Daily Times

For labour in this country the year 2014 has been no different from the preceding hopeless years. As usual, there is distressing lack of political will in implementing the existing labour laws and removing deficiencies in them. The working class is beset with issues of low wages, lack of social protection and job uncertainty. While governments clearly lack in a sense of commitment to address the pressing issues of the working class, the national discourse has been dominated by themes of politics and issues of religious extremism and terrorism, relegating social and economic rights of the underprivileged to obscurity.

Labour rights can be best procured through collective bargaining and trade unions but the situation of collective bargaining in our country is appalling as the majority of workers have been rendered unorganised. Labour leaders say only one-and-a-half percent of Pakistani labour is organised in trade unions compared to about 33 percent in India and 55 percent in Turkey. In Punjab, the situation is worse because the provincial government has exempted most workplaces by enforcing the Punjab Industrial Relations Act 2010. The law requires at least 50 labourers at a workplace for the mandatory formation of a trade union. Earlier, a workplace having 10 labourers was required to have a trade union, as is still the case in the other three provinces. A writ petition challenging the 2010 act has been pending for hearing in the Lahore High Court (LHC) for the last one year.

For almost a decade, until 2012, there was ban on labour inspections in workplaces, which worsened the implementation of the labour laws all over the country. In order to avoid the formation of trade unions, employers show most labourers working for them as hired on contractual terms. The so-called contractual labour in the organised sector is deprived of any kind of social protection and other benefits, in total violation of the labour laws and the spirit of the Constitution. Employers have a field day in denying labour rights by hiring most workers on contractual terms. In a country of 200 million, only 5.6 million workers are registered with the Employees’ Old-age Benefit Institution (EOBI) for pensions.

The organised sector has invented many ways to bypass the law in order to exploit the unemployed youth either in the name of internship or by outsourcing their different jobs to contractors so as to evade giving benefits of healthcare, leave and pensions to a sizeable portion of their staff. For instance, most banks have outsourced their janitorial work to contractors who employ staff at the official minimum wage. This saves banks millions in pensions and other benefits to janitorial staff. There are also instances in which janitorial contractors have employed people holding BA and MA degrees who, in reality, do clerical jobs in banks for the salary of a janitor. The widespread unemployment and absence of effective implementation of labour laws have made educated young people accept such humiliating contracts.

Rampant corruption in official labour departments and the collusion of labour officers with moneyed employers can be seen at work. For example, in Gujranwala, 5,000 skilled power-loom workers engaged in the knitting of shaneel cloth have been struggling for their social security registration but the Punjab Labour Department has denied them this right so far. Most workers in Lahore’s 580 factories and workshops work in poor conditions with no toilets, no cafeteria or fair-price shops in workplaces. A law exists binding the owners to observe health and safety regulations in workplaces but it is observed in its violation. According to a recent survey of the Punjab Labour department, only seven factories in the city were found to have safety equipment.

The authorities and the lower judiciary are clearly biased in favour of employees against labour. For example, a criminal case seeking conviction of those responsible for the death of more than 250 labourers in a blaze at a textile factory in Baldia, Karachi has been pending in a local court for more than two years. According to the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO’s) estimates, there are two million workers in bonded labour while there are three million children participating in labour. In Punjab, around 500,000 labourers work in 20,000 brick kilns and most of them are bonded labour. There is the Bonded Labour Rehabilitation Act 1992 that outlawed bonded labour and advance payments made for this purpose. However, this law has not been fully enforced yet. The malaise of bonded labour has now spread to other sectors of the economy such as the textile industry in Faisalabad.

A main problem for labour is implementation on the minimum wages law. According to some trade unions, only 44 percent workers in the organised sector are getting minimum wages in Pakistan. Payment wages acts and compensation acts exist but pervasive violation of these laws go unchecked owing to a poor judicial system and absence of enforcement mechanisms. According to a recent study, there is only one labour inspector for 250,000 workers. A separation of the judiciary and executive took place in general following a judgment of the Supreme Court (SC) in 1990 but in case of labour laws’ violations the two powers are still combined.

For instance, when a labourer does not get minimum wage or compensation in case of injury or accident under the relevant laws, he has to present his case for adjudication to a deputy director of the provincial labour department. These cases remain pending for years. If a decree is issued, it is not implemented by the employer as the authority has no tools available with them to get the orders implemented. If a labourer appeals for the implementation, his case remains pending for years, more than a decade in some cases.

When the organised sector has defied labour laws with impunity, what to speak of the informal sector that has expanded tremendously but is outside the ambit of the law? It is estimated that about 80 percent of the labour force in urban areas is working in the informal unorganised sector. Similarly, there are millions of home-based workers, mostly women for whom no social protection exists. Most workers in the informal sector, such as workshops and shops, work for 10 to 12 hours daily against eights hours for workers in the organised sector. The provincial governments have not yet legislated to provide social protection to informal sector labourers.

The provincial governments need to make laws to provide old age pension schemes and health insurance schemes among other things to the contractual labour and the labour working in the unorganised sector. Furthermore, all the rural landless households in the country should be provided life and disability insurance cover. The provincial governments should pay the premium of the insurance.

Although political leaders make tall claims in their manifestos and speeches, elected governments have miserably failed to keep their promises. Keeping this in view, rights activists should consider setting up voluntary associations to help labour get their legal and constitutional rights.

The writer is a freelance columnist