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An analysis of the homeworker network
in Pakistan: a global justice network
(GJN) perspective
GHAZAL MIR ZULFIQAR
Suleman Dawood School of Business,
Lahore University of Management Sciences,
Lahore 54792, Pakistan
ghazal.zulfiqar@lums.edu.pk
Abstract Using a global justice network (GJN) approach, in this article I examine
the localization of a transnational network for homeworker rights. Based on my field
research undertaken in Pakistan between January 2015 and December 2017, I
compare different organizing approaches to establish how a politics of vulnerability
may be transformed into a politics of voice and mobility. I found that, from the vantage
point of the homeworker, the process of organizing rather than the results achieved is
what really matters. In the case of Pakistan, union-style organizing by the Home-
worker Federation, which is mindful of gender and class hierarchies, enhances the
homeworkers’ voice, agency and mobility, while also building translocal labour
solidarities. Conversely, an NGO-led national network, with its top–down approach,
perpetuates the very hierarchies it was mission bound to dismantle, thus forcing the
women to stay spatially imprisoned. Without arguing that one institutional form is
superior to the other, I demonstrate that for a GJN to articulate diverse local and
global struggles it must be mindful of the hierarchies and boundaries that isolate and
silence marginalized workers. It must also genuinely include the grassroots in the
production and transference of knowledge.
Keywords AGENCY, GLOBAL JUSTICE NETWORK (GJN), HOMEWORKER RIGHTS,
MARGINALIZED WORKERS, PAKISTAN, POLITICS OF VOICE AND MOBILITY, POLITICS
OF VULNERABILITY, TRANSNATIONAL NETWORK
In an era of unfettered globalization, the informal economy has continually expanded
and reappeared in new guises. The majority of the working poor across the Global
South work as informal, casual labourers (ILO 2018). Recognizing their precarity,
transnational alliances have formed to lobby governments and global institutions to
acknowledge that informal workers make a substantial contribution to the economy,

2. Ghazal Mir Zulfiqar
2
and to demand that they be given the same rights as formal workers (Chen 2008;
Lindell 2010). This view has gained considerable traction since the adoption of the
decent work agenda at the 2002 International Labour Conference and the subsequent
passage of the ILO Home Work Convention (C177), which draws attention to home-
workers – a specific class of informal workers who work in their own homes (Boris
2019).
For more than two decades, transnational advocacy networks have been mobilizing
informal workers and connecting local movements to each other and to broader global
conversations. One of the earliest coalitions of this sort emerged from India’s Self
Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), which registered as a trade union in 1972.
SEWA represents self-employed women across the different sectors and, in the past
few decades, its reach has become global. It was with SEWA’s efforts, and the support
of other actors from the Global North and Global South, that the ILO Convention C177
on homeworkers was passed in 1996 (Boris 2019). Subsequently, in 1997, WIEGO
(Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing) was established as an
action research global policy network to support informal worker networks. Its mem-
bers include homeworker and other informal worker networks, development agency
practitioners, researchers and academics, which together make it a powerful trans-
national space for collective action (Jhabvala 2011).
To localize advocacy on the homeworker issue, in the year 2000 SEWA and
WIEGO helped to establish various so-called HomeNets, which operated at both a
regional and country level and which included a regional network for South Asian
homeworkers called HomeNet South Asia. With the support of the United Nations
Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), HomeNet South Asia began its outreach
in the region, calling for the establishment of country-level HomeNets as NGO
projects across South Asia (Bonner and Carré 2013).
Research from a global justice network (GJN) perspective highlights how global
and regional alliances are often messy, as they attempt to incorporate translocal and
transnational articulations of the collective mission (Juris 2004; Prügl 1999; Prügl and
Boris 1996). This perspective calls attention to the fact that worker struggles for recog-
nition occur in specific contexts but are connected to global processes and politics.
They are marked by a diversity of movements and geographical spread (Cumbers and
Routledge 2013; Lindell 2010). In this article, I argue that the various global, regional
and local coalitions for homeworker rights are part of a single GJN, given that their
advocacy and mobilizing strategies are coordinated, to some degree, and their leaders
are connected through joint workshops, meetings and research projects (Chen and
Sinha 2016).
My concern here is to uncover the mechanisms that help transform a politics of
vulnerability into a politics of voice for those relegated to the bottom of the global
supply chain by virtue of their gender, class and worker status (Meagher 2010). This
is particularly important in the case of homeworkers, who are much more isolated than
those working as farm or factory workers, because even as they work, they remain
confined to their homes. Patriarchal norms restrict their mobility, which makes it
difficult for them to gather market information, bargain with firms or contractors, or

