Bangladesh Labour Foundation celebrates International Home-Based Workers’ Day
Bangladesh Labour Foundation held special events along with affiliates, allies and associate organizations on the occasion of International Home-based Workers’ Day. October 20 is marked as the International Home-based Workers’ Day. This year the day is observed with a theme “Let’s organise and grow the Home-based Workers Movement”.
In Bangladesh, there were about 3.2 million non-agricultural and 7.4 million agricultural home-based workers, according to the 2016/17 Labour Force Survey. This represents, respectively about 5.2 and 12.1 per cent of the employed population aged 15 and older. Home-based work in Bangladesh comprises of outsourcing of certain labor-intensive tasks to home-based workers (HBW) by small and medium enterprises producing for the local market and by some garment factories producing for export to other countries, as well as home‐based craft production for a family enterprise or as self‐employed. The majority of home‐based workers are women, for whom this work has low opportunity cost as it can be combined with their household and career responsibilities, and since it does not require breaking with cultural norms, it also entails relatively little cost for family and community. In fact, women’s home‐ based work is seen as an extension of the domestic work. As a result, in Bangladesh and other countries of South Asia as well, women’s home‐based work is in visible both socially and from a policy perspective. Like other informal workers, most home-based workers do not enjoy adequate economic opportunities, legal rights, social protection or representative voice – referred to by the ILO as the four pillars of decent work. But home-based workers face additional challenges. Working from in or around their own homes, home-based workers, their activities, and their contribution to the economy remain largely invisible and undervalued. This is particularly true for women, who represent the majority of home-based workers. Their economic activities are often dismissed as an extension of their domestic work, rather than being recognized as production for the market that contributes to the economy. Because they remain invisible and undervalued, home-based workers tend to be overlooked by policymakers when they design policies, regulations or services. The result is that most sub-contracted home-based workers are not covered under labour or employment law; most self-employed home-based workers are not covered by commercial law regulating contracts and transactions; and the homes-cum-workplaces of home-based workers often lack basic infrastructure services. Further, policymakers do not understand how wider economic trends impact home-based workers: how inflation increases the price of their inputs; how recession or imports reduce demand for their goods; how competition increases during economic downturns or when factory workers lose their jobs; and how mechanization displaces home-based production.
It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that the average earnings of home-based workers are not only low but also erratic due to seasonal rhythms,
value chain dynamics, and wider economic trends. The three-city study found that the average earnings of all home-based workers are quite low, with
sub-contracted workers earning less on average than self-employed workers. While equal percentages of sub-contracted and self-employed workers were in the poorest earning quintile of their city, a far higher percentage of the self-employed were in the richest earning quintile. In comparing net earnings, it is important to highlight that the sub-contracted homeworkers, like the self-employed, have to pay for many of the non-wage costs of production, notably the workplace, equipment, utilities and transport. From theside of organizations and tradeunions too,there are considerable constraints to organizing HBGWs both internal, related to recognition and resources,
as well as at the macro policy level where HBWs and HBGWs in particular remain invisible. It is now demand of time to recognize the HBW and their work and their contrinution to the economy. Home-based workers are also in need to be included in country social protection schemes and programmes.