By Sankar Ray
Labour force in Pakistan confronts a crisis of existence. Working people have been on the brink of aggravated unemployment following the Coronavirus pandemic. In mid-2021, the awkward rise of job losses, aside from joblessness, in the country as a sequel to COVID-19 spread, reflected in a rise in homelessness and starvation. The pandemic which spread across the globe like a wildfire hit the labour force in impoverished nations including Pakistan (as in India too), leaving many wage-labourers unable to make ends meet. There were widespread dismissals.
Signs of disappointment and distress were manifest even earlier. The labour market in Pakistan had shrunk by 13 per cent in the April-June 2000, rendering 20.7 million jobless, revealed a report, ‘Special Survey for Evaluating Socio-Economic Impact of Covid19 on Well-being of People. Human rights activists believe the magnitude of job losses crossed 25 million although the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics is yet to publish unemployment data, updated up to 2018-19. The latest available report from PBS, ‘Pakistan Employment Trends states,’ the unemployment rate for both sexes was before the pandemic was already at 5.1 per cent between 2017 and 2018. The share of employment in agriculture working 50 hours or more had also declined from 29 per cent between 2006 and 2007 to 23.7 per cent between 2017 and 2018.”
According to the International Labour Organisation, Pakistan’s unemployment rate, which was already 3.98 per cent in 2019, increased to 4.65 per cent in 2020. Now with the third wave of the deadly pandemic sweeping across the nation, the labour force fears that the worst us yet to come. In April-June 2020, it may be recalled, ILO estimated job loss due to pandemic at 400 million the world over. South Asia alone accounted for 110 million of the total 235 million full-time jobs lost this quarter in the Asia-Pacific. Job losses shot up by over 400 per cent in South Asia and Africa each since the first quarter, said the estimates.
The Pakistan Worker’s Federation. in a paper’Covid-19 and World of Work’, an appraisal of trend of unemployment, observed that the impact of coronavirus pandemic on the workforce between 20 March, 2020 and 20 May, 2020 estimated layoffs by mid-May 2020 at 5.6 million in agriculture, 2 million in manufacturing, 1.17 million in accommodation and food, 4.17 million in construction, 1 million in mining and quarrying, 6 million in wholesale, 1.95 million in transport and communication, 20.27 million in daily wagers.
The worst sufferers are marginal, informal and poorly-paid workers. “The workload had already been slowing down since 2018, when dollar prices started to increase. Out of several work setups, hardly one to two were working because no ships were coming to the breaking yard,” stated the ship breaking workers union head, Bashir Mehmoodani who spoke to an NGO. “After two months of strict lockdown, the union started helping the poor people. A few NGOs came out to help as well but that was not sufficient as it was a temporary solution to the bigger problem,” he said, adding that those two months impacted the economy very severely and that it can take years to come back to just the level of stability, he added..
One of the severely affected sections are home-based women workers whose plight is invisible , being hidden in inside their homes toiling day and night for a miniscule minimum wage , better called pittance, .Ten thousand-plus power loom workers alone in Faisalabad have lost their jobs.Thousands of brick kiln workers in the Punjab province have been rendered jobless. Textile industries too had layoffs, especially those industries whose export orders were cancelled due to the pandemic. In Balochistan, 30 per cent of mine workers were without jobs.
The struggles of home-based women workers invisible as they’re hidden in inside their homes. Working day and night for a miniscule minimum wage while also managing house chores and raising kids is not an easy task and when Covid-19 hit, these women lost a lot of work too. These hapless women are mostly catered by a contractor or a supervisor who picks work from companies and distributes it to the low-income areas where women desperately need incomes make extra money without leaving their homes, agreeing to the jobs on very minimal amounts.
The market and businesses mostly exploit workers who are unaware of their rights but are needy. Covid-19 and lockdown affected home-based workers considerably as companies either completely were shutting down or going to half working capacities. Even the men of the houses losing their jobs so the women of the lower social class were helpless in the case and worked tirelessly for the whole day for a mere Rs100 or Rs200. There are no trade unions in the Informal workers’ sector in Pakistan. Some NGOs reach out to a small section of them but the situation in unfavourable even to defend them from human rights angle.
Impoverished workers in Pakistan are held in contemporary forms of slavery even before the Coronavirus pandemic . Now the exploitation has become harsher. Employers forcibly extract labor from adults and children, restrict their freedom of movement, and deny them the right to negotiate the terms of their employment, let alone servitude through physical abuse, forced confinement, and debt-bondage. The state offers these workers no effective protection from this exploitation, even though slavery is unconstitutional in Pakistan. (IPA Service)
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