3. An analysis of the homeworker network in Pakistan
3
even to know what others in the same trade are earning (Chen and Sinha 2016).
Collective action by homeworkers is by no means an easy task. Not only would it
require them to rise up against their spatial confinement, but it would also be at the
risk of abuse, financial exploitation and harassment from the middlemen and con-
tractors on whom they rely to bring them work. Fear acts as a strong deterrent to the
organizing efforts of homeworkers (Baruah 2004). Added to this is the broader
problem that approaches to advocacy and mobilizing are bound up with place, while
at the same time, affected by inequalities arising from globalizing forces that both
enable and hinder organizing by and for women workers (Chowdhury 2011; Escobar
2008).
Drawing on fieldwork conducted between January 2015 and December 2017 for a
larger ongoing study, in this article, I look at the gender, class and spatial dimensions
of what Lindell (2011) calls the politics of informality. In so doing, I attempt to
deconstruct the imaginary of so-called third World Labour, particularly that of women
and the coalitions formed with distant others in their name (Wright 2006). I explore
the homeworker GJN from the vantage point of Pakistan’s homeworkers and their
local advocacy networks. I analyse the uneven development of informal worker col-
lectivization in Pakistan, in particular the power geometries between actors and spaces.
Locating Pakistan’s homeworker alliances within the GJN framework, I explore
competing ways of local organizing that contribute to the GJN. Taking a global view
of issue specific GJNs runs the risk of obscuring competing interests between institu-
tions and actors on the ground. By analysing a national NGO-led homeworker advo-
cacy network and a Marxist homeworker labour federation, my aim is to uncover the
challenges, anxieties and successes associated with local organizing and advocacy.
The NGO I study is HomeNet Pakistan, the organization that has formally led the
national homeworker network since the early 2000s, and the latter is the Home Based
Women Workers’ Federation (HBWWF), a member-based association that utilizes
union-style mobilization. The latter has been referred to in the literature as community
unionism, for it bridges the home–workplace divide (Black 2005). Prügl and Boris
(1996), for instance, have compared SEWA’s organizing approach with community
unionism.
The GJN approach builds on social movement insights but attends more closely to
the tensions and mobilizing opportunities that emerge when linkages are made across
space (Smith 2010). It typifies networks as unstable assemblages, cautioning that,
because varied levels of collective agency are embedded in processes of solidarity-
building, network spatiality must be studied not as a series of totalities but as spaces
in which actors, movements and struggles can converge (Cumbers et al. 2008;
Routledge and Cumbers 2009).
Employing these insights, I examine how issues highlighted in a global policy
arena are localized. From a network perspective, I analyse the degree to which the
grassroots are given access, voice and mobility in determining the levels at which the
struggle is played out. I also consider how and where knowledge is created and trans-
ferred. In this article, I argue that the gender and class dimensions of the homeworker
struggle make the mode of organizing crucially important in determining answers to

4. Ghazal Mir Zulfiqar
4
the above. Specifically, when women and men distanced from their constituency by
class and/or other differences lead institutions, it is critical to be mindful of the dangers
of paternalism and of them seeing ‘themselves as agents of change rather than as
facilitators of grassroots agency’ (Pearce 2010: 632).
In what follows, I begin by situating my study in the GJN literature. I go on to
discuss my fieldwork and research methods, before describing how the transnational
movement led to the emergence of local organizing in Pakistan. I then discuss
approaches to homeworker advocacy and mobilization in Pakistan, detailing how each
deal with questions of legitimacy, access and knowledge production in the spaces in
which they converge. I conclude by reflecting on the conditions that perpetuate disen-
franchisement and those that enhance homeworker agency, and the role GJNs can play
to improve outcomes for the women these networks are meant to empower.
By analysing the homeworkers’ network from the ground up, the article contributes
to the GJN literature in several ways. First, it demonstrates that to poor, isolated and
marginalized workers, the process of organizing matters more than the end product.
For Pakistan’s homeworkers, the community unionism of the Homeworkers’ Feder-
ation has developed an indigenous leadership and focused on women workers’ every-
day struggles, while also building solidarities with the wider labour movement. This
has empowered homeworkers by enhancing their voice, agency and mobility.
Although it cannot be asserted from this that union-style organizing is necessarily
better than NGO advocacy, my analysis shows that the Homeworkers’ Federation has
created a more democratic space for the homeworkers it mobilizes than HomeNet,
which employs a top–down, paternalistic approach. It is important to note these
differences in the current context, for in Pakistan and the rest of South Asia, people’s
economic and social lives are ordered around gender, class and other hierarchies, such
as caste and religion.
This leads to the second contribution of this article, which has to do with the GJN
itself. The study shows how transnational networks can perpetuate gender and class
hierarchies. In fact, unless the organizing processes and narratives are mindful of these
hierarchies, they can actually heighten the isolation, invisibility and silence that mar-
ginalized workers face. When the distance between the leaders of the transnational
network and the local groups with which they work is too great, the former may
reinforce the latter’s spatial imprisonment, especially if there are gatekeepers situated
at the network’s nodes (Massey 1994). Moreover, unless grassroots actors are actively
involved in the production and transference of knowledge, the GJN will fail to produce
what Juris (2004: 345) calls ‘an alternative political project based on the articulations
of diverse local/global struggles’.
Conceptualizing informality politics
Women make up three-quarters of Pakistan’s homeworkers. Relegated to the bottom
of the supply chain, most work on piece-rate contracts, rely on middlemen to access
factories and wholesale markets and, unlike factory floor workers, work in isolation
within their own homes. They are also missing from official labour statistics for the

5. An analysis of the homeworker network in Pakistan
5
most part and do not enjoy the rights that formal workers do, such as a minimum wage,
or health and maternity benefits. Despite this, due to their poverty and lack of labour
market opportunities, they represent 4 per cent of urban employment in Pakistan and
31 per cent of women’s total urban employment (Akhtar and Vanek 2013). Home-
workers are both invisible and marginalized, but in painting them as inevitable victims
of shifting labour standards, there is a danger of the local being dismissed as a passive
product of the global (Massey 2004: 12). In Escobar’s (2001: 155) words, ‘the global
is associated with space, capital, history and agency while the local, conversely, is
linked to place, labour, and tradition – as well as with women, minorities, the poor and,
one might add, local cultures.’
Such binaries gloss over the fact that places crisscross wider power geometries,
which constitute both themselves and the global (Gibson-Graham 2002). The Indian
SEWA is a classic example of an indigenous women’s organization that can shake up
the transnational policy space. It registered as a trade union in 1972 and, since then, its
membership of self-employed women in India, many of whom are homeworkers, has
risen close to two million. Through advocacy and protest, it has pushed for policy
reform in India to include informal sector workers in the provisioning of social
security, welfare, housing and childcare (Boris 2019). At the same time, as mentioned
above, SEWA was instrumental in getting the ILO Convention C177 passed. What is
noteworthy about it is that it has kept a grip on its grassroots constituency while, at the
same time, lobbied internationally (Baruah 2004; Boris 2019). Balancing the two ends
of this spatiality requires tightrope walking, and it is here that local networks face their
severest test. Hill (2010: 173) uncovers uneven spaces even in SEWA’s organizing,
for activism is always marked by conflict and struggle over power and resources.
The question then is, what are the mechanisms through which agency may be more
evenly distributed, especially for downstream actors? Labour geographers note that
the impact of workers’ actions is conditioned by their ability to reach across space in
their organizing efforts and strategies for matching capital’s mobility (Coe and
Jordhus-Lier 2010). One factor determining reach is the type of local networks to
which workers are connected. Globally and nationally, NGOs have most often organ-
ized homeworkers (Bonner and Carré 2013) and here Pakistan is no exception. How-
ever, the Homeworker Federation’s use of community unionism, which does not link
membership to a specific workplace or labour identity, has proved to be an alternative
model of mobilizing.
Lindell (2010) contends that orientations and forms of organizing determine infor-
mality politics. Network actors often have fragmented interests and their identities are
fluidly constructed. The boundaries and hierarchies they face are neither fixed nor
permanent (Lindell 2010). The representational structure of HomeNet South Asia, the
regional homeworker network, is a case in point. Since its inception, it has had an
NGO-style structure informing its governance and representation, for with the
exception of SEWA, indigenous coalitions of homeworkers in South Asia and else-
where have been considered too weak to lead advocacy efforts on their own. However,
in the past few years, to wean itself off of a near complete reliance on country-level
NGOs, HomeNet South Asia has begun transitioning towards a more democratic

