By Ume Laila Azhar
Published in The News on May 18, 2025
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espite four provincial laws recognising home-based workers (HBWs), Pakistan lacks a national registration framework, data system or inclusive policy ensuring rights and protections for home based workers.
“Laws without implementation are promises un-kept. Home-based workers deserve more than symbolic recognition; they deserve structural justice.”
A paradigm shift is under way in how global brands approach labour rights. With the rise of human rights due diligence (HRDD) legislation in Europe, importing companies can no longer escape responsibility by outsourcing exploitation. They are now liable for violations occurring throughout their supply chains.
For Pakistan, as a major supplier to European textile markets, this shift is more than a compliance issue; it’s a question of economic survival. Global supply chains are under scrutiny. Organisations that fail to meet ethical standards risk losing market access. This global pressure has brought new focus to one of the most invisible segments of the labor force, the HBWs.
Pakistan has made notable legislative strides. The provinces; Sindh (2018), the Punjab (2023), Balochistan (2022) and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (2021); have all enacted laws recognising HBWs as workers. These laws commit to extend social protection, regulating terms of work and providing access to legal remedies. Despite the legislative breakthrough, progress on the ground has been limited.
Five years later there is no national registration mechanism. There is no universal access to social security; no harmonised implementation framework and no national policy binding it all together.
“Despite being over four million strong in the Punjab alone, most HBWs remain uncounted, unrecognised and unprotected.”
In the Punjab, the Labour Department’s latest survey estimated that the HBWs comprise 10 percent of the industrial workforce. Most of them are women, working from their homes as part of subcontracted value chains. No data is available in other provinces as the governments have not allocated funds for data collection.
Despite their economic contribution, the workers remain absent from official statistics, social protection schemes and workplace protections. The invisibility of their labour from the labour force survey reinforces their exploitation.
In Sindh, a budget line has been created for HBWs and a registration process initiated. Access to social security remains a challenge. Without benefit distribution, legal access and institutional clarity, registration remains an empty gesture.
Several key challenges and implementation hurdles persist. These cause ambiguity over which department leads implementation: Labour or Social Security. There is also a lack of grassroots clarity on who qualifies as an HBW. The registration process is cumbersome and often inaccessible to rural women due to illiteracy, lack of documentation or restricted mobility. Importantly, some factories are refusing to report HBWs in their supply chains due to fear of non-compliance penalties, leading to their continued erasure. This resistance from factories creates a paradox: the more we try to formalise HBWs, the more they disappear from reported data.
Despite their economic contribution, they remain absent from official statistics, social protection schemes and workplace protections. The invisibility of their labour from the labour force survey; reinforces their exploitation.
A lack of gender-disaggregated data has paralysed policymaking. Labor Force Surveys often fail to capture home-based production, especially unpaid or piece-rate work. Without data, there can be no planning; without planning, no budgeting; wnd without budgeting, no benefits. Data invisibility allows policymakers to ignore HBWs while allowing brands to deny responsibility for them.
Pakistan’s laws are aligned with ILO Convention 177, which defines HBWs as those producing goods or services from home for remuneration, either directly or as part of subcontracted supply chains. This definition is poorly understood or applied at the ground level. Officials often fail to distinguish between informal self-employment and home-based production within structured value chains blurring lines and undermining enforcement.
“We must ask ourselves: is the goal to protect workers or to protect suppliers from scrutiny?”
The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive mandates brands to conduct risk-based due diligence on human rights across their supply chains. For Pakistan, this is both a wake-up call and an opportunity.
To retain market access, exporters will have to prove transparency and responsibility, including for the HBWs they rely on as sub contracted third layer. This could be the external pressure needed to unlock long-stalled reform if the state responds proactively.
The way forward calls for development of a national policy on HBWs because a harmonised national framework is needed to translate laws into practice, laying out rights, definitions and department mandates.
At the same time, its crucial to streamline universal registration processes for female labour force participation. Introduce mobile units, community-based outreach and digital platforms co-managed by women labour unions, groups and organisations for simplified registration.
Expand social protection access by adopting universal self-contributory slabs, EOBI and provincial schemes to include HBWs through low-cost contributions and informal economy pathways is essential. Disaggregated data is needed to strengthen survey tools.
It is important to enforce supply chain transparency and make HBW disclosure mandatory for all export units and integrate labour audits with civil society monitoring by adopting HBWs policies.
Legal literacy needs to be enhanced by launching para-legal training, legal aid centres and awareness campaigns to help HBWs understand and assert their rights. A national oversight body is needed for a multi-stakeholder coordination mechanism to track implementation, evaluate impact and ensure accountability.
One needs to understand that recognition of HBWs is not a matter of charity; it is a question of justice and economic rationality. These workers have carried Pakistan’s export economy on their shoulders for decades. In times of crisis like Covid-19, floods, heat waves and other natural calamities; they are the first to lose income and the last to receive relief. Legislation alone does not change lives. Only a functional system of recognition, registration and redistribution can begin to undo decades of structural exclusion.
Pakistan has laid the legal foundation. Now it must build the institutional scaffolding. The European HRDD framework may well be the most significant external driver for change. Whether we respond to it as a compliance burden or a transformative opportunity depends on our vision for labour justice.
Home-based workers are not just a statistic. They are mothers, artisans, caregivers and entrepreneurs. Their inclusion in the formal economy is not a favour; it’s long overdue justice. The time is now.
