Research Reports

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Status of Labour Rights in Pakistan: The Year 2014

This report was written for the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (PILER) in March 2015.

The task of capturing the status of labour in all its diverse aspects is onerous. Particularly in a country where the State keeps shedding its responsibilities of regulation, documentation, inspection, and monitoring of the complex world of work, where culture is heavily tilted towards oral tradition rather than written, where informal economy is the norm and where social justice and human and labour rights lay at the bottom of the policy-makers’ agenda.

Despite constraints to acquiring accurate data, useful insights and analyses, and with limited resources, PILER, in recent years, has initiated to review the changing trends in labour and employment, and the factors impacting on workers’ lives and the terms and conditions of work. The review also documents the workers’ struggles to confront repressing forces let loose by deregulation, liberalisation and privatisation.

This report, fourth in the series, is yet another modest attempt to put together glimpses of the world of work in Pakistan and present a picture of the current status of labour in the country. The first section of the report, based on secondary research, gives an overview of the socio-economic and political context, human development indicators, legislative development, labour market indicators and the existing terms and conditions of employment. The second section of the report pres- ents a collection of research articles, case studies, and analyses of trends and issues related to labour and employment. PILER is greatly indebted to the researchers and writers who contributed to this section.

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Valuing Women’s Care Work in Pakistan: Lady Health Workers’ Struggle for Rights and Entitlements

This case study was conducted for the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (PILER), with the financial support of ActionAid France in 2017. It was published in both English and French. 

The Lady Health Workers (LHW) Programme, instituted in 1994, is considered one of the largest and successful community based primary healthcare initiatives in the world. The lady health workers’ role has received recognition by the global health bodies in improving Pakistan’s maternal and child health indicators. Currently more than 130,000 lady health workers reach out to 60 to 70 per cent of the country’s population residing in rural and low-income urban areas.

Perhaps if it was not a collective struggle for their rights, the lady health workers would have continued to suffer injustice in silence: a low wage, no benefits and insecure job. It was death of a health worker at child birth that compelled Bushra Arain, a Lady Health Supervisor, to rebel against the irony: health providers’ own deprivation of health facilities and lack of decent work conditions. She and several other lady health supervisors mobilised the workers and founded the union, the All Pakistan Lady Health Workers’ Welfare Association, in December 2008. By early 2009, each district had a Baji (elder sister), a dynamic activist health worker to prepare the cadre for struggle. The union took to legal intervention and street power to claim their due rights at work place. The phenomenon was unique: never before in Pakistan’s history had women workers exercised the right to ‘collective bargaining’ in any sector, much less in the low-paid care economy.

 The case study aims to document the LHWs’ struggle, review the constraints they faced as women workers in a public sector health programme and as caregivers, identify the union’s strategies and highlight the achievements of their eight-year long battle.

Click here to access the full report in English.

 

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Labour Rights in Pakistan: Declining Decent Work and Emerging Struggles

This research report was written for the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (PILER) in 2010. 

This report is on the status of labour rights in the country. It encompasses four elements: fundamental principles and rights at work and international labour standards; employment and income opportunities; social protection and social security; and social dialogue and tripartism.

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Labour Rights in Pakistan: Declining Decent Work and Emerging Struggles

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Labour Rights in Pakistan: Expanding Informality and Diminishing Wages

This research report was written for the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (PILER) in 2011. 

The report highlights the absence of pro-labour strategies in the country’s economic design. It also highlights the destruction caused by the floods in 2010 and 2011. Consequently, the poor face further deprivation and 2.5 million affectees remain deprived of access to food, water, shelter and healthcare facilities. The flood affectees and working poor of the country do not have decent employment and the state has failed in rehabilitating them. The situation is worsened by an economic policy that relies heavily on exports.

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Labour Rights in Pakistan: Expanding Informality and Diminishing Wages

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Denial and Discrimination: Labour Rights in Pakistan

This research report was written for the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (PILER) in 2007. 

