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Making Home-based Work Visible: A Review of Evidence from South Asia

January 2011

Authors:

Ratna Sudarshan

: Work hours recorded by women home workers, 2001

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Making Home-based Work Visible:

A Review of Evidence from South Asia

Ratna M. Sudarshan and Shalini Sinha

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19 January 2011

WIEGO Working Papers*

The global research-policy-action network Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing

and Organizing (WIEGO) Working Papers feature research that makes either an empirical

or theoretical contribution to existing knowledge about the informal economy especially

the working poor, their living and work environments and/or their organizations. Particular

attention is paid to policy-relevant research including research that examines policy

paradigms and practice. This series includes statistical proﬁles of informal employment

and critical analysis of data collection and classiﬁcation methods. Methodological issues

and innovations, as well as suggestions for future research, are considered. All WIEGO

Working Papers are peer reviewed by the WIEGO Research Team and/or external experts.

The WIEGO Publication Series is coordinated by the WIEGO Research Team. This

report was commissioned under the Inclusive Cities Project by WIEGO’s Urban Policies

Programme Director Caroline Skinner, who is based at the African Centre for Cities at the

University of Cape Town.

About the Authors:

Ratna M. Sudarshan is currently Director, Institute of Social Studies Trust, New Delhi and

has researched and published mainly in the areas of informal economy, social protection,

and education, with a focus on women.

Shalini Sinha is WIEGO’s home-based work sector specialist. For over a decade her work

has focused on developing and documenting decent work and livelihoods opportunities for

women engaged in the informal sector of the economy.

Publication date: January 2011

ISBN number: ISBN 978-92-95095-11-3

Published by Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO)

A Charitable Company Limited by Guarantee – Company No. 6273538, Registered Charity

No. 1143510

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This report can be replicated for educational and organizing purposes as long as the

source is acknowledged.

Cover photograph by: Sanjay Kumar, SEWA Bharat

* This paper was ﬁrst published in the WIEGO Urban Policies Research Report Series. In May 2012 WIEGO

launched this Working Paper Series incorporating all the Urban Policies Research Reports.

Contents

Executive summary ..................................................................................................................................1

1. Introduction .........................................................................................................................................2

2. Origins and history of home-based work ...............................................................................................3

3. Deﬁning home-based work ...................................................................................................................5

4. Size of the sector: numbers, trends and contribution to GDP ...............................................................10

5. Home-based workers in value chains .................................................................................................13

6. Characteristics of home-based work ...................................................................................................15

7. The policy environment .....................................................................................................................21

8. Organizing and voice ........................................................................................................................25

9. Conclusion: critical research gaps ......................................................................................................28

Bibliography ...........................................................................................................................................29

Annex 1: Kathmandu Declaration on Women Workers in the Informal Sector,

Particularly Home-Based Workers, 20 October 2000 ..............................................................................34

List of tables and ﬁgures

Table 1: Conventional and non-conventional places of work in the informal sector in South Asian

countries (non-agricultural workers) .........................................................................................10

Table 2: Home-based work among informal sector non-agricultural workers by gender ..........................11

Table 3: Increase in home-based work in India, 1999-00 and 2004-05 ..................................................12

Table 4: Work hours recorded by women home workers, 2001 ..............................................................16

Table 5: Activity status reported by home-based workers in ﬁve South Asian countries, 2006 .................17

Table 6: Work-related problems as reported by home-based workers in ﬁve South Asian countries,

2006 .......................................................................................................................................18

Table 7: Earnings, needs and priorities reported by home-based workers in ﬁve South Asian

countries, 2006 .......................................................................................................................19

Table 8: Average earnings of home-based workers in selected locations in India as a ratio of the

state minimum wage, 2006 ......................................................................................................20

Table 9: Existing state initiatives to extend social protection to informal and home-based workers ...........23

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

Acronyms

ERA Equal Remuneration Act

GDP Gross Domestic Product

GOI Government of India

HBW home-based worker

HNI HomeNet India

HNSA HomeNet South Asia

ICFTU International Confederation of Free Trade Unions

ILC International Labour Conference

ILO International Labour Organization

ISST Institute of Social Studies Trust

NCEUS National Commission on Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector

NGO Non Government Organization

NSS National Sample Survey

SAARC South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation

SEWA Self Employed Workers Association

UNIDO United Nations Industrial Development Organization

UNIFEM United Nations Fund for Women

WIEGO Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing

Glossary

zari zardosi gold thread embroidery

phulkari a traditional Punjabi art of embroidery

beedi leaf cigarette

pakoras vegetables in gram ﬂour batter

agarbathi incense sticks

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

Executive summary

Home-based work has a long history in South Asia, having evolved out of home-based craft production.

Capitalist production has found outsourcing to home-based workers (HBWs) a stable and proﬁtable mode

of production. Workers, especially women workers, have found home-based work is a way of combining

work and care responsibilities with least strain on family and community norms and expectations. Data

shows that roughly half of all women workers are home-based in the region; and the trends suggest that

home-based work is on the increase, and found in both old and new industries.

The ILO Convention passed in 1996 gave a great boost to the efforts of activists to gain recognition for HBW

as “workers.” However the precise deﬁnition of HBW continues to be the subject of debate, ranging from

the narrower deﬁnition of home workers as contracted workers to wider deﬁnitions that would include self-

employed and unpaid family workers. The deﬁnition is the basis for statistical data collection which in turn

helps to shape policy and determine the resources required to give shape to the policy. Given the paucity

of macro data, several innovative methods have been used by researchers to illustrate the conditions of

work of HBW and identify priorities for action. These include value chain analysis, which is a useful way of

depicting the link between low paying home-based work and the often high-price of the resulting products

on the international market; however, this has the limitation of being exclusively focused on the market,

with little attention given to the local economy.

In general, researchers have used mixed methods – structured surveys combined with qualitative methods

– to develop the information base on HBWs. While standard statistical sampling methods cannot be easily

used, the identiﬁcation of sectors and clusters by national experts, and sampling methods such as snowball

sampling or random sampling within clusters, can collect fairly robust data. However, limited generalization

is possible, and the need for national data collection remains; two national sample surveys have been

conducted in India using “place of work” as an indicator, but the protocol for such surveys is still evolving.

Policy discourse in the region on HBWs has tended to focus on social protection and retains a welfarist

bias; much less debate has taken place on the developmental potential of home-based work, and the

possibility of much more widespread cluster-based local economic development. While impressive efforts

have been made to mobilize and organize HBW, the outreach is still limited; mobilizing is slow because it

has to simultaneously address the exploitation of the production structure as well as overcome women’s

fears and reluctance to step outside a known – albeit patriarchal – world at home.

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

1. Introduction

Macro economic policy sets as its objective the achievement of high and sustained economic growth, with

low inﬂation and an “acceptable” deﬁcit in the government budget and the trade balance; the presence

of a large and non-transient informal economy is not normally explicitly factored into macro economic

analysis; with the focus on production and growth, employment becomes an input or a necessary

counterpart. Visible employment includes the farmer in the ﬁeld or the factory worker. Exclusive focus on

visible forms of employment, however, leads to an incomplete understanding of the labour market. Within

the informal economy, one of the less visible forms of work is home-based work. A ﬁrst step to making such

work – and workers – visible, is necessarily getting better data: and this has been the point of departure

for much of the informal economy research carried out in the last couple of decades. The subsequent

question is whether, once better data are available, standard economic analysis will fully address the issues

around informality.

In this review paper on home-based work and workers, focused on South Asia, we seek to make the

following main points (among others). First, that this is a substantial and stable segment of the large

informal economies of South Asia and therefore merits attention; second, that the existence of home-based

work cannot be fully understood exclusively through economic factors, since socio-cultural factors continue

to play an important role in inﬂuencing work and production decisions around home-based work; and third,

that research suggests addressing the vulnerabilities of home-based workers calls for ensuring synergy

between development trajectories and social protection approaches. This review of the available data on

home-based workers also seeks to identify the main gaps in knowledge and hence to suggest a future

research agenda.

The paper is organized as follows. After this brief introduction, Section 2 discusses the different ways in

which home-based work has emerged in the region, its gendered nature, and the manner in which it is

embedded both in social and economic structures. Section 3 reviews the various ways in which home-

based work has been deﬁned for purposes of statistics and data collection. Section 4 synthesizes the

available estimates of the size and contribution to national income of this group of workers. Section 5

discusses the value chain approach to analyzing home-based workers. Section 6 provides further detail

on the situation and vulnerabilities of HBWs through a review of recently completed case studies. Section

7 brieﬂy reviews the existing policy frameworks that address, or partially address, in the region. Section

8 focuses on the existing approaches to organizing and advocacy to create a climate of awareness and

seeking responsiveness from governments. The ﬁnal section pulls together the research agenda emerging

from this review.

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

2. Origins and history of home-based work

There have been multiple pathways through which home-based work has emerged in the region. The

production of craft-based, ﬁne-quality output initially for royal patrons was generally done at home by highly

skilled crafts persons. With the growth of a capitalist economy and democratic political institutions, the gradual

decline of royal patronage also meant a decline in the main support base for skilled crafts workers. In some

cases, the state has intervened with subsidies and cluster development programmes (as in weaving) to ensure

the craft does not die out. For example, in the town of Chanderi, in Madhya Pradesh, India, competition from

modern textile mills and poor marketing, leading to debt bondage and exploitation by middlemen, placed

home-based handloom weavers in a precarious position. In the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century, the Scindia

royal family attempted to support Chanderi weavers through the introduction of new technology and designs.

Between 1960 and the mid-1990s, the cluster was heavily supported by government subsidies, training,

design, and other forms of support. Subsidies were withdrawn after liberalization, although the government

continued to assist and support the weavers particularly through providing marketing opportunities. In 2002,

UNIDO extended its cluster development initiative to the handloom cluster of Chanderi (Green 2005). In other

cases capitalists have been able, through subcontracting arrangements, to draw upon these skills and to link

home-based work in this way into wider domestic and national markets. Thus, in the case of zari zardosi (gold

thread embroidery), families traditionally in the business have shifted to production for a less exclusive market,

while there are also new entrants into this sector due to the demand for the work (Jalees 1989).

There has been a tradition of home-based work for own use or gifting in many parts of the region. A good

example is phulkari, a traditional Punjabi embroidery, which is still done at home by many women who are

not necessarily producing for commercial sale. Another example is carpet weaving in Himachal; here, while

some women have learned carpet weaving so as to be able to market the product, there is also a tradition,

especially among tribal groups in Lahaul Spiti, of making carpets for own use or gifting, and these home-

based products are not available for sale (ISST-HNI 2006; ISST 2009).

