Giving home-based workers their due

Home Net Pakistan held a seminar on the issues concerning home-based workers (HBWs), who are mostly women, and their role in earning national income. Women home-based workers work on food items, packing, ironing, making shoe-tops, clothes and embroidery, shelling prawns, cleaning seafood, stitching clothes, making handbags, incense sticks, bangles, toys, wooden crafts, artificial jewellery, etc.
Home Net Head Umme Laila Azhar said that it was unfortunate that there was no definition of the term ‘Home Based Worker’, which meant that people did not even know what they are. She said that people did not understand the informal sector or what work HBWs do. Often people think they were equal to homemakers, who look after domestic issues, but this was not right. She said besides domestic issues, HBWs have to juggle time around in order to manufacture a variety of things, from agar batti (incense sticks) to shoes.
“They have to look after their children, cook, clean, and on top of it all, they have to also make these things,” she said. “We need the media to highlight the problems these women face because they belong to one of the most ignored sector in our society. With rising unemployment, more and more men are coming back home to sit and wait for another job, while the burden of earning money lies on the women’s shoulders,” she said. “Many of these are not even skilled properly.”
Azhar said that another major problem was that they did not have any laws to support them. This meant that if they needed any kind of help or refuge, no law would protect them because, firstly, they were not recognized, and secondly, law did not cover them. She said that these women were also not given their fair share for payment. No wage slip was given, and pay scales were low as well as late. In fact, they were even known as “unpaid family worker,” she said.
They did not have labour dignity either, she said. Their invisibility in society depicted that the average person, when buying their goods, did not know how it was even produced or by whom, she said. Most people think that men who are selling shoes, bangles or food items have made them themselves and they did not know that behind this was a woman who has no timeline of work, no pay scale, no minimum wage, no job security, no over time, no holidays and no medical leaves or protection.
Most of them work in dire circumstances such as in the bangle home-based factories where health could be severely damaged and for long term. “These women contribute over $ 32billion to the GDP, yet they have no recognition or protection. It is high time they are shown through the eyes of the journalists,” she said. “Many of us buy bangles from markets but we do not even know that there are about 79 steps in bangle-making.”