6. Ghazal Mir Zulfiqar
6
model of representation, so that local homeworkers are represented both with and
without NGO intermediation (Bonner and Carré 2013; Chen and Sinha 2016). This is
beginning to affect local mobilizing and will soon reshape the contours of legitimacy,
spatiality and boundary making.
Geographers point out that when place-based movements are connected to global
networks, some members experience more restricted mobility than others, particularly
those from the grassroots (Cumbers et al. 2008). Mobility is crucially important for
resources and access to international platforms. According to the geometries of oppres-
sion (Valentine 2007), as women, homeworkers already face far more constraints than
men or their wealthier female counterparts. Sangari (1993) argues that patriarchies
function in and through relations of production. As part of the survival economy,
homeworkers are tied to the family unit, being at once subjected to the patriarchal
practices of their own class and the exploitation of their labour by those above them.
In terms of organizing approaches, both NGOs and unions offer advantages and
challenges about which network actors need to be mindful. Over the last few decades,
NGOs have provided women with integral services, and have played a prominent role
in policymaking and media debates about gender roles and inequalities (Ennaji 2016).
At the same time, critical research on NGOs warns against the tendency to become
bureaucratic, hierarchical patrons of the poor, instead of ‘tapping oppressed commu-
nities for their own knowledge, strength and leadership in constructing models for
social change’ (Ransby 2003: 74; see also Chowdhury 2011; Guenther 2011). Being
donor dependent, NGOs are also accused of aligning themselves with donor agendas,
which runs the risk of losing their grassroots legitimacy (Pearce 2010). South Asian
feminists in particular have argued that women’s NGOs that are led by urban, elite
women can be worlds apart from their poor, rural counterparts, resulting in intra-
network battles for clients and resources among differently placed actors (Chowdhury
2011; Karim 2004). This can produce a crisis of legitimacy, for those with the greatest
power locally, control both the funding and the global connections (Massey 1999).
Community unionism, which builds on community organizing, is becoming an
increasingly popular approach to bridging the home–workplace divide (Black 2005;
Wills 2001). It is a local response to changing global labour systems and calls for the
application of union practices to organizing informal labour at the level of the com-
munity (Black 2005). Labour leaders recognize that, to challenge global capitalist
processes, they have to engage with the working class across scales and levels (Ellem
2006). Fine (2005) explains that community unionism overcomes rigid union
structures by focusing on issues of wages and work for low-paid workers through a
combination of service, advocacy and organizing. Forms of identity, including race,
ethnicity and gender stand in for industry as a means of recruitment (Banks 1991; Fine
2005). They differ from other forms of community organizing in that workers are
organized around the idea that the battle is with rising neoliberalism rather than with
the state (Banks 1991). At the same time, community unionism is risky, for it requires
an upfront resource commitment, since organizing begins long before specific
employers are targeted. Research, however, shows that community unions that are able
to link genuine grassroots mobilization to transnational solidarity networks can

7. An analysis of the homeworker network in Pakistan
7
empower some of the most vulnerable and marginalized workers (Choudhry and
Thomas 2012).
Regardless of approach, however, network functioning is greatly affected by the
flow of information, which in turn is tempered by gender, class and ethnic realities
(Juris 2004). Individuals and groups are differentially placed in relation to these flows;
while some initiate them, others are on their receiving end and others still are
effectively imprisoned by them (Massey 1994). Routledge and Cumbers (2009) argue
that information flows with much more fluidity between activists from the Global
North than it does to and from grassroots activists from the South.
While it is true that these realities lead to the development of uneven discursive
practices, which reinforce gender, class and global economic inequalities, it is also true
that knowledge production is never a static process. We can see this being played out
in the present study as labour activists in Pakistan begin to replace the hitherto NGO-
led homeworker discourse with expressions of class-based solidarity. This redrawing
of boundaries inevitably causes conflict within the national network. Tensions between
NGOs working on labour rights and unions are well documented (Egels-Zanden and
Hyllman 2011; Spooner 2004), but strains also appear between more local groups and
larger national networks, on issues of representation and resources. Scholars generally
overlook such politics of informality, for they tend to focus on the battle between net-
work actors and the state, so ignore the highly differentiated and complex nature of
alliances between network actors (Lindell 2010).
The documented experiences of SEWA and others in India and Africa also show
that if the unions are run by men, they may fail to meet the needs of female informal
workers (Agarwala 2014; Baruah 2004; Lindell 2011; Meagher 2010). This is not
surprising given that network decision-making tends to devolve to a small group of
elites and if they happen to be men, women’s interests are easily undermined by gender
hierarchies (Cumbers et al. 2008; Lindell 2011). Scholars also warn against the unex-
pected ways in which globalization reconstitutes patriarchies (Chowdhury 2011).
My aim in this article is to detail network unevenness and how this leads to contes-
tations and negotiated articulations (Featherstone 2008), both in spite of and in relation
to global justice networks, without undermining the notion that advocacy efforts have
to be transnational, for the globalization of production mandates the globalization of
states and alliances (Prügl 1999: 199).
Methods
To explore how local actors and the homeworkers they mobilize are connected and
represented and, conversely, how local alliances with GJNs distance and mute them, I
draw on in-depth interviews, focus groups and observations conducted between
January 2015 and December 2017. Some people were interviewed several times over
the course of the three years. I established initial contact with the network leaders
through my position as a faculty member of a well-known local university and under-
took the primary research with the help of a research assistant, also a woman and a
native Urdu speaker. We conducted the research across the cities of Lahore, Karachi,

