Hard Times For Pakistan’s Working Classes | Abdul Rauf Shakoori

 The Friday Times

Hard Times For Pakistan’s Working Classes

Pakistan lags most countries in the application of labor law and in following the ILO's standards. The dismal state of labor law enforcement is the reason Pakistan ranks 8th out of 167 countries in the Global Slavery Index.

by Abdul Rauf Shakoori

May 1, 2023

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About 3.3 million Pakistani children are trapped in child labor, depriving them of their childhood, health, and education, and condemning them to a life of poverty and want. It has been estimated that almost a quarter of women aged 20-49 were married before the age of 15, and 31% before they reached eighteen years of age. Only 34% of children under five are registered at birth nationally (PDHS). Birth registration is a fundamental right of all children as legal proof of a child’s existence and identity. As an accurate record of age, it can help prevent child labor and child marriage, and protect children from being treated as adults by the justice system.

Pakistan, like other parts of the world, is celebrating Labor Day to honor workers’ contributions for the country’s development and prosperity. Pakistan has ratified the 36 International Labor Organizations (ILO) conventions, as well as the fundamental conventions. Being a signatory of the ILO conventions, Pakistan is responsible for honoring international standards related to fundamental principles and rights at work.

One in every four households in Pakistan employs a child in domestic work, predominantly girls, between 10 to 14  years of age.

The International Labor Organization Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work was adopted in 1998 and amended in 2022 required all members to uphold basic human values that are vital to our social and economic lives. It further requires that the government, employers, and workers’ organizations should affirm the obligations and commitment that are inherent in membership of the ILO and require that they should protect and uphold the freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining, work towards the elimination of all forms of forced or compulsory labor, and put in place measures that guarantee the effective abolition of child labor. The elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation, and the provision of a safe and healthy working environment are also requirements set by the ILO.

However, in the case of Pakistan, though we have ratified international labor conventions and signed various declarations on fundamental principles at work, we have not yet implemented those in letter and spirit in our country. On World Day Against Child Labor (WDACL) in 2022, the ILO highlighted that one in every four households in Pakistan employs a child in domestic work, predominantly girls, between 10 to 14  years of age. UNICEF estimated that 3.3 million children were trapped in child labor, which deprived them of fundamental rights such as education. Though there are several laws discouraging child labor in Pakistan, children continue to employed to perform domestic work. The U.S. State Department in a report also raised concerns about child labor in Pakistan, and quoted that the Child Protection and Welfare Bureau rescued over 1,000 children from begging in Punjab and referred 1,500 to 2,000 children for psychological counseling.

The report highlights that about 9.8% of Pakistan’s population is children between 10-14. There is a higher proportion of children working in Sindh than in Punjab, with agriculture, domestic labor and the industrial sector being the most common employers of children. The ratio of children attending school is 77.1% in Punjab, but only 60.6% in Sindh.

Moreover, the International Labor Organization released a report in 2023 from a committee of experts on the application of conventions, with serious concerns about Pakistan related to the Right of Association (Agriculture) Convention, 1921, and stated that share of the employed labor force in the agriculture sector in Pakistan is around 67.24 million which stands at 37.4% of the total employed workforce. Despite that, there is no specific legislation available to protect agricultural worker’s rights. The report further states that all the Federal and Provincial Industrial Relations Acts are applicable to formal sectors, but not to the agriculture sector.

The report further highlights that there are no restrictions on agriculture sector employees to form a union. The report states that Balochistan Industrial Relations Act, 2022 (hereafter BIRA 2022) provides in its section 1(4) that the Act shall apply to all workers and employers at all workplaces working or conducting business within Balochistan. It further points out that the Government of Sindh has registered four unions of agriculture workers and two associations of landlords of agriculture farms. However, the workers engaged in agriculture holdings that do not run an establishment or farmers working on their own, or with family are out of the ambit of industrial relation laws. The committee urged Pakistan to ensure that federal and provincial Industrial Relations Acts are amended to expressly cover all agricultural workers, including those in the informal sector, and to enable them to enjoy the rights conferred by the Convention in law and in practice. It requests the Government to provide information on any progress achieved in this respect.