In the case of several agricultural products such as milk, and more recently vegetables, changes in the

system and institutions of marketing have led to a shift from production for self-consumption to production

for the market. Factors that have contributed to this shift include increased monetization, better transport,

and organized marketing. This is seen with food processing, milk production, and now vegetables and fruit

through organized retail. The role of expanding marketing networks has been most crucial in drawing HBW

into production for sale here. Thus in the case of dairy, the Operation Flood programme started for the

ﬁrst time in India a process by which milk was collected from small producers in remote locations across

the country and made available, after processing, largely to urban consumers. This was successful mainly

because of the high and growing demand for milk and milk products from urban consumers. Organized

retail in vegetables is in its infancy in India and has possibly made more inroads into the urban markets in

the south than elsewhere in the country (see Kumar et al. 2008; Joseph et al. 2008).

There is thus a tradition of home-based work in the region. More recently, new industries have outsourced work

to home-based workers, in activities that have not been done traditionally by them. For example, a study by

UNIFEM ﬁnds a large number of home-based women assembling bicycle parts in Ludhiana; since 70 per cent

of the women sampled had husbands who were technicians in adjoining factories or who were self-employed

in technical trades, it appears that “the participation of household women in bicycle manufacturing trades can

be considered as a spillover of the technical occupations practiced by their husbands” (UNIFEM 2000: 80).

This has been possible because there is still, in many places, control over women’s mobility and a strong social

resistance to women working outside the home; if work is offered to be done within the home, thus “invisible”

and does not on the face of it disrupt other established roles such as family care, women and their households

are willing to take it on. In a study of the beedi (leaf cigarette) industry, Meena Gopal ﬁnds that the sub-

contracting system prevailed because of stringent labour laws and the need to avoid the legal welfare liabilities

towards workers (Gopal 2005). An example of disintegration of organized large units into smaller ones, including

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

home-based workers, is the hosiery industry in Ludhiana (UNIFEM 2000: 82). Such changes in the organization

of production reﬂect entrepreneurial responses to market demand, and a balancing of costs of production

including labour law compliance, and economies of scale, against ﬂexibility and looser regulatory requirements.

Many big companies, including multinational corporations, have evolved a vendor system of subcontracting

for their production. Jhabvala and Sinha (2002) report that, depending on the nature of work, some of these

vendors either employ women workers in large numbers or give out work to HBWs mostly through contractors.

Some companies have set up cooperatives of women living in the vicinity of their plants for production of items,

for example the Steel Authority of India Ltd. and Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd. Yet other companies have a

subcontracting arrangement. Established companies give out work to small units in the organized/unorganized

sector which in turn outsource some simple operations to home-based workers. The company often mediates

with these units/workers through contractors who get the production work done and deliver the output to the

company; this can include ﬁnishing and quality control, assembling, sorting, packaging and labeling. Many

medium and small-scale industries in the organized sector and production units in the unorganized sector

subcontract work to home-based women workers. Generally the manufacturers establish direct contacts with

these workers and sometimes even act as contractors for bigger companies. This subcontracting has been

found to be widespread in the unorganized manufacturing sector and seems to have expanded over the past

decade. In almost 90 per cent of the households in the resettlement colonies and slum areas surveyed by SEWA,

at least one woman was reported to be doing some kind of home-based work (Jhabvala and Sinha 2002: 2039).

In an analysis of data from the National Sample Survey Organisation, Unni and Rani ﬁnd that the expansion

of markets and heightening of economic activity in production systems as a result of economic reforms in

India meant that “overall expanding markets led to an increase in homebased work, but not necessarily a

movement towards this form of production system” (Unni and Rani 2004: 14). While there may be some

doubt on the exact extent to which this “putting out” system has increased in the production systems of the

economy, there is no doubt that it is not being displaced with modernization and high rates of economic

growth. It can be argued that it is because home-based work is so deeply entrenched in production for

domestic demand that it has also become a part of global value chains.

Gerefﬁ, Humphrey and Sturgeon’s (2005) analysis identiﬁed ﬁve global value chain governance types, ranging

from “pure” markets to “pure” hierarchy. Outsourcing and home-based work is compatible with more than

one type of network governance. In fact it could be found anywhere between the extremes of pure market

co-ordination and complete vertical integration or hierarchy. They argue that the particular business form that

emerges in any particular sector or country is inﬂuenced by the complexity of information, ability to codify it,

and the capabilities of actual and potential suppliers. At the same time, it has been noted that: “Even when the

underlying conditions for emergent organizational forms such as value chain modularity are well established,

as they are in the Japanese personal computer industry, large scale outsourcing might be antithetical to long

standing corporate strategies and institutions, such as lifetime employment in large ﬁrms, which make radical

industry reorganization extremely difﬁcult and slow” (Gerefﬁ et al., 17). The South Asian region seems to be at

the other extreme – dispersed, small scale home-based production is often resistant to efforts to bring work and

workers into a factory or work shed. The manner in which workers, and women in particular, are drawn into the

new and emerging agreements and networks is greatly inﬂuenced by underlying social structures. Social norms

mediate between the trends that are associated with economic forces and the outcomes for women workers.

In summary, there is a tradition of home-based work in the region, and enterprises have used this tradition

to develop a class of ﬂexible and invisible contractual labour, largely female, and with varying levels of skill;

the structure of production that we observe today, with home-based workers sometimes independent and

self employed, but more often sub-contracted workers at the bottom end of value chains, has evolved as

a result of economic forces playing out within a speciﬁc social and cultural context. There is a need for

historical studies that can draw out the ways in which religious or cultural practices have supported social

norms so as to mediate economic forces and result in a speciﬁc kind of production organization, with a

stable and persisting home-based mode of production.

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

3. Deﬁning home-based work

The use of the term “informal employment” is relatively recent, dating back to the 1970s. A clear deﬁnition

of “home-based work” is even more recent. Home-based work is not a sector of production; it cuts across

the analytical categories of “industry,” “occupation” and “activity status” by which workers are classiﬁed.

As Unni and Rani have put it: “The employment status of the home-based workers can be seen along a

continuum of dependence, from being completely independent to being fully dependent on the contractor/

middleman for design, raw material and equipment and unable to negotiate price of the product. They

constitute a separate production system forming a different layer or segment both in the product and

labour markets” (Unni and Rani 2004: 4). The reason for seeking to deﬁne and visualize the group is

because they have speciﬁc vulnerabilities. The NCEUS in India agreed that HBWs deserve to be separated

out from the broad category of the “self-employed” where they usually get placed, because “They warrant

separate treatment from a policy point of view” (GOI 2007: 5).

Internationally, the ILO Convention on home workers provided a deﬁnition of ‘home workers’ in 1996.

This deﬁnition recognizes workers who work from home but are in a clear employment relationship

(discussed in more detail below). While it is the location or place of work that characterizes home-based

work, within the group of HBWs, a further distinction can be made between “piece-rate workers” and “own

account workers.” Piece rate workers could be contracted by a ﬁrm, an individual entrepreneur, traders,

subcontractors or other intermediaries, are usually given the raw materials and are paid a stated amount

per piece produced. These workers do not have any direct contact with the markets for the goods they

produce. Own-account workers are those who are generally in direct contact with the market and buy their

own raw material.

Activists have strongly made the argument that separate data on home-based workers is needed to address

their particular vulnerabilities. Therefore, it is useful to review the kinds of situations that a good deﬁnition

could be expected to capture.

Home-based workers: who are they?

Is working from home itself a form of labour status? One of the ﬁrst characteristics that can be noted about

HBW is that of multiple sources of income. As Ela Bhatt has said:

A small farmer works on her farm and if it’s not a good season, on other’s farms as a labourer. When

the agriculture season is over, she goes to the forests to collect gum or other forest produce. Year

round, she produces hand embroidered items either at a piece-rate for a contractor or sells it to

a trader who comes to her village to buy goods. Now how shall we categorize her trade? Does she

belong to the agricultural sector, the forestry sector, or the handicraft sector? Is she the farmer or the

farm worker? Is she self-employed or a piece-rate worker? For the lack of ﬁt into a category, her work

status suffers and her right of representation in the union movement is unrealized. The tyranny of

deﬁnition has condemned her to be a nobody (Bhatt 2004:7).

In the case of home-based women workers, it is often hard to draw a clear line between work that sustains

the home or is reproductive work, and work that is productive, since such workers continue to carry out

gendered household duties simultaneously with home-based work, without separation of space or place of

work. Observed adverse health outcomes are caused both by doing both kinds of work and by additional

sources of strain, as in the example below:

I get up in the morning at about 4 a.m. and after ﬁnishing some household chores, start work at

about 10 a.m. I work till midnight. Working after sunset is very tiring as lack of inadequate light often

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

makes my eyes ache and water and I get a headache on almost all days. In addition to that, sitting

on the ﬂoor and doing intricate work causes cramps in my back and legs (GOI 2002b: 17).

Another complication is the difﬁculty of deﬁning “home” as workers often work just outside the home or, as

in the example below, from their boats. One of the most deprived groups in the region is a community of

pearl divers in Bangladesh for whom “home” is a boat. The extract below shows the multiple deprivations

that affect them – inability to acquire new and better equipment and shelter, as well as child poverty and

vulnerability, occupational health risks, and exclusion from mainstream institutions.

The Boid community in Dhaka, Bangladesh, have been living for generations in this area on house

boats, anchored by the banks of river Dholeshoiri for more than 50 years. They live in this area as they

believe the pearls extracted from this part are larger in size and therefore, can fetch a good price. The

boids search for shells at the river bed without any equipment. They have to keep their eyes open

under water and search with their bare hands. The workers reported that ﬁnding pearls was so rare

that after searching 100 to 200 shells one tiny pearl would usually be found. Fifty years ago when the

ﬁrst generation of boids settled on this bank, shells were abandoned and pearls were bigger in size.

Now to extract shells people have to work much harder. Thus, during peak season women work for

an average of 11 hours in a day. During the lean season, they work for 6 hours per day. Not only does

work put the boid women’s health at risk; their children’s lives are made more dangerous as well. One

woman said “when we go for shell extraction in deep river keeping our young children unguarded

sometimes they fall into the water and drown.” One woman reported that since they live on the boats

the Micro Finance Institutions do not lend to them, as they believe that ‘boids’ will go away despite the

fact that they had been living on that riverbank for 50 years now and had no other place to go. Other

women sarcastically said, “thank God we don’t have a home or else we had to pay the house rent.”

(HNSA-ISST 2006: 171-188)

Activists have argued that there are enough commonalities in the work-related vulnerabilities of home-

based workers to justify identifying them as a group and addressing these vulnerabilities through

appropriate policy and programmes. A clear deﬁnition becomes essential in order to collect data on home-

based workers and estimate the resources required and the scale of the problems to be addressed.

It is difﬁcult to make a sharp distinction between contractual and self-employed workers as many women

do both kinds of work depending on what is available. Moreover, own account workers might be in a

“commercial” arrangement that disguises their dependence. For example, beedi workers in India are

required to “buy” the raw material from the contractor and “sell” the ﬁnished beedis back to the same

contractor. The workers absorb the losses if the raw material is damaged due to natural events such as

rains. Therefore, activists argue for a deﬁnition that would include both types of home-based workers, the

self-employed and the piece rated.

