PESHAWAR, June 5: The federal ministry of social welfare has proposed making employment of children below 15 years a penal offence punishable with imprisonment up to three years or fine up to thirty thousand rupees. For regulating services of domestic workers, the ministry, with the support of International Labour Organisation, has prepared draft of a law, to be called ‘protection of child domestic workers act, which envisages various steps including signing of a contract between employee and employer, fixation of working hours, payment of wages, the minimum age of servant and standard of treatment.

The ministry and the ILO had already started countrywide consultations for giving the proposed law a final shape after which it would be placed before the parliament for legislation.

The draft law makes classification between ‘domestic workers’ and ‘domestic helpers’. A domestic worker has been defined as ‘any full-time domestic employ performing tasks described as normal household chores within a specific household for which he/she is paid by the employer’. The definition includes maids, cooks, house-boys and family drivers, who provide daily service to a single, specific household either on a live-in or live-out basis.

A domestic helper, according to the draft law, means ‘any person who provides domestic or household service to either a single or a number of households on a contractual or day-to-day basis and paid directly by the employer’. A ‘child domestic worker’ means a domestic worker under the age of 18 years.

The ministry has proposed a minimum wage of Rs3000 per month for a domestic worker and Rs1000 per month for a domestic helper or child domestic worker, working in the limits of a municipal administration.

It is proposed that normal working hours shall be ten hours a day, exclusive of one-hour break for each regular meal of the day.