Apart from the agriculture sector, the report highlighted concerns regarding the formation of associations for workers as well as managerial staff, and urged the government to revise all Industrial Relations Acts, federal as well as provincial, and ensure that both labor and the managerial workers can form and join the organization of their choice. Pakistan was also asked to amend the laws to accommodate the workforce of Export Processing Zones (EPZ). Though Pakistan assured that it has withdrawn S.R.O. 1004(1)/82, except clause 7, through a notification dated 5 August 2022, and stated that the eight industrial relation laws which are not applicable to the EPZ are now applicable. The Government also informed the committee that it has formed the rules in this regard as well, however, a copy of the rules was not provided to the committee to examine the veracity of the rules. The committee urged the government to provide a copy of the final version of EPZ (Employment and Service Condition) Rule 2009 and provide them with information about the rights of trade unions in the EPZ and their registration criteria.

Pakistan ranked 8th out of 167 countries on the modern slavery index

Apart from improving the right of association, the country is very relaxed in implementation of labor laws. Being a member of the ILO, Pakistan has so far failed to implement a 40 hour work week and minimum wage rules in the private sector. Workers who are employed in the markets or in the private sector normally work between 12-16 hours a day for seven days, whereas people employed to serve as domestic workers even work for longer hours, however, in reward, they do not even get the minimum pay set by the government of Pakistan.

Consequently, these workers are forced to live a life that resembles modern slavery. Law enforcement agencies adopting a largely lenient approach in implementing labor laws is the main hurdle in the upliftment of living standards of workers and eliminating poverty. The Norwegian Human Rights Fund, referring to the report of the Global Slavery Index stated that 3,186,000 people in Pakistan are victims of modern forms of slavery, and Pakistan ranked 8th out of 167 countries on the modern slavery index. The government of Pakistan should realize that any further delays in implementing labor laws not only tarnishes the country’s image on global platforms, but also increases unemployment in the country.

Pakistan - Karachi: Why the Covid-19 crisis is an urban crisis

Dawn

Why the Covid-19 crisis is an urban crisis

Approximately 60% of Karachi's population lives in informal settlements with limited access to water and sanitation. 

 

Karachi Urban Lab   Updated Mar 30, 2020 08:46pm

 

As we brace ourselves for the Covid-19 epidemic in Pakistan, we are being told to wash our hands and self-isolate. What if you are unable to do any of these things? According to the Census 2017, Pakistan's population is 207.8 million with an urban share of 75.6 million. The United Nations asserts that in 2015, 45.5% of Pakistan's urban population was living in informal settlements. Thus, an estimated 34 million people in Pakistan live in katchi abadis or urban informal settlements, where water is scarce for the most basic of needs.
In Karachi — a city of over 16 million — approximately 60% of the population lives in informal settlements with limited or no access to clean water and sanitation. Let us compare this — for a moment — with countries being devastated by Covid-19. For example, Italy and Spain, where there is almost universal access to clean water, sanitation, soap and antibacterial gels. Even with their comparatively tiny populations, the virus has spread and killed at a pace no one could imagine. So with northern health systems on the brink of collapse, will the spread of Covid-19 in Pakistan bring urban informal settlements to the frontline of the crisis?
The threat to Pakistan is palpable. As we anxiously await the impact while self-isolating, the voices of the most vulnerable are barely audible. What health threats do the 34 million people living in Pakistan’s informal settlements face? What does this mean for the spread of Covid-19 across the country? How can we leverage data for designing urgent planning interventions that will actually work?