Evolving international labour organization deﬁnitions

Internationally, the ILO has recognized the category of “home workers.” The term has been included in The

Conditions of Work Digest of the ILO, and a deﬁnition has evolved which has been amended from time to

time. The presence of an employment relationship remains a central feature of this deﬁnition.

Home work implies an employment relationship between the home worker and the employer,

subcontractor, agent or middleman. The agreement may be implicit or explicit, verbal or written, as

speciﬁed in the national legislation. The place of work is outside the premises of the employer. However,

not all forms of homework are necessarily “home-based.” They can be carried out from neighbourhood

workstations, workshops or premises that do not belong to the employer. This also implies there is very little

supervision or regulation of methods of work by the employer.

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

The form of payment is usually by the piece or unit of production, but not all piece-rate workers are home

workers. As regards the supply of materials and tools, in some cases home workers own their tools, while

in others the employer provides the tools on loan or on hire-purchase basis. In a similar way, some workers

may buy their raw materials on the market or from the employer or subcontractor and sell the ﬁnished or

semi-processed products back to him or her (ILO 1989: 4).

This deﬁnition was further reﬁned by the Convention No 177 of the ILO (1996), which deﬁnes

homework as:

(a) work carried out by a person, to be referred to as a home worker,

– in his or her home or in other premises of his or her choice, other than the workplace of the

employer;

– for remuneration;

– which results in a product or service as speciﬁed by the employer, irrespective of who provides

the equipment, materials or other inputs used, as long as this person does not have the degree

of autonomy and of economic independence necessary to be considered an independent worker

under national laws, regulations or court decisions;

(b) the term “employer” means a person, natural or legal, who either directly or through an intermediary, if

any, gives out home work in pursuance of his or her business activity (ILO 1996).

The Homework Convention does not apply to genuinely self-employed home workers. An employer has to

be identiﬁed. In many cases the employment relationship is ambiguous, disguised or triangular (or even

involving multiple parties), thus difﬁcult to make explicit.

At the ILC 2006, a Recommendation concerning the employment relationship has been adopted (R 198).

The Recommendation encourages governments to introduce legislation in order to deﬁne an employment

relationship. Criteria are listed (II/13) that might be helpful to fulﬁll this task, as follows:

The fact that the work:

• is carried out according to the instructions and under the control of another party

• involves the integration of the worker in the organization of the enterprise

• is performed solely or mainly for the beneﬁt of another person

• must be carried out personally by the worker

• is carried out within speciﬁc working hours or at a workplace speciﬁed or agreed by the party

requesting the work

• is of a particular duration and has a certain continuity

• requires the worker’s availability or

• involves the provision of tools, materials and machinery by the party requesting the work

further:

• periodic payment of remuneration to the worker

• the fact that such remuneration constitutes the worker’s sole or principal source of income

• provision of payment in kind, such as food, lodging or transport

• recognition of entitlements such as weekly rest and annual holidays

• payment by the party requesting the work for travel undertaken by the worker in order to carry out the work

• absence of ﬁnancial risk for the worker.

(ILC 2006)

This Recommendation is important because it can be used as a guideline to lobby for the introduction of

a law that clearly distinguishes between an employment relationship in which workers are not deprived of

the protection they are due, and genuine self-employed workers. Furthermore these guidelines can help to

formulate some essential parts of a national law on home work.

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

Other deﬁnitions

Within South Asia, the most progress with evolving a suitable deﬁnition has been made in India. The

deﬁnition that has been pioneered here draws upon the international ILO deﬁnition, but seeks to expand

it to include the self-employed and contributing family workers, as a large number of workers would

otherwise be excluded, and the categories of contractual and self-employed workers are rarely mutually

exclusive, stable arrangements.

The ﬁrst such deﬁnition in India is found with reference to the beedi sector. Indirectly, the term

“homeworker” has been deﬁned in the Beedi and Cigar (Conditions of Employment) Act 1996 and in

the Contract Labour (Abolition and Regulation) Act and the Minimum Wages Act, all of which recognize

the existence of outworkers who do not work from any establishment (see Mukul 1998).

The Expert Group on Informal Sector Statistics, chaired by the Secretary, Ministry of Statistics and

Programme Implementation, Government of India and known as the “Delhi Group,” was set up in 1997

as one of the city groups of the United Nations Statistical Commission to address various methodological

issues that arise in connection with the informal sector. The 4th Meeting of Delhi Group in 2000 produced

this statement:

The Expert Group on Informal Sector Statistics recommends that countries include the variable

“place of work” in labour force and informal sector surveys and endorses recommendations of the

ILO Project on Measurement of Place of Work, as follows: The physical place of work – where the

worker spends most of the time – rather than the place of the economic unit to which he or she is

attached, is the appropriate unit of classiﬁcation when the unit of analysis is the worker.

(Retrieved from http://mospi.nic.in/report_4.htm)

A question on “place of work” has been introduced in labour force surveys in several countries in South

Asia, in Pakistan (2001-2), in Bangladesh (2002-03), in Nepal (1998-99), and in India (1999-2000),

although not yet in Sri Lanka (Unni 2006).

In its 5th meeting in 2001, the Delhi Group made the following recommendations:

(a) Depending upon their employment relationships and types of contracts, home workers can be

found in any category of status in employment. Homeworkers should, therefore, be identiﬁed

through the variable “place of work” in conjunction with existing other classiﬁcations, such

as industrial and occupational classiﬁcations, rather than as a separate category of status in

employment.

(b) In order to deﬁne the criteria for the distinction between independent and dependent homeworkers, as

well as between own-account workers and employees in general, questions on the type of contractual

arrangements should be used in surveys. Such questions provide better results than a mere self-

assessment by respondents of status in employment.1

In January 2007, while inaugurating the “SEWA-UNIFEM Policy Conference on Home Based Workers of

South Asia,” the Prime Minister of India referred to the statistical invisibility of home-based workers in the

national statistics of the country. The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation then decided,

in May 2007, to set up an Independent Group on Home-based Workers in India, under the chairmanship

of Dr. N.S. Sastry, to examine the existing data sources and suggest means to capture the data related to

home-based workers. The Group recognized the central role played by “place of work” in deﬁning “home-

based worker.”

1 At http://mospi.nic.in/rept%20_%20pubn/ftest.asp?rept_id=report_home_based_worker_28july08&type=nsso (accessed on

15 August 2010)

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

Economic activities at home such as weaving, pottery, basket-making with bamboo materials, tailoring,

embroidery, jewelry-making, toy-making, sale of groceries, etc., are performed not only in the space used

for living purpose but also in a structure attached to the living place, and/or open-area/detached structure

adjacent to the living place. Taking into consideration such realities regarding the use of space for carrying

out economic activities at home, the Group recognized the need to deﬁne “home” in the context of deﬁning

a “home-based worker.”

The Group recommended the following deﬁnitions for “home” and “home-based workers.” Home is

deﬁned as (i) dwelling unit and/or (ii) structure attached to dwelling unit and/or (iii) open area adjacent to

the dwelling unit.

With the above deﬁnition of home, home-based workers are deﬁned as:

a) own-account workers and contributing family workers helping the own-account workers, involved in the

production of goods and services, in their homes, for the market; and

b) workers carrying out work in their homes for remuneration, resulting in a product or service as

speciﬁed by the employer(s), irrespective of who provides the equipment, materials or other inputs

used; and those contributing family workers helping such workers.

Workers referred to in (b), above, are homeworkers working in their homes according to ILO Convention

177 on Home Work,1996. For data collection purposes, such home workers may be classiﬁed as own-

account workers.

It may be noted that, unlike in the deﬁnition of “homeworkers” given in the ILO Convention 177 on Home

Work, 1996, the Group felt that “Own-account workers and contributing family workers helping such own-

account workers, having their workplaces in their own homes, qualify for inclusion in the group of home-

based workers” (GOI 2008a:11). It can be noted that the 66th Round of Indian National Sample Survey

(July 2009-June 2010), in “Employment and Unemployment” Schedule 10, collected data on “home-

based workers” using the deﬁnitions of “home” and “home-based workers” recommended above by the

Independent Group on Home-Based Workers.

The Unorganised Workers Social Security Act 2008 in India uses the following deﬁnition: “Home

based worker’ means a person engaged in the production of goods and services, for an employer, in

his or her home or other premises of his or her choice, other than the workplace of the employer, for

remuneration, irrespective of whether or not the employer provides the equipment, materials or other

inputs.” (GOI 2008b:2)

There are differences between the international ILO deﬁnitions and the one recommended within India;

the main difference relates to the inclusion of the self-employed/own account workers and to unpaid

family workers. A broader deﬁnition better reﬂects the context of ﬂuidity between categories and also

recognizes the large contribution of family members. In some countries, it is also argued that full-time

domestic workers – women or men who live and work in the homes of others – should be considered

HBW. Thus, there is still no universally accepted single deﬁnition of HBWs; the ILO deﬁnition is widely

used, and the Indian deﬁnition has broadened this. Research that examines the inclusions and

exclusions of varying deﬁnitions and with reference to existing empirical information is needed to help

resolve these ongoing discussions.

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

4. Size of the sector: numbers, trends and

contribution to GDP

Home-based work encompasses a wide diversity, ranging from traditional embroidery and weaving to

tele-work. Home-based workers may work in the new economy (assembling micro-electronics) or the old

(weaving carpets), they can be in the rural areas as well as in the urban. Finding the contribution of the

group to the GDP requires that we have estimates of the home-based workforce in each sector, as well as

the per capita productivity. However, very little data is available on this group of workers: in India there is

some data available at the national level from the decennial Census, which provides data on “household

industry.” More direct information based on identifying home-based workers by location of work is available

for 1999-2000 and 2004-05 from the National Sample Survey. For other countries in the region there are

fewer data sources, and there is an additional problem of lack of comparability across countries due to

differences in deﬁnition. An attempt has been made through re-tabulation of data from various Labour

Force Surveys to get a comparable picture. These calculations suggest that only around half of all workers

produce from what can be called “conventional” workplaces in South Asia (Table 1).

Table 1: Conventional and non-conventional places of work in the informal sector in South Asian

countries (non-agricultural workers)

Country/Year Conventional Place of Work:

Ofﬁce/ Factory/ School/

Institution (per cent)

Non-conventional Place

of Work: Home/Street/

Construction site (per cent)

India, 1999-2000, all ages 50.1 49.9

Pakistan, 2001-02, 10 years + 53.5 46.5

Bangladesh, 2002-03, 15 years + 40.2 59.8

Source: Jhabvala, Unni and Sinha 2007: 5.

