The discourse on labour in Pakistan is dominated by the terms and conditions of employment and other indicators such as the labour participation rate and the status of employment. Labour productivity, a crucial measure of economic performance and one of the key indicators of the labour market, receives scant attention and is yet to be reported by the FederalBureau ofStatistics in its yearly Labour Force Survey being published since 1963.

The factors that determine labour productivity include physical capital and technology, human development (health, education and skills of the labour force) and labour relations. Underpinning productivity is work ethics which is considered the key force behind economic growth and prosperity in any country. Though work ethics, or the lacl( of it, in our society is constantly commented on in the private sphere, the issue is seldom debated or researched by social scientists, economists and policymakers.

Work ethics refer to a basic set of moral values associated with the way work is done whatever its nature or status. Honesty, responsibility, discipline and diligence are values we inculcate in children from an early stage linking these up with performance in school and early childhood tasks. We ask children to perform in school `to the best of your ability`. In adult life these values should translate into hard work, efficiency, discipline and integrity at the workplace.

Societies that displayed strong work ethics have prospered. Max Weber linked work ethics with the Protestant faith to explain the development of Western Europe. Later in the 20th century, the rise of Southeast Asian countries was attributed to the values espoused by Confucian philosophy. Weber`s work, though seminal, has been refuted by many. Values associated with work ethics are intrinsic and espoused by all major religions.

In Islam the concepts of making an `honestly earned living` or rizq-i-halal, and contractual obligations between the contracting parties are of utmost importance.

Pakistan has one of the lowest labour productivity rates in the region and suffers from poor work ethics. Anecdotal evidence abounds regarding the violation of ethical values at the worl(place by all and sundry, from top to bottom in the organisational hierarchy and in all sectors, be it manufacturing or services, public or private.

Even our parliamentarians and legislators demonstrate poor work ethics. The average attendance rate at the National Assembly hovers around 20 per cent, below the minimum quorum of 25pc.

In the manufacturing sector, industrialists recount stories of workers` negative attitudes, inefficiency, irresponsibility, absen-teeism and low productivity. The workers have their own tales to tell of employers` harsh attitude and violation of labour rights.

Flagrant disregard for ethical standards (unaccountability, nepotism, corruption, etc) by all tiers of workers and management in the services and public sectors are an open secret. Workers display little respect or sense of responsibility towards equipment and machinery at the workplace.

The tendency to get away with minimum effort and not abide by the rules is pervasive.

ThelateDrAkhtarHameedKhan,renowned development practitioner, had described this trait very aptly as `chori aur kaam chori` The picture is grim but there is light at the end of the tunnel: mechanisms for inculcating work ethics can be designed and sustained. Foremost is the need to improve substantially our human development indicators which have a significant bearing on labour productivity. It is time to increase public spending on education and health from the currently dismal allocations of 2pc and 0.8pcrespectively to at least 4pc for each.

In addition, work ethics need to be nurtured through curriculum development advocating the value of work.

Inculcating in schoolchildren a perspective that work is a creative, self-fulfilling andsocially productive activity lays the foundation of strong work ethics. Schools should stress on performance-orientation, and help students adopt good work habits based on discipline, punctuality and team work, besides facilitating development of a balanced relationship between the individual, work and society. At the secondary level, children should be educated about the contemporary world of work and their own future contribution.

While talking about the general trend of poor work ethics, we must not lose sight of the fact that there always remains a segment of the worl(force that displays a good sense of work ethics. They do not just believe in but also demonstrate their honesty, integrity and accountability at the workplace.

Hardworking and committed, these people contribute to the country`s progress to the best of their ability. What we need is for a critical mass to be turned into an expanded labour force with strong work ethics.

The writer is a researcher in the development sector.
zeenathisam2004@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

HOW do you deal with deceit, dishonesty and debasement in your day-to-day life? Sounds like an existential question. Substitute the three D’s with a single word, ‘corruption’, and the question loses its dimensions and sounds almost clichéd.

