HYDERABAD: The conditions of rural workers and peasants, who make up more than 70% of the labor force in Sindh’s rural areas and toil long hours in agriculture, farms, and brick kilns, have gotten worse, according to the Hari Welfare Association (HWA), which claimed on International Labour Day.
In a statement Akram Khaskheli President HWA said that the government of Sindh has never given these people priority. These millions of workers lack access to social security, good employment, and the minimum wage. According to HWA, a rural worker does not earn the Rs25, 000 minimum salaries that the Government of Sindh guaranteed for unskilled laborers in 2019. Millions of young people in rural Sindh are forced to work for little more than Rs6, 000 per month in shops, restaurants, and workshops due to unemployment, and a lack of opportunities for education, skills development, and employment. They include women, girls, and minor boys who pick cotton and chilies for pitiful pay. They are the prime target of exploiters.
President HWA said that, people are forced to subsist by taking advantage of and abusing their limited economic opportunities due to poverty, unemployment, hunger, and social and economic injustice. Khaskheli claims that because there is a growing lack of irrigation water for the lower parts of the canals, the majority of peasants have relocated to the rural labor market where they are given meager wages.
According to HWA, social and economic injustice, unemployment, hunger, and poverty forced rural workers and peasants to rely on meager economic prospects, which often result in their wretched exploitation and abuse in the hands of contractors, middlemen, and corporate companies. The majority of peasants have reportedly gone to the rural labor market where they are given minimal wages due to the growing shortage of irrigation water to lower portions of \the canals, according to HWA. Workers frequently spend their free time in roadside rest spots or agricultural fields looking for work when they are unable to find employment or government support because of seasonal jobs and a lack of irrigation water in many locations. Thus, suicide has been on the rise in rural areas most often due to poverty.
HWA went on to say that the main cause is a lack of political will on the part of the administration to ensure labor law and policy implementation. The Sindh Industrial Relations Act of 2013 is a labor law specific to the province of Sindh in Pakistan and provides a legal framework for the regulation of industrial relations, including the formation and registration of trade unions. However, HWA expressed that the government has not made an effort to ensure that these rural workers, particularly in the agriculture and brick kiln industries, are unionized.
Although the Sindh Women Agriculture Workers Act (SWAWA) was passed in 2019, it is currently inert, just like every other law passed since independence. The SWAWA, like any other law, could aid in defending rural peasant and worker women from marginalization, exploitation, and abuse in feudal and tribal societies, claims HWA. HWA said that in addition to the implementation of laws, the real change is pitted into the land reforms, which has never been the priority of the Sindh government because it is captured by landlords and feudal families. They are in never favor of a shift in land ownership patterns and land distribution. Therefore, since 1955, the concurrent governments have never implemented the Sindh Tenancy Act (STA) of 1950, which aimed to address the issues of tenant exploitation and landlessness by granting security of tenure to tenants and regulating the relationship between landlords and tenants. However, despite the STA, implementation has been observed on the ground, and tenant exploitation and landlessness remain significant problems in rural Sindh. It added that in the entire Sindh, HWA was unable to find any single peasant / sharecropper having a written agreement with the landlords under the STA.
HWA urged the Sindh government to guarantee that all workers in rural regions receive a salary of Rs 25,000. In this sense, people who disobey the minimum wage policy should face exceptional penalties.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023
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