One of the striking features of work force participation and of home-based work in particular, is its

gendered construction. Data shows that in South Asia, women’s economic activity participation is roughly

half that of men and varies from a low of 36.7 per cent in Pakistan to 66.5 per cent in Bangladesh. A large

proportion of women workers are either paid or unpaid home-based or family workers. In a survey based

study in Ahmedabad city, Gujarat, India, Unni and Rani estimated that 32 per cent of women workers and

5.8 per cent of men were home-based and self-employed (Unni and Rani 2000: 35). Across Asia, while

HBWs are found mainly in manufacturing and services, they are also found in agriculture, and in both rural

and urban areas (see Mehrotra and Biggeri 2007: 11). The NSS Employment and Unemployment Survey

(1999-2000) estimated that in India, there were nearly 8.2 million HBWs, of whom about 4.8 million (or 58

per cent) were women; home-based workers thus represented about 7.4 per cent of the unorganized non-

agricultural workers. Of all unorganized sector non-agricultural workers, 23.7 per cent worked from their

own dwelling. Among rural workers, 18.6 per cent of male and 61.2 per cent of female HBWs worked from

their own dwelling; in urban areas, the corresponding ﬁgures were 12.9 and 45.9 per cent respectively

(GOI 2007: 5, 80). While women are over represented among home-based workers, it is also important to

note that “while gender is a strong differentiating factor in the Indian labour market it is mediated by one’s

class and caste/ community position in the society” (GOI 2007: 91). Although data does not always provide

these differentiated categories, the overlap of social and economic disadvantages is well documented.

For example, Unni and Rani (2005) ﬁnd that “The scheduled castes had a higher participation of women

both at home and outside as expected. Muslim women had a lower participation both at home and outside

it. The odds ratio of a Muslim woman participating in work outside the home was signiﬁcantly lower than

her chances of participating in home-based work. The difference was not signiﬁcant for the scheduled

castes where women tended to work equally outside or inside the home. This could be due to the fact that

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

Muslims tend to ﬁnd self-employed work through social networks while the scheduled castes are more in

casual work” (Unni and Rani 2005: 47).

Women turn to home-based work for a number of reasons. Lack of necessary qualiﬁcations and formal

training for formal sector work, absence of child care support, social and cultural constraints on mobility are

some of the reasons. This social dimension is similar across South Asia. In Bangladesh, about 70 per cent of

all women workers in manufacturing are found working in the garment factories. This does not release them

from religious norms or traditional roles (see Absar 2001). As the table below shows, in Bangladesh, as in

Pakistan, home-based work is the dominant form among informal sector non agricultural women workers.

Table 2: Home-based work among informal sector non-agricultural workers by gender

Place of Work Pakistan (2001-2) Bangladesh (2002-3) India (1999-2000)

Male Female Male Female Male Female

Own home 4.2 64.8 20.7 71 11.1 35.5

Employers

home

11.9 15.1 13.1 7.5

All 100 100 100 100 100 100

Source: Jhabvala, Unni and Sinha 2007: 7

Statistics further suggest that home-based work has grown in the last couple of decades with

liberalization and globalization. Subcontracting intensity, deﬁned as “the ratio of the value of goods

sold by the company in the same condition as purchased from a manufacturer to net value added by

the company” went up for factories with more than 50 workers from 9.46 in 1970 to 15.9 in 1992-3

(Ramaswamy 1999 cited in Raj and Kapoor 2001: 10); and this is associated with other trends that have

encouraged increasing home-based production, including a growth of exports and small scale industries,

and increased outsourcing to women home-based workers (Raj and Kapoor op cit:12-3). Factors that

contribute to extensive sub contracting include the importance for workers, especially women, to be near

the home so as to also undertake other activities; the reluctance of contractors to hire regular employees

and meet labour related regulations; saving on costs of space for the task assigned to the worker; no

need for expensive capital equipment to be shared by workers; strong social networks that prevent

individual workers from reneging on contracts; repeated transactions resulting in less need for formal

contracts (Sudarshan et al 2007: 181).

Home-based work appears to be on the rise around the world, particularly for women, largely reﬂecting

the effort to cut costs through ﬂexible work contracts or sub-contracting, and in some cases through loss

of formal sector jobs, seen for this region too (GOI 2007: 5). In an analysis of the impact of recent policies

on home-based work, Rani and Unni (2009) ﬁnd that at the macro level, a rise in the unit cost of labour

is associated with an increase in female home-based work. Their analysis suggests that while women

“choose” home-based work – the micro model of social determinants was a better ﬁt for women than for

men, or than the macro model for women – men were “chosen” for home-based work. Cost cutting at a

time of liberalization thus has more impact on men’s home-based work than women’s. In her analysis,

Neetha ﬁnds that “a large proportion of women within the category of self-employed are unpaid and the

increase in self employment during the reform period is on account of the swelling number of unpaid

workers” (2010: 153). Table 3 below presents estimates of the changing structure of place of work in India

over the periods 1999-2000 and 2004-05, based on two national sample surveys. A smaller percentage

of both men and women report “no ﬁxed place” while a marked increase is seen, for women, in “own

dwelling” from 35.5 per cent to over 51 per cent, along with a lower proportion in “employer’s enterprise.”

There is some increase in men’s presence on streets and construction sites.

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

Table 3: Increase in home-based work in India, 1999-2000 and 2004-05

Location of Work 1999-2000 2004-05 1999-2000 2004-05

Male (per cent) Female (per cent)

No ﬁxed place 13.8 8.3 11.2 3.2

Own dwelling 11.1 12.3 35.5 51.3

Own enterprise 17.7 18.5 8.4 10.7

Employer’s dwelling 3.1 3.0 7.5 6.7

Employer’s enterprise 35.9 35.0 26.3 18.9

Street 2.9 7.7 2.1 2.9

Construction sites 9.0 11.0 5.1 4.0

Other 6.4 4.2 3.8 2.4

Total 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0

Source: GOI High Level Committee on Status of Muslim Community in India 2006, as cited in Jhabvala, Unni and Sinha 2007: 9

Micro level estimates, based both on small surveys and qualitative methods are available for some sectors

and countries and these have been important in strengthening the knowledge base on home-based workers.

Attempts have been made to estimate the numbers of home-based workers in sectors where they are known

to be concentrated. This includes the garments sector. Unni, Bali and Vyas (1999) made an independent

estimate of 34,957 home-based garment workers in Ahmedabad city. Of the total population, they estimated

27,157 (or around 78 per cent) were women (Unni et al 1999: 25). Paula Kantor, using a one-stage stratiﬁed

cluster sample, conducted a similar study in Ahmedabad and estimated a total of 44,307 home-based gar-

ment enterprises, of which 75 per cent were female. This study found more than three times the number of

home-based women producers in the garment sector than those counted by the Census as working in house-

hold industry plus marginal workers, even though garments is only one of many household-based enterprises

(Kantor 2001).

Contribution of home-based workers

In India, an estimated 47 per cent of total non agricultural GDP was contributed by the non- agriculture

informal sector in 1993; women’s contribution to non agricultural informal sector GDP as a percentage of

total non-agricultural GDP stood at 10 per cent; that of men stood at 18 per cent (ILO 2002 cited in Hill

2010: 25). While the numbers of home-based workers may be high, and their presence in the informal

economy signiﬁcant, estimates of their contribution to the economy are not separately available.

The contribution of home-based work to household income varies. In a study of around 600 sub-contracted

home-based workers drawn from three sectors in India, the average contribution across all sectors of home

work was seen to be 35 per cent in rural, and 35.6 per cent in urban households. The range is seen to be

22.3 – 46.8 per cent in rural areas, and 26.4 – 70.8 per cent in urban areas. (Sudarshan et al. 2007: 189).

Other sources of income for households included wage work (53.6 per cent in rural and 39.9 per cent in

urban households), self employment (6.1 per cent in rural and 9.9 per cent in urban households), salaried

employment, remittances and others.

In Bajaj’s 1999 study, an attempt was made to estimate home-based women workers’ contributions in a

few sectors across South Asia, drawing on available studies and using focus group discussions with groups

of workers to supplement and corroborate the literature. While these estimates are rough and not based

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

on systematic sampling, they are important in setting a benchmark, and identifying perceptions, for further

work to build on. For example, the study reports that:

• Theagarbathi industry in India in 1989-90 showed total domestic sales of approximately USD 198 million

and exports of USD 42 million; and employed approximately 500,000 workers. 90 per cent of the labour

in the industry is supplied by women, 80 per cent of them are home-based workers (pp 11,13).

• GarmentexportsinBangladeshby1990-91earnedaroundTk.27,000million(orapproxUSD380

million2) per annum for the economy, being the country’s principal export earner and fourth largest

employer. 80 per cent of the labour used by the industry is that of women workers. Estimates for HBWs

were not available, but their presence was conﬁrmed by activists (p 19).

• Pakistanisthesinglelargestmanufacturerandexporterofmatchgradefootballsintheworldand

accounts for over 80 per cent of total world production. An estimated 58 per cent of football stitchers in

the industry are home-based women workers (pp 25, 27).

• Thetradeinmedicinalplantandothernon-timberforestproductsfromNepalemploysover100,000

people and contributes around 4 per cent of the share of forestry to the national GDP. While no data is

available on the gender division of labour in this sector, forest product collection is predominantly the

work of women (pp 32, 34).

An ofﬁcial survey on the working and living conditions of workers in beedi industry in the early 1990s

found that 88 per cent of all those sampled considered beedi work to be their main source of income. On

average, income from beedi work was 65 per cent of household income from all sources (GOI 1995). In an

earlier survey of Muslim beedi makers in Allahabad, carried out for the ILO in 1980, Bhatty had reported

that the contribution from women’s earnings from beedi to household income averaged 45.5 per cent. A

SEWA study in the mid-80s in Gujarat found women’s contribution from beedi work to average 30 per cent

of household income (cited in Sudarshan and Kaur 1999). A more recent study found in Madhya Pradesh

the contribution to household income of beedi work was 30.9 per cent in urban areas, and in Tamil Nadu it

was 46 per cent in rural and 71 per cent in urban areas (Sudarshan et al. 2007: 189).

Overall then, much of what we know about the contribution of home-based workers is still largely drawn from

micro studies, though some data are available at national level. More research is needed at the “meso” level

of city or sector, and especially research that seeks to capture the dynamics of change, interaction between

formality and informality in the processes of economic growth, and changing organization of production.

5. Home-based workers in value chains

The products of home-based work may be sold locally, nationally or even internationally. The value chain

concept is a useful one to situate home-based work within the larger production system. A value chain

traces all the stages of value addition as a product passes from the initial stage of design to the ultimate

consumer. The chain may be short – for example deep fried pakoras (vegetables in batter) being prepared

and sold by a street vendor – or it may be extremely long, where the product goes through several stages

of manufacture and a series of wholesale and retail intermediaries before reaching the ﬁnal consumer.

Showing where HBWs ﬁt in the value chain for a particular product makes them more visible; this also

helps to identify the kind of interventions that would increase their skill, productivity and earnings.

