LAHORE, Oct 19: Speakers at a meeting on Thursday underscored the need for recognising the women working in their homes and evolving a strategy for saving them from the middleman exploitation.

At an advocacy for home-based workers arranged by the Aurat Foundation, Homenet and the Legislative Watch Programme, a group of working women said they performed different kinds of simple works for middlemen against meager wages. They had no option but to accept nominal wages because the work done by them required little or no skill and any number of women was willing to do it, they said.

The women said they did works like sewing clothes, filling of matchboxes or tamarind in cellophane packets, stringing of badminton racquets and embroidery. They were paid only one to two rupees for sewing a cloth or ‘kameez’, Re1 for filling a dozen packets of tamarind and Rs6 for filling 1,000 matchboxes and Rs10 for stringing 12 badminton racquets. Wages for embroidering a suit in two weeks do not exceed Rs200.

Aurat Foundation director Misbah Tahir said the home-based women workers required immediate attention of the policy makers because they were the poorest of the poor and required to be saved from ruthless exploitation by the middlemen. The government could recognise them as workers under the law to make them eligible for minimum wages. She said such women constituted at least 50 per cent of the informal sector workforce.

Asad Rehman said the government should ratify the International Labour Organisation Convention on home-based workers for protecting their rights. These women should also be provided access to credit on soft terms and opportunities to market their products in exhibitions so that they could get better return for their work. They should also have opportunities to improve their skills for getting better wages.

Other participants were of the view that poverty alleviation campaigns could not succeed without improving the lot of the home-based women workers in view of their large numbers. They stressed the need for compiling statistics of home-based and other categories of workers during census for future planning.

The Beaconhouse University has offered space for display of their products and help them improve their skills.