A report by the Asia Floor Wage Alliance released on Thursday described the so called “wage losses” suffered by Asian garment factory workers during the Covid-19 pandemic as “wage theft.”

The AFWA, which is an Asian labour-led global labour and social alliance across garment producing countries, conducted the study among 2185 garment workers employed across 189 factories, located in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Indonesia, India, Cambodia and Bangladesh.

In Pakistan, the number of factories in the sample were 50, and the workers 605. 85% Pakistani workers experienced layoffs and 14% terminations during the Covid crisis, with 81% of the workers pushed below the international poverty line of the World Bank. The statists show that Pakistan faced a huge level of wage theft, attributed to the strict imposition of pandemic lockdowns.

While the overall garment exports in Pakistan declined by 2% only, suppliers passed the burden of the order cancellations and price reductions on to the workers by laying them off without monetary compensation, terminating their jobs without the “legally mandated severance payments,” and rehired some workers but with an unpaid overtime. Most of the rehired workers were men only.

The wage theft report stated that garment factory workers across Pakistan were denied about $85.08 million as wages, with the theft peaking in April 2020 but being consistent throughout the year well into 2021.

“Workers reported an overall wage theft of 29% in 2020, with a sharp decline in wages by 61-69% during the total lockdown period and 26% during the partial lockdown period,” said the report.

Male-female wage disparity

The report noted that Pakistan has a high rate of gendered wage disparity, 66% of the causal workers in the garment factories were found to be women, who earn very low wages and security compared to regular workers.

“82% of women experienced wage loss in 2020 compared to 71% of men,” the report stated. The already existing problem of social inequality and patriarchy added fire to the issue of wage theft among women-women lost more jobs and had a lower chance of getting rehired, compared to men.

The report cited 30-year-old garment worker Amira’s experience at a Levi’s supplier factory in Faisalabad. “Before we were laid off in May, we had to work 14 hours a day, but had no contracts or any access to social security benefits,” Amira stated.

“Women workers who had worked for more than a decade in the factory were terminated overnight and were given no severance benefits…In October, when the factory reopened, only male workers were reemployed,” she added.