Several studies have traced the value chains for speciﬁc products. For example, Mehrotra and Biggeri

(2007) present ﬁndings from value chain analysis studies carried out in India and Pakistan. The study

in India looked at three sectors and found that there were usually four to ﬁve intermediaries between

2 At an exchange rate of USD 1= 71 Taka, December 2010

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

the HBW at one end and the retailer at the other. The study also found the share of the ﬁnal price paid

by the consumer that reaches the home-based worker varies across sectors: of Rs 100 paid by the con-

sumer, home workers received Rs 15 for zardosi (gold thread embroidery); Rs 17 in beedi or cigarettes;

and just Rs 2.3 in agarbathi (incense sticks; perfuming, which adds most value, is done at a subsequent

stage). The reasons behind these observed discrepancies also vary; for example zardosi work is highly

skilled, but zardosi workers are not organized, while beedi workers are. Of course this analysis does not

indicate the absolute levels of well being. The study in Pakistan ﬁnds that the HBW working in incense

sticks got 0.083 per cent of what a consumer paid; for carpets, 18 per cent; in prawn peeling, 2.5 per

cent (Mehrotra and Biggeri 2007: 76). Based on this analysis, Khan and Kazmi argue: “Since power is

unequal in the market equation, redress is necessary.” They suggest that there are ample margins at the

higher ends of the value chain for it to be possible to establish a welfare fund for each sector (Khan and

Kazmi 2003: 18).

Unni and Scaria (2009) have similarly traced the value chain in textiles, with home-based workers

located at the bottom end of domestic or international value chains. They examine the forms of control in

garment embellishment value chains through the work process and through social institutions. In global

chains, lead ﬁrms exercise control through such factors as design, lead time and quality parameters.

Flexibility in production is enabled through informalization. They suggest: “The comparative advantage

in the cost of labour in the international chain is largely realized through outsourcing of work to home-

based workers, who mostly comprise women, and whose workplace is most often their home.” (Unni and

Scaria 2009: 648).

A study across ﬁve major retailers in the UK and USA revealed that up to 30 per cent of their total

sourcing comes from India. The main products they source are apparel, accessories, leather products,

brassware, home crafts and imitation jewellery. On an average, 25 per cent of their sourcing from India

involves hand-work. This is in the form of embellishment of all kinds on apparel and home furnishing,

stringing in jewellery, and even whole production in the case of craft products. If we were to look at the

contribution of weavers and spinners in base fabric production, this percentage would rise even further

(Singh 2007).

While the conventional use of value chain analysis has been to further understanding of the economic

process, Lund and Nicholson point out that “the value chain approach has the potential to ground the

study of social protection in the real world of the working poor. It offers the opportunity to understand

better how workers at different points in the chain of production may have different access to a ‘ladder

of protection’” (Lund and Nicholson 2003: 19). Value chain analysis has thus been used to draw out the

forms of control on home-based work; to examine the exploitation made possible by weak power and high

returns from the ﬁnal consumer; and to explore the possibility of developing social protection out of the

“hidden surplus” at higher tiers of the value chain.

It is a useful methodology to develop a “situation analysis” for any particular product group. It is, however

exclusively, market focused and, at best, illustrates just some potential strategies that could be introduced

within a speciﬁc global value chain. The Ethical Trading Initiative has tried such an approach. One of its

limitations is its vertical focus – that is, it does not capture (as a sub-sector mapping would be able to do)

the other agents at the same level of each node on the value chain. This can be important – for example, if

the HBW is aware of other opportunities, domestic or local, this could improve her bargaining power even

within the value chain. Therefore, value chain analysis that is “embedded” within the broader social and

economic structure can be a more useful way of explicating the economic vulnerabilities of HBWs. So, for

example while Mehrotra and Biggeri use the value chain method to understand the situation, in their policy

recommendations they shift to a local economic perspective “because both promotive action and social

protection upgrading need to have solid roots in the local economic system to be effective” (Mehrotra and

Biggeri 2007: 363).

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

6. Characteristics of home-based work

Many of the key characteristics of home-based work are already evident from the above analyses.

The main motivations behind several micro studies that have tried to identify the characteristics

and vulnerabilities of home-based work have been linked to the on-going efforts at organizing

and policy advocacy. Research suggests there is an inverse link between being in home-based

work (or other forms of informal work) and the level of access to schooling, skills training, health,

credit; thus, high social costs are associated with informality (Mehrotra and Biggeri 2007;

Sudarshan 2002).

Research into this area has to address the difﬁculties of not being able to use standard statistical

sampling methods, because of the difﬁculty in creating an appropriate sampling frame. However several

innovative methods have been used by researchers to get over this problem. Usually mixed methods are

employed, and there is a wealth of rich insights in the qualitative work from this area. Among some of the

recent studies, methods used in three can be brieﬂy described:

1) Mehrotra and Biggeri combined analysis of secondary data with a carefully designed sample

survey, the findings of which cannot be generalized to the whole country, but are likely to be

representative for the clusters and areas studied. This study included India and Pakistan, and

three countries in South East Asia; a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods was

used to obtain comparable data on home-based workers across the five countries. The sample

consisted of 603 households in India, 397 households in Pakistan. A multi-stage sampling

method was used; first, a large grouping engaged in home-based work was identified; second,

sectors and clusters were selected; and finally, households were selected within the clusters.

While clusters were selected by national experts and based on their experience and knowledge

about the sector, individual households were selected randomly. Almost all households in a

cluster were engaged in home-based work in India; in Pakistan, a snowball method was used as

it was difficult to locate HBWs, and this was done by getting information about other households

in close proximity to the one being interviewed (Mehrotra and Biggeri 2007: 33-4; Khan and

Kazmi 2003: 6-7).

2) A five-country study that included Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka was

conducted by ISST and HomeNet South Asia (a network for home-based workers). Sectors were

selected for study in a manner similar to the above study – that is, a review of secondary data

and discussion with national experts; a structured questionnaire was distributed to households

where HBWs were willing to participate in the study. Sectors studied included pottery-making,

shell and pearl collection, incense sticks (agarbathi) production, weaving and garment making.

As an action-research project designed to help with developing the advocacy of the HNSA

member organizations, the data collection was participatory and included case studies and

focus group discussions to supplement the survey. Approximately 150 households with a home-

based worker were surveyed in each country; a total of 837 respondents participated in five

countries.

3) A third study was conducted among HBWs in different sectors and locations in three Indian states

by ISST and HomeNet India. Data was collected through case studies, interviews, and focus group

discussions with workers across several activities, and a structured survey covered 323 total

respondents in four sectors. The sample for the survey was selected using a snowball method in

clusters identiﬁed by key respondents (HNI-ISST 2007).

All three of the above studies had a focus on women HBWs.

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

The multi-country study directed by Mehrotra and Biggeri established that home-based work is not “part-

time” as often perceived – high average per-day work hours were recorded. The average work-day varied

from 5.2 hours per day to 9.2 hours per day, while the highest work day recorded was 15 hours, as in the

table below.

Table 4: Work hours recorded by women home workers, 2001

Average hours worked per day Range across sectors surveyed

India (peak season) 8.7 7.8 – 10.6

India (lean season) 4.6 0-7

Pakistan 7.0 6.7-7.6

Indonesia 5.2 5-5.4

Philippines (high season) - 10-18

Philippines (lean season) - 1-6

Thailand 9.2 8.7-9.9

Source: Mehrotra and Biggeri 2007: 97

The study found that in India, all home worker contracts were unwritten. In Pakistan, close to 90

per cent were unwritten. Despite this, the production relationship was a stable one, in the sense

that workers continued to take work from the same contractor/s and were not seen to shift easily

from one contractor to another. The authors suggest a number of potential reasons – limited

information about alternative work opportunities available to HBW and the strong social networks

that link workers to particular contractors and to each other; lack of any direct contact with the main

contractor or the consumer; isolation from other workers; and other forms of control, such as debt

bondage (Mehrotra and Biggeri 2007: 74, 78). The study found very limited organizing, with just

16.8 per cent of women HBW in India being a member of a labour or trade association; and only

12.5 per cent in Pakistan who reported that they had ever negotiated a better rate via collective

action (Ibid 105).

Overall, 71.2 per cent of respondents in India and 69.6 per cent in Pakistan reported having a house –

although the quality of facilities varies, in particular the regular availability of water has a direct impact

on the time spent by women and children on this chore (Ibid 87-8). Homeworkers are often illiterate – in

the Indian study, 52.5 per cent of all the sample was literate, while 94 per cent of all home workers in

Pakistan had never attended school (Ibid 99, 194). Weak health status is a combination of work related

problems and the unhealthy living conditions (Ibid 104). An important set of ﬁndings of this study was

the presence of child labour and its implications for inter-generational transmission of poverty. In general,

children from home-based work households had a higher probability of working than those from the

control group; and the incidence is higher than the national incidence for child labour in a similar age

group (Ibid 163).

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

Some of the main ﬁndings of the HNSA-ISST study are reproduced below. First, the fact that HBW includes

piece-rated, self-employed and unpaid family workers; this has relevance for the earlier discussion

on deﬁnitions, and shows how in the South Asian context all three types can be signiﬁcant. Table 5

below shows the distribution of home-based workers in the sample across these categories. While self

employment dominates in some sectors, piece-rated workers do so in others. Unpaid family labour is most

signiﬁcant in the pottery sector.

Table 5: Activity status reported by home-based workers in ﬁve South Asian countries, 2006

Country Sector (arranged

in ascending order

of earnings level)

Self-employed Piece-rate

workers

Unpaid family

labour

(percentage of all workers)

Bangladesh Weaving 10 77 13

Shell/Pearl 100 - -

Garments 29 71 -

Pottery 40 8 68

India Agarbathi 3 87 10

Garments 11 80 7

Weaving 2 90 6

Nepal Handmade paper 76 24 -

Weaving 75 25 -

Garments 37 63 -

Pakistan Weaving 11 61 28

n/a 45 n/a

Garments 6 94 -

n/a 62 n/a

Pottery - 39 61

Sri Lanka Coir Yarn 7 87 6

Reed 54 36 10

Mat making 32 68 -

Jewellery 18 61 21

Batik 57 33 5

Source: Sudarshan 2010: 174

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

The key problems commonly faced by home-based workers, as reported by them, are given in the table

below. Access to inputs such as electricity and raw materials, difﬁculty of storing the product and raw

materials, and problems in receiving timely and regular payments emerge as commonly-faced problems.

However the relative ease or difﬁculty can vary, bringing out the necessity of locale-speciﬁc and

differentiated strategies for each cluster of workers.