Inducted into the Urdu lexicon and used ad nauseam in our popular political discourse, the word when deconstructed in a specific context holds a mirror up to ordinary lives made difficult through avarice and misuse of entrusted power. A look at ‘corruption’ through the perspective of Lady Health Workers (LHWs) explains why corruption is termed by the UN on the International Anti-Corruption Day (observed two weeks ago) as one of the biggest obstacles to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and a formidable hurdle in the path of “development, peace and security”.

Zeenat Hisam

In a country that spends a pittance, ie 0.46pc, of its GDP on health and where basic health indicators are the lowest in South Asia, more than 130,000 LHWs struggle daily with corruption while servicing almost 80 million people, as per estimate, in rural and low-income urban areas across the country.

The Lady Health Workers Programme is recognised globally for its positive outcomes. Over 22 years, the programme has survived changes in government, devolution to the provinces and perennial underfunding. The health workers’ collective struggle and successful legal battle have won them the rights of minimum wage and regular service, though delay in the payment of wages and other issues persist. What remains is their silent fight against corruption in the health sector.

LHWs confront corruption of various types including sexual harassment. Though there are strict criteria in place for selection and interviews are carried out by a panel, cases of appointments made on the basis of nepotism and favouritism are not rare. There exist some 15pc to 20pc ghost LHWs appointed by corrupt officials who get a 50pc cut of these ‘workers’ salaries, I am told.

Health workers are subjected to cuts from their meagre salaries, field travel allowances, training allowances and payment for polio vaccination. Nomination for training programmes and crash courses is juggled by health officials who send their favourite women or female relatives. Monthly supplies of medicines are stolen or pilfered instead of reaching the LHWs for free distribution to the deserving.

In a country that spends a pittance, ie 0.46pc, of its GDP on health and where basic health indicators are the lowest in South Asia, more than 130,000 LHWs struggle daily with corruption while servicing almost 80 million people, as per estimate, in rural and low-income urban areas across the country.
The facility of vehicles given to women health supervisors are misused by higher officials. A supervisor’s vehicle was kept by a district health official for two years. She was told that the children of a lawmaker were using the vehicle. The log book had her signature apparently forged by the field officer; meanwhile the health supervisor commuted on public transport.

It appears corruption in the programme has increased since the Supreme Court ordered the provincial governments in 2012 to integrate health workers in the service structure. When the provincial governments finally complied after two years, the health workers were asked by respective officials to pay Rs1,000 each to receive the appointment letters under new terms and condition.

The LHWs’ union fought tooth and nail. It collected individual complaints on stamp papers from the workers and submitted the material in the Supreme Court, which then ordered the concerned departments to send appointment letters by courier to personal addresses. Now the union is strategising on how to fight corruption to receive full arrears of their raised salaries as the individual amount comes to Rs200,000 to Rs300,000 and the officials are said to be eyeing some Rs50,000 per LHW!

The union has filed many complaints about corrupt officials collectively and supported individual complaints to reach higher-ups in the department and the Supreme Court. Several officials saw their services terminated. There have been many honest officials whom LHWs remember by name. Unfortunately, there always remain some who have no scruples.

The union suggests a strategy to curb corruption: end provincial supervision of the programme. Abolish the post of the provincial coordinator like KP has done. Induct senior lady health supervisors for the post of assistant district coordinators.

Corruption affects the weak and poor the most. Poverty and corruption are now inseparably linked. According to the UN, corruption “is a dominant factor driving fragile countries towards state failure”. The UN estimates that, globally, $1 trillion is paid in bribes and $2.6tr are lost annually to corruption. The UNDP estimates that such funds are 10 times the amount of official development assistance.

It is time anti-corruption measures were integrated into the programme. The management and the system of the programme should be improved as recommended in past reviews. Also, a post-devolution review of the programme is due.

