Labour welfare: Focus on strengthening on-going projects

A province-wide survey of child labour has been proposed .

LAHORE:

This year’s budget for Labour and Human Resources focuses on strengthening welfare projects introduced last year and has set aside Rs4 billion for skill development projects.

According to the white paper on the budget, the idea is to improve working conditions and bring them at par with international standards. The government also aims to enforce existing labour welfare laws in factories, shops, and in the transport and railways sectors. An important goal is the elimination of child work and bonded labour.

For this purpose, the government has established a computerised Labour Market Information System which records details of labour inspections and information about sectors with job vacancies.

Last year, the government allocated Rs111 million as the labour and human resource development budget. It undertook the following projects: establishment of 120 non-formal education centres, a database of factories, a computerised inspection system, a job portal and registration of brick kilns in Gujrat, Faisalabad, Bahawalpur and Sargodha.

This year’s development budget for labour and human resources stands at Rs610 million – a significant raise from the previous year. Of that, Rs560 million has been allotted for previous projects; and Rs50 million for a proposed province-wide survey of child labour.  Apart from that, there is a special labour package with Rs4 billion for skill development, Rs395 million for an integrated project for the promotion of decent work for vulnerable workers in the Punjab and Rs100 million for the Punjab Workplace Literacy Project.

Commenting on the budget, Khalid Mehmood of the Labour Education Foundation said one of the reasons the government had announced a large number of developmental schemes this year was because it was under pressure to retain the GSP Plus status. He said the schemes did not include provisions to improve social security coverage or health conditions of workers. He said even literacy projects in previous years had focused on teaching workers how to read and write without providing awareness of their rights as workers.

He said despite his reservations with government projects introduced for workers in the past, if the on-going projects were implemented properly, they could bring significant improvement to the working conditions of workers.

Commenting on the integrated project for the promotion of decent work, Mahar Safdar Ali of the Bonded Labour Liberation Foundation said the project had been allotted the highest amount among all development projects. Ali said, however, the project had not achieved anything significant in terms of improvement in working conditions over the past years. “This project is not sustainable and the government should work towards enforcing laws through the police instead on initiating such projects,” he said.

The total budget for the Labour and Human Resource Department for the fiscal year is Rs1.38 billion.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 13^th, 2015.