8. Ghazal Mir Zulfiqar
8
Hyderabad and Kasur. Karachi and Hyderabad are cosmopolitan metropolises in the
province of Sindh. Lahore is the largest city and the capital of Punjab province, and
Kasur is a semi-rural town in Punjab. These sites were chosen because network leaders
identified them as the places where most mobilization activity was located.
The research design was led as much as possible by the voices and concerns of the
homeworkers themselves, to mitigate the inevitable power asymmetries between the
researcher and the respondents (Spivak 1988: 287). Homeworkers were identified by
local network actors, and ten focus groups were conducted in homeworker communi-
ties in Lahore, Karachi and Hyderabad (see Table 1). The eight focus groups in Lahore
each had between six and eight members, while those in Karachi and Hyderabad each
had about fifteen women. Focus groups are a preferred mode of collecting data from
marginalized groups who may otherwise feel uncomfortable expressing themselves in
front of strangers (Fouche 2015: 115). Each focus group included women from the
same community who knew each other well, which helped facilitate an engaged dia-
logue. In Kasur in-depth interviews replaced focus groups, for the mobility restrictions
in this semi-rural area prevented the women from leaving their homes. All homeworker
respondents, with the exception of the bangle makers in Hyderabad, were part of the
garment manufacturing supply chain. They ranged from young women who had grown
up helping their mothers produce garments or bangles and continued with the work as
young adults, to grandmothers who still spent several hours a day as homeworkers.
The homeworkers’ interviews and focus groups were semi-structured. The topics
covered were designed to elicit the extent to which informal workers understood their
position in global processes of production and representation, their relationship with
the local and national actors mobilizing them, and the material and non-material
changes they had experienced or felt likely to experience as a result of the activities in
which they were participating. The interviews were held in Urdu, the national langu-
age, and transcribed into English. All homeworkers’ names have been changed to
protect their identities.
Apart from these women, over the course of the three years, I held 27 in-depth
unstructured interviews with senior leaders of HomeNet Pakistan, the National Trade
Union Federation (NTUF), the HBWWF and the Labor Education Foundation (LEF)
(see Table 1). During this time, I became well acquainted with the leaders of HomeNet
and HBWWF, so in addition to the interviews, informal conversations over the phone
between formal meetings provided contextual detail to the collected data. The NTUF
and LEF are local labour federations. NTUF and HBWWF both with headquarters in
Karachi, while the headquarters of the LEF and HomeNet are in Lahore.
Next, we interviewed district action committee (DAC) coordinators from eight dis-
tricts across the province of Punjab. DACs were originally designed to serve as district-
level activity hubs for homeworker advocacy and mobilization. The interviews with
the coordinators took place at a local hotel in Lahore where a regional DAC meeting
was being hosted. Table 1 provides the details of our respondents.
I also sat in as an observer on five provincial-level meetings convened by HomeNet
and attended by members of the women’s wing of the two main political parties of
Punjab, homeworker leaders, members of HomeNet’s partnering district-level NGOs

9. An analysis of the homeworker network in Pakistan
9
and a few academics. These meetings, which took place in local hotels, included
network leaders who had travelled to attend the meetings in Lahore. Various donors,
including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under the
auspices of its Gender Equity Program, Oxfam and the UK’s Department for Inter-
national Development (DFID) covered their expenses. As an observer, I also attended
a weekend bazaar in Lahore where the city government, in collaboration with the
Women Chamber of Commerce, provided the homeworkers with a dedicated space in
which to display their wares. I was also an observer at a policy consultation at the
labour ministry in Lahore, presided over by HomeNet Pakistan and attended by state
officials from the labour and women’s ministries, NGO directors and labour activists.
Finally, an analysis of press releases, web-based documents and published reports
triangulated the data.
Table 1: Categories and organizations represented by interview/focus groups
Category/Organization Interviews/
Focus Groups
Number
HomeNet Pakistan Interviews 10
Labor Education Federation (LEF) Interview 1
National Trade Union Federation (NTUF) Interview 1
Home Based Women Workers Federation (HBWWF) Interviews 5
Baidarie – Local NGO in Punjab Interviews 2
District Action Committee (DAC) coordinators Interviews 8
Women Homeworkers:
Lahore Focus groups 8
Kasur Interviews 7
Karachi and Hyderabad Focus groups 2
Representation and legitimacy: localizing a transnational movement
An estimated 82.4 per cent of Pakistan’s workforce is employed informally. Approxi-
mately 92 per cent of employed women work on piece rate contracts either out of their
own homes or in the homes of their employers, making on average half of what inform-
ally employed men earn (ILO 2013, 2018). Most are part of the manufacturing supply
chain that produces garments, leather goods, shoes, carpets, bangles and sports
equipment (Akhtar and Vanek 2013).
HomeNet Pakistan was set up in the early 2000s as a donor funded project at the
Aurat Foundation, the largest women’s advocacy NGO in Pakistan. It was designed to
serve as a national network hub to link the GJN to local groups. In 2005 it registered
as a standalone NGO and subsequently secured funding from UN Women, the ILO,
USAID, Oxfam and others, to conduct research, mobilization and advocacy across the
country.
In 2007, SEWA convened a conference called Women, Work and Poverty Policy.
Its agenda was to urge South Asian governments to ratify ILO C177 on homeworkers.
The regional conference spurred action on a federal homeworker policy in Pakistan.

