Invisible women workers in Pakistan

They assemble electrical parts, sew beads onto clothes and label goods: Pakistani home-based workers carry out tasks that cannot be done by machines.

These unskilled workers are paid under the table. Many industrial sectors rely on them, but their names do not appear in any contract, and they lack clear-cut rights.

Meanwhile, their working conditions are among the most precarious in Southeast Asia, where around half of the world's home-based workers are based.

Zehra Khan, a trade unionist from Karachi, wants to change that. She has been campaigning for the rights of home-based workers for almost twenty years.

“Nobody knows exactly how many home-based workers there are in Pakistan”

In 2009, she founded the Home-Based Women Workers Federation (HBWWF), the first trade union for home-based workers in Pakistan.

It brings together women who would otherwise have little chance of demanding their rights from the seclusion of their homes. Khan makes them visible and strengthens their position in negotiations with their employers.

Nobody knows exactly how many home-based workers there are in Pakistan. Estimates put the number of people working in the informal sector at twenty million, around a quarter of whom work from home. Most of these are women.

“In Pakistan, it is the cultural norm for women to live private lives and not come into contact with strangers,” explains Zehra Khan, a 46-year-old who has a firm handshake.

“The women and girls often work more than twelve hours a day and also take care of the household.”

Many of the home-based workers start working as children because their families need money. Because they do simple jobs, they are interchangeable for employers.

The women and girls often work more than twelve hours a day and also take care of the household. “There is hardly any time left to organise in a trade union,” says Khan.

“In the beginning, we had to go from door to door to find the women,” she recalls. Families expressed many reservations: “They thought we were human traffickers or that we wanted to westernise their wives and daughters so that they would no longer obey the men.”

But Khan kept at it, and over time, she found the women who had some influence in her neighbourhood and acted as multipliers. "Once we had their support, we were able to grow." Khan educates home-based workers about their rights and the potential problems of their work.

They are paid too little and by the unit. If they can’t work as many hours, for example, due to pregnancy or illness, they are not entitled to help.

Khan herself comes from a working-class family. Her parents were not active in a trade union, but "it was always common to do voluntary work."

In the course of her Master’s degree in Gender Studies, she realised that home-based workers in Pakistan were one of the most marginalised groups. The more she learned about the issue, the more her desire to change the situation of women grew.

At one of the first meetings, Khan recalls, the companies threatened the women workers that they would no longer hire them if they joined the HBWWF.

Hundreds turned up anyway: “That was a turning point,” she recalls. Today, the HBWWF has around 4,500 members. The union is now accepted by most clients and intermediaries as the official representative of homeworkers.

“Many European companies have their products manufactured at low prices in Pakistan and neighbouring countries.”

Some issues have only been changed on paper but have yet to be implemented. For example, since 2016, the minimum wage of the equivalent of around one hundred euros per month in Sindh province has also been applied to home workers who produce glass bangles.

In 2018, Sindh also became the first province to pass a law requiring the registration of female workers. Only if they are visible in the production chain can they demand their rights - in Pakistan and worldwide.

After all, many European companies have their products manufactured at low prices in Pakistan and neighbouring countries. Of late, some countries, including Germany, France, and the Netherlands, now have supply chain laws that oblige companies to actively prevent exploitation and human rights violations at every stage of their production.

Pakistani homeworkers could also benefit from this. For Khan and other trade unionists, European laws are a lever to exert pressure on their government as well as local companies.

They reinforce their goal of transparency: “We ask the homeworkers to always ask which company the order comes from. Now the homeworkers increasingly know the name and address of the client, and, bit by bit, the entire supply chain becomes visible.”