Forword - " It was way back in 2009, when a Pakistani scholar from Cornell University reached me online "

FOREWORD

It was way back in 2009, when a Pakistani scholar from Cornell University reached me online. He identified himself as Iftikhar Ahmad, student of comparative labour law, and wanted to know why Pakistan was not among the 50-odd countries we were working in at the time. Well, simply because we have not yet found a suitable counterpart in the country, my standard answer must have been. Could he not qualify? Iftikhar wrote back. He liked what we were doing, he said, and he also wanted to dedicate his working life to the interests of the common working man, woman and family. He was studying at Cornell and would return home to Islamabad, where he would restart working as a career civil servant for the Pakistani Government. So, indeed, why not, I mused. Let’s give it a try. And that is how we embarked on an adventurous and truly rewarding partnership that, 10 years later, has culminated into the first comprehensive Labour Rights Index with global outreach, covering 115 countries in 2020 - and counting. 

Over the past decade, Iftikhar and I have had at least a thousand online conversations and - when travelling was still easy - at least a dozen meetings in Islamabad, Amsterdam, Geneva and some other places where and when our work brought us together. Iftikhar, a methodical and systematic thinker with a strong bent for research, had recognized that we, at WageIndicator, collected data on wages and labour rights in a highly structured way. Our common systems approach provided the framework and directed our mutual brain picking. This happy meeting of inquisitive minds is the second crucial strand in our enduring cooperation - next to our shared drive that the work we do should benefit the working man and woman of meagre means, who make up the public at large in any country.

It so happened that the Decent Work Check, a nascent tool, that we at WageIndicator had been experimenting with (online and in print) in rural Africa and Central America, became the hub of our intense and intensifying exchanges. After much initial tampering, sculpting and a lot of scrutinizing, it today stands as the legal backbone of our pioneering Labour Rights Index 2020 and would continue to do so for its future editions. Moreover, our mature Decent Work Check proves to be of great value for national WageIndicator websites in 115 countries, and also in WageIndicator projects at the factory and plantation level in Indonesia, Ethiopia and Uganda, empowering (female) garment workers and flower growers.

I look forward to our continued cooperation with Iftikhar and his team at the Centre for Labour Research, along the lines that have brought us - and many others - so much: professionally, intellectually and as friends.

Paulien Osse, 
Director 
WageIndicator Foundation