10. Ghazal Mir Zulfiqar
10
To initiate the process, the ILO engaged in policy tourism, taking Pakistan’s federal
labour minister to Thailand and the Philippines, where some form of informal worker
legislation had already been enacted.
HomeNet Pakistan simultaneously coordinated the setting up of a national home-
based policy working group to strategize action on the issue of homeworkers. The
working group, which included representatives of various local NGOs and labour
federations, was, in collaboration with the ILO, able to finalize a draft of the federal
homeworker policy with the federal labour ministry by 2010. When a constitutional
amendment devolved major ministries down to the provinces, the working group
began to lobby the provincial ministries of labour. Since 2013 homeworker policies
stand approved by the provincial legislators of Punjab and Sindh, although a lack of
political will continues to hamper enactment. The other two provinces are still at the
policy formulation stage.
While it is true that negotiating with a reluctant state is a difficult task, during the
long process of negotiation and advocacy, the working group failed to engage smaller,
district-level players or the homeworkers themselves. One view is that the policies
continue to fall short of enactment because the working group pushing for reform
alienated the homeworkers. The president of one local NGO in Punjab that belongs to
the advocacy coalition contends that the stalled policy process occurred because the
state largely saw it as an NGO-driven exercise: ‘we don’t give the homeworkers policy
space. Whoever has a toothache is better able to explain their condition to the doctor
than anyone else (speaking on their behalf).’
HomeNet’s mobilizing is done through its community mobilizers. These are iden-
tified within the homeworker communities in which HomeNet wants to establish its
networks. The mobilizers receive their training through a series of workshops and are
subsequently responsible for persuading the homeworkers in their area to attend the
meetings, protests and conventions that HomeNet organizes and to answer questions
during donor exposure visits. HomeNet pays them a stipend to cover their travel and
provides them with food. However, organizing has proved difficult, for many home-
workers in Lahore say they are tired of attending HomeNet-sponsored events because,
having attended for years, they have experienced no material benefits. Those whose
piece-rate contracts have dried up are especially disappointed, for they say that
HomeNet made no attempt to help them make direct links with the market. HomeNet’s
executive director argues that it is natural for women who have not yet seen the
material benefit of organizing to complain. She also blames the local culture of greed
and apathy for the problems her network encounters in mobilizing homeworkers:
According to some people, movements don’t occur in Pakistan because every-
thing is paid here. In order to (start) a movement you need to give money to the
people, and they will come out of their homes. This is also happening right now
because people do not know how to get their rights accepted.
Homeworkers, on the other hand, find it difficult to attend protests not only because
they are rarely granted permission to leave home but also because it means forfeiting

11. An analysis of the homeworker network in Pakistan
11
their daily wage. Shenaz is a middle-aged woman with four daughters who have not
gone to school beyond fifth grade. All five of these women weave hand-spun cloth,
hand embroider formal dresses, and run a beauty salon in the front room of their tiny
hovel in Kasur. Shenaz explains that her husband does not allow their daughters to
leave home, but that he has twice given her permission to attend HomeNet’s meetings
in Lahore. When asked what happened at the meetings, she said she ate some food,
chatted with the other attendees and returned home. She said that no official spoke to
her and that she did not talk to any of them.
Nevertheless, some homeworkers like Rasula, a young divorcee who described
herself as a community leader in Kasur, are more outgoing and assertive. She recog-
nized that HomeNet’s capacity building workshops helped to hone her leadership skills
and described how she had organized the homeworkers in her area and arranged for
HomeNet officials to lead a workshop for them in Kasur, but now admits to feeling
disheartened. She described her disappointment with the LEF, an NGO that works with
HomeNet to advocate unionization for homeworkers in Punjab:
I met the head of LEF in Lahore several times and he told me there is a union
for women workers that he will connect me with. I have heard that the union
members will get facilities like workers in factories from the Labour Depart-
ment. I reminded him, but people talk, and they forget, or they do not have time
to meet people like us.
This expression of frustration indicates that if network actors are to retain their legit-
imacy, they need to do more than simply organize, protest and advocate on behalf of
the groups they mobilize, especially if donor funding is involved. Homeworkers like
Rasula say that they realize how much money is coming in to fund the organizations
that work with them, but that they themselves receive none of the benefits the funding
provides in their name.
The HBWWF, which the policy working group set up as a homeworker associ-
ation, adopted a different approach. Within a couple of years of its establishment, it
broke away from the HomeNet-led network to organize homeworkers in Karachi and
Hyderabad independently. There is a stark difference in the leaderships of the two
organizations. HomeNet’s executive director is an articulate, middle-aged, NGO
professional, whose conversation slips between English and Urdu – evidence of an
upper-class education. The HBWWF secretary is a much younger, lower-middle
class woman who speaks passionately about the homework labour issue exclusively
in Urdu. HomeNet’s other officers are also NGO professionals. Apart from the general
secretary, all of the HBWWF’s leaders identify themselves as active homeworkers
and align themselves ideologically with the NTUF, a Marxist labour federation in
Karachi. While HomeNet professionals refer to their constituency as khawateen
(women), the HBWWF uses the term mazdur (labour) when referring to the women
it organizes. The president of the NTUF explains that this comes from a difference
in defining the problem: ‘the NGOs have argued that this is a women rights issue,
but we have always said “no! this is a labour rights issue”. The NGOs see

