Hand-stitched ball business decreasing at an alarming pace: Baidarie

The export data obtained from the US Department of Commerce and the US International Trade Commission suggests that Pakistan which being the largest exporter of quality hand stitched footballs in the past had been meeting 75 percent of the global needs has now been reduced to status of the second largest exporter of footballs.
This declining trend is holding its track fast with the result that now it is meeting just below 40 percent the global needs. This was stated by Professor Arshid Mehmood Mirza Executive Director Baidarie Sialkot while addressing a consultation moot with the stakeholders in football industry on Thursday.
He said that in Sialkot, which is the main rather the only hub of football production in Pakistan, the hand-stitched ball manufacturing process is highly segmented. The labour intensive stitching process is outsourced to almost 45,000 workers in more than 3,000 large to small stitching centres and in homes, where workers work on a casual basis and are paid by piece rate. The rest of the process, including lamination, cutting panels, screen printing, quality control and packing, is completed by factory workers in almost 226 large to small sized industrial units.
Majority of more than 10, 000 female stitchers work part-time in the industry as home-based workers. A recent research study by ILRF indicates that the temporary status and nature of these home-based women workers badly exposes them to precarious labour, low wages, poor working conditions, gender discriminations, lack of social security cover and violations of freedom of association and collective bargaining rights etc. No organised and sustained effort at a large scale has so far been made to comprehensively address the problems of this most exploited set of women workers.
Professor Mirza alluded to the fact that the volume of the hand stitched ball business is decreasing at an alarming pace because of diminishing competitiveness of Pakistan's products in the international markets due to ever increasing production cost, rampant power shut-downs, difficulties in respecting the production and shipment deadlines, increased business driven needs, trends for automation and sophistication in the industry and poor compliance of the buyers' codes of conduct etc.
This market phenomenon of causing major cuts in the volume of the hand-stitched ball business and the business driven-trends of automation in the industry will make huge number of those women workers jobless who are currently working in factories, stitching centres and in homes etc. These retrenchments-an unfortunate addition to the terminations which have already been made in the preceding months, are sure to have very serious economic and social impacts on the families of the respective women workers. They will have to pay big cost of becoming jobless by getting compelled to deprive their children from much needed nutrition, education and health care facilities etc. These children may be pushed to the workplaces for earning livelihoods for their families.
Speaking on the occasion Ms Hina Noureen president Baidarie said that this deterioration in the already languished economic and social status of the poor and ultra poor women would lead to tremendous increase in social exclusions. It is apprehended to further the vulnerability of women for all kinds of social, economic and political dependence, exploitation, violation of their rights and excesses, including increased gender based discriminations, domestic torture and physical and sexual violence etc.
The participants of the consultation session demanded that for taking the in-time corrective actions for saving the employment, working and living conditions from further deterioration it is inevitably necessary that assessment should be made on expedited grounds that the decline in hand stitched football business will affect how many women workers and in what ways.
A marked increase in advocacy efforts is also required to impress upon the opinion, policy and decision-makers in state and in the local businesses circles for taking effective measures to saving these voiceless women workers from the economic and social repercussions of the on-going market phenomenon. Choudary Shabbir-ul-Hassan Advocate, Tahir Butt, Muhammad Rashid and others also spoke on the occasion.