On International Labour Day, Abid Lashari, President National Disability and Development Forum (NDF), said that we celebrate and appreciate the tireless, laborious work of rural and urban workers in the formal and informal sectors across Pakistan. However, in the backdrop of this celebration lies a harsh reality of a silently growing number of persons with disabilities (PDWs) due to unsafe working conditions in both sectors, and the federal and provincial governments have failed to protect or support them.
Abid Lashari said that Pakistan has extremely poor mechanisms and systems to record accidents and injuries at the workplace, even in the formal sector; but the informal sector has the highest number of accidents and injuries, in many cases, deaths, which have increased more people part of the PWD group. It added that every day on construction sites, in mines, factories, deep-sea fishing, and the agriculture (especially cotton pickers and chemical sprayers) sector, countless workers in Sindh and across Pakistan suffers severe and major injuries due to largely absent occupational health and safety measures. Arms, legs, eyes and other parts of the body are lost, which shatter individual lives and push families into abject poverty. Yet, the majority of such cases go unrecorded.
Undocumented, and unaddressed. Abid Lashari further said that more than 90 per cent of work in the construction sector is done through informal procedures where contractors are engaged to engage workers on a daily wage. Most often they fall from heights, get injured because of falling debris or machinery or are electrocuted because they are not provided with basic safety gear such as helmets, harnesses and others. Overall, in Pakistan, the construction sector largely ignores basic safety standards. Like the construction sector, there are many dozens of informal work sectors such as waste picking, hawking or street vending, transport, home-based work, and domestic work, which are without basic occupational health and safety standards.
Abid Lashari said that though the most informal sector workers are without health and safety protection, the formal sector workers are also without such protection because of the lack of implementation of existing labour and safety laws, which is not just a failure of laws and justice, but it is a failure of human rights. Upon becoming permanently disabled on the job, workers encounter numerous forms of marginalization and exclusion, such as no compensation, no access to public healthcare, no rehabilitation, and no state-sponsored social safety nets. Such workers become part of the PWD group and are often left with no choice but to protect themselves in a system that does not protect them before and after injury.
NDF urged the federal and provincial governments to protect people from becoming disabled at the workplace, whether formal or informal. For this, implement and enforce occupational health and safety laws to prevent workplace-related disabilities and also set mechanisms to ensure immediate medical and financial support for injured workers.