12. Ghazal Mir Zulfiqar
12
homeworkers only as women, but we see them as workers who must engage in class
struggle.’
The HBWWF contends that homeworkers’ everyday struggles are at the forefront
of their concerns, which working from home and being primarily responsible for their
families’ wellbeing, exemplifies. Broken utility connections and open sewers are
obviously more pressing matters for most homeworkers than seeking policy changes
from the state. The HBWWF’s general secretary felt that it was easier to keep home-
workers engaged if the federation worked with them to resolve their everyday prob-
lems. However, during their focus group discussions in Karachi and Hyderabad, the
women described how their association with the HBWWF had at least helped them to
break down certain patriarchal barriers and gain legitimacy at both household and
community levels:
Nowadays poverty has made the woman so brave that if any difficulty comes,
she will face it because she is a mother as well as a wife. All the burden is on
the women, so we stood up, even against our men. [We told them] either earn
and give us money or let us go out. We are doing good work, not bad. When
they realized that we are fighting for their rights also, they sat quietly. Now if
there is any problem in the community, they approach us, and we go to the
police station, to the water company, or to the courts to help them. Our men
now back us.
How exactly has the HBWWF’s approach helped ‘the marginalized to move to the
center’? (Ransby 2003: 368). For one, the unions that the federation has registered,
including the Home Based Women Bangle Worker Union in Hyderabad and the United
Home Based Garment Union in Karachi, are each led by homeworkers – their presi-
dents, general secretaries and all other office holders are from their communities. The
confidence with which these women now speak is proof of the agency they have
acquired over time, which they describe as a stark departure from how inhibited they
felt because of their social and economic isolation before joining the HBWWF.
Second, the HBWWF’s general secretary is a woman whose socialist ideals have
helped her forge genuine bonds of solidarity with the homeworkers with whom she
works. The women expressed their support for her in focus group discussions, empha-
sizing that she was one of them:
We give the most credit to her because she will not see whether the place is
dirty or if there is a sewer flowing nearby, she will just sit with us. None of us
lets the other person feel it is dirty here or we should not drink water together.
We drink the same water like her. She talks to us as if she is one of us and this
is how people join together.
Without the distancing from other members by gender and class hierarchies, the
leadership here enjoys a legitimacy not discernible in Lahore and Kasur, where
HomeNet and LEF mobilized the homeworkers. HBWWF’s members exude a strong

13. An analysis of the homeworker network in Pakistan
13
working-class identity. They are clear that they should be the ones to represent them-
selves politically and explain how they are preparing to contest the local elections
as independent candidates. They say that, to get state recognition, they have to
represent their own interests in the provincial and local assemblies. The federation’s
reflexive policies appear to have empowered them to experience the material and non-
material benefits of engagement, for they have even begun to stand up collectively to
the middlemen in their area and to demand higher wages. Finally, the federation
achieved policy success when the province of Sindh’s homeworker bill was approved
in 2016, although the homeworkers are still protesting about its lack of implemen-
tation.
These victories, driven as they are by a much more local and grassroots approach,
have begun to push the national homeworker discourse. HomeNet Pakistan has now
begun to talk about the importance of homeworkers contesting local elections and even
mentions unionizing as a long-term goal for all homeworkers. This is a significant shift
from its original stance, which has come as much from witnessing the HBWWF’s
success as from its interactions with the ILO and other transnational labour networks.
Moreover, HomeNet South Asia’s recent move to open more channels of represen-
tation at the country level has given the HBWWF much more voice at international
meetings and conferences, thus forcing the national network to move towards a more
nuanced and inclusive narrative.
Voice, agency and mobility
The homeworker GJN seeks economic justice for spatially imprisoned homeworkers
throughout the world. The Global Labour Institute (GLI) in Manchester, UK, is part
of a transnational network that builds bridges between translocal trade unions and civil
society groups working on labour issues. At a GLI workshop in 2015, the executive
director of HomeNet presented case studies of homeworkers from across Pakistan,
which described the acute poverty, marginalization and exploitation of these women
at the hands of middlemen and a state that fails to recognize their status as workers.
Needless to say, no homeworker was available to give her own testimony; and this
oversight was not incidental; in fact, it seems to be the norm in policy discussions at
national and provincial levels. Homeworkers and others in the informal sector, such as
domestic workers, are often absent from high level labour policy consultations, even
when these are being held specifically to address the homeworker or domestic worker
issue. In a conversation about this lack of direct representation, the director of the
Punjab Commission on the Status of Women said: ‘I am all for the subaltern, but these
women shouldn’t be brought to the table – they wouldn’t know how to represent them-
selves.’ The commission is a quasi-state body that uses a multi-pronged approach to
enhance gender equality across the province.
The question is, if the immobility of homeworkers is at the same time both viewed
with sympathy and reproduced, then is it possible to build genuine alliances on mutual
solidarities (Cumbers and Routledge 2013; Escobar 2008)? The research suggests that