Table 6: Work-related problems as reported by home-based workers in ﬁve South Asian countries, 2006

Country Sector Access to

electricity

Problems

with raw

materials

Problems

with storage

Problems with

payment

(Percentage of responses)

Bangladesh Weaving 48 76 76 74

Shell/Pearl 0 46 96 71

Garments 68 74 40 28

Pottery 32 92 72 64

India Agarbathi 76 4 86 7

Garments 96 9 67 24

Weaving 88 21 83 22

Nepal Handmade paper 100 62 18 44

Weaving 97 45 47 48

Garments 100 14 63 63

Pakistan Weaving 95 21 16 47

Garments 100 6 93 55

Pottery 84 6 83 13

Sri Lanka Coir Yarn 90 69 24 69

Reed 91 54 27 54

Mat making 80 60 23 60

Jewellery 67 100 26 100

Batik 81 62 24 62

Source: HNSA-ISST 2006: 274

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

Given the difﬁculty of capturing incomes earned through work that has no ﬁxed wage rates and suffers

from seasonality in demand, the following table reports on the ratio of peak season earnings to the average

per capita income of the country to illustrate the location of home-based workers in a country’s economic

spectrum; the data show that actual peak season earnings, as a proportion of the national per capita

income, ranged from a low of 4 per cent to a “high” of 40 per cent for this group. While all groups listed

income-related problems, for the weaker groups the main issues were the need for more work and timely

payment, while those with a little more security also listed skill training and credit for expansion.

Table 7: Earnings, needs and priorities reported by home-based workers in ﬁve South Asian countries, 2006

Country Sectors Earnings

(percentage of per

capita income in

peak season)

Needs

Bangladesh Weaving 5 Timely

payment

Minimum

Wage

More Work

Shell/ Pearl 5 Housing Maternity

Beneﬁts

Credit

Garments 15 Skill training Credit Housing

Pottery 21 Credit Housing Skill training

India Agarbathi 4 Loans Housing Health

Insurance

Garments 10 More work Housing Loans

Weaving 11 More work Loans Housing

Nepal Handmade

paper

30 More work Market

Information

Health Care

Centre

Weaving 30 Market

Information

More work Health Care

Centre

Garments 40 Skill training More work Timely

payment

Pakistan Weaving 16 Credit Timely

payment

Market

Information

Garments 22 Timely

Payment

More work Skill training

Pottery 31 Timely

payment

Credit More work

Sri Lanka Coir Yarn 6 Credit Loans Housing

Reed 7 Minimum

wage

Loans Housing

Mat making 7 Loans Housing Skill training

Jewellery n/a Skill training More work Credit

Batik 16 Skill training Credit More work

Source: Sudarshan 2010: 177

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

Apart from “economic insecurities,” discussed above, the HNSA-ISST study explored key sources of

“social insecurities,” including, predominantly, poor housing conditions, limited access to health care and

high burden of health care expenditure. The low age of entry into home-based work, with a majority of

the workers in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan reporting that they started work before age 15, is linked to

workers having limited (if any) schooling, and a pattern of perpetuating poverty through the generations

(see HNSA-ISST 2006, pp 268-270).

The study carried out by HNI and ISST on home-based work in three Indian states compared the average

income earned in peak and lean seasons as a ratio of the state minimum wage; to be noted is both the

variation at different times of the year as well as the different experience across sectors. In this study, the

range is from 6 – 46 per cent of the state minimum wage in the lean season, and from 18 – 116 per cent in

the peak period.

Table 8: Average earnings of home-based workers in selected locations in India as a ratio of the state

minimum wage, 2006

Characteristics Appliqué work in

Rampur, Uttar

Pradesh

Zari Zardosi work

in Bareilly, Uttar

Pradesh

Phulkari work in

Patiala, Punjab

State minimum wage Rs 58.00 per day Rs 58.00 per day Rs 83.00 per day

Average income (per month) in

peak period

Rs 305 Rs 1916 Rs 2889

Percentage of state minimum

wage

18 110 116

Average income (per month) in

lean period

Rs 110 Rs 798 Rs 1026

Percentage of state minimum

wage

6 46 41

Source: Bhattacharya and Nandi 2006

This brief review of observed characteristics of HBW offers a direction to policy advocacy. The multiple

disadvantages faced by HBW due to poverty, poor habitat, unsuitability of the house from the point

of view of storage and working environment, weak educational and health status are compounded

by gendered norms and additional care responsibilities. Because women HBW are not “workers” in

one sphere and “mothers/wives” in another – but rather ﬁll all these roles simultaneously and in the

same space, both literally and ﬁguratively, economic and human development approaches and social

protection strategies need to be equally holistic and there needs to be synergy between them. Some

sources of insecurity and vulnerability lie within the boundaries of the local space; others arise from

processes which are national or global in nature. While more such explicative studies will be useful,

given limitations of existing information, future research needs to further unravel the implications for

development and social protection policy.

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

7. The policy environment

International and regional policy trends

Internationally, an important milestone in the development of policies for home-based workers has been

the ratiﬁcation of ILO Convention No. 177, which mandates that all home workers should have basic labour

rights – irrespective of the sector in which they work – and guarantees the applicability of core labour

standards and other standards to all home workers.

The Self Employed Women’s Association was instrumental in persuading the International Confederation of

Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) to pass this convention.

Prugl (1999) notes:

Negotiating the Home Work Convention was contentious in part because participants brought

to the table very different understandings of what home-based workers were…. Next to concep-

tualizations of identity that revived the old image of exploited mothers (the unions’ perspective)

appeared those that suggested home-based workers were the maternal source of economic de-

velopment (the Third World government perspective), and those that reversed the dichotomy and

described home-based workers as resilient and resourceful family providers (the homeworker ad-

vocates’ perspective).

Prugl 1999: 106

Individual governments need to ratify the Convention, and introduce national legislation. The campaign to

ratify C177 is making slow but important progress. To date, seven countries have ratiﬁed the convention:

Albania, Argentina, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Finland, Ireland and the Netherlands. HomeNet

South Asia and the Global Labour Institute, with support from WIEGO, continue to encourage unions and

other opinion-formers to press for ratiﬁcation, and for the introduction of national laws to implement the

Convention’s principles.

The Home Work Convention (C177) is an international regulatory, comprehensive framework that aims to

treat home workers equally to other wage earners. In Article 4 (2) of C177, the Convention states:

Equality of treatment shall be promoted, in particular, in relation to:

a) the homeworkers’ right to establish or join organizations of their own choosing and to participate in the

activities of such organizations;

b) protection against discrimination in employment and occupation;

c) protection in the ﬁeld of occupational safety and health;

d) remuneration;

e) statutory social security protection;

f) access to training;

g) minimum age for admission to employment or work; and

h) maternity protection.

(ILO Convention No. 177)

In October 2000, in a Conference organized by UNIFEM and WIEGO, home-based workers and their

organizations, South Asia governments’ policy-makers and researchers met and formulated the Kathmandu

Declaration for the rights of South Asian home-based workers. The Kathmandu Declaration recommended

formulation of a national policy and a plan of action on home-based workers by the governments of the

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

South Asian Region in consultation with the stakeholders. It also urged SAARC to address the issues

of home-based workers in the region and take measures to enable them to deal with the risks and

opportunities of globalization.

The Kathmandu Declaration (see Annex 1) identiﬁes the following major areas inviting the attention of

governments:

• Formation of National Policy on home-based workers by each country;

• Minimum protection, which would include right to organized, minimum remuneration,

occupational health and safety, statutory social protection, maternity, childcare, skill development

and literacy programmed;

• Access to market and economic resources including raw material, marketing infrastructure, technology,

credit and information.

• The establishment of social funds for home-based workers, which would provide insurance against risk

of illnesses, death, old age, accidents, loss of livelihood assists and contingencies as locally required;

• Incorporation into ofﬁcial statistics baseline data regarding various categories of workers in the

informal sector.

These discussions led to the formation of HomeNet South Asia (HNSA) by SEWA and UNIFEM in 2000.

HomeNet South Asia has emerged as a dynamic and vibrant network of organizations working with HBWs

from ﬁve countries in South Asia: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal. It seeks to be the

collective voice of the HBWs of the region, and use this voice at the national, regional and international levels

to inﬂuence legislation, policies and programmes; the network also extends technical support to its members.3

The home work convention and the Kathmandu Declaration seek to put in place special and separate

measures that would secure for HBWs a status as workers entitled to social security. There are, however,

a range of other measures in place to which HBWs have an entitlement, even though the actual outreach

may be low. Some argue that more effort should go into ensuring better outreach and implementation of

existing policies and programmes; others believe a separate law is needed to ensure adequate protection.

In India, the ofﬁcial website of the Ministry of Labour and Employment states:

With a view to provide legislative protection, welfare measures and social security to this large body

of home based workers who have been hitherto neglected, Government proposes to formulate a

National Policy on Home Based Workers. The elements that could go into the preparation of this

document could, inter-alia, include survey of home based workers, provision of legislative protection,

occupational health and safety, provision of social security, prevention of child labour and forced

labour, access to training, provision of welfare measures etc.

Ministry of Labour and Employment, Government of India

(accessed at http://labour.gov.in/dglw/homeworker.html on Dec 6, 2010)

In other South Asian countries however, despite HNSA lobbying for similar national policies, the need for a

separate policy is not yet accepted.

Country speciﬁc policy frameworks

A range of social protection initiatives do exist in South Asian countries that cover home-based workers,

in theory; however the outreach is very limited in practice. Thus labour laws, insurance schemes, micro

ﬁnance, pensions, employment guarantee schemes, and welfare funds have some limited application to

home-based workers. But they are not tailored to home-based workers and hence are not designed to

cover their speciﬁc vulnerabilities.

3 http://www.homenetsouthasia.org/index.php accessed Dec 6, 2010.

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

In India, Ela Bhatt, while a member of the Rajya Sabha,4 proposed the Home Based Workers (Problem and

Welfare) Bill as a private member’s bill in 1988. This could not be passed at that time due to insufﬁcient support

among legislators (Mukul 1998: 758). Recognition of home-based work within policy circles has come about

gradually. Shramshakti (GOI 1988) and the National Commission on Rural Labour (GOI, 1991) both drew

attention to the group, as did the Second National Commission on Labour (2002a) (GOI 1988, 1991, 2002).

The current outreach of government social protection is limited, and a report of the National Commission

on Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector on social security estimates that “the total number of persons

covered under various social security schemes is 21 million, which is equivalent to a mere 6 per cent of the

total number of unorganized/informal workers of around 362 million, as in the year 2000” (GOI 2006: 4.0)5.

This means in practice, people cope with contingencies and chronic problems by relying upon traditional

mechanisms of support, including borrowing from neighbours, contractors, employers and relatives.

While economic aspects of security (wage level, seasonality, access to credit) are critical, health emerges

as a top priority as conﬁrmed for example in the HNSA-ISST study. Poor health was reported to be linked

to the work process and seen as an occupational health issue, as well as being inﬂuenced by overall

living conditions. Examples of the former include abdominal pain and miscarriage among weavers due to

continuous pedaling; and eye problems and joint pains among garment and pottery workers due to posture

and poor lighting. Pottery workers had other problems – the constant handling of clay leading to creases

and discoloration of the hands. Agarbathi workers suffered from working in poor lighting and in cramped

spaces; inhaling of agarbathi powder led to persistent colds, coughs and bronchial problems. Sitting in a

hunched position for long hours caused backaches and joint pain. Shell and pearl collectors complained of

eyesight troubles as they keep their eyes open under water. Finally, in the handmade paper sector, workers

felt they faced immense health risks due to the chemicals they were exposed to during their work.

