HYDERABAD Waseem Ali Solangi has to be extremely nimble on his feet to be able to serve as many customers as possible at the roadside café where he works as waiter for a petty amount of just Rs120 a day. He wishes more customers come to his café each day because it means more tips and some extra income to fulfil his and his family's essential needs and maybe some innocent desires.
He arrives at his workplace at 3.30 pm and leaves for home at 200 am with his Spartan earnings, which come to around Rs4,000 a month.
'With electricity tariff going up and inflation going through the roof, its very hard to make both ends meet and everyone can understands that,' said Solangi as he wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand.
His colleague Zafar Jamali has a somewhat similar tale to tell. They and a large number of workers like them who toil throughout the day in the informal labour sectors like hotels, small workshops, transport and filling stations have to live on the edge because they are not covered under relevant laws for protection of their rights.
Their employer can show them the door at whim.
Labour laws cover such workers if they number at least 10 at a given workplace under the Shop and Establishment Ordinance 1969.
The law requires their employers to maintain attendance register, fix workers' duty timings, record of casual leave or otherwise, overtime and salaries but nobody bothers to keep such record.
In some cases they work on commission basis. They are not covered by the Employees Social Security Ordinance 1965 which is otherwise essential nor do they have any entitlement to pension under the Employees Old Age Benefits Act 1976.
The Labour Department officials remain least concerned with their plight and the department's writ simply does not exist in any workplace. The department headed by director labour, who is also chief shop inspector of Sindh by virtue of his post, and the additional deputy director labour Sindh, who is deputy chief shop inspector, never pay visit to such workplaces to see if requirements of law for daily-wage earners are being complied.
They avoid it for obvious reasons.
Some unions of shop workers were initially registered in 1973-74 in Shahi Bazaar and other areas but they have remained ineffective since their inception.
Law does not allow these workers do form trade unions and even recently enacted Industrial Relations Act 2008 is also silent on the issue.
Labourers working in the informal sector also fail to attract attention of labour associations and federations, which prefer to take up much bigger issues.
Debate on labourers working in formal sectors like industries, factories, mills and public sector continues unabated though Industrial Relations Act 2008 has been introduced by the government, which overrides Industrial Relations Ordinance 2002, described by labour organisations as black-law as it was introduced by Gen (Retd) Pervez Musharaf.
Mills and factory workers are also not covered under various provisions of labour laws while labour department need somebody to make a complaint to be able to pursue their cases.
'Labourers in textile sector have no right to form trade unions. And each textile unit has a 1,000 or so workers registered. Only pocket unions exist. Labour department officials look the other way when it comes to issues of these workers,' said Rana Mehmood Ali Khan, president of the Sindh chapter of National Labour Federation.
He said that performance of democratic governments was not so impressive as far as formulation of labour-friendly laws was concerned.
The government organised a tripartite labour conference in Islamabad in February this year in which the prime minister announced formation of a 24-member Standing Committee.
The committee would have representation of six officials each fro all provinces to propose amendments to the IRA 2008, safety and health laws and Services Conditions Act being contemplated by the government.
However, the committee has not been formed yet.
'We don't reject or accept IRA 2008 though there are people who reject and accept it in totality,' said Rana.
He claimed that 18 clauses of the IRA needed to be amended after which it would become a suitable law for labour-related issues.
'We believe definition of 'worker' is vague in the Act. Trade unions have to be allowed in every sector except army and police but Act 2008 has kept intact clauses of IRO 1969 as far as trade union formation is concerned,' he said.
Muttahida Labour Federation Secretary-General Qamoos Gul Khattak severely criticised the tripartite labour conference and said it was perhaps the first such conference that concluded in just four hours without making any productive discussion.
'It was more an exercise in public relations than a real labour conference,' said Khattak.
He believed that labour issues could not be addressed unless IRA 2008, which was introduced without consultation, was suitably amended. 'There are 150 mistakes of grammar in the Act that changes entirely interpretation and meaning of a given issue,' he pointed out.
MLF believed that IRA's clauses related to the definition of industry, worker, agreement and settlement, National Industrial Relations Commission (NIRC), judges (who would now be appointed by the government) and punishment for violation of Act 2008 needed to be changed, he stressed.
Labour organisations are of the view that since the PPP government is committed to workers' cause it should allow them to form trade unions in textile, rice, cotton ginning and cement factories where forming a union has become a crime.
'There is a feeling in labour federations that the government doesn't support trade union activities. When such is the state affairs in formal labour sectors how will it be able to protect labourers working in informal sectors,' said Khattak.
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