This research report was written for the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (PILER) in 2017.
The PILER 2016 Report on the Status of Labour Rights, sixth in the series, based on secondary research, aims to present an overview of the status of labour and the issues in the year impacting labour directly or indirectly.
Click on the link below to view the complete report:
This report is a component of a multi-stakeholder programme led by the Ethical Trading Initiative in partnership with the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (PILER) started in 2018.
Pakistan is a major exporter of high-quality surgical instruments, produced in the Sialkot region, that are used in public and private health authorities
in Europe and the USA. Over the past decade a number of in-depth studies have highlighted instances of severe labour exploitation and child labour within the industry. There have been some improvements in compliance with international labour standards from exporting factories in Sialkot. However, there is little visibility or oversight of the lower tiers of the supply chain where exploitation is known to be prevalent.
This report builds on existing knowledge of the sector and its challenges. It set out to understand the root causes of poor labour standards and to identify the actual and potential roles and responsibilities of all of the key stakeholders in the global value chain. The aim was to identify recommendations that could deliver long- term solutions to these complex, endemic problems.
Click here to view and download the full report:
Labour Standards in Pakistan’s Surgical Instruments Sector:
a Synthesis Report
Published in Dawn, December 30th, 2022
WHILE the global textile and apparel industry is in the process of moving into total digital transformation, Pakistani industry is struggling with basic workplace safety issues. So how can the Pakistan Accord on Health and Safety in the Textile and Garment Industry be a game changer? Precisely because a sound infrastructure is the edifice the industry — any industry, especially a labour-intensive industry — is built upon. If the entire industry endorses, owns and implements the Accord, which is to be launched in January 2023, it can trigger a process of change for the better.
Continue readingPublished in Dawn, February 1st, 2022.
RECENTLY, I had a brief but interesting conversation with a Karachi bookseller who deals in old books and manuscripts. He is a mine of information on current trends. For instance, nowadays most of the orders he receives are from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a province which has also shown a fresh interest in Persian manuscripts due to the situation in Afghanistan; the Urdu-speaking population has lost interest in books; in Sindh’s smaller cities and towns, people ask for Sindhi books and manuscripts; and, of course, Punjab is where Urdu grew and most Urdu books and magazines were, and are, published.
When he asked me about my vocation I told him I write on labour issues. He remarked, “Labour, that’s a left wing issue… .” I replied, “Labour is as much of concern for the right wing as it is for the left!”
Continue readingPublished in Dawn, March 7th, 2021
The key elements of neoliberal policies — free market, minimal state intervention and flexible labour — hinge on a crucial principle which, according to Noam Chomsky, is “undermining mechanisms of social solidarity and mutual support and popular engagement in determining policy”. Yet, despite the crushing creed of neoliberalism that gives precedence to individual ‘freedom’ over collective agency, strong resistance to neoliberal hegemony is alive and kicking in the world.
One such voice you find at home is of the Anjuman-i-Mazarain Punjab where apparently ‘all is quiet’ since its general secretary Abdul Sattar Mehar was acquitted in September 2020 after four years of incarceration. The Anjuman’s struggle against corporatisation of farms is ongoing as successive governments have not granted them land ownership. It has been two decades since tenant-cultivators in Okara and the adjoining districts took control of the farms and stopped paying rent.
Continue readingPublished in Dawn, May 1st, 2017
THE world of labour has gone through great turbulence. Globalisation, restructuring, deregulation of economies and technological changes have reshaped labour relations. Precarious, informal employment and diverse contractual forms of work have replaced traditional permanent employment.
The supply chain production system has left the workforce dispersed in various unconnected spaces, shrinking the power of labour unions. Legal frameworks based on old employment relations models no longer protect workers. This has led to a global debate on labour law reforms to address adverse impacts of change.
Published in Dawn, April 17th, 2017
INVISIBLE to the frenzied world of urban dwellers, and anchored in the rural hinterlands of Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe, live communities of peasants — small farmers, tenants, sharecroppers — joined together in their tumultuous fight against forces bent upon usurping their rights to land, to produce and to continue their way of life. La Via Campesina (literally ‘the peasant way’) is a unique international labour movement representing 200 million rural workers in 73 countries.
Today, April 17, is the International Day of Peasants Struggles celebrated by La Via Campesina the world over to honour the 19 members of Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement who were shot dead by the military police on this day in 1996 in the village of Eldorado Los Carajás during a demonstration against federal appropriation of land cultivated by 3,000 rural families.
Published in Dawn on January 15th, 2017
“There are many horizons that must be visited … and white pages in the scrolls of life to be inscribed…” Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North.
IT was 1991 and I was travelling by road in a small group to Iran, Turkey and Greece. In Maku, a city in a mountain gorge in west Azerbaijan province, 22 kilometres away from the Turkish border, we met two Bangladeshis who were travelling to Turkey onward to Greece “on mules”, they told us.
I was flabbergasted. “We travel by night, lest we are caught,” they shared with us, their fellow South Asians. Once they would reach Greece, they planned to slip away to greener pastures — Germany or France. Later, in a small pension in Istanbul, overlooking the Bosphorus, we were served by a young man from Punjab who told us his tale of woe: his agent, also a Pakistani, had robbed him of his passport and dollars.
Published in Dawn, May 1st, 2016
The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. — Antonio Gramsci
THE old world of the labour movement started unravelling in the 1990s when finance and production went global, kicked up by unbridled capitalism. In the new system of production, traditional labour relations — characterised by long-term employment, job security and workers’ representation — fell apart. In developing countries, union density plummeted. Was it the end of organised labour? Or, have new forms of labour solidarity started filling the vacuum?
Published in Dawn on January 12, 2016
‘Let the sky fall, when it crumbles, we will stand tall and face it all together.’ — Skyfall, Adele
Natural disasters aside, white-collar workers can’t even imagine the sky falling down on us, literally, while we are at work. Neither can they imagine what happens in that flicker of a second, and thereafter, to the body and soul of the workers on whom the roof crumbles as they toil for a pittance, or to the families when their dear ones die or are injured. ‘Standing tall and facing it all together’ seemingly is not in our collective ethos. Hence, incidents of factory collapse hardly make a ripple in the power corridor or in society’s consciousness.
Zeenat Hisam 