In all South Asian countries there has been some effort to reach out to workers, including home-based

workers, in the unorganized or informal sector, but outreach is low. The tables below list the existing state

initiatives, and best practices identiﬁed by HNSA members.

Table 9: Existing state initiatives to extend social protection to informal and home-based workers

Country Policy Status

Bangladesh Workers Welfare Fund Act

Maternity Voucher Scheme

Proposed

Pilot Scheme

India Minimum Wages Act 1948

Employees Provident Fund Act 1952

Maternity Beneﬁt Act 1961

Beedi Workers Welfare Fund Act 1976

Beedi Workers Welfare Cess Act 1976

Beedi and Cigar Workers Act 1996

Janashree Bima Yojana

Insurance schemes for ﬁshermen, handloom

weavers

Universal Health Insurance Scheme

National Social Assistance Programme 1995

Wage employment programmes notably NREGA 2005

Unorganised Workers Social Security Act 2008

Passed by Parliament December

2008

4 The Rajya Sabha is the Upper House of the Indian Parliament. Ela Bhatt, who founded SEWA in 1972, served as a nominated

member of the Rajya Sabha between 2006-09.

5 http://www.nceus.gov.in/Final_Edited_Social_Security_Repor.htm#chap2 accessed on 14 August 2010

continued on following page

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

Country Policy Status

Nepal Labour Act 1992

Labour and Employment Policy 2006

Pakistan Labour Policy 2002

National Policy for Development and Empowerment

of Women 2002

Sri Lanka Workmen’s Compensation Ordinance of 1934 as

amended

Maternity Beneﬁts Ordinance of 1939 as amended

Statutory Pension Schemes for the Self Employed –

farmers, ﬁshermen, others

Poverty alleviation scheme 1989

Covers all workers

Covers all trades

Source: Sudarshan 2010: 180

Apart from the state-level initiatives, in each country there are several non-government efforts reaching out

to home-based workers and seeking to offer some kind of support. Bangladesh pioneered innovative efforts

around micro credit; these have since also come up in other countries (India and Pakistan, for example).

However most NGO efforts are small in scale and while they might work intensively with a small group, only

a few are able to offer holistic support. A brief discussion of some of these “best practices” is included in

the report by HNSA-ISST (2006).

Mazumdar draws attention to the fact that policy approaches have been embedded within a patriarchal

framework; while recognizing that home-based work might lead to “more direct forms of income for women

in the family,” this means that the policy discourse continues to “buttress the practice of conﬁnement

of women to the home by the economic process.” (Mazumdar n.d.: 40-41). Tradition and faith play an

important role in the persisting seclusion of women and hence the necessity for any intervention to be

gradual and organic, concludes a study among home-based women workers in the costume jewelry

industry (Action India 2000: 26).

Mehrotra and Biggeri suggest that the challenge for policy “is to minimize the vulnerability of workers in

home work while supporting the elements that ensure efﬁciency in production.” Their recommendation

is to focus on local economic development, using a cluster approach, a strategy used very successfully in

Italy, for example (Mehrotra and Biggeri 2007: 120, 362).

Most of the policy discussion for HBWs in the region, and especially in India, has tended to focus more

on social protection than on development. While the policy on home-based workers remains in draft

form, the government has now passed legislation designed to offer social security to all unorganized

workers. Its proposal includes health insurance, life insurance, maternity beneﬁts and old age pensions.

The home work activists have argued the need for other forms of social protection – notably child care,

shelter security and micro ﬁnance. One of the ways in which informal workers have been reached,

including some groups of HBW, is through sectoral and tripartite welfare funds of which the Beedi

Workers Welfare Fund is the oldest example. Southern states in India have been more proactive in

introducing welfare funds for diverse groups. Discussions around ways in which HBW could contribute

through a cluster development approach to local economic development have been muted. The national

development strategy envisions a particular form of decentralization but the connections between

HBWs and local development, and between local development strategies and macro economic policy

formulation, remains weak.

Table 9 continued: Existing state initiatives to extend social protection to informal and home-based workers

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

8. Organizing and voice

Organizing, particularly for poor women, is a way of addressing the limitations imposed by poverty, lack

of knowledge about the world, and dependence that results from such insecurity. “For women whose

world has been conﬁned to home, family and work, the very act of joining an organization adds breadth

to their lives” (UNIFEM 2005: 76). Through organizing, voices of the disempowered can be heard across

the world.

Barriers to organizing

However there are several barriers to organizing home-based workers. When SEWA tried to register

itself as a trade union under the Trade Unions Act, the Labour Commissioner objected on the grounds

that in the absence of clear employer-employee relationship, they did not ﬁt the “traditional” deﬁnition

of a worker. Also, since HBWs typically engage in a wide range of occupations, simultaneously or

consecutively, it is difﬁcult to slot the union into a particular sector. Generally, a typical “worker” has only

one permanent occupation and trade unions are formed by occupation. In deﬁning HBWs as a category

of workers entitled to the same rights as other workers, the deﬁnition of “work” itself is being questioned,

as Ela Bhatt of SEWA explains:

The ﬁrst conceptual block we encountered was when we tried to register SEWA as a trade union

under the Trade Union Act of India. We did not ﬁt into their deﬁnition of “worker” or “trade union.”

We were an organization of chindi workers, cart pullers, rag pickers, embroiderers, midwives, forest

produce gatherers; but we were not “workers.” Moreover, we did not have a ﬁxed employer to agitate

or ﬁght against and so the government resisted against our registration as a trade union. Labour laws

could not be applied to us. According to them, we were not workers; we did not work. The day we

registered SEWA, we questioned the deﬁnition of work.

(Bhatt 2004: 7)

One of the reasons that women working from home is socially acceptable is because there are often

stated or unstated restrictions on women’s mobility – some communities being more explicit about the

restriction. Contractors and sub contractors will ensure that work is carried to the woman’s house and

the completed product taken back. This reduces chances of organized protest or collective bargaining,

or competitive price setting. Control can also be exercised through varying forms of debt bondage as in

the example below:

The contractor delivers the raw materials and collects the ﬁnished product from my house. We

have to maintain good relations with the contractor because he is our only source of income and

we cannot afford to annoy him. When my father died, he had lent us some grains and some money.

We are still repaying that loan. On the other hand, he always turns down our requests for better

payments, citing some excuse or the other. Neither does he pay us our entire earnings at one go –

often retaining or deducting for poor quality of work.

I know that he employs other workers too, but I am unaware about the rates he pays them and

the rate at which he sells the products embroidered by us. Sometimes, he gets orders from other

countries too, at very good rates.

(GOI 2002b: 17)

In practice, one of the most powerful barriers to organizing has been seen to be fear – women have been

brought up to fear their men, their employers, and their communities. Traditional attitudes towards women

result in a lack of mobility, a lack of value for women’s worth, and a position of deference to male opinions;

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

traditional attitudes also lead to a sense of helplessness among women, which must be overcome before

they can begin to take their lives into their own hands. This makes the process of building solidarity a

deeply political and transformative endeavour. Hill concludes her analysis of SEWA’s strategies by noting

that “poor women workers who come together in their own union use their collective agency speciﬁcally

to advocate for access to the productive resources they have historically been denied. This is a contested

strategy that emphasizes the social relations of socio-economic power” (Hill 2010: 180). Among the

examples of organizing home-based workers, the process by which a tripartite agreement was eventually

reached for agarbathi workers in the mid-1990s – a process that had to break through the barriers placed

by those with economic power colluding with those with political power – is an excellent example of the

opposition that women face when their demands are for equality of treatment and include minimum wages,

identity cards, and welfare (Hill 2010: 163-4).

Yet another factor that impedes organizing is the manner in which the isolation of home-based work can

lead to competitiveness with each other. For example, Meena Gopal writes:

as the workplace enters the homes, where each woman is literally on her own…women are isolated

in their struggle for survival... Being unaware of the workings of the industry and the real reasons

why certain terms and conditions are imposed on them, they try to compete with each other also.

Thus their own labour process exercises divisiveness.

(Gopal 2005: 143)

Trends in organizing

Despite these barriers, when UNIFEM and HomeNet South Asia carried out a mapping of organizations

before developing a programme for home-based workers, they found that there were at least 508 such

organizations in Bangladesh and 307 in Pakistan, with a large percentage of women members. It can

be an advantage for women to join “new” unions because there is less weight of established practices to

contend with:

For women, the advantages of organizing in ‘new’ unions is that they can set up innovative

structures and programmes that are less patriarchal and more open to changes than traditional

unions. For example, women’s unions are generally more creative in ﬁnding solutions to issues such

as child care and meeting times.

(UNIFEM 2005: 77, 80)

There are also a large number of co-operatives of home-based workers in the region and this seems to be a

preferred form of organizing for the women home-based workers. Co-operatives are people’s organizations

which promote and generate women’s employment for those who do not have bargaining power in the

labour market and are placed at a lower level in the economic hierarchy. There are a few Trusts and

Societies too, which function with the “spirit” of a cooperative, though they are not registered as such.

One of the commonly used entry points in organizing HBWs is through micro-ﬁnance, which has spread

considerably in the last two decades. A large number of self-help groups (SHGs) are now in existence, and

these form a base for further organizing; SEWA, for example, has found this especially true as it extends to

newer areas. The SHGs themselves are a result of considerable mobilization at village levels, which may

have occurred spontaneously or more usually through the interventions of NGOs or government efforts.

SEWA has been in the forefront of organizing and policy advocacy for HBWs and, as mentioned earlier, played a

key role in the formulation of the ILO convention on home work. Among SEWA’s own membership, HBWs were 17

per cent of the total membership of 483,012 in 2006 (Hill 2010: 47). Labour unions in the region have developed

their organizing skills in the context of the formal economy, and until today very few have been able to organize

informal workers, including HBWs (Ibid 51). SEWA is the largest organization of informal working women; others

include the Working Women’s Forum in Tamil Nadu and the Annapurna Mahila Mandal in Mumbai.

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

Organizing for work and traditional gendered roles

Most organizing and advocacy for HBWs has therefore grown out of women’s experience and has been

led by women. Naila Kabeer points out that “women-led organizations appear to express a preference for

negotiation over confrontation, with militant tactics treated as an option of last resort. SEWA …opts for a

style of negotiation that does not threaten the livelihoods of workers whose weak bargaining power makes

protest difﬁcult” (Kabeer 2008: 86). This likely reﬂects fewer work choices, greater social embeddedness,

and care responsibilities (Ibid 87). As Hill points out, quite apart from exploitative work arrangements,

families and communities value women more for their reproductive roles, and this makes it doubly difﬁcult

to organize women (Hill 2010: 71).

Precisely because there are high barriers to be overcome, successful organizing can have powerful impact.

