Building a Wider
Horizon With Labour
Home-based producti on, a substanti al and rapidly-growing sector linked to the products oriented value chain, gained momentum and has also increased at an unprecedented rate. The growth of producti ve enterprises and the expansion of eff ecti ve producti on opened up more employment opportuniti es to the workers working at home. Households became a signifi cant part of the workplace and it also helped the workers to earn their livelihood without leaving their premises. Home-workers are vulnerable to all forms of exploitation and unfair practices in craft based industry. The combination and complexities, between and among diff erent actors in chain, the uncertainty in employer responsibiliti es and the invisibility of home-workers makes it harder to ensure good employment conditions for home-workers. Child workers and children of home-workers are even more deprived in this sector. Home-based works in the informal sector fall into diff erent categories of employment: from employer to self-employed, to informal and casual wageworkers, to industrial outworker, to contracted, subcontracted or dependent workers. Home-workers are paid very low wages, devoid of assured work or benefi ts, and the majority of them belong to poor economic households. Home-based workers contribute the most to global trade as they form a signifi cant share of the workforce in key export industries involving manual tasks or labour intensive operati ons. They are hard to reach, largely invisible, not separately identi fi ed, and the longer and constantly changing supply chains make them difficult to map. These workers are enti rely dependent on their employers for work. In order to fi nish the work, meet the deadlines, and to acquire more work and orders, home-workers engage other members of their family in work. Being vulnerable, children are largely been drawn into home-working at a very young age in order to enhance production. The growth dynamics of economies that integrate with large scale products increased the demand for child labour. It is in this context that the structure, advantages and disadvantages of home-based producti on need to be analysed properly in order to address the issues associated with it.