14. Ghazal Mir Zulfiqar
14
global solidarities depend on workers’ groups moving beyond their territorially deter-
mined identities (Routledge and Cumbers 2009). In Pakistan, the HBWWF urged its
members to recognize their own role in transnational labour politics. A comparison
between the posters covering the walls of the HBWWF’s office in Karachi and those
at HomeNet’s office in Lahore shows how each organization in its own way attempts
to shape worker identities. HomeNet’s posters point to the homeworkers’ vulnerabili-
ties and suggest that a state homeworker policy would help solve their problems. The
HBWWF’s office, on the other hand, is plastered with posters from its members’
various demonstrations, including a solidarity march for the victims of the 2013 Rana
Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed more than 1100 factory workers. In
the same vein, when a famous textile factory in Karachi laid off its workers in May
2017, HBWWF members marched alongside the fired workers until the management
agreed to reinstate them. Although not a direct victory for the federation, these marches
did enable isolated homeworkers to experience a sense of being connected to translocal
movements, which in turn gave rise to a communal resistance identity (Castells 1997).
In the words of an HBWWF member, ‘so what if they work in factories and we in our
homes? We are each other’s brothers and sisters.’ Such grassroots solidarity bonds are
exactly what GJNs aim to forge transnationally.
Places and networks are marked by varying degrees of access and agency, causing
conflict especially where resource sharing is involved (Grossberg 2013). As a network
hub, HomeNet gets the largest share of donor funds, which it is supposed to use to
support more local networks. Its executive director describes how difficult it has been
to manage the network, given a race-to-the-bottom battle for clients and resources with
local actors:
There were organizations that told homeworkers [that] they were not allowed
to attend events hosted by HomeNet without letting them know first. … They
asked us not to contact them directly. They said that the project funding was
coming for homeworkers so they, the smaller NGOs, should get the funds and
not us. … As I told you, with donors we made this agenda mainstream; there
was goodwill and we wanted to take this process forward. A few of our active
partners really just died out because … they tried to stand parallel to us … they
tried to walk faster than us.
Unless resolved, such conflicts between differently placed network actors can
break the momentum of grassroots organizing, as in the district action committees
(DACs) containing an element of gendered gatekeeping. HomeNet established DACS
in 2012 as grassroots hubs for mobilizing homeworkers, but they are primarily led by
local men across the Punjab, especially in the more rural districts. Most male DAC
coordinators admit finding it difficult to gain access to the homeworkers they repre-
sent, given the norms of segregation that confine the women to their homes. The few
women who do take up leadership positions often have to vacate them because of
family pressure. For instance, a female homeworker in Vehari District was elected as
her DAC’s president but her family refused to allow her to attend any meetings away

15. An analysis of the homeworker network in Pakistan
15
from her home. The only female DAC coordinator we interviewed was from
Gujranwala District and she felt that most women avoid taking on leadership roles
because the DAC position is voluntary, and they cannot afford to forgo their daily
wages for it. But, if local homeworkers cannot take on leadership positions in the local
network, how will authentic knowledge be produced and transferred up the national
and global network?
Knowledge production
Transnational alliances like WIEGO and HomeNet South Asia influence policymaking
by collecting and disseminating data from the informal economy, organizing the
regional and global meetings of policymakers and homeworker representatives, and
enabling homeworker associations to engage cross-nationally. While this helps to
soften the policy process, it is important also to ask what knowledge is being produced
across the network. From where are the dominant sources of knowledge emanating?
And, how democratic are the channels of dissemination?
The dominant transnational discourse on informal employment holds nation-states
responsible for formalizing the economic status of informal workers. Most home-
workers do not know how far their products travel to reach the final consumer, for as
Cumbers and Routledge (2009) point out, theirs are geographies of disconnection,
even as their labour is connected to transnational politico-economic processes. As long
as these knowledge gaps persist, the hegemonic hold of global capitalism over home-
worker labour will continue to be reproduced. To ask Southern states to mop up the
mess created in the wake of indiscriminate outsourcing does not get to the root of
global exploitative labour practices. Advocacy groups in Pakistan demand that the
state provide homeworkers with paid maternity leave, social security and a dowry fund
for their children. A local network actor described this as a major reason why domestic
policies on homework continue to fall short of enactment. The state is both unwilling
and unable to provide material benefits to millions of homeworkers.
The homeworker GJN relies on SEWA to put pressure on the ILO to pass Conven-
tion C177 and SEWA continues to be a significant international and regional player
(Boris 2019). Its national coordinator is a founding member of WIEGO who serves as
the current chair of the board. HomeNet South Asia and SEWA, both headquartered
in Ahmedabad, India, work together closely, which allows the former to feed off
the latter’s pioneering approach to mobilization and advocacy. SEWA Academy,
founded in 1991 to strengthen the grassroots mobilization of homeworkers in India,
runs capacity building workshops, literacy programmes, action research and leadership
training. It also trains homeworkers from other countries. There is inevitably an
asymmetrical relationship in terms of knowledge production, in which SEWA
overshadows ‘lesser’ local networks like HomeNet Pakistan, which does not actively
get to shape the GJN narrative. HomeNet South Asia tries to bridge this unevenness
by including representatives of other country HomeNets on its advisory board.
Nevertheless, resources and power relations within the network are inevitably
differentiated (Massey 2004: 13).

16. Ghazal Mir Zulfiqar
16
From SEWA’s viewpoint, this is less about a jostle for power than it is about the
fact that its social basis for mobilization is simultaneously place-based and transnation-
ally engaged (Escobar 2004). This is because SEWA was born out of an indigenous
struggle that later helped transform the global discourse on women’s informal employ-
ment. The HomeNets of other countries, by contrast, operate according to a reverse logic,
for they were established as funded projects that were part of an international push for
translocal action. They are not ‘long-standing social organizations with strong roots in
community and grassroots organizing’, so may continue to take their cues from above
rather than support grassroots knowledge production (Pearce 2010: 622). HomeNet
Pakistan, for instance, passes information down to local actors strategically and asym-
metrically, assuming the role of boundary maker. During the process, the homeworker
remains marginal and disembodied, unable to reach across space to produce, push and
disseminate her own account, as the GLI example above demonstrates (Coe and Jordhus-
Lier 2010). This is not to say that HomeNet fails to give resources to the homeworkers
it organizes. It invests in their capacity building and trains the most outspoken of them
to become community mobilizers. It also arranges annual homeworker conventions
that enable women from across the country to meet each other, providing homeworkers
opportunities to build horizontal ties, though given their characteristic isolation it is
difficult for them to take this process forward on their own (Juris 2004).
The HBWWF’s community unionism, on the other hand, focuses on political
education through practices typically employed to organize factory labour (Black
2005), including the use of unionist literature, labour anthems and study circles to
discuss class, gender, capitalism and patriarchy. As described above, this has roused
homeworkers to contest local elections in their respective districts, as well as to
negotiate better terms with the middlemen, who are the men in their households and
communities. This is a much more empowering experience than participating through
the rigidly structured DACs. Although the DACs hold monthly stakeholder meetings,
they only do so after HomeNet has sent them a detailed agenda of the proposed meet-
ing, along with a budget explaining how the money is to be allocated between travel,
food and stationery. When DAC coordinators are invited to attend provincial meetings,
they are told who to bring with them and what each member will be expected to
contribute, which frustrates them because they think they understand local realities
better than HomeNet. As district coordinator Lodhran put it:
You see in this meeting in Lahore only I was invited, the deputy coordinator
was not invited, the homeworkers from my area were not invited. They
(HomeNet) only allowed me to bring one woman from my district. … When
they call me to Islamabad (for a meeting) and send me second-class bus fare
rather than air-conditioned bus fare then the work they should expect from me
is also second-class.
Meetings with transnational allies are carefully choreographed. HomeNet’s media
officer instructs the women on how to present their testimonies before donor repre-
sentatives and reminds them not to appear too despondent. Homeworkers, like Rehana