Access to water

While the instructions for containing the spread of the virus sound fairly simple — wash your hands for 20 seconds with soap multiple times a day — it is not an easy task for the majority of Pakistan's informal settlements that are water deprived. Access to water varies massively. People living in Karachi's Machar Colony, an informal settlement at a considerable distance from the city centre, pay Rs7,000-8,000 a month in water purchased through tankers and other informal means. Residents of Gharibabad, near Karachi's PIDC, spend over Rs5,000 a month on the same. For poor households, this is a very significant portion of their earnings. The idea of using that water repeatedly for washing hands is a luxury. Here are some basic calculations on daily water use for maintaining hygiene:

Just for a single month, a household of eight would then require 750 additional gallons of water. This constitutes half of a 1,500 gallon tanker, which costs at least a minimum PKR2,500 in a typical informal settlement. The additional financial cost for basic protection against Covid-19 by washing hands, would then be around PKR1,250 per month for the family. While the figure does not seem very high in isolation, it becomes a critical portion of their income in the absence of earned daily wages amidst the current lockdown. Can a low-income family in an informal settlement even be capable of providing for this additional water expense in times when the same amount would be needed to buy essential food items?
Cost alone (leaving aside logistical factors such as water availability, transportation, waiting lines) — to perform hand washing as per government recommendations — points to the absolute urgency of making cheap water provision a top priority for informal settlements. Without that intervention, the virus is likely to spread like wildfire, the consequences of which are hard to imagine.
Such a sorry state of our existing water infrastructure is indicative of the larger problem. A 2016 International Development Research Centre (IDRC) report investigated the state of infrastructure in Pakistan's urban informal settlements. It concluded that a drastic overhaul is needed in urban planning and services to enable infrastructural upgrading, especially for public health and access to decent work. Unsanitary environments, in densely populated areas, have devastating a impact on health and livelihoods. For too long the health and social needs of such populations have been invisible. Now — our lives are more interconnected than ever — without addressing their needs, the whole city is at risk.
This brings us to the second recommended measure: social distancing. Let’s look how practical this measure is, using existing spatial and household data.

Density, space, data

The most critical input for tackling urban issues is data. What data sets do we need right now? To phrase it another way: what data-sets — open access and appropriate for secondary analyses by independent researchers or institutions to supplement the meagre data visualisation capacity of all tiers of government — actually exist, for Karachi, and for urban Pakistan?
In Sindh province, the government estimates that there are 1,414 katchi abadis out of which 575 are in Karachi and 408 in Hyderabad. A 2008 World Bank study indicates there are a total 902 katchi abadis in urban Punjab; 65 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 55 in Balochistan and 52 in Islamabad. With these sparse, and potentially out of date figures, we can roughly estimate a total of 2488 informal settlements across Pakistan's major urban centres. This data excludes the numerous goths (approximately 900, as per an Orangi Pilot Project study and the Karachi Strategic Development Plan 2020, that dot Karachi's periphery; areas that are rapidly transforming into peri-urban settlements), with no clear planning regulations, no formal mechanisms for service provisions, often needing to tap into (siphoning) water and other public utilities to survive.
In cities like Karachi, there is a double deficit: data on informal settlements is either not collected regularly, and if it is, it is not disaggregated — especially on social indicators such as health. How can the various tiers of government tackle this crisis through emergency plans if they do not have realistic and up-to-date figures on the number of people living long-term in a ward or district? What about the number and type of built structures they occupy? Their proximity and interaction patterns that could facilitate the spread? The capacity and effectiveness of the infrastructures serving them? Without this data relief planning for Covid-19 becomes a guessing game at best. This provides loopholes in the relief mechanisms — loopholes that can be exploited for populistic provision rather than for where the need is highest.
The most comprehensive and reliable data on demographics in Pakistan is supposed to be gathered by the population census. Yet, reflecting on the methodology adopted for the 2017 census, this crisis demonstrates the ineffectiveness of the data: it collected de jure data on Pakistani citizens, counting them in the wards/districts displayed on their CNICs, and not where they were actually living. Such data quickly becomes irrelevant for subsequent studies, and especially unusable for detailed analysis on the realities of lives and processes in urban Pakistan. Take the Covid-19 crisis: how can governments generate epidemiological models to predict its spread in populations when there is no existing or reliable data about them?
Based on work done by the Karachi Urban Lab over 18 months and spanning 13 informal settlements in different districts of Karachi, our findings reveal that people are living on plots as small as 20 square yards. Households have an average family size of eight to nine people, but barely accommodate a single room with a slab for a kitchen and a toilet. In locations where people have expanded vertically, household sizes go as high as 30 people per 80 square yards of plot. These household numbers are higher than the average represented in the 2017 census. The reality is that social distancing is almost impossible to implement in these settings. This kind of population density rings alarm bells for the safety and security of these urban residents and for the spread of Covid-19 across Pakistan. Coupling this constriction of available space for the vast urban majority with a city-wide curfew or extended lockdown hours spells disaster for people forced to confine themselves to tiny, dense, interior spaces. In cases of smaller plots or higher densities the scenario becomes even more unnerving. This, coupled with studies which show that 88% of the housing stock in the city consists of plot sizes 120 square yards or less, lies in strong contrast to people living in houses sized 400-2000 square yards constituting only 2% of the housing stock.