As Doane (2007) put it:

…it is crucially important for home-based women workers to become organised, in order to

ensure access to even basic levels of social protection. Home-based and other informal workers’

organizations provide information to and a voice for their members. In fact, it is not clear that

effective policies will be implemented or sustained in the absence of this ‘voice’ and these well

established and ongoing organizations... The ‘success stories’ of informal women workers, of

which policymakers are understandably proud, can certainly be a source of inspiration and

learning. However, coming up with systematic and effective responses to the real needs of the most

vulnerable must remain the clear and sustained focus of attention, beginning with a recognition of

the true circumstances of those at the bottom.

(Doane 2007: 29-30)

Even as mobilizing of HBWs extends to include more and more workers in South Asia, some of the basic

dilemmas remain to be resolved. Whether or not paid work can be a pathway to empowerment has elicited

different views, but there is a convergence in the view that work within the home “is least likely to effect any

signiﬁcant changes in power relations, either within the family or outside it” (Kabeer 2008: 31). Socialist

feminists, in particular, have argued that subordination to “merchants, sub contractors, and employers”

is greatly facilitated by HBWs being seen as housewives (Prugl 1999: 91). Is a feminist, transformatory

mobilization possible without changing the home-based nature of the work? Hill’s analysis suggests that it

is; while others might argue otherwise.

A recent analysis of the experience in using the Equal Remuneration Act (ERA) in India showed how little

it has, in fact, been used as an instrument of gender equality (ISST 2010). In a context where informal

workers are poor and vulnerable, individual efforts for equality are risky and could not lead to more

systemic change; and organized groups are yet to exert their weight to ensure implementation of such

available policy tools as the ERA. Narratives of women organizing for change are still insufﬁciently recorded

and analyzed, and this is an exciting future agenda for research.

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

9. Conclusion: critical research gaps

In concluding this paper presents some areas where more research is needed that would help to advance

the policy debate, and where activist energies are needed.

First, there has been a lot of progress over the last 10-15 years towards evolving a universally accepted

deﬁnition of home-based workers and collecting data on the group so deﬁned. More work remains to be

done in comparing deﬁnitions being used in different countries – examining which groups get included

and which excluded in each of these – and whether there is a case to be made for including the excluded

groups, and what this would mean for the deﬁnition itself.

Second, the data on HBWs is still very patchy. Countries have collected some data nationally but there is

still no clear protocol for national data collection on this group. Micro and meso level studies that have been

carried out, and these have helped to illuminate the picture. Most studies use a combination of quantitative

and qualitative methods. Given the nature of the group and its heterogeneity, small case studies continue to

be relevant; however future work needs to make an effort to embed such studies into the “macroscape” to

determine how the work has evolved over a period of time, what the nature of the link is, if any, with formal

enterprises and the organized sector, and what the growth trajectory might be.

Third, much more attention needs to be given to the relevance and potential of cluster development

approaches for HBWs. While there is a role for global consumer-led ethical approaches to ensure

implementation of labour codes for all workers, including HBWs, sustainability and implementation of

labour codes require local embeddedness. Given the signiﬁcance of domestic markets for home-based

work in South Asia, value chain studies need to be supplemented with local economic development

analysis.

Fourth, women HBWs face multiple disadvantages due to poverty, poor habitat, the unsuitability of their

houses for working and storing goods, weak educational and health status, and also the simultaneous

constraints imposed by gendered norms, speciﬁcally but not exclusively around care responsibilities. The

implications of the latter for actual outcomes of policy interventions or even programmes designed by

activists need to be understood. Research also needs to document the ways in which such gendered social

norms change over time.

Fifth, at a policy level, the discourse on social protection needs to be linked to development discourse

more strongly. Social protection is often presented to economic growth advocates as a safety net, while

its developmental potential is ignored. The development potential of each group of HBWs is not the

same, and the nature of the social protection deﬁcit will correspondingly vary. While many segments are

strongly linked to existing growth paths, others may be more in tune with alternative growth paths. The

nature of the impediments to the growth of HBW groups – technical, administrative, political, or other –

call for more research.

And ﬁnally, narratives of women organizing for change are still insufﬁciently recorded and analyzed.

The actual strategies used – the ways in which women address household constraints as well as work

constraints, the role of external agents and of organizing, the shifting social norms and the HBWs work life

choices – are a rich source for gender and empowerment research.

WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

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WIEGO Working Paper (Urban Policies) No 19

Annex 1: Kathmandu Declaration on Women Workers

in the Informal Sector, particularly home-based

workers, 20 October 2000

The South Asian Regional Meeting on Women Workers in the Informal Sector: Creating an Enabling

Environment, participated by the Governments of India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka; and by trade

unions, nongovernmental organizations, relevant UN and international organizations, community based

organizations and research organizations from these countries, and Bangladesh, having met in Kathmandu

on 18-20 October 2000 and having deliberated on the issues hereby resolved as follows:

Whereas, women workers in the informal sector, unorganized and agro-based sectors contribute

signiﬁcantly to the economic development of their respective countries, and acknowledging that home-

based work has been growing rapidly worldwide due to globalization and liberalization, particularly in

South Asia, And whereas available evidence suggests that homebased work is an important source

of employment especially for economically disadvantaged women, And Noting that there are at

least 50 million homebased workers in South Asia of whom around 80% are women, who carry out

remunerative production and services in their own homes and include own account or self employed

workers as well as those who do not work for contractors or employers at the piece-rates,

And whereas such workers contribute signiﬁcantly to the National Economy, these workers are mostly

illiterate, invisible, unrepresented and voiceless, and are not generally incorporated in the National

Development agenda. Therefore, in order to bring these homebased workers into the national

economic mainstream in accordance with the ILO Convention no. 177, this meeting recommends:

Formulation of a National Policy and a Plan of Action on Home-based Workers by the Government of the

South Asian Region in consultation with the stakeholders, with the following components:

• Minimum protection, which would include right to organize, minimum remuneration, occupational health

and safety, statutory social protection, maternity, child-care, skill development and literacy programme.

• Access to markets and economic resources including raw materials, marketing infrastructure,

technology, credit and information.

• Set up Social Funds for homebased workers, which would provide insurance against risks of illness,

death, old age, accidents, loss of livelihood assets and contingencies as locally required.

• Incorporate into ofﬁcial statistics baseline data regarding various categories of workers in the informal

sector and in particular homebased workers and their contribution to national economies.

Urges SAARC to address the issues of homebased workers in the region and take measures to enable them

to deal with the risks and opportunities of globalization by:

Setting up a Technical Committee for informal sector workers and home-based workers to promote:

• National Policies

• Bilateral Co-operation

• Regional Co-operation

• Promote increased integration of markets at the regional level so as to create more employment

opportunities.

• Include homebased products in the SAFTA priority list.

About Inclusive Cities: The Inclusive Cities project aims to

strengthen membership-based organizations (MBOs) of the

working poor in the areas of organizing, policy analysis and

advocacy, in order to ensure that urban informal workers

have the tools necessary to make themselves heard within

urban planning processes. Inclusive Cities is a collaboration

between MBOs of the working poor, international alliances

of MBOs and those supporting the work of MBOs. For more

information visit: www.inclusivecities.org.

About WIEGO: Women in Informal Employment: Globaliz-

ing and Organizing is a global research-policy-action net-

work that seeks to improve the status of the working poor,

especially women, in the informal economy. WIEGO builds

alliances with, and draws its membership from, three con-

stituencies: membership-based organizations of informal

workers, researchers and statisticians working on the infor-

mal economy, and professionals from development agen-

cies interested in the informal economy. WIEGO pursues

its objectives by helping to build and strengthen networks

of informal worker organizations; undertaking policy analy-

sis, statistical research and data analysis on the informal

economy; providing policy advice and convening policy dia-

logues on the informal economy; and documenting and dis-

seminating good practice in support of the informal work-

force. For more information visit: www.wiego.org.

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Jan 2010

Shrayana Bhattacharya

Earlier work on the transformative potential of women's groups has investigated the struggles and narratives of the group as a whole, with limited exploration of the linkages between women's participation in larger collective action and their individual experiences of intra-household gender relations. Thus, very little is known about the nature of individual agency exercised by women within their interpersonal relations with family members after entering social movements and labor unions. This paper examines such issues by describing the lived experience of collective action and analyzing SEWA's history in organizing women for minimum wages in the agarbatti (incense sticks) sector. It highlights how adherence to gendered norms also referred to as "maryada"-implying social boundaries relating to women's identities as family and community members within patriarchal institutions-influence the entry, exit and experience of union membership and collective action. Women are able to participate in collective action, once unionists acknowledge these social boundaries that poor working women deal with via gendered roles, familial expectations and social networks. My findings illustrate the importance of organizing and labor movements in providing women access to state and market based social security measures. Intra-household and collective security perspectives used in the paper also highlight how women exhibit agency to derive security by using union activities and services to strengthen their positions within collective familial units. © 2010 Asian Center for Women's Studies; Ewha Womans University Press.

Worker identity agency and economic development: Women's empowerment in the Indian informal economy

Article

Jul 2010

Elizabeth Hill

More than nine out of every ten working women in India are employed in the informal economy, unprotected by labour laws and excluded from basic forms of social security. They work as daily labourers in the fields, small producers and industrial outworkers in their own homes and as vendors on the streets. These workers typically receive very low wages and experience extreme forms of social, economic and political marginalisation. This book examines what types of interventions can improve the well-being of women working in the Indian informal economy. Using the case study of the Self Employed Women's Association, Worker Identity, Agency and Economic Development argues that work-life reform for informal women workers has moral and social dimensions, as well as economic. Drawing on the work of social philosopher Axel Honneth, the book argues that worker agency is critical to the process of work-life reform in the informal economy. Using empirical data collected amongst SEWA members the study shows that there is a positive and developmental relationship between a worker's identity, or psychological integrity, and her actual capacity to engage in the political economy for constructive change. The study shows that membership based organisations can promote the social foundations of recognition and respect that are critical to identity and agency, as well as provide worker's with real opportunities to develop alternative non-exploitative economic institutions that deliver improved wages and social security. But in organizing informal workers for collective action the existing distribution of power and wealth, as well as gender privilege are challenged. The result is social conflict and sometimes violence. Conflict of this nature is endemic to the development process, but is often overlooked in development literature and policy design. The book will be of interest to development scholars and practitioners, as well as those interested in the dynamics of women's empowerment and socio-economic change for informal economy workers.

Liberalisation and the Woman Worker

Article

Jan 2002
Econ Polit Wkly

Liberalisation and its after-effects has been a subject of great debate. While proponents point to the declining levels of poverty, opponents insist the opposite has happened - poverty has increased, employment opportunities and access to social services have declined. This article looks at the micro sector - the world of the unorganised woman worker and analyses the varied impact that liberalisation and globalisation has had on her working conditions. A decline in employment opportunities has seen a simultaneous 'casualisation' and growing 'feminisation' of the workforce - with concomitant ills of low wages and declining job security.

Making Home-based Work Visible: A Review of Evidence from South Asia

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