Not quite two weeks before Labour Day this year a girl, a domestic worker, died in Punjab allegedly tortured to death by her employers. Seeing that the case is probably still in the courts, let’s give the employers the benefit of doubt and presume them innocent unless proven otherwise.
The question for now is: how did this girl come to be working as a maid in the first place? Because at the time of her death, she was just six: yes, that’s six years of age, a little mite of a thing.
Six years old, when your children and mine were still listening to chapters of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Alif Laila, thumbs in their mouths, tucked into bed before school the next day. And while they are in school being taught the alphabet in a room brightly decorated with pictures, others in greying clothes, like this little girl, are washing dishes, cutting vegetables, running a cloth along dusty furniture, while fat Begums relax.
The first of May, called Labour Day, or May Day, is a holiday in many countries around the world. The day celebrates achievements of labour rights campaigns, such as the eight-hour day movement, which divides a twenty four hour day into eight hours for work, and eight each for recreation and rest…because once elsewhere in the world too, conditions for workers were hardly salubrious.
Rights of workers are written into the Constitution of Pakistan, which prohibits slavery in all its forms, forced labour, and child labour.
Article 11(3) of Pakistan’s Constitution prohibits the employment of children between the ages of fourteen and eighteen in any factory, mine or other hazardous place of employment. It also makes it a Principle of Policy of the State of Pakistan to secure just and humane conditions of work, ensuring that children and women are not employed in work unsuited to their age or sex.
Pakistan’s constitution, however, falls miserably short of specifying the minimum age for employment and at the end of the day entirely fails to enforce the existing prohibitions and rules specified by it. Workers in this country have no recourse to legal redress in case of mistreatment, the courts being what they are, and lawmakers having failed abysmally in their job by not coming up with legislation designed to protect the young.
‘Hazardous employment’ is a loose term, and factories and mines are not the only hazardous places of employment in the world. It is almost as hazardous for a child not to get adequate sleep, as it is to be exposed to coal dust or dangerous industrial equipment, and infinitely worse to be exposed to violence.
A child working in an apparently benign home may be required to keep long hours, working under harsh conditions for strenuous work eminently unsuitable for a child, with innumerable cases of sexual abuse to top the misery.
Many people do not think or consider it important to provide domestic workers with comforts they themselves take for granted. Men, women and children employed as domestic workers are not always provided with fans in a country where the heat tops 40 degrees Celsius. They may be found sleeping on the floor, on uncomfortable bedding in rooms without adequate ventilation or mosquito screens, their ‘bathrooms’ consisting of little more than holes in the ground in tiny cupboard sized spaces.
The minimum wage specified at Rs 7,000 per month is frequently not met, in the case of children it never is. What difference is there between such conditions and slavery? Either implies a compulsory service, an involuntary subjection to often degrading, cruel conditions. Would any human voluntarily place him/her self in such a situation?
There are innumerable cases of children of desperately poor parents being bonded to work for monstrous employers, such as Shahzad 12, and Ramzan 10 of Lahore, whose ill and jobless parents bonded them to an ‘employer’ who kept them shackled.
‘Bonded labourers,’ says the human rights activist I A Rehman ‘face some very threatening circumstances and receive almost no protection.’ He says the police is bribed not to file reports in such cases and blames the government for not giving the issue priority.
Said the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH): ‘All children are Allah’s children, and dearest to Allah are those who treat His children with kindness.’
The reality on the ground is that although Pakistan calls itself an Islamic State and is also among the countries that celebrate May Day, the term better suited to this and every other day in this country would be the French venez m’aider better known as the international code word for an emergency, Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Translated it means: ‘come help me!’
