Rights activists say workers should have job contracts, defined hours and other benefits
Karachi
Marking International Domestic Workers’ Day, leaders of labour and home-based workers organisations said on Friday that there were about 8.5 million domestic workers in Pakistan, most of them women and a significant portion of the country’s informal economy, but they were neither regulated nor covered by labour laws, making them vulnerable to all sorts of exploitation.
Speaking at a press conference organised at the Karachi Press Club by HomeNet Pakistan, a network of organisations working for the recognition and labour rights of domestic workers, speakers discussed the policy advocacy and implementation of domestic workers.
Rehana Yasmeen, a HomeNet Pakistan’s leader, said that there was a need to identify 8.5 million domestic workers in Pakistan as a workforce.
“Domestic workers, the second largest sub-sector of the informal economy, are living in almost every low-income urban locality and remote rural areas in the country, and they, especially women, are among the most exploited group of workers today,” she said.
“In today’s’ urban context, the concept of domestic help has been on the rise, and with this a large work force has been working by providing their services to the household without and social and legal protection.”
Citing statistics of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), she said that more than 21 million people across Asia and the Pacific, of whom 80 percent were women, were employed as domestic workers and the Asia led the world in the number of domestic workers. Malka Khan, a women rights activist associated with the Aurat Foundation, said that domestic workers should be protected by Pakistan’s labour laws so that they had job contracts, defined hours, salaries, pensions and other benefits.
She said that domestic work was not a new phenomenon, but in the recent years, there had been a big increase in that sector. “Employing a domestic worker is becoming a big feature in the lives of professional and middle class people in our countries, many of whom need help in order to combine work and family life,” Khan said. “Increasingly, it is also becoming an important issue for the sick and the elderly from the working classes, who in many countries are dependent on homecare by domestic workers.”
Urging the Sindh government to adopt a law on domestic workers, Shujauddin Qureshi, a representative of the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (Piler), said domestic workers were a large but mostly invisible workforce around the globe, including Europe and South Asia, and they were extremely vulnerable to gross exploitation and required any help the trade union movement could give them.
Following the press conference, labour and civil society activists organised a protest outside the Karachi Press Club, chanting slogans for ratifying the ILO C 189, the provision of social security cards and putting an end to child domestic labour.
They urged all the provincial governments to ensure equality in treatment, decent wages and enhancement in the skill-set of domestic workers.
International Domestic Workers Day, marked worldwide on Thursday, was supposed to be an occasion to celebrate the United Nations’ landmark adoption five years ago of labour standards for one of the most vulnerable workforces.
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