The writer is a researcher in the development sector.

zeenathisam2004@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

THE US elections have stoked excitement and fear among all, in and outside the country. The liberals hate Trump whom they think is dangerous and reckless and backed by uncouth rednecks; they say he would play havoc with civil rights if in power. A white Democrat American said (jokingly) to me that she would seek political asylum in Pakistan if Trump won.

Zeenat Hisam

Win or lose, the damage has already been done to American politics and society: Trump has ruined the Republican party, according to political pundits, brought out the worst in people, sharpened divisions and amplified the fear of ‘the enemy’ of America.

His call for a ban on Muslims entering the US, and for racial profiling has given a boost to the grand narrative of ‘Islam-(and Muslims) as an enemy of the-West’. Buffeted by political rhetoric, news coverage, social media and Hollywood movies, the meta-narrative is churning out localised hate crimes against Muslims. It may appear ridiculous to us but a recent research says that 30 per cent of white Americans think that the Muslims want Sharia laws (in the US). Perceived as a ‘threat to Western values’, Muslims are a mere 1pc of the total US population.

Hate crimes against Muslims in the US have increased.

Though Islamophobia has existed in the US since earlier times, after 9/11, hate crimes against Muslims spiked to 1,700pc nationwide resulting in 481 incidents in just four months in 2001, according to a 2002 report. Since last year, violent anti-Muslim acts have increased by 78pc, says a 2016 report released by the Centre for the Study of Hate and Extremism. The spike came particularly after Trump’s call for banning Muslims’ entry in 2015 though the Paris attacks also played a role. In 2015 there were 418 hate crimes. In the second week of September the Huffington Post Islamophobia tracker reported 261 hate crimes in 2016.

As a Muslim visiting the US, I wonder about this hatred of the common people for the Muslim community. Generally one finds Americans to be nice and friendly; on the surface the society appears to believe in the dictum ‘live and let live’. But one wonders what goes on beneath the surface — if Islamophobia is being manufactured like any other consumer item and people are being made to buy it.

According to a June 2016 report released by the University of California Berkeley’s Centre for Race and Gender and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Islamophobia has become a multi-million-dollar business. The report has identified 74 organisations that contribute in one way or another to Islamophobia in the US. Of these groups, the main purpose of 33 “is to promote prejudice against, or hatred of, Islam and Muslims” among the populace. The report states that these organisations had access to $206 million funding between 2008 and 2013.

What if Trump wins? What will be their future in the country they made home one or two generations ago?

“Anything can happen. Remember the US government interned the Japanese in 1942,” says an old friend of mine who made America her home in the late 1970s. A committed professional who loves her job, is 60 plus and content with her life, my friend feels integrated in society. Nonetheless, she thinks the situation for the Muslims in the US is turning from bad to worse.

Young Muslim Americans learn in grades 8 and 11 about the internment of the ‘enemy’ en masse: 120,000 Japanese-American citizens were forcibly relocated and incarcerated in camps. It was in 1988 that the Civil Liberties Act conceded that “the government actions were based on ‘race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership’.”

The ‘enemy’ of the US keeps changing. When it defeated its enemy, Japan, and devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it found a ‘new’ enemy, Russia, whom Europe had always perceived as the ‘other’. The overriding image of Russians, writes historian Paul Sander, since Early Modern Age, was that of the “barbarians at the gate”. After the Cold War, Islamophobia replaced Russophobia. Trump has now warned his nation that “radical Islam is coming to our shores”.

I find the second-generation Muslim Americans to be different from the first generation of settlers like my friend. The young Muslim Americans, born and bred in the US, are assertive about their identity as Muslims and their rights as American citizens. They consider America as their only home and do not feel connected to the country of their parents.