Health and vulnerability

Dozens of informal settlements in Karachi have been under the threat of eviction for the past 18 months. More than one thousand households have already been rendered homeless in Karachi's District Central. Our ongoing and participatory research with residents, shows that about 40% of households in informal settlements have at least one family member who requires special medical and social care. Adding to the staggering numbers of immunocompromised individuals, there is a diversity of medical, physical and social healthcare needs. About 70% of the persons who need care can be categorised as persons with chronic illnesses who are facing a heightened risk of contracting Covid-19.

The news of Covid-19 — added to eviction anxieties — has created very high levels of psychological stress amongst residents in informal settlements. The distress of managing the food, water and healthcare needs of the family had already reached unprecedented levels but now the lockdown is leading to further disruptions and distress disorders. Psychological research repeatedly shows that stress weakens immunity.
Women and girls are particularly vulnerable to these stressors and their impact. They are most likely to be trapped at home and absorbing significantly higher levels of care work during the lockdown. Levels of violence against women and girls have spiked in the lockdowns in China, the UK and the USA — there are real concerns about the safety and security of women and girls across Pakistan, but especially those in crammed households suffering immense precariousness.
The insecurity, uncertainty, and stress puts residents of informal settlements at high risk of immune-compromisation, compounding their vulnerability to Covid-19. They are at the frontlines of this crisis.

Long-term planning

The Covid-19 pandemic should be an urgent wake-up call for urban planners, bureaucrats and policymakers in Pakistan, to invest substantially and meaningfully in understanding and levelling out the highly unequal access to urban infrastructure services. Fragmented governance and lack of accountability at multiple layers of government have hindered inclusive planning efforts for decades. Residents of informal settlements can no longer be invisible to policymakers — as they are a critical part of the functioning of the city, and as some of the most vulnerable people, they deserve due attention.
Simply put, the long-term effects of Covid-19 combined with impacts of climate change, will take place in sites and at scales that involve populations which have never been accounted for in previous planning efforts. Here is a list of both urgent and long term recommendations:

1. Restore the local government system across Pakistan.
2. Immediately establish a coordination committee of representatives from provincial/local governments, NGOs and community leaders.
3. Include and account for high numbers of persons with healthcare needs.
4. Document up-to-date numbers and generate spatial data on populations in each ward, with particular emphasis on informal settlements.
5. Prioritise emergency budgets to upgrade existing water infrastructures and include emergency provision of cheap and clean water in informal settlements.

This report has been co-authored by Adam Abdullah, Maheen Arif, Soha Macktoom, Arsam Saleem, Muhammed Toheed, Dr Nausheen H Anwar, Dr Gulnaz Anjum and Dr Amiera Sawas.
Header image: People reach out to get a charity food handout during a lockdown after Pakistan shut all markets, public places and discouraged large gatherings amid an outbreak of the coronavirus disease in Karachi, Pakistan on March 30, 2020. — Reuters