The report assesses the working conditions and employment situation in Pakistan. Apart from the secondary sources of media reports and internet, the report includes the input obtained through surveys, rapid assessments and sector profiles not to mention the national conventions of workers in the textile, brick kilns, transport, construction and light engineering sectors organised by PILER in 2005.

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Denial and Discrimination: Labour Rights in Pakistan

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Religious Minorities in Pakistan: Constitutional Rights and Access to Judicial System

This research report was written for the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (PILER) in 2013. 

This study, which was co-written by Yasmin Qureshi, sought to examine social and legal aspects impacting on the freedom of religion of the minorities in Pakistan. The constituional provisions, laws and judicial-administrative practices via-a-vis minorities were reviewed. An analysis of the role of the state, identity, religion and ideology in shaping the mindset of the dominant Muslim community was also attempted.

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Religious Minorities in Pakistan: Constitutional Rights and Access to Judicial System

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Labour Standards in Football Manufacturing Industry: A Case Study of a Nike Vendor in Sialkot, Pakistan

This research report was written for Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (PILER), Karachi and was published in June, 2009.

This report is the result of a PILER Project on the terms and conditions that retrenched football stitchers worked under, as well as their present circumstances. It stresses on providing football stitchers with legal aid and capacity-building support, as well as facilitating the emergence of a tripartite institutional mechanism for labour standards compliance and monitoring in Sialkot.

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Labour Standards in Football Manufacturing Industry: A Case Study of a Nike Vendor in Sialkot

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Women and Children in Prison

This research report was written for the Association of the Business, Professional and Agricultural Women (ABPAW) in November 2003. 

This report includes the study of three prisons in Sindh, Pakistan, namely, Special Prison for Women, Larkana, Women Ward, Sukkur Prison II and the Juvenile Cell, Sukkur Prison II.

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Women and Children in Prison

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Women Workers in Textile/Readymade Garments Sector in Pakistan and Bangladesh

This research report was written as a project undertaken by Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (PILER) in collaboration with South Asia Alliance for Poverty Eradication (SAAPE) and was published in 2009.

This brief paper attempts to investigate the status of women workers in textile/apparel industries of Pakistan and Bangladesh, and explore the extent of mobilization and organization of women workers in the context of weakened trade unionism in the two countries. The study seeks to analyze the nature and extent of women’s contestation of barriers
and negotiation of space as defined through the institutionalized mechanisms of control and cultural barriers in the Muslim societies of the two countries.

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Women Workers in Textile/Readymade Garments Sector in Pakistan and Bangladesh

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Road Transport Workers in Pakistan

This research report was written for Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (PILER), Karachi and was published in 2006.

This study presents an overview of road transport sector work environment, labour relations and working conditions and examines workers’ response to address some of the issues relating to social security through collective action. Methodology includes literature review and assessment through informal discussions with a select number of transport workers/operators, representatives of transport workers’ unions/organizations/federations, and private transport companies.

Excerpt:

Mustachioed, grim-faced, 44-year-old Najibullah Khan is on the road for the last 29 years. He works  as a driver on long distance route—Karachi to Islamabad. “I get Rs. 1500 per trip. A trip takes 26-27 hours. I make about 6 trips a month and that adds up to Rs. 9000 per month”. Born in a village in Musakhel, Mianwali, Najib dropped out of school after class 6 and was pushed into the labour market as a child. Initially he worked as bus cleaner and helper. When he got his license at 18, he took to driving. In 1973 he came to live in Karachi where he shares a rented accommodation with another person. 

Najib’s family members (parents, wife and 5 children) work as sharecropper in the village. These days he is paying a monthly installment of Rs. 1000 to the money lender for a loan of Rs. 10,000 he took to help his family buy agricultural inputs. “There is one more driver along with me in the bus, and we take turns after 4-5 hours of driving, taking 2-3 hours rest in between. After each trip I am off the bus for 24 hours and busy with maintenance of the vehicles and carry out related errands. I get little time to spend with my family whom I visit fortnightly.” For Najib, there are no holidays, no medical or other facilities and no social security.

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Road Transport Workers in Pakistan