The writer is a researcher in the development sector.
zeenathisam2004@gmail.com
Published in Dawn September 28th, 2016

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

By Zeenat Hisam
Aug 19 2016 (Dawn, Pakistan)

“I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not.” — Ta-Nehisi Coates

WHILE everything appears to have changed for the better, almost gleaming, in the US this summer of 2016, what stays the same, I feel, is the status of African-Americans: you see black people as usher boys, janitors, guards, cleaners, salesmen. You find more black homeless people sitting in the parks and shabbily dressed, obese, sad-looking women on the streets. Indeed, when you read the 40th Status of Black America report, your observation is validated: the 2016 Equality Index of Black America stands at 72.2 per cent.

Zeenat Hisam

The report, brought out by the National Urban League, informs us of the wage differential: for each dollar a white person earns, the black gets 60 cents. Compared to 10.8pc whites, 27pc blacks live below the poverty line. The unemployment rate is twice as much for blacks (9.6pc) as for whites (4.6pc). While 35.6pc of whites of age 25 years and above have got a Bachelor’s degree or more, 22.2pc blacks go that far.

What these figure fail to convey is the depth of marginalisation: how deeply it is embedded institutionally and at how many structural levels it operates. The data does not embody the pain and suffering of the marginalised. I would not have had a chance to glimpse the soul of a black person had not I picked up Between the World and Me in a book store.

The book was released last year but it was now in NYC that I happened to read it. This tale of a dark world sears your heart, makes you wonder what went wrong with the American Dream and raises questions not just about America but about any society, including ours, that excludes its minority groups and dehumanises them in ways implicit and explicit.

Written in the backdrop of the rising number of extrajudicial killings of blacks by police and vigilantes, and in the form of a letter to his teenage son, the book is a personal reflection by Ta-Nehisi Coates, an African- American writer, journalist and educator, on how a black body negotiates a restricted portion of the American galaxy and what lessons he can offer to his son. Ta-Nehisi inhabits the space wherein he feels “a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty”.

The spatial segregation that came about in post-war America has played a crucial role in maintaining the oppression of African-Americans. Dr Marc Lamont Hill, a leading black intellectual, professor and journalist, analyses the multiple forms of oppression that operate simultaneously along race and class lines in his book Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond, released this August. Hill explores public policies, institutionalised private practices and discriminatory attitudes nurtured in a post-civil rights era that turned blacks vulnerable, disposable, invisible, or ‘Nobody’ as he calls them. “To be Nobody is to be vulnerable…to be subject to State violence”, he says.

Hill traces the spatial, demographic and social development of Ferguson, a small city in St Louis County that erupted in protests and caught global attention when an 18-year-old black boy was shot to death by police in August 2014. He analyses the public-nuisance laws and how these are used to marginalise the vulnerable. Hill tells us that out of the 20,000 population of Ferguson, more than 16,000 had some form of “outstanding arrest warrant, nearly all of them relating to a missed payment or court appearance on a traffic fine.…”

Dr Hill analyses how urban policies, zoning laws, private real estate contracts, urban development, razing of city centre slums — where lived the African-Americans who had migrated from the rural south to the cities of the north — and the invention of public housing ensured segregation by race and class.

Indeed, I have encountered spatial segregation everywhere. In NYC, the most multicultural city in the US, there are enclaves of white, African-American, Chinese, South Asian, Italian and Latino populations. In the suburbs, the epitome of the American Dream, comprising neat, freshly painted houses, strip malls and huge parking lots, you seldom come across black families.

Black Lives Matter, a movement that emerged in the aftermath of acquittal of a white policeman in 2012 for shooting to death a 17-year-old black boy, faces challenges. White America does not approve of the movement and the section of media that gives coverage to it is demonised. Meanwhile, the “chilling pattern of deadly encounters between Black bodies and State power”, as Hill calls it, continues. The shooting to death of a 17-year-old black boy in Chicago on 28 July, and a similar death on August 13 of a young black man in Milwaukee reinforces this observation.

The writer is a researcher in the development sector.

zeenathisam2004@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

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