swathe of national voters come 2018.

Yet, while offering the cards is a step in the right direction, it is not nearly enough. Exploitative conditions still exist in the labour market, not least in the brick kiln industry. The government must first tighten the standards for worker safety and then increase its capacity to enforce the law. There is no point in offering social insurance schemes unless employers are also simultaneously forced to improve the conditions for their workers. The symptoms of abject poverty can be treated with social welfare programmes, but the disease can only be cured by removing the socioeconomic conditions that created that poverty.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 24^th, 2014.

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