Women and Employment in Plural Legal Settings: Some Reflections on Theory and Practice of Islamic Teachings and Legal Pluralism in Pakistan

This paper seeks to analyse the issue of women's employment in the informal sector' in Pakistan by engaging in a discussion on Islamic perspectives on women's work and legal pluralism. In Pakistan during the past two decades there has been a change in the organisation of work in the employment sector. ...By using the case of women domestic workers in this paper it is argued that a variety of socio-religious and cultural factors shape *Research Fellow School of Law, University of Warwick and former lecturer, Faculty of Law, University of Peshawar, Pakistan. 1According to the Resolution adopted by the 15th International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS), the infoimnal sector comprises units, such as households enterprises, engaged in the production of goods and services with the pnimary objective of generating employment and income to the persons concerned, not necessarily with the deliberate intention of evading the payment of taxes or other legislative or administrative provision. These units typically operate at a low level of organization, on a small scale, and with labour relations mostly based on causal employment. The definition of the infoimal sector in Pakistan is foimuilated in termns of the first two criterion, namely, household enterprise and size of employment. In the language of the international standards, the informual sector in Pakistan is defined for statistical purpose as follows: l)AlI household enterprises owned and operated by own-account workers, irrespective of the size of the enterprise (informnal own-account enterprises), 2) Household enterprises owned and operated by employers with less than 10 persons engaged, and 3)Excluded are all household enterprises engaged in agricultural activities or wholly engaged in non-market production.