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The informal sector labourers, accounting for an overwhelming 85 per cent of the country’s labour force, keep their hopes high that the interim government would fulfil their longstanding demand for inclusion in the formal sector as part of its labour reform initiative.  

Labour rights activists believe that the inclusion would usher a watershed moment in the country’s labour rights campaign as it would mark the first step towards ensuring labour rights of the thousands of workers counted so far as informal sector labourers.

The interim government, which replaced the now ousted Sheikh Hasina regime from August 8, has launched a reform campaign in several sectors, labour sector one among them. It has tasked a 10-member labour reform commission, formed on November 18, with submitting its recommendations to the chief adviser within 90 days. 

According to the Bangladesh Labour Force Survey 2022, around six crore or 84.9 per cent of the total working population in the country are engaged in informal employment that includes a highly varied range of work.

Most familiar of the informal sector jobs include agriculture labourers, domestic workers, construction and utility sector wage labourers, self-employed workers, including street vendors, hawkers and rickshaw pullers. Informal sector workers  sell their cheap labour without any formal contracts with the employers and without any regular benefits. 

Rights activists for domestic workers and municipality cleaners, while saying that they are marginalised among the informal workers, demand that the reform commission recommends their due recognition.

‘We eke out a living by selling our labour but we are not valued as workers. We hope that the interim government will recognise our due status,’ said Zakia Sultana, president of Grihakarmi Jatiya Forum, a platform for domestic workers. 

The country’s massive 96.6 per cent of 2.48 crore employed women are engaged in informal employment.

Zakia added that informal workers’ long-due demand for recognition remained unheeded because the previous governments did not create any mediums to facilitate the discussion.

‘The labour reform commission is supposed to work as the much-expected media,’ she said.

She further said that domestic workers often avoided being pregnant, fearing job loss. ‘They are not given maternity leave. So when someone gets pregnant and gives birth to babies her plights become endless. In absence of day-care facilities at the slums where they live, mothers of newborns or small children face extreme challenges as they are not allowed to take her children to the employers’ house.’

Domestic workers, particularly those who work as live-in helps, do not have fixed work hours, weekends and standard wages.

Although the Domestic Workers Protection and Welfare Policy was enacted in 2015, it brought hardly any positive impact on the domestic workers’ rights situation as it was not translated into a law.

Municipality cleaners, doing a critical service to keep the environment of cities and municipality towns, also face an increasing level of job insecurity.

Gajan Lal, senior vice president of Bangladesh Harijan Oikya Parishad, a platform of the Dalit community from which many earn livelihood as cleaners of cities and municipality towns, has said that most of the cleaners work on an ad hoc basis, and so can neither bargain on their wage nor demand increment.

‘Moreover, newcomers, mostly from the Muslim community, have made the temporary cleaning jobs more competitive,’ Gajan Lal said.

While talking about increasing livelihood insecurity of vendors and hawkers, Bangladesh Hawkers Union vice president Monzur Moin has said that they are in a constant risk of eviction.

While the authorities regularly run eviction drives, they do not provide alternative livelihood sources to the hawkers, says Moin. Moreover, as their occupation is not formalised, they cannot take their demands to the government in a systematic way.

‘The hawkers as informal sector workers do not have the right to trade union. We expect that the labour sector reform will recognise all engaged in the informal sector to ensure their legal protection,’ the hawker leader said.

Socialist Labour Front president Rajekuzzaman Ratan commended the formation of the labour reform commission as a reflection of the informal workers’ long-due expectations.

‘For the first time in the history of Bangladesh, a reform commission has been formed to address the discrimination in the labour sector. We hope for the best,’ Ratan said.

Recently, the interim government has added 15 new industrial sectors to the existing list of 42 sectors under wage regulations.

The newly included sectors are private clinics, hospitals and diagnostic centres; fertiliser factories; brickfields; private airlines; electric and electronic goods manufacture; ceramics; cement; batteries; poultry; commercial amusement parks; dry fish manufacture;,  stone crushing; IT parks; colour and chemical factories; and milk products and dairy farms.

Labour rights activists allege that while some industries, such as type foundry industry, which no longer exist or have become insignificant in the changing economic scenario, are still in the wage regulations list, many new sectors involving significant numbers of workers have yet to find their place in it.

Chief of the labour reform commission, Syed Sultan Uddin Ahmmed, observes that informal sector workers remain deprived of fundamental rights and social dignity.

‘The commission will highlight all the discriminations that the informal workers are facing. Steps must be taken to ensure their social dignity, security, and humane and sustainable livelihood,’ Sultan said.