17. An analysis of the homeworker network in Pakistan
17
from Kasur, feel despair about this: ‘the British people came, the American and also
the German and asked us about our stories. We told them but nothing practical has
happened for us.’ Their disappointment turns to resentment when they compare
themselves with SEWA. As Rabia, a homeworker who attended the SEWA Academy
in Lahore, explained:
The newer factories are not willing to give us work because we do not have a
guarantor. The work has stopped from the two factories we used to get work
from because of computer embroidery. … I told HomeNet I want work. … I
asked them to get me a contact with a factory so I can take work from them. I
requested them but it did not happen … HomeNet took us to visit SEWA
Academy in India. The difference is that SEWA goes to the places where the
poor live and checks on them and brings them work.
Rabia was referring to SEWA’s producer and marketing cooperatives that have
helped homeworkers negotiate better rates and more stable contracts (Bonner and
Carré 2013). Her exposure to SEWA enabled her to witness interventions that could
strengthen both her agency and mobility. She points out that HomeNet fails to empa-
thize with the helplessness borne of having to engage in contingent subcontracted work
on the periphery of the labour market (Benería and Floro 2004). HomeNet’s director’s
response to this is that since rights do not feed people, poor and illiterate homeworkers
cannot be expected to appreciate the network’s efforts to push for policies that would
grant them formal worker status, solving their problems in the long run.
Conclusion
By using insights from the GJN literature to examine the dynamic processes through
which the local interacts with the global and vice versa, in this article I have tried ‘to
go beyond the simplistic and superficial gloss’ on transnational activism (Routledge
and Cumbers 2009: 196). I have looked at the distribution of power, what that means
for the homeworkers the global and local networks represent and its implications for
building and deepening the framework of a more grassroots-driven GJN (Cumbers et
al. 2008). I now conclude by summarizing the article’s contributions to global policy
and relate these to the organizing approaches I analyse in the article.
First, the article shows how it is the processes and not the ends of organizing that
matter to the network’s constituency. In other words, it is not policy-level success that
ensures legitimacy but the bonds that network actors forge with homeworkers that
serve to disrupt the gender and class hierarchies that keep them marginalized and
isolated. For this to happen, the network has to make sure that it allows the most local
actors to cross spatial and resource boundaries. If SEWA’s indigenous roots in India
allow it to retain its authenticity transnationally and locally, the HBWWF empowers
its members by privileging their everyday concerns and gendered realities over a
single-minded pursuit of policy reform and transnational interconnectedness, as in the
case of HomeNet Pakistan. The latter passively continues to follow a structure imposed

18. Ghazal Mir Zulfiqar
18
from above rather than one rooted in place, which ends up heightening local inequali-
ties.
Second, this study confirms that painting homeworkers as passive victims of
globalization presents an unnecessarily bleak picture, for the local too has agency
(Gibson-Graham 2002). The HBWWF’s community unionism approach has given
voice and mobility to Pakistan’s homeworkers through a range of initiatives. These
include political education; giving the homeworkers positions of authority in the
unions it helps to register; strengthening their bargaining positions at home, in the
community and vis-à-vis middlemen; encouraging them to contest local elections; and
developing translocal solidarities between homeworkers and other working-class
groups. The HBWWF has done all this while also pushing the provincial government
to pass legislation on the homeworker issue. HomeNet, by contrast, has focused only
on policy advocacy; it treats its homeworkers as clients who need only to turn up for
protests, demonstrations and donor meetings. Moreover, by allowing information to
pass through asymmetrically and strategically and by presenting itself as an agent of
change rather than as a facilitator of grassroots agency, it acts as a boundary maker
(Pearce 2010).
Third, just as patriarchy functions in and through relations of production (Sangari
1993), it can also reconstitute itself within feminist advocacy networks. The fact that
men primarily lead the DACs that HomeNet established further distances spatially
segregated homeworkers from the alliance bearing their name. If the HBWWF model
has had an empowering impact it is because it works as an independent federation and
is not part of a larger male-centred union, as SEWA was before it broke away and
established itself as an independent entity.
Finally, if the homeworker GJN is truly to represent ‘an alternative political project
based on the articulations of diverse local/global struggles’, it has to ensure that home-
workers from every region are actively involved in the production and transference of
knowledge. HomeNet South Asia’s recent efforts to open up more channels of repre-
sentation is a step in the right direction, one that should have a democratizing effect
on its translocal networks as long as it appreciates the legitimacy of different modes
of organizing while giving preference to more indigenously constructed networks, as
evidenced by the Pakistani experience.
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