Human Rights
at home, abroad and on the way...
Human Rights
at home, abroad and on the way...
The South Asia partners of GAATW’s Women Workers Forum met in Kathmandu, Nepal from 17 to 20 August. This was the second regional gathering of the programme after the Southeast Asia partners meeting in Bangkok in July.
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Group photo of the SouthEast Asia participants at the Women Workers Forum held in Bangkok in July 2022. Photo by Jennifer Janssen |
In July, we organised a convening of the Southeast Asia partners of the Women Workers Forum (WWF) programme in Bangkok. The core aim of WWF is to create a supportive space for workers’ political education through peer-learning processes, which would aid in realising their rights at work and strengthen their self-organising. Building their collective strength and voices is a way to challenge the invisibilisation of women’s work in society. It is premised on the belief that women workers can set their own learning agendas and articulate their visions for change, with external agents such as NGOs only supporting the process. We hope that through the process of mutual learning and increasing awareness, women workers will be able to engage with the state, employers, and other stakeholders to make their demands for dignified work and living conditions. The programme’s partners span several countries across Southeast, South and West Asia.
Migrant women’s experiences of social inclusion and access to the labour market are shaped by their gender, ethnicity, and migration status according to our new research report ‘I spent many days on the road but I made it here’: Socioeconomic inclusion of migrant and trafficked women in South America.
Migrant and trafficked women are employed in precarious conditions within the informal economy, and relegated to gendered work such as the domestic, care and cleaning sectors. The burden of care work and the gendered division of labour shape both their access to paid work and their roles within families.
The women’s migration journeys were fraught with challenges and uncertainties, yet these also illustrate their courage and resilience in trying to improve their lives. Most women spoke of hardships such as spending days on the road, sleeping on the streets, going without food, facing racist or xenophobic behaviours, and fear of sexual attacks. Many had taken on large debts or exhausted their life savings. Yet, the hope for a better life kept them going. A Dominican woman in Uruguay shared, “we took a bus to Brazil, where we stayed in a shelter for three days. I didn’t sleep…I remember we left the countryside on a Tuesday and arrived on a Saturday, we hopped from bus to bus.”
Describing her harrowing journey, a Venezuelan woman in Brazil said: “After sleeping for three days on the street and the fatigue of the 13-day bus ride across the border, my body couldn’t take it anymore. I wanted to die.”
Many women’s experiences with socioeconomic inclusion in the destination country were closely linked to their responsibility for unpaid care work. Most women continue to be responsible for care giving and household work within their families while also being the breadwinners. This double, sometimes triple, workload has many impacts: it negatively determines their access to job opportunities and relegates women to irregular or lower paying jobs, affects their physical and emotional health, and causes “time poverty” where the very idea of free time does not exist. As one Venezuelan woman in Peru said: “It has been difficult for me to achieve a balance between family and work life because I work, I sleep very little, I have very little time left to care for my daughters and every now and then I get the chance to take a little walk once a week or every fortnight […] I work until very late, so there is not much free time.”
Last month we supported our members and partners from Women's Initiatives (WINS), the Telangana Domestic Workers Union, the National Network of Sex Workers India, the Andha Domestic Workers Union, and the Centre for World Solidarity, to write to the Indian Minister of Labour ahead of a national meeting in Tirupati of the Ministers of Labour from all the states and Union Territories.
Statement by the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women to the United Nations Constructive Dialogue on Trafficking in Persons, 1 July 2022, Vienna
Read the statement below or view it read out by Maya Linstrum-Newman, International Advocacy Officer at GAATW.
