Women’s lib:Lady cotton pickers take a utited stand for better wages
Azeema Khatoon, a mother of five, has spent most of her life labouring in Pakistan’s sunbaked cotton fields for less than $2 a day.
Last year, she and a group of around 40 women struggling to feed and clothe their families on their meagre wages did something almost unheard for poor women working in rural Pakistan — they actually went on strike. and wonder of wonders.. The gamble paid off!
Khatoon, 35, says she has nearly doubled her wage in the past year, now taking home $3.50 a day compared to $2, with her success just one story cited by labour activists to encourage rural women to work together and form a united workforce.
Illiterate women like Khatoon make up the bulk of the estimated half a million cotton pickers in Pakistan, the world’s fourth largest cotton producer, after China, India and the United States, but their working conditions are almost always execrable.
Khatoon said she worked for hours for little money in the fields of Sindh where she lives in Meeran Pur village about 225km north of Karachi.
“Before our collective bargain we made no profit from our work,” said Khatoon, picking rows of fluffy, white cotton shining under the baking afternoon sun near Meeran Pur. “We all collectively decided to refuse to work for low wages,” she added, quite proudly.
Pakistan is one of the few Asian countries where agricultural wages have gone down, not up, in the past 10 years, according to the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), Britain’s leading international development and humanitarian think tank.
The ODI said rural wages are rising across Asia. But Pakistan remains one of the few exceptions where powerful feudal lords rule the roost.
