KARACHI, Dec 2: Speakers at a workshop on Sunday urged workers to get educated so that they can know what their rights are.

Speaking at the seminar on the “Rights of the Workers Employed in the Informal Sector” organised by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), they said that without being organized, the workers could not wage a struggle for the rights they had been deprived of by vested interests.

They said that the trade union movement in the country had deteriorated over the years and the workers employed in the formal and informal sectors were not being given their due rights.

They said that the condition of women workers was even worse as the majority of them were not even given the appointment letters and were employed under the contract system.

They said women were paid less than their male counterparts though they did the same jobs and were equally qualified, they were not even given the same benefits given to male employees.

They alleged that a large majority of women employees were sexually harassed at workplaces and those who did not respond ”positively” or did not give in to the “advances” of their superiors were victimised and sometimes even sacked, and some women workers who “extended personal favours” to the superiors were given undue promotions and other benefits for the “services rendered.”

They said that even trade unions- whose constituency usually comprised male workers- did not do much to solve the issues relattd to female workers. They urged trade unions to defend the rights of their female colleagues, make them their members and bring them forward into the decision making process in the unions.

They said that majority of women workers had to use the public transport regularly and they were sexually harassed also during their daily commuting between home and workplace.

They said that there were not enough effective laws and the few laws that existed were not strictly implemented.

They said that most of the prevailing labour laws were formulated before Partition and were written in English which the majority of workers could not read, write or understand.

They said under these laws employers, with the assistance of the labour department officials and police, were exploiting the situation to their benefit and victimising workers.

They demanded that fresh, worker-friendly labour laws, keeping in view the ground realities, be formulated and widely publicised in Urdu and other regional languages so that workers could understand them easily.

They said that under the present system it usually took a long time to get a matter settled in the labour courts, which the poor workers could not afford. They suggested that government should fix a suitable time limit within which the labour courts should decide a matter.

The also demanded that the superior judiciary should also review the working of the labour courts regularly to ensure that they provided quick justice.

Referring to illegal methods used by employers to prevent workers form forming unions, they demanded that the government should make laws to the effect that every organisation should have at least one trade union.

They also criticised the government policy of keeping all export processing zones out of the jurisdiction of labour laws and demanded that all such areas and other special industrial areas kept outside the labour laws’ jurisdiction be brought under the cover of the labour laws so that the workers employed there could also get the benefits available to other workers in the country.

They also demanded that under the recently installed city and town governments the newly elected labour councillors be given powers to check violation of the labour laws in their respective jurisdictions.

Moazzam Ali, Anwer Shahzad, Ashraf Rizvi, Umer Abbas, Saima Anis, Malik Naveed, Khizer Hameed, Abdul Hakeem, Rahim Bakhsh azad, Dr Yousuf, Hameed Sikander, Mirza Maqsood, and others spoke on the occasion.